One Plus One(90)
Author: Jojo Moyes

32.

Ed

‘Sometimes,’ Gemma said, glancing behind her at the puce, screaming child, arching its back at the next table, ‘I think the worst sort of parenting is not actually witnessed by social workers but by baristas.’ She stirred her coffee briskly, as if biting back a natural urge to say something.

The mother, her blonde corkscrew curls cascading stylishly over her back, continued to ask the child in soothing tones to stop and drink its ‘babycino’. It ignored her, possibly unable to hear her over the self-created noise levels.

‘I don’t see why we couldn’t go to the pub.’

‘At eleven fifteen in the morning? Jesus, why doesn’t she just tell him to stop? Or take him out? Does nobody know how to distract a child any more?’

The child screamed louder. Ed’s head had begun to hurt.

‘We could go.’

‘Go where?’

‘The pub. It would be quieter.’

She stared at him, and then she ran a speculative finger across his chin. ‘Ed, how much did you drink last night?’

He had emerged from the police station spent. They had met his barrister afterwards – Ed had already forgotten his name – with Paul Wilkes and two other solicitors, one of whom specialized in insider-trading cases. They sat around the mahogany table and spoke as if choreographed, laying out the prosecution case baldly, so that Ed was in no doubt about what lay ahead. Against him: the email trail, Deanna Lewis’s testimony, her brother’s phone calls, the FSA’s new determination to stamp down on perpetrators of insider trading. His own cheque, complete with signature.

Deanna had sworn that she had not known what she was doing was wrong. She stated Ed had pressed the money on her. She said that had she known what he was suggesting was illegal she would never have done it. Nor would she have told her brother.

The evidence for him: that he had plainly not gained a cent from the transaction. His legal team said – in his opinion, a little too cheerfully – that they would stress his ignorance, his ineptitude, that he was new to money, the ramifications and responsibilities of directorship. They would claim that Deanna Lewis knew very well what she was doing; that his and Deanna’s short relationship was actually evidence of her and her brother’s entrapment. The investigating team had been all over Ed’s accounts and found them gratifyingly unrewarding. He paid the full whack of tax every year. He had no investments. He had always liked things simple.

And the cheque was not addressed to her. It was in her possession, but her name was in her own writing. They would assert that she had taken a blank cheque from his home at some point during the relationship, they said.

‘But she didn’t,’ he said.

Nobody seemed to hear.

It could go either way with the prison sentence, they told him, but whatever happened Ed was undoubtedly looking at a hefty fine. And obviously the end of his time with Mayfly. He would be banned from holding a directorship, possibly for some considerable time. Ed needed to be prepared for all these things. They began to confer among themselves.

And then he had said it: ‘I want to plead guilty.’

‘What?’

The room fell silent.

‘I did tell her to do it. I didn’t think about it being illegal. I just wanted her to go away so I told her how she could make some money.’

They stared at each other.

‘Ed –’ his sister began.

‘I want to tell the truth.’

One of the solicitors leant forward. ‘We actually have quite a strong defence, Mr Nicholls. I think that given the lack of your handwriting on the cheque – their only substantive piece of evidence – we can successfully claim that Ms Lewis used your account for her own ends.’

‘But I did give her the cheque.’

Paul Wilkes leant forward. ‘Ed, you need to be clear about this. If you plead guilty, you substantially increase your chance of a custodial sentence.’

‘I don’t care.’

‘You will care, when you’re doing twenty-three hours in solitary in Winchester for your own safety.’

He barely heard her. ‘I just want to tell the truth. That’s how it was.’

‘Ed,’ his sister grabbed at his arm, ‘the truth has no place in a courtroom. You’re going to make things worse.’

But he shook his head and sat back in his chair. And then he didn’t say anything more.

He knew they thought he was odd, but he didn’t care. He couldn’t bring himself to look exercised by any of it. He sat there, numb. His sister asked most of the questions. He heard Financial Services and Markets Act 2000 blah blah blah. He heard open prison and punitive fines and Criminal Justice Act 1993 blah blah blah and he sat there and he honestly couldn’t make himself care less about any of it. So he was going to prison for a bit? So what? He had lost everything anyway, twice over.

‘Ed? Did you hear what I said?’

‘Sorry.’

Sorry. It’s all he seemed to say these days. Sorry, I didn’t hear you. Sorry, I wasn’t listening. Sorry I f**ked it all up. Sorry I was stupid enough to fall in love with someone who actually believed I was an idiot.

And there: the now familiar clench at the thought of her. How could she have lied to him? How could they have sat side by side in that car for the best part of a week, and she hadn’t even begun to let on what she had done?

How could she have talked to him of her financial fears? How could she have talked to him of trust, have collapsed into his arms, all the while knowing that she had stolen money right out of his pocket?

She hadn’t even needed to say anything in the end. It was her silence that told him. The fractional delay between her registering the sight of the security card that he held, disbelieving, in his hand, and her stuttering attempt to explain it.

I was going to tell you.

It’s not what you’re thinking. The hand to the mouth.

I wasn’t thinking.

Oh, God. It’s not –

She was worse than Lara. At least Lara had been honest, in her way, about his attractions. She liked the money. She liked how he looked, once she had shaped him according to what she wanted. He thought they had both understood, deep down, that their marriage was a kind of deal. He had told himself that everybody’s marriages were, one way or another.

But Jess? Jess had behaved as if he were the only man she had ever truly wanted. Jess had let him think it was the real him she liked, even when he was puking, or with his face bashed up, or afraid to meet his own parents. She had smiled sweetly and let him think it was him.