Was it that much? thought Natalie. She felt a throb of pride.
‘We’ve traced them all back to NuLine customers. As you gathered from Mr Smythe, your Managing Director, NuLine are taking this extremely seriously, as well they might. This is fraud on a very large scale.’
She hadn’t called it fraud, even to herself. The word removed it from her – it did feel, in fact, as if somebody else had done it.
‘What I’d like to know,’ said the detective ‘is how much more you’ve got hidden away.’
‘I don’t know what you mean.’
‘I think you do, Natalie.’ His eyes twinkled; he gazed at her legs as she recrossed them. The woman looked on, stonily.
There was a tape-recorder whirring, like on The Bill, and a downtrodden duty solicitor straight out of Cental Casting. Natalie was the femme fatale, her black skirt riding up her thighs. She was that woman in The Last Seduction.
She had been given her rights. If you are asked questions about a suspected offence, you do not have to say anything. But it may harm your defence if you do not mention, when questioned, something which you later rely on in court. Anything you say may be given in evidence.
They had charged her with fraud, handling and deception. ‘It would make everything a lot easier for yourself, and save everybody a lot of time, if you just told us about it now,’ said the detective. He had one of those trim beards that looked quite attractive when seen from the front, but with an abrupt, shaved line around the jowls. It made his neck look fat. ‘You’re a bright young woman, I’m sure you can see that if this went to trial, in a Crown Court, the jury would without a doubt find you guilty. You haven’t a hope in hell.’ She had an urge to point it out: Don’t shave your neck, use clippers. Maybe his wife liked it that way, but Natalie doubted it. ‘We can take a statement now,’ he said.
Natalie crushed out her cigarette in the foil tart case. ‘I didn’t do it, and that’s that.’
She remembered the name of a solicitor Farida had used and phoned him up. It was only three o’clock but the day seemed to have been going on for weeks. Could it really have been that same morning when she had stood in the MD’s office facing Mr Smythe, a stunned Phillip Tomlinson and two policemen? As she was driven away, faces had appeared at the NuLine windows. She had waved at them, like royalty.
Natalie waited in the lobby of the police station. Out in the street a hearse slid past, slowly. It was heaped with flowers: GRANDPA. Other black cars followed it, then a van saying THORNTHWAITE AND SON: BUTCHERS. She thought: All that fuss when a human being dies, and there’s a van full of dead meat. Nobody’s mourning all those animals. Nobody’s even kept the legs and shoulders together.
She was starting to feel weird, as if she had left the dentist’s with a numb jaw and the sensation was returning. Where was Colin? She couldn’t get through on his mobile but she had left a message at work. It made her uneasy, to think about him. She felt very alone, sitting on her plastic chair. Light-headed too, for nobody had given her anything to eat. Were they trying to starve the truth out of her? She felt sick, from the sweet tea.
And then the solicitor arrived and drove her to his office. He was a man, thank goodness, a large bluff Yorkshireman called Mr Wigton. She was better with men. And now she was sitting in his office, which was up an alleyway. Its window overlooked the rear view of Sainsbury’s. A huge lorry was backed into its opening; unseen, its contents were being disgorged.
‘Now, my dear, there’s something you must understand. You needn’t tell me anything you don’t want to; what you choose to tell me, it’s entirely up to you.’ Mr Wigton had a large moustache, which he stroked. ‘I’m here to act on your instructions, and we shall put up as good a case as we possibly can, you may be sure of that.’
A long way away she could hear the normal sounds: the lorry rumbling, a man shouting. Mr Wigton’s office looked curiously temporary – flimsy partition walls, sparse furniture, as if when Natalie left it would be dismantled. There had been no secretary in the lobby either, just an abandoned desk.
She took a breath. ‘Say – just say – they found me guilty. What would I – you know – get?’
‘We’re certainly looking at a custodial sentence. Eighteen months, two years maybe, depending on the judge. But let’s not consider that. We shall fight it all the way.’ He smiled at her, in an avuncular way. ‘You’re a bright girl, I can see you have plenty of fight in you.’
‘What would be the defence?’
‘That’s what I’ll discuss with counsel. Computer error – there’s plenty of that about. Only last week I got a phone bill for six hundred pounds, turned out to be somebody tapping into an – ahem – an adult chat line in the Philippines.’ He shuffled together the three pieces of paper that lay on his desk. ‘We’ll present you as a victim of a corporation cock-up, if you’ll pardon the expression. NuLine trying to cover it up, trying to keep their shareholders’ confidence; after all it doesn’t look too good, does it? Especially with a big takeover in the pipeline. But these mistakes happen, don’t they? We all know that. And there you are, the scapegoat, and all because your initials happen to be the same.’
‘They weren’t.’
‘Come again?’
‘I made them the same.’ Natalie spoke in a rush; it was such a relief, to confide in somebody. ‘I found a bloke whose surname began with T and I married him.’
The response was gratifying. Mr Wigton slumped in his chair, his chin resting in his hand, and stared at her. ‘Can you just run that by me again?’
‘I found this bloke – Colin – and I married him.’
‘You married a man just to give yourself the initials N.T.?’
She nodded. Mr Wigton looked enthralled. Natalie was starting to enjoy herself. So absorbed were they that neither of them heard the outer door open and somebody enter the reception room behind them.
‘Did he know?’ asked Mr Wigton.
‘God no. He’s sweet . . . he doesn’t know anything. I mean, I liked him, of course . . .’
Mr Wigton’s shoulders were shaking. He stroked his moustache, to hide his mirth. ‘You’re a clever girl, my dear,’ he said, ‘but not quite as clever as you think.’
‘Why?’ she demanded.
‘You didn’t need to go to all that trouble. You could have just changed your name by stat dec.’
‘What’s that?’
‘Statutory declaration – Bob’s your uncle. Don’t even have to do it by deed poll. Anybody can have any name they want.’
He was laughing at her! ‘Oh, I thought of that,’ she said, stung. ‘But it would have looked a bit suspicious, don’t you think? Suddenly just changing my name?’
Mr Wigton shook his head. His shoulders were still shaking. ‘The poor bugger.’
‘What?’
‘Your husband. The poor bugger.’
She shouldn’t have told him, of course. Just then she heard a noise in the other room. They swung round.
It was Colin. He had sat down, suddenly, in a chair.
They were sitting in Colin’s van, outside the lawyer’s office. It was rush hour. Traffic roared past; in the van, however, the silence was terrible.
‘I can’t believe it,’ said Colin at last. ‘I can’t believe what I heard.’
‘It wasn’t like that,’ Natalie blustered. ‘Not really. I mean, I’m very fond of you and everything, you know that, Colin. It just popped into my mind, after I met you.’ She reached out to touch his leg, and stopped. ‘I mean, Farida had an arranged marriage and they’ve been getting along like a house on fire, she really likes him—’
‘Fuck Farida.’
She jumped. Colin never swore.
‘Haven’t we been happy?’ she said. ‘Really happy? Nothing can change that, nothing can take that away, it’s all quite genuine, honestly—’
‘How can you say that? What sort of person are you?’ He swung round to face her. ‘I thought you loved me—’
‘I do!’ She put her a
rm around him but he shook it off.
‘I thought – how could she love me?’ He wiped his nose with the back of his hand. ‘I was over the moon, I couldn’t believe my luck . . .’
‘Please believe me—’
‘You cheated on me and you cheated on them. All this time, stealing all that money—’
‘Who says I did it?’ she asked weakly. Looking at him, she realized there was no point in protesting her innocence.
He was trying to take it all in. Rigid with shock, he was trying to catch up with it all. ‘How could you do it, Natalie? I wondered where it was coming from . . . I can’t believe it . . .’
‘I’m sorry, Stumpy, I really am.’ She tried to light a cigarette but the matches spilled. ‘I didn’t hurt anybody. Remember when we talked about the little people, people like us?’ She scrabbled on the floor. ‘I haven’t hurt them, have I? You said how you hated the gas board, how they clobber old ladies, how they don’t give a fuck . . .’ She picked up a match and tried to strike it. ‘Well, NT’s the same . . . they didn’t even notice it, they make such a stonking profit, so what’s the harm?’
He stared at her. A tear hung on his lower lip. ‘What’s the harm? You ask, what’s the harm?’
He turned away and started up the engine.
That night Colin slept on the settee. He didn’t have the heart, it seemed, to pull it out into a bed. Natalie gazed into the lounge. He lay curled in his anorak, the lights blazing.
‘Come to bed, Colin,’ she said.
There was no reply.
Natalie overslept. Her first thought, when she woke, was: Christ, I’m late for work. And then she remembered. She wouldn’t be going to NuLine, ever again.
She had woken to a changed world. No – a world that carried on regardless, but from which she had been removed. It was as if she had been diagnosed with cancer. A few words, and she was dispatched into a parallel universe which had been there all the time, but unvisited by all except the unlucky ones.
And now she was caught up in the momentum of this new life: another appointment with the solicitor, an appearance on Monday at the Magistrates’ Court. This new existence brought with it a new vocabulary: Custody Officer, Notice of Entitlements . . . She had entered a foreign country with its own language and there was no going back.
On the floor lay her rain-stained shoes. Yesterday, in another lifetime, she had dressed for work. That young woman was unreachable now; for a panic-stricken moment Natalie felt a stranger even to herself. Somebody wrote the wrong date on a cheque and now she was a criminal. She hadn’t felt like one before; in fact, she had got so accustomed to what she was doing that it had long ago lost its fizz. She thought of her desk at work: its partition stuck with postcards. Already it had the elegiac quality of an old photograph, of an existence taken for granted but now gone for ever.
Natalie stood in the bathroom, brushing her teeth. Her hand was shaking; the toothpaste smeared on her lip. Where was her mother, now she needed her? And where was Colin – her simple, decent husband whom she had hurt so deeply?
She saw him down in the garden. He hadn’t gone to work; he must have phoned in sick. It was still raining. Head bowed, he tramped through the mud.
She ran downstairs and followed Colin into the big new shed she had bought him. He was feeding his cane toads. Watch them! he had told her once. Look at them, the fat greedy whatsits, they’ll eat anything – bread, cheese, the kitchen sink. Today he just tipped in a carton of crickets, then turned away, listlessly, and looked at her.
Colin didn’t move. The only sound was the trill-phone warbling of the crickets. She remembered larking around. Hello, this is Natalie speaking, how may I help you? Today she said nothing. In the tank there was a flurry of activity; one by one, the crickets were silenced.
Natalie took her husband’s hand. For the first time, oddly enough, she felt truly married to him.
Colin followed as she led him upstairs. In the bedroom, she took off his woolly hat and unzipped his anorak. She lifted the duvet and they climbed into bed. It was still warm.
Fully clothed, Colin lay down beside her. She pulled up the duvet up over them. ‘Our tortoise shell,’ she whispered. ‘Nobody can get at us now.’
Colin lay flat on his back. She turned to him and stroked his cheek; it was as plump and smooth as a child’s – just a faint sandpapering of stubble round the chin. Was he going to be able to cope with this?
She wrapped her arms around him and held him tight. ‘I need you, Stumpy,’ she said. ‘Don’t leave me.’
So Colin stood by her. He was a loyal young man and he loved her deeply. Her crime bemused him; it was beyond his comprehension. What could have caused her to cheat, so continuously and on such an umimaginable scale? As the weekend passed, however, he started to accept it simply as a part of her personality. He was a rock-climber; he saw it as a fault-line in otherwise solid granite, a stratum of something soft and treacherous like chalk.
But who cared? He rallied. In fact, he felt a stirring of pride, that he could adapt to these new circumstances with such fortitude. For better or worse. Wasn’t that the point of the marriage vows – that they were tested?
Besides, he had benefited from her criminal activity; they were in it together. He thought, guiltily, of the ease that money had brought to their lives – not just a house, but a lack of hesitation in gratifying their desires: a Sony wide-screen TV, a new washing-machine for his mother. Over the months he had started to take things for granted – that they would fill up the tank instead of buying only ten pounds’ worth of petrol; that if something broke down they needn’t worry, they could get it mended or buy another one. None of this had bothered him once; he had lived frugally enough and been perfectly content. Now he felt tainted by his raised expectations; he deserved to be punished. Would somebody take it all away from them – the house, the items they had bought? More to the point, what was going to happen to Natalie? Would they take her away too? He didn’t say the word prison even to himself, he couldn’t bring himself to think about it.
Her betrayal of him, of course, had wounded him deeply. However, she had been so loving towards him since then – more loving than he had ever known her – that at times he was almost grateful for this crisis which had flung them together.
For they were very close now, the two of them clinging to each other in the midst of a hostile world. At last Natalie needed him. How helpless she was, with nobody else to care for her! His protective instincts had usually been frustrated, for she was a feisty young woman. Now, however, they blossomed. He looked after her as if she were an invalid. A few people phoned – a girl from the office, the man called Phillip from the personnel department – but, gratifyingly, she didn’t want to speak to them. ‘Get rid of them,’ she whispered.
Later, Colin remembered that weekend with great tenderness. Nothing can take that away, Natalie had said. Amidst all the fear and anxiety he felt true happiness. Soon the outside world would know – reporters, his mother – but just for now normal life was suspended, it was just himself and Natalie, alone. And to no one else, except her solicitor, had she confided her guilt.
They went out together into the countryside. She even accompanied him on his trip to catch meadow plankton, a nutritious fresh food for small lizards and frogs. He gave her a butterfly net and watched her as she swept it through the weeds. For the first time in their marriage she helped him, putting the bags of insects in the fridge until, stunned by the cold, they were ready to be dispensed.
He took her up on the moors, far north, up to Wensleydale. He showed her the ruins of his grandfather’s farmhouse and the fields his family had toiled in all their lives. On the fells above, a satellite mast had been erected. It shocked him by its size. Maybe NuLine, the wrecker of Natalie’s life, had put it there, but even that failed to blight their time together.
For he was happy. High up in the sky a lark sang, as if flung there by a fist. It was the most secret of holidays, the honeymoon they had
never had. Holding hands like sweethearts, they walked until they were exhausted. The windswept, uncaring hills comforted him. They knew that this was a trifling matter and that love would endure, as they had, beyond the pettiness of the present. Natalie trotted beside him in her silly shoes; she was all his, undistracted by her normal, baffling preoccupations. It would be months before the trial but already he felt the possible loss of her. It was in the balmy air, like the scent of autumn.
‘Wear what you wore when you came to tea with my mam,’ Colin said. ‘You looked really nice then.’
Natalie laughed.
‘I don’t mean—’ he stumbled ‘I mean, course you look nice, normally . . .’ He meant demure and respectable. He hadn’t seen those clothes on her since then, in fact.
She ruffled his hair. ‘It’s OK.’
Natalie looked remarkably calm. He was already perspiring in his white shirt and tie. They were due at the Magistrates’ Court at ten. Mr Wigton was meeting them there. It’s only a formality, he had said. Nothing to be nervous about. To Mr Wigton, of course, it was all in a day’s work.
Natalie dressed in the pale suit she had worn to Farida’s wedding, and pushed back her hair with the velvet band. She looked unfamiliar to him, elegant and yet vulnerable. He wondered at her variety. She was a chameleon, changing her colour according to circumstances. Of course, chameleons also had the ability to rotate their eyes in different directions. He thought: Criminals can do that too. They could talk to someone’s mother whilst eyeing the family silver. Despite their closeness, Natalie unsettled him. All these months, while seemingly focused on him, she had in fact been leading a secret life. Another man might have gone back over the past, re-examining events and searching for clues – when had she lied? – but Colin wasn’t the type. He trusted her; he had to trust her. It was as simple as that.