I didn’t. I hadn’t heard of him before. I watched on and it did sound like James’s business, except, of course, as James had said, there was no cryptocurrency then. Money was just money, so those people should have known that if it seemed too good to be true, it was too good to be true.
Later, it all started to go wrong. People stopped giving him money, while other people, who had given him money, started asking for it back. More and more was going out and less and less was going in and even I, who had only just scraped a C in GCSE maths, could see the way that was going.
The next day, when James had gone to work, I opened up my laptop and typed “Ponzi scheme” into the search bar. The description was thus:
Guaranteed returns with no risk.
Yes, that matched what James had told me.
Investment strategies that are “too complicated” to explain.
“It is pretty complicated,” James had said when he told me aboutit. “Most people don’t really get it. That’s what I’m here for.” And he had fudged and fuddled from there on.
The list continued:
Official documentation is hidden from investors.
That went some way to setting my mind at ease because I had a certificate, somewhere. I wasn’t sure where I’d put it. Next:
Investors find it hard to withdraw their funds.
That was true, although James said it would be a different story in years ahead.
In years ahead. Years before, he’d said I’d double my money within weeks. He’d said I only had to leave it in longer if I wanted to triple or quadruple it, or more. He said.
I didn’t say anything else about it to James after that, but I was sure by then that I would never get the money from my mum’s house back.
I didn’t know what to do. If I went to the police, it would be blown open and out of my control. If I waited, things could get worse. But they could get better. James could tap into a new vein of investment and the whole thing could right itself. He could turn it around and make it legitimate. At that time I still didn’t believe James was nothing but a fraud—I thought the business must be fundamentally sound, but circumstances must have caused him to take a temporary detour. I believed that this could still be put right, with no one any the wiser and that that was what James would do. So I did nothing.
And for a while everything seemed to be on an even keel. Our lifestyle didn’t change, and James seemed unconcerned. I told myself that, after all, I hadn’t seen concrete evidence of a problem and which was more likely: I’d jumped to conclusions or my super talented, very clever husband, whom no one had a bad thing to say about, was asuccessful businessman? People did come from humble backgrounds to great success. I told myself that over and over again until I believed it, and life went on exactly as before.
Then, just a couple of years before the incident with Lennie Green, there was the first sale.
James used to own a yacht. It was a luxury one; it cost millions and could sleep ten, plus crew. It had everything you could find in an average house on board: a TV, a fridge-freezer, a washing machine. It had a swimming pool, and I don’t mean the sea.
We used it once. There were just the two of us and six crew in our ten-berth boat, bobbing around off the south coast. It was too cold to go out on the deck and enjoy the sun, so we watched films in the lounge, which we could have done at home. After that it was left in the marina, costing a fortune and dwarfing all the other yachts. But James still liked to talk about “the yacht,” as if we were hanging out there with celebs all the time.
He sold it. I asked him why and he said because we never used it, which seemed reasonable on the face of it, but knowing him like I did, I had my doubts. Next, he sold his Lamborghini. That was the first of the classic cars to go. He used to have twelve. One by one they were whittled down to six: the Rolls, the Bentley, the Porsche, the Jaguar, the MG, and the Mercedes. And, of course, the modern Audi for everyday use.
Now I realized why he hadn’t divorced me; this marriage hadn’t worked out any better for him than for me, but he couldn’t end it because when the lawyers started poking into his finances, all would be revealed.
That was when the thought of killing him first crossed my mind. It was just an idle daydream at first. I pictured myself leaping outat him from behind a curtain, dressed asThe Scream, brandishing a knife. But it made me realize how much I wouldn’t mind if James was dead, and in fact, the more I thought about it, the more I thought I would prefer it. It wouldn’t solve the Ponzi problem, but it would allow me to take some control over what happened next.
So I made the decision, in principle at least, to do away with him, but the plot got no further than that because I couldn’t find a way.
I looked back at the forum, all the people in the village oblivious, thinking their futures were safe. I read back over the bit before, where Emma had been suggesting there was a serial killer at work and at what BigDreams had said about “jumping out of our skin whenever we see a spade.” What did he know about a spade? The police hadn’t said that, the papers hadn’t said that, the radio station hadn’t said that. Only James and I knew Mr. N had been battered with a spade.
BigDreams was James.
***
Encouraged by Arty’s enthusiasm for the clothes I made, and by James’s fury at them, while I mused over James’s presence in the forum, I created summer dresses out of a huge collection of decorative handkerchiefs I found in a dusty cupboard. I made culottes from a selection of tote bags. I repurposed a 1960s hippy smock I saw in a charity shop window into a skirt and matching handbag. They were comfortable and stylish, whether James thought so or not. I made a few of his thousand-pound ties into hairbands.
I took advantage of the Pets at Home sale and made a jacket out of dog and cat blankets, the lovely polka-dot patterns along the sleeves, and one of the more expensive furry blankets around the body.
It wasn’t long before I had a whole new wardrobe: skirts, trousers,tops, day dresses, evening dresses, summer dresses, accessories. All made bespoke.
I found a Boney M top in the Cats Protection shop, with all four of the band members on it. It was too small for Arty to wear, so I cut the pictures into separate patches and sewed them into a new T-shirt for him.
