Marriage and Other Games (6 page)
‘Ed . . . ?’
The policeman put out a hand to stop her.
‘Mrs Briggs - I’m afraid your husband’s under arrest.’
Twenty minutes later, Charlotte sat bolt upright on the sofa, her hands pressed in between her clenched knees, her teeth biting down on her bottom lip to stop her from crying.
Ed had taken the ball money. He had taken all the profits raised from the tickets, the raffle, the auction, and the donations and bought a tranche of shares on a tip-off from a friend in the City. A small but dynamic software firm was about to be taken over by a larger company. It was a given that the shares would quadruple overnight. Obviously Ed’s plan had been to sell the shares on straight away, put the money back into the ball account ready to be handed over ceremoniously to the hospice, and keep the substantial difference.
But by a million to one chance, the deal hadn’t come off. The dynamic managing director, the brains and therefore the intrinsic value of the company, had died in a helicopter crash on the way to signing the buy-out. Without him the company was worthless. The buy-out was pointless; the share prices crashed to zero. The money was wiped out. Ed was left with nothing.
Or rather, the charity was left with nothing.
It hadn’t taken long for his misdemeanour to be detected. He had forged the signature on the cheque in the hopes that the money would be back in the account before the other committee members noticed it was missing. But of course they were all clamouring to organise the presentation to the hospice, all relishing the prospect of a ceremony and a photo-shoot. Ed had had little choice but to put his hands up and turn himself in. It was either that or flee the country. No wonder he had been tense all week. He must have been waiting for the hammer to fall from the minute he had heard about the helicopter crash. And praying for some miracle. Praying that the original deal would be salvaged, though God knows how. And now, the police were preparing to take Ed down to the station for further questioning. They’d wondered at first if Charlotte was involved, but he’d made it clear she had nothing to do with it.
He’d gone to fetch his jacket. He came back into the room looking dreadful, his skin pale, blue rings under his eyes.
Charlotte looked at him, bewildered.
‘Why, Ed . . . ?’
‘I did it for us,’ he said in a choked voice. ‘I thought . . . if we could get out of London, get a house in the country, take the pressure off . . . I thought if you could stop work, then maybe . . . We didn’t have time to wait for me to be able to afford it. I was trying to speed things up.’
Charlotte felt a surge of fury.
‘Is that was it was about?’ she demanded. ‘The bloody baby thing? You took that risk, took someone else’s money, just for another shot at it?’
‘I wanted things to be different! I thought maybe it was London stopping you . . . us . . .’
‘But I told you I couldn’t go through it again!’
Ed looked distraught. ‘I can’t take no for an answer, Charlotte. I love you. I want us to have children. More than anything.’
Charlotte felt tears spring into her eyes - tears of frustration that Ed couldn’t seem to grasp the simple truth.
‘You’re insane! I don’t know how you could have thought it would work, even for a moment.’
‘I spoke to the consultant. He suggested a change of scene, a change of lifestyle.’
‘He was clutching at straws, Ed. Just like you. And now where has it got us?’
She stood up, trembling. She thought she was going to be sick. She felt cold and clammy and nauseous. ‘Well, thank God I didn’t have your children.’
It was the harshest thing she could think of to say.
Ed recoiled as if he had been slapped. The policeman stepped forward.
‘Mr Briggs? If you’re ready to come to the station now?’
Charlotte sank back down onto the sofa as Ed was escorted from the room. She couldn’t look at him. She pressed her face into her palms, shutting out the world. Moments later the room was still, empty, and she felt very small inside it. There was nothing to do but wait.
When Ed came back later that night, Charlotte was scrunched up in a ball on the bed, shivering like a kitten that had been left out in a thunderstorm. She had been beside herself all afternoon, but she hadn’t been able to think of a single soul she could call on for sympathy or advice. How on earth could she admit to any of her friends and family what Ed had done - though they would find out soon enough? So she had wandered the house in turmoil, her emotions veering from rage to despair to total bewilderment. She’d necked down half a bottle of red wine, in the hope that it might calm her down, but it only made her feel worse and made her already throbbing head pound. In the end, she threw herself on the bed and sobbed herself to sleep.
Ed stood awkwardly in the doorway.
‘They’ve let me out on bail. But I’ve been charged with obtaining money by deception. God knows when the trial will be.’
There was silence.
‘Charlotte?’
She sat up suddenly.
‘Why didn’t you just take out a loan? Or extend the mortgage?’ she demanded. ‘Surely it would have been better to risk our own money? Better than stealing somebody else’s, at any rate.’
Ed darted a nervous look at her. Charlotte swallowed.
‘Ed . . . ?’
‘I did. As well. I needed another fifty grand to make it worthwhile.’
‘What?’
‘We’d have walked away with half a million . . .’
‘You extended our mortgage?’
‘Yes.’
‘Shouldn’t I have signed the paperwork?’
‘You did.’
‘I’d remember borrowing that kind of money . . .’ She trailed off, remembering Ed coming in with some forms from the building society one Sunday morning when she was still sleeping off last night’s party. He’d said something about moving mortgages because they’d come to the end of their tie-in period. Something about getting a better deal. Of course she’d signed it. He dealt with all that sort of thing. And of course she hadn’t looked at the small print. She wouldn’t have suspected her own husband of trying to pull a fast one.
She buried her head in the pillow. He sat on the bed next to her and put a hand on her back, stroking her gently.
‘I did it for you,’ he was saying, his voice soft and urgent. ‘I can’t bear it, watching you run yourself ragged. You throw yourself into your work to forget your unhappiness. And then you exhaust yourself. And then of course you don’t get . . .’
He couldn’t even bring himself to say the word.
‘Pregnant!’ Charlotte looked up and shouted it at him. ‘No, I bloody don’t. And thank goodness. Lucky escape. God must have been on my side all this time. I don’t want a psycho-fraudster fathering my child.’
‘I wanted a big house in the country,’ he went on, ignoring her outburst. ‘Trees, and a pond, and a big kitchen, and a huge attic room to put train sets in. And a chocolate Labrador.’
‘I hate the countryside!’
‘You wouldn’t.’ Ed shook his head. ‘You’d love it once we were there.’
Charlotte sat up wearily.
‘So,’ she said, ‘this was all about your dream. Your fantasy. You’ve ruined our lives because of what you wanted.’
‘I wanted it for both of us.’
He reached out to stroke her hair. She ducked away.
‘Don’t touch me,’ she snarled.
‘Charlotte—’ His voice cracked. Etched on his face was utter misery and despair. But Charlotte didn’t feel as much as a flicker of sympathy.
‘We’re going to lose our house because of this. You’ll go to prison. You’ll be out of a job. How can you expect me to understand? We’ve lost everything, because all you can think about is yourself!’
‘I was thinking about us.’
‘No. You were thinking about Ed Briggs, and the fact that you want hundreds of your offspring running about the place. What about what I want?’
‘I know deep down that’s what you want too.’
‘I don’t! I’ve tried to tell you often enough, but you can’t take it in, can you? I’ve had enough of it all. I can’t go through it any more. I’ve come to terms with the fact that I won’t ever have children. It’s just a pity you can’t deal with the fact.’
She fell back on the bed and looked up at the ceiling.
‘Fine,’ Ed replied flatly. ‘If you don’t understand that I wasn’t prepared to accept defeat, that I wanted to fight—’
‘So you stole over a hundred grand? From a charity? From your best friend’s dead son, effectively?’
‘It wasn’t supposed to go wrong.’
‘Wrong?’ Charlotte knew she was shouting now, but she was so filled with fury that she couldn’t help herself. ‘Wrong is the whole point. Even if it had gone right it would have been wrong. I don’t want a baby on those terms!’
‘You’d never have known.’
‘So what would you have told me?’
‘I don’t know. That I’d won the lottery?’
He was shouting back now, equally frustrated that she couldn’t - wouldn’t - ever understand his motives. It was the first proper row they’d ever had. They had minor squabbles, of course, and the occasional difference of opinion, but it never became heated.
‘I’m sorry, Ed.’ Charlotte scrambled off the bed in an effort to put some distance between them. ‘There’s nothing you can say that will make me change my mind. What you did was evil. Selfish. Foolhardy. Irresponsible . . .’
She was running out of adjectives.
‘Well, I’m sorry.’ Ed spoke softly. ‘But I did it because I love you.’
Charlotte regarded him coldly.
‘Don’t you ever, ever dare use me as an excuse.’
She turned on her heel and walked out of the room.
She walked around the streets for hours, knowing there was no one she could go to. Besides, she didn’t want to be influenced. She wanted to make up her mind about what she was going to do without the world and his wife giving her their opinions, although it was unlikely that anyone would consider Ed’s crime anything other than heinous.
She knew Ed had dreams, delusions of grandeur, almost, about a big country pile to bring up their putative children in. A lot of people he worked with came from that sort of background: they did their stint in a flat in the City, but when they started families they shot off to the country, no doubt with substantial financial help from their parents. But neither Ed nor Charlotte came from wealthy families; their respective parents were comfortable, but not sufficiently well endowed to be able to hand out lump sums to put down on a dear little rectory. And while between them they earned a good six-figure sum, it really wasn’t enough to sustain a mortgage on the type of home Ed had in mind.
Yet he was always ploughing through copies of Country Life, sighing with longing, and sending off to posh estate agents with triple-barrelled names for details. Charlotte found the glossy brochures strewn all over the living room and in the downstairs loo, with Ed’s mathematical calculations scrawled over the envelopes. His vision was to find something that needed doing up, and for Charlotte to be able to leave her job and work her way through it until they had the home of their dreams. But the maths never worked. Anything with potential was always snapped up by builders; anything with a remotely affordable price tag always had something badly wrong, like a motorway on the doorstep or a mobile phone mast in the apple orchard.
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