The Clayton Account Read Online Free Page B

at Verbier.
    When people asked how he had met Caroline – which they always did, as an oblique reference to their different nationalities – Tom delighted in saying he had picked her up in a bar. Which was true, though he did not mention that the bar had been Annabel’s and that they had both arrived with different but overlapping groups of friends. But he vividly remembered first noticing her and how, towards the end of the evening, they had both deserted their respective escorts and decamped together to Tom’s flat.
    They had been together ever since, and if Tom remained deeply American, for all his Irish roots and established expatriate status, then Caroline was the embodiment of the well-bred Englishwoman: from a six-generation line of soldiers, confident, daring and totally independent. When she had eventually taken Tom to Gloucestershire, to meet her parents, he had at first been received suspiciously. But the ice had soon melted, and today the old Colonel welcomed him with affection.
    As they drove home from the airport that morning, Tom once again thanked his lucky stars and reflected with a smile that, even if he still had an eye for a pretty lady, he had been faithful to Caroline for seven years, which, considering his previous track record with girlfriends, surprised all who had known him as a bachelor. Dressed casually, without make-up, her slight, almost boyish frame looked vulnerable to Tom. He felt a strong urge to embrace her and protect her, reluctant to acknowledge that his emotions stemmed from guilt: from the mess he was about to bring into their lives, and which he still could not admit to openly.
    ‘What are you thinking about?’ she asked, catching a glimpse of his smile.
    ‘You.’
    ‘Good,’ she said with a mischievous grin. ‘Keep it that way!’
    When they reached the house it was deserted, the children and their nanny ordered earlier to the park. Before Tom had a chance to hang his coat, Caroline had started up the stairs, barely pausing to kick off her shoes and throw her jeans down at her husband. Her mood could not have been more evident.
    Later, lying on the tangled duvet, he told her about the bank account, but even then he could not be entirely truthful. He could not make himself tell Caroline – lest her dream be shattered – that all they owned could soon be taken. That his job, his career, his prospects of ever working in finance again, would go up in smoke. He could not admit that he had gambled, illegally, traded futures to his own account in breach of rules, and lost. He dared not say that, unless he plugged the holes before he was discovered, prison could be a real prospect.
    Instead, for the moment, he continued to live the dream.
    ‘How much is half a million dollars?’ she asked. Though Caroline was neither illiterate nor innumerate, such was her Englishness that all foreign money – even the Almighty Dollar – had no value in her mind until expressed in sterling.
    ‘About three hundred and fifty thousand,’ he replied, then added as if reading her thoughts: ‘Plus interest, of course.’
    ‘How much in total, then?’ she exclaimed, sitting up suddenly and fixing her gaze on Tom’s.
    ‘Dunno,’ he teased, running the back of his hand over her left breast. ‘Half a million. One million. It depends how straight the Swiss want to play it.’
    ‘That’s it, then,’ she said happily and with finality. ‘You get that money, and we’ll have that house!’
    That house
was an eighteenth-century manor, sitting on twenty-six of Wiltshire’s finest acres. Caroline had set her heart on it, for after eleven years of the London bright lights, she, like all of her class, longed for
The Country
. Caroline had little interest in money, having never been without, and though her father had offered the use of a cottage on the family estate, Tom had turned it down. We’ll have our own in time, he’d promised her.
    ‘Was your grandfather a crook?’ she asked