The Honey Queen (23 page)

Inside, she kicked off her shoes, sat at the kitchen table, took another bite of toast and checked that her tea was still warm. Perfect. She flicked through the headlines: politics, politics, a sports victory …

A reality TV star was marrying for the fourth time. Meredith, who loved that stuff, settled down to read. Other people’s disasters made her own life choices seem sensible in comparison. OK, so she wasn’t married and didn’t have a boyfriend, but she had a great job, a career, a luxury apartment: things were good. She wasn’t splashed all over the newspapers wearing dark glasses with the most lurid details of her private life revealed. She flicked the page, broadsheet wavering in the air, and read another headline:

INJUNCTION TO FREEZE ASSETS OF DUBLIN GALLERY

Late on Saturday, an ex-parte injunction was sought in the High Court by a painter and sculptor represented by the Alexander Byrne Gallery to freeze the gallery’s assets. Mick Devereux and Tony Sanchez, whose works sell for in excess of fifty thousand apiece, are owed several hundred thousand euros by the gallery’s owners, Keith and Sally-Anne Alexander, and their partner, Meredith Byrne.

The
Sunday News
has learned that the fraud squad are currently investigating the Alexanders in relation to a separate pyramid investment scheme in which both artists had invested. The scheme is alleged to be similar to that run by convicted New Yorker Bernie Madoff, who scammed thousands of investors of millions of dollars in a vast Ponzi scheme.

It is estimated that the Alexanders have accumulated losses in the region of five million euros. Fraud squad officers have as yet been unable to question the couple, who are believed to have fled the country. A case is being prepared for the Director of Public Prosecutions …

Have YOU been a victim of this scam? If so, phone the newsdesk on …

Meredith scanned the rest of the article, holding her breath. This couldn’t be true. How could the gallery’s assets be frozen? What was going on? If they were likening Sally-Anne’s investment schemes to the one run by the infamous Bernie Madoff, then all those property deals were fictional, a ruse to keep transferring money around so that investors would think they were getting huge returns when in reality it was simply someone else’s money. Lured by the prospect of a twenty or thirty per cent profit to be made, people would immediately reinvest without demanding to see any paperwork.

Meredith began to shake. Not only had she borrowed money in order to invest it with Sally-Anne, she’d encouraged friends to invest. Friends like Laura and Con.

It had to be a mistake. The newspaper had got it wrong. There was no way Sally-Anne and Keith would do this to her. They were her friends. How
could
they do this? The sense of betrayal was overwhelming.

She’d had an intuition that something was wrong, but she’d ignored it. Instead of trusting her instincts, she’d trusted Sally-Anne. If this was a Ponzi scheme, as the paper said, she’d sunk everything she had into it. What chance did she have of getting any of it back?

Meredith ran to the bathroom and threw up.

She needed a lawyer, she decided when she emerged pale and still shaking from the bathroom. She had been named as a partner in the gallery. She would be interviewed by the police and she needed to prove that she had been a victim of the fraud and not part of it.

They
had
to believe her: she’d lost everything – the money she’d borrowed to become a partner, the money she’d invested in Sally-Anne’s schemes. But would anybody believe that a grown woman could be so stupid? That she’d been so desperate to fit in, it never occurred to her to question
anything
?

Even to Meredith, that didn’t sound the most credible defence.

Meredith knew one lawyer. There had been a girl called Serena something at the law firm who’d acted for her when she bought her apartment. A total professional, Serena had made the whole transaction so painless and simple. But there were different sorts of lawyers. Serena was a house-buying one. What was the word …? Meredith’s brain was barely functioning this morning. Conveyancing, that was it.

If the gallery’s assets were frozen, and she was the only partner still in the country, it wouldn’t be long before the police showed up, wanting to talk to her. What she needed was a criminal lawyer.

Serena’s mobile number was stored on her phone. She sent a text and followed it up with a phone call a few minutes later, which was answered on the second ring, and she launched into an explanation.

‘Oh my Lord,’ said Serena, sounding very unlawyer-like and shocked. ‘You’re involved in that thing with the Alexanders?’

‘Yes, I mean, no,’ said Meredith, wondering if this was the way all conversations were going to go from now on. ‘I’m Sally-Anne’s business partner, a partner in the gallery, and—’ Suddenly another thought hit Meredith.

Keith had asked her to send the gallery’s most valuable painting out of the country. How would
that
look?

‘I may have done something very stupid which will look incriminating,’ Meredith said wearily. She sounded like a character in a television cop series. ‘I had nothing to do with any of it. If it’s true that they were operating a Bernie Madoff scam, then I have lost literally everything. But I will need a lawyer to help me, because I am a partner in—’

‘Don’t say anything else,’ interrupted Serena, firmer now. ‘You need to talk to one of the firm’s criminal lawyers. I think it’s James Hegarty on duty. I’ll ring him this instant and give him your number.’

James turned up at noon, after Meredith had spent frantic hours phoning every single number she could find for Sally-Anne and Keith. Part of her was still clinging to the hope that it was all a big mistake and that the Alexanders would roll into town with a plausible explanation that would make everything right.

The first thing James did was sit her down and ask her about her involvement in the gallery.

‘I took care of things at home while Sally-Anne was abroad. She travelled a lot because of her investments,’ Meredith said.

‘Yes,’ said James with portent. ‘And you invested your own money?’

‘Yes.’

‘Do you have any paperwork?’

‘Well, no,’ said Meredith, feeling stupid. ‘I trusted Sally-Anne.’

‘I’d say that everyone else who trusted her is phoning the police as we speak.’

‘But they’re not partners in the gallery!’ wailed Meredith. ‘It’ll look as though I was part of it.’ She thought of the painting Keith had asked her to send off – the most valuable piece in the gallery. One more thing for Sally-Anne and Keith to steal. And she’d delivered it right into their hands.

She told James all about it.

‘I see,’ he said, writing everything down.

‘I’m the innocent one in all of this,’ Meredith protested. ‘I borrowed the money that I invested and now I’ll have to pay that back. Everything I own will have to be sold. How can we get the money back and how long will it take?’

James took his time answering.

‘These cases drag on for years while the police gather evidence and take statements to make a case for the DPP. As for getting your money back …’ He looked at her solemnly. ‘It doesn’t look good.’

Meredith got up and rushed to the bathroom again to be sick. Then she sat on the tiled floor with the expensive under-floor heating and cried.

She thought of all the gallery parties where people had talked to her about the mythical Alexander investment funds and their fabulous returns. Meredith had loved being an insider, part of the charmed circle. She’d boasted about the money she’d made, endorsing their schemes in the process. With her luxury apartment and her designer clothes, she was a living advertisement for the Alexanders.

She’d even brought her friends in on it – Laura and Con. And now they’d lost everything too. All thanks to her.

On Sunday night, Freya, Opal and Ned sat in the cosy sitting room drinking mugs of tea, eating Hobnobs and doing their best to answer some of the questions on
Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?
Uncle Ned was addicted to the programme and watched endless reruns on the cable channels. Even Freya had to admit it was madly compulsive. After spending Friday and Saturday with her mother, she felt gloriously happy to be back with Opal and Ned.

‘Greenland, definitely Greenland,’ said Ned with determination, and Freya smiled over at him. She loved it when he didn’t know the answer but tried to convince himself that he did
.
This time he was sure Greenland had the highest population in the world of some species of rare duck, so Greenland was the correct answer, absolutely no doubt about it. He got quite worked up about it.

‘No, Ned, you’re wrong,’ Opal said. ‘Canada – it’s bigger, it’s got to be right. Freya, what do you think? More room for ducks.’

Freya didn’t know for sure and was therefore wary of putting her money on one or the other. When you didn’t know the answer for something factual, you didn’t know the answer. Life, now that was different. Life’s answers were often a matter of instinct, so things could go either way. But when it came to ducks, Greenland and Canada, it was all down to facts and she simply hadn’t a clue.

Foxglove let out an outraged miaow. They all turned to look. Her favourite perch was on the radiator, where she liked to curl up next to the tank of Steve, the bearded dragon. Steve belonged to Freya’s cousin Steve, but once the first flush of love was over, the human Steve had not been up to the day-to-day minding of his namesake. So the reptilian Steve had ended up a permanent resident at 21 St Brigid’s Terrace, where Ned dutifully fed him live cockroaches every day. Freya and Opal, though they both loved animals, could only cope with holding Steve for a millisecond and had drawn the line at handling live cockroaches. Which was why Ned had ended up the designated zookeeper. The cockroaches lived in the shed. Freya and Opal had been firm on that point.

The human Steve loved the fact that his pet had somewhere nice to live.

‘Do you think he recognizes me?’ he’d said to Freya one day, crouching down so he was eye-level with Steve the bearded dragon, who gazed at him with unblinking, mysterious eyes.

‘To tell you the truth, Steve,’ said Freya, ‘I don’t think he knows or cares where he is as long as the cockroaches keep coming. He’s not a very touchy-feely pet.’

‘Ah, it was stupid getting him,’ Steve sighed. ‘I saw him in the window of the pet shop. Couldn’t resist going in. You know the way. Some guys get warm-water fish, I got Steve.’

Freya grinned. ‘If you ever feel the need to get any warm-water fish,’ she said, ‘call me and I’ll talk you out of it. I’d say they’d be even worse than Steve here for looking after, feeding and cleaning. Besides which, Foxglove could stick her little paw in and have lunch every day for a week and we wouldn’t notice.’

Steve the bearded dragon didn’t move much and when he did it was so stealthily that nobody noticed. But once in a while something would come over him and he’d give a quick tail-swishing wriggle and it must have been this, during the great Canada Versus Greenland Duck Argument, that had made poor Foxglove screech out loud.

On the television, they’d moved on to another question.

‘No, no!’ gasped Ned. ‘We missed it! Oh my God, how could we have missed it? I can’t bear it. How can we see that episode again?’

‘There’s bound to be a website or something,’ said Freya. ‘I’ll look it up, Uncle Ned, promise.’

Ned was still in anguish when the doorbell rang. The three of them looked at each other in puzzlement. Who would be calling at this hour on a Sunday night?

It was half past nine. Opal liked a house that ran along particular lines. Nobody turned up at the house or rang after nine o’clock at night.

‘Otherwise,’ she’d explained to Freya years ago, ‘I think somebody’s died. That’s what you think when the phone rings late at night. Sorry Freya, I didn’t mean …’

Too late, Opal had remembered the late-night phone call when Freya’s father had died.

‘I’ll go,’ said Freya, getting up.

It couldn’t be the boys, she thought, they all had keys. And Molly next door never turned up this late, being a complete slave to Sunday night costume dramas.

Freya opened the door. There hadn’t been many occasions in her life when Freya was lost for words, but this was one of them. Standing at the door were two suitcases. Coming up the small path dragging two more was her cousin Meredith. But she didn’t look like the Meredith that Freya knew.

That Meredith was sheeny and glossy, all salon-dried hair, perfect nails, discreet make-up and the cool, slightly edgy clothes that people wore in the art world. Stuff you could only buy in fashionable designer shops.

This Meredith was wearing old jeans and a scruffy sweatshirt. Her hair was lank and tied back and if she’d put on any make-up that morning, it was long gone. Her face was pale and almost haggard. Opal came up behind Freya to see who was at the door.

‘Meredith, what happened?’ she gasped.

Meredith stopped in her progress with the third and fourth suitcases. Her face crumpled and tears flowed from her eyes.

‘Oh, Mum,’ she said, ‘Mum, I’ve nowhere else to go.’ She threw herself at her mother and Freya watched as her aunt stroked Meredith’s hair, the way she’d so often stroked Freya’s.

Freya watched Meredith in absolute astonishment. Why on earth was she here and what had happened to the glossy cousin she knew?

F
reya went down for breakfast the next morning earlier than usual for a Monday. She’d been wakened during the night by Opal and Meredith’s voices on the floor below. At one point it sounded, Freya thought, as if somebody was being sick, but she couldn’t be sure.

She knew
she
was shattered from lack of sleep, but when she walked into the kitchen and saw Meredith, hollow-eyed, sitting at the kitchen table, staring listlessly at a cup of tea and a plate of scrambled egg on toast, Freya decided that she was supermodel fresh compared to her cousin.

Opal didn’t look much better than her daughter. Probably nobody in the house had slept last night – aside from Foxglove, who was sitting on a chair at the table cleaning her paws contentedly.