Divide and Conquer

Elspeth

Every empire ends the same way. Not at the border. In the counting house.

You can spend a century building walls, and a decade bribing the garrison, and it will not matter, because the thing that brings down a great family is never the enemy at the gate. It is a brother who has been skimming the take. It is a nephew with a private account. It is a clerk who notices that the totals no longer foot, and says nothing, and begins to keep a second set of books.

Dennis used to say that the first lesson in forensic accounting was also the last: Nobody trusts the people they steal with.

"Say that again," says Kestrel.

"Westbrook."

"Westbrook Advisory."

"A limited liability company incorporated in Wilmington, Delaware, in the spring of last year. Registered agent in a strip mall. One member, listed as a trust. The trust's beneficiary is a woman called Margaret Dunne, who does not, as far as I could establish, exist." I am sitting at the desk in the study with a pencil in my hand and a clean sheet of paper in front of me. It's Tuesday, the twenty-third. The snow has stopped. The plow has been through. "Between March of last year and the end of August this year, fourteen transfers left the Larkspur Holdings account in George Town. Each was between two and three million dollars. Each went to a bank in Wilmington. Each was recorded on the Marrow family schedule as a disbursement to related party."

"And the related party?"

"Westbrook. And Westbrook, in turn, pays a monthly retainer to a law firm."

"Which?"

I look up.

"Marrow, Pryor and Dane," I say. "On Park Avenue."

Kestrel is standing at the window, in his shirtsleeves, with his hands in his pockets. He doesn't move. He looks at me for a very long time with an expression of dawning appreciation, as a man might regard a chess problem that has just revealed its solution.

"Warren," he says.

"Warren."

"How much?"

"Thirty-eight million, six hundred and fourteen thousand, two hundred dollars." I write it on the paper. "Nine point four percent of the total take. Exactly."

"Exactly."

"I noticed because it was a percentage. Nothing in Larkspur was a percentage. The rest of the money went in lumps, to named recipients: Augustin's campaign vehicles, Cordelia's Foundation reserve, a trust for Conrad. Round numbers, agreed in advance, on a family schedule. Three-way. Forty, thirty, twenty." I tap the pencil. "That adds up to ninety percent. I assumed the other ten was a fee. Legal costs. The sort of thing a lawyer takes."

"And it was nine point four."

"It was nine point four on the books. In reality it was thirty-eight million, taken piecemeal, in the dark, so that no one would notice a lump." I put the pencil down. "Warren didn't take a fee. Warren took a cut of the cut, and didn't tell his mother."

…

There is a silence.

The clocks tick. Outside the window the snow lies smooth and blue on the slope, and a single pair of footprints, made by a groundsman at dawn, runs down toward the gate.

"I don't understand," says Kestrel slowly. "He is the family's cleaner. He has been its right hand for twenty years. Why would he steal from them?"

"Because he is the family's cleaner."

He turns.

"Think about it. What does a cleaner get for his work? A salary. A partnership. A place at the table, always second, always behind Augustin and Cordelia and the favorite son. He grew up in a house where the only thing that mattered was the name, and he is the only one of them who has ever had to work for it." I fold my hands. "I have seen this in a hundred companies. The loyal lieutenant, who does everything and gets nothing. One day he takes a little for himself. He tells himself it's a bonus. By the fourteenth transfer, it's a pension."

"And Dennis."

"Yes."

I say it in the same even voice.

"Dennis found it. He saw it in the margin of the schedule, a line that didn't foot. He wrote W? in red pen. He meant to ask me about it the next morning." I look at my hand. "I think he knew what it was. I think he understood, before I did, that it wasn't the Larkspur theft that would get us killed. It was this."

"The tape," says Kestrel.

"Yes."

"Conrad said it was his idea. To take the binder. To scare you."

"Conrad has never had an idea in his life that wasn't someone else's."

"And Warren."

"Warren was in the car. Warren had a key to the back door, and a can of gasoline, and a poker. Warren had a plan that required no one to be left alive who had seen the schedule." My voice doesn't change. "It was never Larkspur he was protecting. Larkspur was the family's sin; they'd have survived it. It was Westbrook. He was protecting thirty-eight million dollars from his own mother."

Kestrel sits down slowly in the chair opposite.

He looks like a man who has been shown, quite unexpectedly, a room in his own house.

"Cordelia doesn't know," he says.

"No."

"You're certain."

"If she knew, he'd be dead. Or in Paraguay. Cordelia Marrow wouldn't tolerate a lieutenant who had his own treasury. I've watched her for eight years. She forgives vice. She forgives cruelty, murder, sloth. She does not forgive disloyalty in the accounts."

"Then you mean to tell her."

"I mean to put it in front of her."

"With what?"

I turn the sheet of paper round and slide it across the desk.

…

It is a single page.

I wrote it at dawn, in block capitals, with a soft pencil, in the manner of a clerk. There's no heading and no signature. There is a column of dates, fourteen of them, each with a figure. A column of account numbers. A line at the bottom with a total, ruled twice. Underneath, in smaller letters:

SOURCE ACCOUNT: LARKSPUR HOLDINGS LTD, GEORGE TOWN, ENDING 9261.

RECEIVING ENTITY: WESTBROOK ADVISORY LLC, WILMINGTON.

BENEFICIAL OWNER: W. A. MARROW.

THE FAMILY SCHEDULE SHOWS 9.4% AS LEGAL FEES. THE FAMILY HAS PAID THE SAME FEES TWICE.

Kestrel reads it twice. His lips move slightly at the total.

"It's very cold," he says.

"Cordelia likes things cold."

"It doesn't accuse him."

"It doesn't have to. A good page never does. It just sets out the facts and waits for the reader to arrive at the conclusion on her own, so that she'll believe she thought of it." I take back the pencil. "The only thing she'll ask is where it came from. And there is no answer to that, which will drive her mad."

"She'll suspect me."

"She'll suspect everybody. That's the point."

"Elspeth."

I look up.

"What happens when she confronts him?"

"Warren will deny it. He's a lawyer; he'll deny it very well. Cordelia will say nothing. She'll go quiet, and she'll start to audit. She'll send for the Foundation's books, the family schedule, the original wire confirmations. She'll find the Wilmington account in a week." I smile. It is a cold, small smile. "In the meantime, Warren will find himself unaccountably short of his mother's trust. He'll panic. A man who is protecting thirty-eight million dollars from his own family makes mistakes."

"He'll turn on us."

"He'll turn on everyone. That's what a cornered man does. He stops being a lawyer and starts being a Marrow."

Kestrel is silent.

"You've done this before," he says.

"Not to a person." I put the page down. "To companies. To boards. You find the one fault line in the family, and you set a very small charge in it, and then you get out of the way."

"And the family?"

"The family comes apart. It always does. Greed is cheaper than mortar."

…

"It will need to be posted," says Bridget.

She is standing in the door of the study. I hadn't heard her come in. She is in her coat and woolen hat, with a canvas bag over her arm, and a scarf up to her chin. Her cheeks are red from the cold. It is her afternoon off; the roads opened at noon, and she has permission, for the first time in a month, to go into town.

Kestrel rises.

"Nurse Sorrell."

"Doctor." She shuts the door. "I heard what you said. I was in the hall."

"Bridget," I say.

"Don't." She holds up a hand. "You've something you need to get out of the building, and you can't do it yourself, and he can't do it without it coming back to him. I go to Poughkeepsie on a Tuesday every second week. I buy Daniel a sweater. I get my hair done. I post a letter." A faint, dry smile. "No one will notice one more."

"They'll notice," says Kestrel, quietly.

"Who?"

"Hollis's friends."

"Hollis is in a truck on the county road." She says it flatly. "I saw it yesterday from the pantry window. A gray Ford. He sits there at night with the engine off. Smoking." She shrugs. "He's been told to watch. He doesn't know what for."

"Then you shouldn't go."

"I should." The chin lifts. "It's a post office. It's a stamp. It's a woman buying a stamp. Do you imagine I haven't done it two hundred times?"

I look at her.

I see everything I need to see. I see the stiff, defiant back, and the red cheeks, and the canvas bag with the knitting needles poking out of it. I see a woman who stood eleven years on a ledge and has just discovered that she has been allowed to step off. She is not afraid. That is what frightens me. She has the clear shining eyes of someone who has finally found an errand that is worth doing.

"Bridget," I say, "I don't want you to."

"I know."

"If anything happened..."

"Elspeth." Her voice is almost gentle. "I've been carrying a note in my pocket for twenty months. I've never known what for. Let me carry this."

I look at the page on the desk. At the pencil. At a column of numbers I wrote at dawn, and a name at the bottom.

I could say no.

I could say it now. I could fold the page into my pocket and tell her to go and buy her sweater, and we could find another way. We have twelve days. There is no other way. I know it as I know my own pulse.

And I think, with an absolute and horrible clarity: this is what it is to be them.

This is how it is done. A woman with a clean mind and a good cause looks at a person who is willing, and counts the cost, and writes the figure in a column. Acceptable. And then she smiles and says thank you.

"Use a gloved hand," I say.

…

She leaves at half past two.

I watch from the window of the Lantern Wing as the hospital van, a white Ford with a green stripe, pulls out of the yard and rolls slowly down the drive between the beeches, trailing a plume of powdered snow. It reaches the gate. It pauses. It turns onto the county road and is gone.

I stay at the glass.

I count the minutes. Twelve to Poughkeepsie, if the roads are clear. Twenty if they are not. Twenty minutes at the counter. Ten more, if she buys the sweater, if she has her hair done, if she does all the small ordinary things that make a woman invisible.

I count them again.

At a quarter to four I understand that I am counting for the wrong reason.

I stop. I sit down on the window seat with my hands between my knees. I am looking at the snow, but I'm not seeing it; I'm seeing a girl on a prescription pad, writing in pencil, in the dark.

I was good at this job. Tell them that.

I wonder what Bridget would say to that, if she could say it. You did what you had to. She would. That is the thing I cannot bear: she would say it kindly.

At ten past five, the van comes back.

I hear it before I see it. The crunch of tires. The cough of an engine. A door. The stamp of boots on the step. A pause in which I do not breathe.

And then, very faintly, through the floor, from the direction of the kitchen: the sound of a kettle, filling.

…

She finds me in the linen room an hour later.

She is white. Not frightened; I know her fear now, the stiff blankness, the clipped speech. This is something else. She is flushed under the pallor, as if she had been running, and her hands, as she shuts the door behind her, are trembling in a way I have not seen.

"It's done," she says.

"Tell me."

"Post office on Market Street. Four forty. I used the machine." She wets her lips. "I wore the gloves. I put it in the slot. I stood there, and I watched it go down." She laughs, a short, breathless sound. "Elspeth, it was so easy. I've never done anything so easy in my life."

"Was there anyone?"

"A man at the counter. A woman with a baby. Nobody."

"And the truck?"

A pause.

"There was a car," says Bridget.

I go cold.

"On the way back. A gray one. A sedan, not a truck. It came up behind me at the lights on Route 9. I thought nothing of it." She runs a hand over her mouth. "And then at the turn for the hospital road, it wasn't there. It had gone on."

"You're sure."

"I'm sure it went on."

"Did you see the driver?"

"No."

I think.

I think very hard, in the dark of the narrow room, with the sheets stacked to the ceiling and the laundry chute thumping.

"It was nothing," says Bridget. "A car."

"Yes."

"They don't know."

"No."

But I see her hand, which has found the edge of a shelf and is holding it. And I see the way her eyes keep going to the door.

She reaches into her canvas bag and brings something out. A small, flat, round tin, painted red, with a picture of a candy cane.

"I bought you a present," she says. "I know. It's a daft thing. But they had them at the register, and I thought..." She presses it into my hand. "Peppermints. For the road."

I look at the tin.

It is the cheap, bright, tawdry sort that one finds beside a cash register at Christmas. A cardboard picture of a candy cane, a little rusty at the corner.

I close my fingers over it. It is cold, and light, and smells of sugar.

"Thank you," I say.

"Happy Christmas, Elspeth."

"It's tomorrow."

"I know." She smiles. It's a real smile, quick and uncertain, and it makes her ten years younger. "I thought I'd get in early."

…

That night, I cannot sleep.

I lie on the quilt in the Lantern Wing with the lamp on and the tin on my chest. I open it and shake out one mint into my palm. It is hard and white and faintly sticky, with a twist of cellophane at each end. I do not eat it. I hold it in my hand and look at the ceiling.

Divide and conquer.

I did it right. I can see every step of the argument, as clear as a column of figures. The page is in the post. Cordelia will read it on the twenty-sixth. By the second of January she will have sent for the Wilmington filings. By the third, she and Warren will be at each other's throats.

It's an excellent plan.

I think it is the best I have ever made.

At a quarter to three, the lights flicker.

They come back at once. A fault in the generator. Nothing. I look at the dark window, where the snow has begun to fall again, and I think: I am going to count to a hundred, and then I am going to sleep.

I count.

At forty-one, I hear a car on the gravel drive.

I go to the window.

It is a long way down, and dark. The beeches throw bars of shadow across the white. A pair of sidelights comes slowly up the drive, no headlamps, and stops at the foot of the steps. It's a gray sedan. I can't see the make. A man gets out. A big man, in a long coat. He walks round to the passenger side and opens the door.

He doesn't take anything out.

He just stands there for a moment, with his hand on the roof, looking up at the house.

Then he gets back in and the car glides away.

I stay at the window until the sound has gone. My heart is slow. I tell myself that it was a delivery. A wrong turn. A man looking for a house number.

I close the curtain.

At twelve minutes past three, in the silence under the floor, the kettle in the pantry begins to whistle.

Two long notes.

I wait for someone to lift it from the stove.

No one does.