Stranded Read Online Free

finished the degree. I’ve just started the one-year course you need to be a solicitor.’
    â€˜You don’t get a grant.’ Some of my best friends are lawyers; I know about these things. ‘The fees are somewhere around four and a half grand. Plus you’ve got to have something to live on. Which you expected to get from the divorce settlement. Only, there’s a problem, isn’t there?’
    â€˜You’re well informed,’ she said.
    â€˜It’s my job. He’s clever with money, your husband. On paper, he’s spotless. It’s the offshore holding company that owns the car, the house, everything. He takes a salary of a few hundred a month. And the company pays for everything else. And it’s all perfectly legal. On paper, he can’t afford to pay you a shilling. So you decided to extract your divorce settlement by a slightly unorthodox route.’
    She looked away, studying the hand that held the cigarette. ‘Ten grand’s a fraction of what I’m entitled to,’ she said softly. Her admission of guilt didn’t give me the usual adrenalin rush. She sighed again. ‘You have no idea what I’ve had to put up with over the years.’
    I submitted my account to Gerry Banks without a qualm. I’d done the job he asked me to do, and as far as I was concerned, he should be grateful. He’d asked me to handle the exchange, to make sure his car came back to him in one piece. It had been me who’d made the foolish offer to get the Z3 back without handing over the cash. And everybody knows that we women aren’t up to the demanding job of being private eyes, don’t they? Hardly surprising I wasn’t able to live up to my promises.
    Besides, we’ll have forgotten each other inside six months. But I’ll never forget the wind in my hair the night Tania Banks and my inner spiv cruised the M6 till dawn with the top down.

The Wagon Mound
    N othing destroys the quality of life so much as insomnia. Ask any parent of a new baby. It only takes a few broken nights to reduce the most calm and competent person to a twitching shadow of their normal proficiency. My wakefulness started when the nightmares began. When I did manage to drop off, the visions my subconscious mind conjured up were guaranteed to wake me, sweating and terrified, within a couple of hours of nodding off. It didn’t take long before I began to fear sleep itself, dreading the demons that ripped through the fabric of my previous ease. I tried sleeping pills, I tried alcohol. But nothing worked.
    I never dreamed that I’d rediscover the art of sleeping through the night thanks to a legal precedent. In 1961, the Privy Council heard a case concerning a negligent oil spillage from a ship called the Wagon Mound in Sydney Harbour. The oil fouled a nearby wharf, and in spite of expert advice that it wouldn’t catch fire, when the wharf’s owners began welding work, the oil did exactly what it wasn’t supposed to do. The fire that followed caused enough damage for it to be worth taking to court, where the Privy Council finally decreed that the ship’s owners weren’t liable because the type of harm sustained by the plaintiff must itself be reasonably foreseeable. When Roger, the terminally boring commercial attaché at the Moscow Embassy, launched into the tale the other night in the bar at Proyekt OGI, he could never have imagined that it would change my life so dramatically. But then, lawyers have never been noted for their imagination.
    Proximity. That’s another legal principle that came up during Roger’s lecture. How many intervening stages lie between cause and effect. I think by then I was the only one listening, because his disquisition had made me think back to the starting point of my sleepless nights.
    Although the seeds were sown when my boss in London decided to invite the bestselling biographer Sam Uttley on a British Council tour