And separately — and this is the part — in the January of 2023 she opened a current account at a different bank, in her own name, put sixty-one thousand into it, and told exactly two people it existed.
One was Ines Talbot.
The other was Ellis Prentiss. At a Sunday lunch. In passing. As though she had had a sherry and gone loose-tongued about her granddaughter’s inheritance.
That woman was not loose-tongued in her life. She was eighty-four years old and she was laying bait.
What happened to the bait.
Between the March of 2023 and the June of 2025, that account was emptied.
Not in one go. Fourteen transfers, none over nine thousand, each authorised with a signature that a document examiner has since called “a competent but not expert imitation.”
Every one of them went to the same place: a client account operated by Yardley Rowe Capital, and out of there into three companies I had never heard of.
Ondine Marr set up eleven of those payments. Her name is on the instructions. She was my husband’s assistant, and my husband gave her my grandmother’s account details.
And the entire time, the two of them believed they were quietly bleeding an old woman’s estate.
