The envelope

Chapter 42

The Envelope

Elena got in the front seat and the driver pulled away immediately.

Ethan opened the envelope.

Inside were four documents folded together and a small memory card taped to the back of the last page. He unfolded everything carefully and held the first page under the light from his phone.

Dan leaned over to read it at the same time.

Judith watched their faces.

Dan sat back first. “It is real,” he said quietly.

Ethan kept reading. He went through all four pages slowly without saying anything. Then he held up the memory card.

“This is the recording,” he said. “Cassel and my father. Four days before Gerald Thompson died.”

The car was quiet.

“We need a laptop,” Dan said.

“Grace has one at the property,” Elena said from the front. “I saw it on the kitchen counter this morning.”

“How long until we get back,” Judith asked.

“Forty minutes,” the driver said. First words he had spoken all evening.

Judith looked out of the window at the dark city going past.

Peter Cassel. A name she had not known this morning. A man sitting in a government office right now in a clean suit pointing at everyone else while her father’s name was somewhere on a recording in Ethan’s hand.

She looked at Ethan. “What do the documents say.”

He looked up from the pages. “Financial records mostly. Cassel’s name running through the same shell companies as my father and Whitmore. But going back further than either of them. Fifteen years further.” He paused. “Cassel was not just part of this arrangement. He started it. My father and Whitmore came in later. Cassel built the whole structure and then brought them in to run it.”

“So he is not just the third person,” Dan said. “He is the first person.”

“Yes,” Ethan said.

Judith thought about what Whitmore had said in that room. Your father found Cassel’s name in the records he accessed. That is what made him truly dangerous. Not just to Richard and to me. To Cassel.

Her father had not just stumbled onto a corrupt property deal.

He had accidentally found the man at the top of everything.

And that man had decided he could not survive it.

She pressed her hands together in her lap and kept her face still and looked out at the dark road.

They got back to the property at half past ten.

The house was quiet. All the downstairs lights were off except for the kitchen where Grace had left the small light above the cooker on. Judith went straight upstairs and opened Lily’s door.

Lily was asleep on her back with Mr. Bear on her chest and one arm thrown above her head. Breathing slow and even.

Judith stood in the doorway for a moment. Then she pulled the door almost closed and went back downstairs.

Grace was in the sitting room with a book. She looked up when Judith came in.

“Everything alright,” Grace said.

“Yes,” Judith said. “Thank you for staying up.”

“Go and do what you need to do,” Grace said simply and went back to her book.

Judith went into the kitchen.

Ethan had Grace’s laptop open on the table. The memory card was in the side of it. Dan was beside him. Elena was standing behind them both.

Judith sat down.

Ethan pressed play.

The recording was not clean. There was background noise at first. A door closing. Someone moving. Then two voices settled into the room and became clear.

The first voice was Richard Blackwood. She recognised it immediately from that morning on the pavement outside Dan’s building. Pleasant and controlled.

The second voice was different. Older. Flatter. The voice of someone who was used to making decisions and having them carried out without discussion.

Peter Cassel.

They listened without speaking.

The conversation lasted nine minutes.

Richard Blackwood’s voice asking questions. Careful questions about timing and exposure and what could be traced back. Cassel’s voice answering each one with the patience of a man who had thought through every angle before picking up the phone.

And then near the end Cassel said it.

Gerald Thompson needs to be handled before the end of the month. Cleanly. Nothing that points back.

Richard Blackwood said nothing for a moment.

Then he said, Understood.

The recording ended.

Nobody moved.

The kitchen was completely silent except for the wind outside and the low sound of the countryside at night.

Judith sat very still with her hands flat on the table in front of her.

She had spent six years wondering. Six years telling herself it was an accident because the alternative was too big to hold. Six years carrying her father’s absence like something she had no right to be angry about because accidents happened and the world was unfair and that was simply how things were sometimes.

Gerald Thompson needs to be handled before the end of the month.

She had just heard the man who ordered her father’s death say his name out loud.

Dan reached over and put his hand over hers on the table.

She did not pull away.

Ethan closed the laptop slowly.

He looked at her across the table. He did not say sorry. He did not say anything for a moment. He just looked at her the way a person looks at someone when there are no words that are going to be enough and they know it.

Then he said, “We send this to Sarah and Robert’s lawyer tonight. Right now. Before anything else.”

Judith nodded.

Her voice when it came out was steady. She was surprised by how steady it was.

“Send it,” she said. “All of it. Tonight.”

Ethan opened the laptop again and started typing.

Dan kept his hand over hers.

Elena moved to stand beside Ethan and help him with the attachments.

Outside the garden was dark and still. Somewhere out there the swing Lily loved was moving slightly in the wind.

Judith looked at the kitchen wall and breathed slowly and let the anger sit where it was.

It had earned its place.

She was not going to push it away.