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“And depressed,” she added grimly.
I rubbed my chest with the heel of my hand, the pain there sharp.
“It wasn’t until a couple of years ago that I came back to myself, and I finally asked about him. It hadn’t occurred to me that I hadn’t seen him in years. I wasn’t functioning much, you see,” she explained. “My staff told me that they stopped seeing him when Val died. They’d asked Rosa’s staff about him. She’d told them that he went him home to live with his father. They wanted to know whether he was safe, and whether she would be. She’d painted her husband as violent and unhinged.” Her angry huff was filled with revulsion. “Why would she send her son home to him, especially if he could reveal her whereabouts? The woman had an answer for everything, though—she said he’d agreed to leave her alone if he got his son back. Her husband apparently loved her son and wouldn’t hurt him like he did her.”
“Oh my God,” I breathed, disgust at the lies she’d told coursing through me. If only that’s what she’d done. I could forgive her for stealing all that money. I could even excuse her faking her own death and disappearing. But I could never forgive her for taking Asher away from people who loved him, amputating his foot, then killing him in cold blood when she got sick of him.
“I didn’t understand how a mother could send their only child back to live with an abusive parent, even if he supposedly loved Asher. He was safe here. But then I remembered Asher had spoken about his sister. I looked for her. I found a picture of Rosa and Zali from an old newspaper. There she was, a beautiful little girl sitting on the floor in a recording studio while her mother was the rockstar of the moment—the queen of investing. How could Rosa have left her with an abusive ex-husband?”
“Monroe wasn’t abusive,” I reassured her. “From what I know of him, he’s a good man. He loved Rosa and Asher dearly—their deaths destroyed him—and Zali is his pride and joy.”
“I know that now,” she replied. I could hear the frown in her voice, the sadness permeating her tone. “I knew Monroe’s name from the media reports, so I had some background checks done on him when I got suspicious. I didn’t find a single thing that suggested he was anything but the doting husband and father he was.”
I closed my eyes, wishing I had the power to change the past.
Martha’s voice hitched, and she paused for a moment. “Val and I failed that boy. But we had no idea until it was too late. Parents fight with their children. They go through rough patches. Pre-teen kids get moody. Fleeing abuse and moving across the world would have been hard for both of them. There would have been an adjustment period. It was only when I asked about Asher years later that alarm bells started ringing. That was when I discovered her staff were all terrified of her. She’d managed to isolate them and bully them into submission. They were too scared to speak. I tried to help them. I had a solicitor give them legal advice to get out of their employment contracts, and I promised them all jobs if they left. They trusted me enough that when I asked them to do some digging, they did.”
“What did they find?”
“Asher’s ashes. The plastic urn was in the bottom of the cupboard in his bedroom like it’d been tossed there. The staff took them and searched his room, looking for anything that might have hinted at how he died. They found the other things in the bag hidden under the mattress.”
“Why did they collect them?” I asked. “Why not telephone the authorities? Why didn’t you?”
“Like I said, they were too terrified of Rosa to speak to the police. It was my first suggestion as well, but they refused.”
“And you?” I persisted.
“I did. I went into the station and reported the information I had, which wasn’t very much. But then nothing happened. There were no raids, no arrests, not even a single police car came to the house. I spoke with my friend, the Minister for Immigration, to make sure that Asher hadn’t left the country like she said. He hadn’t. I called the police again. I chased it up and was given the runaround. My complaint had disappeared.”
My gut sank. Rosa had someone on the payroll high up enough in the police that they could intervene and protect her. The saying was that money was the root of all evil. In this case, it wasn’t the money; it had just enabled the evil.
“No one knew what I was talking about. I went in again, spoke to the same officer, and they denied ever speaking with me. They told me I was mistaken and that I was a senile old lady. Then the station house officer came into the interview room and started making noises about me needing to be cared for. I got out of there when they threatened to have me committed.”
“Jesus,” I breathed, shocked and appalled by what I’d been told.
Martha continued, adding, “Rosa’s staff didn’t collect Asher’s things at first. Rosa had shut and locked the door, leaving everything exactly as it was. When they told me, I thought it was perhaps somewhere she went to feel close to him. I still haven’t moved Val’s clothes out of her closet—it’s where I go to feel close to her. But they said everything was covered in dust. It didn’t look like it’d been touched in years. I’d told them not to touch anything until I had more information, but my second visit to the police station prompted an alternative approach.”
I closed my eyes and counted backward from ten, trying to diffuse the rage and devastation her words ignited in me. How could she? Had Rosa always been a sick fuck who had managed to deceive everyone around her, or had something happened? I made a note to involve a criminal psychologist on the podcast if it ever got to the point of being recorded. One day Zali and Roe would have questions, and I wanted to be able to answer them as best we could.
“You got them to take his ashes and the mementos,” I surmised.
“Yes, I asked them to go back and get what they could without it being noticed. And I did some research.”
“What did you find?”
“You, Professor Reid,” she said fondly. “I read one of your early papers and watched a presentation you did at a conference where you used ReimagINC as a case study. You raised some pertinent questions.”
I remembered that presentation. I’d been in contact with a defamation lawyer to make sure that I didn’t run the risk of being sued by Rosa’s estate. Their advice was to leave off any and all names. I ignored it, going with my gut. Thankfully I had, or I might never have had this conversation.
“With a lot of digging, I found out that you’d applied for funding for the class you wanted to run as well as a podcast, and that it had been refused. I had my lawyer reach out and offer an approval with the insistence that you publish the results.”
My head was spinning. Martha had come at the same problem from a different perspective, and we’d intersected. The result was the truth being uncovered. It was exactly what I’d set out to do when I’d started seeing anomalies in the way that liquidations during the GFC were carried out compared to those immediately before and after. ReimagINC had been one of the largest, yet no one batted an eyelid.
Except for me.
“What did you get out of it?” I asked, still flabbergasted that she was the one behind all of it.
“The truth—and hopefully justice for that little boy. I was holding on to his ashes, but they weren’t mine to look after. He needed to be with his father.”
