Chapter 8: The Warrant
Calloway called at seven the next morning.
"We're at his property now," she said.
"He was home.
He answered the door himself."
I was standing in the kitchen in my dressing gown with a cup of tea going cold in my hand.
David stood across from me, watching my face.
"How did he react?" I asked.
"Calmly.
Which is either innocence or very good preparation." A pause.
"His lawyer arrived within twelve minutes.
That's not innocence."
They took his financial records, his company servers, and three boxes of physical files from a locked room he initially claimed was a storage space.
It contained, among other things, a set of documents Calloway described as a parallel set of accounts going back twenty-six years.
She called again at noon.
"The forensic accountant is already flagging transfers," she said.
"The Aldren-Voss portfolio alone shows approximately two point three million redirected over a four-year period.
And that's before we look at the property holdings."
"Is that enough?"
"Combined with your father's statement, the witness testimony, the recording you made yesterday, and your mother's account — yes.
We'll be charging him."
I sat down at the kitchen table.
David sat across from me.
"What did she say?"
"They're charging him."
He reached across the table and put his hand over mine.
Neither of us said anything for a moment.
Mae came in from the garden.
She looked at our faces and stopped in the doorway.
"It's happening?" she said.
"Yes," I said.
She came and sat beside me.
The three of us sat at the kitchen table in the morning light and nobody spoke, and it was the quietest, most complete moment I had felt in as long as I could remember.
Then Mae said: "What happens to him now?"
"He'll be formally charged.
There'll be a process.
It won't be quick."
"Will he go to prison?"
"Calloway thinks so.
The fraud alone is significant.
And the fire—" I stopped.
"They're reclassifying the investigation.
It's no longer accidental."
Mae folded her hands on the table.
"Good," she said simply.
That afternoon, Gareth called.
I answered.
"Natty." His voice was different.
The warmth was still there, but underneath it something had gone tight.
"I think there's been a misunderstanding.
The people who came this morning — I don't know what you've told them, but—"
"I haven't told them anything, Gareth," I said.
"My father did.
Twenty-three years ago."
Silence.
"Whatever you think those documents say—"
"I know what they say.
I also know what Dorothea Marsh saw on the morning of the fire.
I know what my mother heard in the hallway.
And I know what my father said on the phone to Aldous Fenn an hour before the fire started."
The silence stretched longer this time.
"Natty." His voice had dropped.
The warmth was g*ne entirely.
"You don't understand what your father was involved in.
He wasn't the man you think he was.
There are things about that partnership—"
"Stop," I said.
He stopped.
"You are going to be charged with fraud, arson, and whatever else they determine when they finish going through your files.
You are going to face that in a courtroom.
And you are going to do it without my sympathy, without my confusion, and without the version of me that spent twenty years calling you uncle." I paused.
"Don't call this number again."
I ended the call.
My hand was shaking.
I set the phone on the table and looked at it.
David was in the doorway.
He had heard all of it.
"Are you all right?" he said.
"I don't know yet," I said honestly.
He crossed the room and sat beside me.
"You were extraordinary," he said.
I looked at the phone on the table.
The screen was dark.
"He was going to blame my father," I said.
"Even now.
Even at the end."
"Yes."
"He was going to make me doubt him."
"He was going to try."
I picked up the phone and turned it face-down on the table.
"He didn't know about the envelope," I said.
"He spent twenty-three years thinking he had destroyed everything.
And my father had already moved it."
David was quiet for a moment.
"Your father knew you'd come looking eventually," he said.
I thought about the letter inside the envelope — my father's handwriting, careful and unhurried, addressed to no one in particular, beginning with the words: *If you are reading this, then something has happened to me, and I am sorry I could not be there.*
I had read it four times.
I had not been able to read it a fifth.
May you like
Not yet.
But I would.
