Page 101 of Still Me
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I was just opening the door to my room when Mr. Gopnik appeared. He was still dressed in his workout gear—unusual for him after seven—and lifted a hand when he saw me, as if he had been trying to locate me for some time. “Ah. Louisa.”
“I’m sorry I—”
“I’d like to talk to you in my study. Now.”
Of course you would, I thought. Of course. He turned and walked back up the corridor. I cast an anguished look at my room, which held my clean clothes, deodorant, and toothpaste. I thought longingly about a second coffee. But Mr. Gopnik was not the kind of man you kept waiting.
I glanced down at my phone, then jogged after him.
—
I walked into the study to find him already seated. “I’m really sorry I was ten minutes late. I’m not normally late. I just had to...”
Mr. Gopnik was behind his desk, his expression unreadable. Agnes was on the upholstered chair by the coffee table in her workout gear. Neither of them asked me to sit down. Something in the atmosphere made me feel suddenly horribly sober.
“Is... is everything okay?”
“I’m hoping you can tell me. I had a call from my personal account manager this morning.”
“Your what?”
“The man who handles my banking operations. I wondered if you could explain this.”
He pushed a piece of paper toward me. It was a bank statement, with the totals blacked out. My eyesight was a little blurry but just one thing was visible, a trail of figures, five hundred dollars a day under “cash withdrawals.”
It was then that I noticed Agnes’s expression. She was staring fixedly at her hands, her mouth compressed into a thin line. Her gaze flickered toward me and away again. I stood, a fine trickle of sweat running down my back.
“He told me something very interesting. Apparently in the run-up to Christmas a considerable sum of money was removed from our joint bank account. It was removed day by day from a nearby ATM in amounts that were—perhaps—designed not to be noticed. He picked it up because they have anti-fraud software designed to identify strange patterns of use in any of our bank cards and this was flagged up as unusual. Obviously this was a little concerning so I asked Agnes and she told me it wasn’t anything to do with her. So I asked Ashok to provide the CCTV for the days concerned and my security people matched it up with the times of the withdrawals and it turns out, Louisa,” here he looked at me directly, “the only person going in and out of the building at those times was you.”
My eyes widened.
“Now, I could go to the banks concerned and ask them to provide the CCTV from their ATMs at the times the amount was taken, but I’d rather not put them to that trouble. So really I wanted to know whether you could explain what was going on here. And why almost ten thousand dollars was removed from our joint account.”
I looked at Agnes but she was still looking away from me.
My mouth had dried even more than it had that morning.
“I had to do some... Christmas shopping. For Agnes.”
“You have a card to do that. Which clearly shows which shops you’ve been in and you provide the receipts for all purchases. Which, up to now, I gather from Michael, you have done. But cash... cash is rather less transparent. Do you have the receipts for this shopping?”
“No.”
“And can you tell me what you bought?”
“I... No.”
“So what has happened to the money, Louisa?”
I couldn’t speak. I swallowed. And then I said, “I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?”
“I—I didn’t steal anything.” I felt the color rising to my cheeks.
“So Agnes is lying?”
