Luke brought smoked salmon, and ham and cheese sandwiches, with a huge bowl of crisps and some salted peanuts. He set out the white Burgundy in a cooler. He changed the glasses and ashtray. Aubrey poured himself some wine and tasted it appreciatively.
‘This is very nice. Can I pour you a glass?’
Conrad shook his head, raising his whisky glass.
‘No, I’ll stay with this.’
Aubrey started on the sandwiches with a vengeance. He had not realised how hungry he was.
‘I was in the hole for a few thousand by then. But it seemed manageable. John Aspinall had torn up a few of my IOUs to the House. He’s that kind of man, you know. It’s something he does for some of the members. I know he’s done it for Lucky Lucan several times.’
Aubrey shrugged. ‘That would just be good business sense, wouldn’t it, apart from anything else? You don’t want your punters going under, do you?’
‘I suppose not. But that only goes so far. You can’t rely on it. In any case, I had every confidence that I would recover. The only problem was, I needed some seed money.’
‘To fund the effort to chase your losses?’
‘Yes. There’s something of a science to that in a sick kind of way. Once funds become available you have to make sure that you don’t run out of money for necessities – paying the mortgage, your clerk’s fees, your chambers rent and so on. You have to be aware of how much is coming in for your fees, and calculate how much you can risk to start with. The hope is always that you can start out with a thousand, say, and win a few hands, and get there, or almost there. Then you can relax, even if you haven’t got it all back.’
‘But if that doesn’t work…?’
‘Then you have to decide whether to chase an even bigger sum. In my case, I could never quite give up on the idea that one day it was all going to work out well.’
Aubrey drained his glass and allowed the wine to linger on his palate before pouring himself another.
‘But it didn’t work out well, I take it?’
Conrad drank from his glass, shaking his head.
‘I came damn close once or twice, Aubrey. And perhaps if I’d stopped then… but who knows? I didn’t stop, and I still needed more money.’
‘Where did you get it?’
Conrad did not reply for some time.
‘Deborah has a trust fund,’ he replied eventually.
‘She’s the one with the real money,’ he continued. ‘I didn’t have much when I started – well, you remember those days, when we were starting out. We’d only just come down from Cambridge and taken our Bar finals. Neither of us had two pennies to rub together.’
Aubrey smiled. ‘I remember very well.’
‘I was lucky, I suppose. I married a woman who could support me while my practice got off the ground. Deborah had money from her parents – a lot of money – but she has never been all that interested in it.’
‘She’s very involved in her church, isn’t she, if I remember rightly?’ Aubrey asked.
‘That would be putting it mildly. The local Baptist church is her second home. She gives the church a lot of money and takes part in most of their activities. That’s been her life for many years now. She likes to show me off to the people there, but she takes very little interest in me, or my professional life, any more. Even when I became a judge, she wasn’t very impressed. She smiled and said “well done” and she came with me to see the Queen when I got my K. But that was about it.’
Aubrey paused in the middle of eating a sandwich. An uneasy feeling was coming over him.
‘I can’t see Deborah as the kind of woman who would give you money from her trust fund for gambling. How did you persuade her to – ?’
‘I didn’t.’
Aubrey replaced the half-eaten sandwich on his plate.
‘I see.’
‘She got sole control over the fund when she turned twenty-five. That’s the way her father set it up. Both her parents are dead now, and she’s always been too busy with the church to take much day-to-day interest in money, so she gave me power over the fund as a joint signatory. That made sense, actually. If either of us ever becomes too ill to cope, the other can access the fund without any problem. But I never touched it until I got into trouble, I swear. I mean, we raided it together for certain purposes over the years – to get our deposit when we bought our house, to make improvements here and there, that kind of thing. But I never touched it for any other reason until…’
‘How much?’ Aubrey asked.
‘Twenty thousand.’
‘Any of it left?’
‘Not a penny.’
‘And when the twenty thousand went the same way as your savings?’
‘I took out a second mortgage on the house for ten.’
‘What? How…? Is the house in your sole name?’
‘No, joint names.’
‘But you couldn’t… didn’t the bank need a signature from Deborah?’
‘Of course; and I gave them one.’