He has supervised contact once a month at a centre in Brightwater. He has attended nine of eleven. He is, by all accounts, careful with her and does not know what to do with his hands.
I have no interest in my daughter growing up with a mythology about a man. She can meet him and make up her own mind at twenty, with the whole file, which I have kept in order.
And the forty-one million, which I did not understand until the December.
Ines’s accountant is a man called Hugo Breen who talks very fast and draws boxes.
He came to the house in the December and drew it on the back of an envelope in about four minutes: the three companies, the subscriptions in, the money out, the loop.
A hundred and nine people had put money into something that paid returns out of what the next person put in.
And then he said the thing that stopped my hands.
“Your grandmother’s sixty-one thousand went in on the same three days as some fairly large subscriptions. Whoever moved hers wasn’t stealing it for himself. He was topping up a gap.”
Sixty-one thousand of a dead woman’s money was used to make three other people’s monthly statements look right.
