Page 87 of The Librarians
“And you didn’t advise Perry against this foolishness?”
In the reflection of the glass, her face is ghostly yet hard-edged. Angry. Kit’s misdeeds are no longer victimless crimes. And by the long-standing tradition of her people, she too is now partly to blame for Perry’s lifeless body in a cold cabinet.
Strangely enough, faced with her combativeness, Conrad’s expression loses some of its earlier implacability. “Perry didn’t say anything to me about his troubles until ten days before he had to either pay up or cough up Daddy’s Picasso. By then he was in a blind panic.”
The slight softening of his stance makes her feel even more wretched. She rubs her temple, trying in vain to prevent the onset of a throbbing headache. “Who was my husband to Perry that he would entrust that much money to him?”
“They knew each other all their lives—dads went to school together, mums at the same college in Oxbridge, that sort of connection.”
“I don’t remember meeting any Bathursts at either of our weddings.”
She and Kit held one set of ceremony-and-parties in Singapore and another in England.
“Perry’s parents’ divorce was hardly a conscious uncoupling—they didn’t go because they didn’t want to run into each other. Perry wanted to go but he was under a forty-five-day house curfew for driving under the influence. His sister went, but as she once dated your husband, I don’t imagine he paraded her in front of you, his new bride.”
There might be more than a little bite in the way he said those last three words.
She slumps against the back of the bench. “I had no idea that even without you showing up, my wedding was that close to turning into a soap opera.”
“Perry’s sister wouldn’t have wanted to make a fool of herself in front of you: You are far wealthier and infinitely more beautiful than she.”
He does not look at her as he gives this compliment. It is a compliment, right? At least the more beautiful part?
She revives slightly. “You seem to know a lot about my wedding.”
“Perry became obsessed with Kit when he couldn’t track down either Kit or his money. And when he confessed his troubles to me, he dug up Kit’s wedding on social media. Imagine my surprise when I saw you walk down the aisle with the man Perry swore defrauded him out of three million pounds.”
She says nothing. What is there to say?
“I remembered your cargo shorts and big visor from Madeira,” he murmurs. “At one point I almost convinced myself that this elegant creature with terrible taste in men couldn’t possibly be you.”
She draws in a long breath. “I didn’t know about Kit’s fraudulent business dealings until the police raided our place. I thought he was having an affair.”
Conrad sits back down and stretches his legs out. He looks as tired as she feels. “Perry made me study Kit’s wedding because he couldn’t understand why Kit, who married into a family of extraordinary wealth, bothered to swindle a mere few million pounds.”
She drops her face into her hands.
The same thought had crossed her mind when Detective Chu first brought up Kit’s failed cryptocurrency speculations. But the digital forensics she’d commissioned—as well as the one undertaken by her grandfather’s people—confirmed that Kit had indeed made wrong bets.
Or rather, he had read the trends correctly and shorted certain overinflated and problematic coins. But coincidentally, or perhaps not so coincidentally, the exchange in which he placed his put options shut down due to “technical issues” just as his gains shot through the roof. No one could log on to their account to buy or sell or do anything.
By the time the “technical issues” had been fixed and the exchange was once again operational, not only had Kit’s gains evaporated but the shitcoins he’d counted on to lose their values had stabilized, leaving him to face an astronomical margin call.
That would be when he embezzled close to twenty million pounds from the prominent and highly successful art investment fund he worked for. The amount he took from Perry might have been taken in good faith, asseed money to recuperate his prior loss and to pay back his employers. But then he bet that the buoyed-up shitcoins would shoot up higher in value, only to see them fall to next to nothing, this time with no “technical issues” to prevent the cratering.
Kit’s family, though still privileged, is no longer wealthy. He’d had to work hard to get ahead. To lose his life’s savings would have been horrifying enough. To become a pauper when he was married to Bartholomew Kuang’s granddaughter must have been unbearable.
But as it turned out, stealing from his employer and his personal friends to cover his shortfall so that he would not face the excruciating ordeal of accounting for both his crime and his new poverty to his in-laws was not the only thing Kit did.
As the police investigated the embezzlement, they uncovered something else altogether. They found out that he had been selling fake signed pop art prints from his art galleries to the tune of almost a million dollars.
That predated his crypto troubles and spoke not to momentary lapses in judgment but to a profound lack of character.
Andthathad been the one thing that became public knowledge. That the grandson-in-law of Bartholomew Kuang had taken two whole years to swindle a piddly one million dollars from chiropractors and accountants who wanted signed pop art prints in their suburban offices.
In the wake of the scandal, Hazel did not disappear. She went to the usual number of birthday and anniversary parties, where, a glass of wine in hand, she shrugged any number of times to variations ofI guess this is what can happen when you marry a foreigner, when you don’t know the family inside out.
Some people said it in sympathy, some in mockery disguised as commiseration. She accepted the sympathy and smiled at the mockery, numb to its sting.
