Page 48 of Bitter Burn
Tristan doesn’t reply.
I wish I could see his face, but I’m calling from a cheap phone I bought outside a Metro station right now, and even a call to Canada has it practically spitting sparks in my hand.
And then the man I’m waiting for strolls into the room anyway.
“I need to go,” I tell Tristan, and the regret is a pinch in my throat. “I—I just wanted to make sure you were okay.”
“Thank you,” he says woodenly. “Send my regards to Mrs. Trevena.”
A click before I can say anything else. Like I love you.
Like I made a mistake. Although there’s not much point to a lie like that. Do I feel guilty separating him and Isolde? Do I hate every minute he’s so far away from me? Yes and yes again, but would I do anything differently?
Of course not.
I put the phone in my coat pocket and walk over to my father-in-law, who’s standing in front of a three-piece wooden etching of Joan of Arc. He’s wearing a three-piece suit, as he usually does, with a long wool coat and scarf, but despite his clothes being as crisp and unwrinkled as a shop mannequin’s on Savile Row, there’s an undeniable jitteriness to him.
“Mr. Trevena,” he says quickly and then looks behind us, as if to check that we’re alone.
I nod. “Mr. Laurence.”
“Thank you for meeting me,” he says. His eyes are darting around, lingering on the empty doorways into the room. “I know you’re busy, but it couldn’t wait.”
He’d said as much on the phone this morning when he’d told me that he’d booked a flight to London for the express purpose of discreetly laying over in DC. “Oh?”
“It’s not—it’s not ordinary business,” he explains. His face—always a severe one—is carved with lines when he turns back to me. “I think I’m being followed. And I think Cashel has something to do with it.”
This does arouse my interest, but I don’t give an outward show of it. I have been extremely careful to keep my father-in-law ignorant of my motivations and the depth of my knowledge, especially as pertains to Isolde and Cashel. And while Geoffrey Laurence has the distinction of being the person I hate the most whom I don’t also plan on killing, I think learning that your child murders people at the behest of an evil churchman should come from a father-daughter chat and not from a morally dubious son-in-law.
I’m old-fashioned like that, I guess.
“When Isolde’s mother died, the entirety of the Cashel family’s wealth and property were rolled into the family trust, with Isolde as the trust’s sole beneficiary,” Laurence continues. “Mortimer had renounced all claim to the family’s money years ago when he took his vows, but he assumed the role of trustee. I obviously insisted on becoming a co-trustee after Inis’s death, since I wanted to make sure things were done right. I mean, what would Mortimer know about stewarding a trust? He took his vow of poverty so seriously that Inis had to shove new socks in his bag whenever he’d visit.”
That sounds like Cashel. His singular fusion of austerity and power. If his piscatory ring were made out of spent bullets rather than gold, he’d find it just as beautiful.
“He’s never shown a lick of interest in the trust, so I—well, I haven’t personally checked on it much in the last few years,” Laurence says, a ruddiness coming into his pale cheeks. “It was delegated to someone below me. I glanced over the annual reports, made sure things were heading in the right direction, and moved on.”
“And now you’ve found something.”
He twists his hands together once. “Money has been siphoned off, little by little. Very carefully done, the way a banker would do it.”
“The way the person to whom you delegated the management of the trust did it?”
A jerky nod, and the flush in his cheeks is growing darker and splotchier now. “I’m not proud of this, Trevena. That it happened at my bank at all could be catastrophic, but that it happened to my own family is a…a violation.”
“How much money?” I ask. “Can you see where it went?”
“Millions over the last seven years. Less than ten, more than eight. The amounts were deducted as transaction fees or management fees and then promptly slid right out of Laurence Bank into a shell company. Which went into another shell company. And so on and so on until they eventually got to Armenia or Tajikistan or the Caymans and melted away. There were only two that our investigators were able to trace to their final destinations. One payment went to the tuition department at Stanford. The other went to a woman named Regina Springer.” He digs in his pocket and hands me a folded piece of paper.
I tuck it away in my own pocket to look at later. “So you’d like me to look into it,” I say, not really asking, because I already know. This was the nature of our agreement four years ago. His daughter as surety for our continued services to each other. “But why do you think that Cashel has something to do with it?”
“Inis adored her brother, you know,” Laurence murmurs. “Said that his faith was a faith of peace and that’s what the Church needed in these times. She thought all the glad-handing and reconnaissance and mediating was just simple diplomacy, but I knew better. I knew he wanted to be the pope.”
Laurence’s eyes drift to Joan of Arc. Etched knights kneel adoringly around the saint as her eyes are cast heavenward, and angels are arrayed around her like the rays of a sun. She has a sword held in one hand, a distaff in the other, and a dazzling golden halo. Beneath her levitating feet are the words “Mes derniers voeux, ma dernière pensée, sont pour mon dieu, ma patrie, et mon roi.”
My last wishes, my last thought, are for my god, my country, and my king.
It makes me think of Isolde. Of Tristan. Children asked to hold swords for lies that would make martyrs of them in a heartbeat.
