The Whore, Her Husband And Me

I had been following her for a month now and I was getting the picture, she was a whore. not your common garden type whore, standing on the street waiting for passing trade, or working the clubs, or even an escort agency, no, she was class, she had style and she was discreet. Her targets were all rich attractive men who either had money of their own or who had married money.

The common denominator of her trade was that her lovers stood to lose it all if their wives found out about the affair.

Her husband hired me a month ago to get the evidence he needed to divorce his wife. He was certain that she had been cheating on him but couldn't prove it. He it was, that put forward the suggestion of her client group. The one thing that he was certain of was that she wasn't carrying out the affairs in the evenings because these were spent together.

"I know this sounds strange, but I know that my wife is being unfaithful, but I have no proof. She goes out several times a day and refuses to tell me where she goes. At first I thought that she might be working for an agency, you know one that would call her when they have a wealthy client that needs to be 'entertained', but again I have no proof. I then thought that she might be freelancing but where would she get the contacts? I can't prove anything but still I'm sure that she is on the game."

"How do you know that it's prostitution and that she's just not having an affair with one man?"

"I have been able to keep track of her movements to some extent because we live in a gated community and she has to swipe her key card each time she passed through the gate. The gate log also kept a record of anyone who was allowed in by a resident. She has passed through the gate several times each day but always on her own and she never stayed out more than an hour each time. I've checked with our male friends and none of them have been available at the times that she was out of the house."

He was still certain that she was up to something. At first I put it down to jealous paranoia, but now I'm not so sure.

Robert Bryce Farncombe was born into wealth, as was his father and his father. He worked for his father in the family banking company and believed that by right he would inherit the company when his father retired.

His marriage to Phileda Forrest was a merger in more ways than one. Her family also had banking interests and, although they were not as wealthy as the Farncombes they lived as if they were, and this was the problem that caused them to seek out this marital merger. Phileda had graduated from Harvard Law with a degree in Business Law and worked in the family business, so it came as no surprise to her when the merger was proposed. Thus far the union was not blessed with children, something that did not trouble either partner.

After a month of checking and re-checking gate logs, listening to the voice activated bugs that I managed to plant around the house, (Robert had driven me in one day when he knew that she would not be home) I had come to the conclusion that I would have to follow her to find out where she went on her many forays out of the community. Placing a homing device on her car hardly seemed necessary because her bright yellow Lamborghini Gallardo stood out in the crowd.

Her first stop was at the shopping mall where she had coffee with friends (female and attractive) then some retail therapy (designer dress D&G) shoes, a clutch bag to match the shoes, and some jewellery to compete the ensemble. I figured that in the space of half an hour she had spent in the vicinity of 20,000 dollars and that was more than my car had cost. Then she drove home.

Some three hours later she went out again, this time to a gym where she exercised for close to an hour, her personal trainer was a woman, before hitting the showers and emerging fresh and gorgeous to drive home again.

This time she only stayed home for two hours before leaving once more. This trip was much more mundane, to the local markets where she picked up a variety of gourmet foods, fruit and vegetables, some meat from the butcher, several different cheeses from a delicatessen and some freshly roasted coffee beans. They must be having a dinner party tonight.

It was going to be a long night for me, eavesdropping on the dinner party, listening to the idle chatter hoping for a clue to what was happening, so I settled down with a thermos of coffee. It was boring right up until the guests had gone and then a domestic started. "Where the fuck were you all day?"

"Where do you think I was? You wanted to impress your guests and who did you want to provide the good impression? Me! And I had to prepare for this evening, I had to buy food and prepare it to your standard. I had to glam myself up to your standard. I had to suck up to them so that you wouldn't be embarrassed by my feeble efforts at being the perfect wife, just so that you can con them out of their money."

"You didn't have to go as far as you did."

"What do you mean?"

"Slipping John some tongue when you kissed him goodnight."

"Oh, so it's all right for you to play tonsil hockey with that fat tart of a wife of his but I can't return tongue. Talk about double standards!" I heard a door slam and then silence, and that was it for the rest of the night.

I was tired and nodding off when she came through the gate. I was parked in my usual position in a side street some fifty metres from the gate and I wasn't paying all that much attention to her until the Lambo swung into the street and parked in front of my car. The door swung up and her shapely leg emerged, its black stockinged perfection a precursor to what was to follow. She tapped on my window and waited for me to lower it.

"I know that you're just going to follow me so I thought that I'd save you the trouble. Come with me." She opened my door so I got out and followed her. It was much harder than I thought it would be to get into one of those things but soon I was strapped in and we were off. I was surprised when we turned into the gateway and she placed her card over the scanner and the huge wrought iron gates swung open.

She caught my puzzled expression. "I want you to help me with something I have to do today, do you think you can do that?"

"Sure, anything." I was curious. We arrived back at the house and the garage door slid up and she drove inside and parked beside the Bentley and a large SUV. We got out and walked inside the house as the garage door closed.

"I know that you know who I am, who are you?"

"Roger Delany. Your husband hired me to keep an eye on you."

"To get evidence against me that he can use, you mean."

The first thing that we did was to go to his walk-in wardrobe and take all of his clothes and dump them into a couple of large cardboard removalist boxes. Then we went to his office and she cranked up his computer and searched through the files, downloading those that she wanted onto an external hard drive and then accessing the operating system and setting it to reformat the hard drive, effectively wiping it clean of all programs and files.

She then opened his file drawers and emptied his files into another packing case. Then she opened his safe and took out his passport and threw it into the case as well.

It was around then that the front gate buzzer announced someone's arrival. "Good, can you let them in for me?"

"What's going on here?" I had a fair idea but I just needed confirmation.

"Later, I'll fill you in on all of the details later."

The first arrivals were a couple of men from a local charity store who came to collect his clothes. "I love the clothes but they're not the style that we usually handle." One of them said as he took some out to look at them. "I can't imagine some of our regulars sleeping rough in these."

"Well if you don't want them." Phileda said.

"Oh no, we'll take them, we have other clients."

I helped them load the boxes into their van and watched as they drove off. I walked back inside hoping for some answers, but the buzzer interrupted before I had a chance to ask. This time it was a recycling company come to take away all the papers to be passed through the shredder in their van.

"Is there anything else?" I asked as the van left and the gate closed behind it.

"What story did my husband give when he hired you? Was it the one where he told you that he thought that I was being unfaithful but needed proof so that he wouldn't lose everything when he divorced me?"

"Something like that, yes."

"I thought as much. This isn't the first time he's pulled that particular stunt, but let me tell you that it is the last time. If you have an hour or two, of course you have, you're watching me right? Let me tell you the real story."

"When I first met Robert Bryce Farncombe he was the spoilt brat son of a wealthy family who thought that their shit didn't stink, but it did. Talk about robber barons, they would do anything legal or otherwise to make money and they screwed my family's business and then offered us an out clause, they would write off the debt if I would marry the little shit. I was forced to agree and that began the worst time of my life, putting up with his tantrums, his petty jealousy, his manipulation and the way that he humiliated me whenever he thought he could get away with it. I've put up with it because I had to, up until now. I no longer have to put up with his shit and believe me revenge will be long and painful."

"What he knows about the banking business you could write on the head of a pin. Oh he has a degree in Business Management but it comes from one of those Weeties packet universities and he only got that because Daddy donated a new Library to the school. He swans around chatting to whoever his father wants him to chat with in order to gain new business and he thinks that he's great at it."

"Unfortunately for him and the business, he's been listening to the wrong people and pulling some deals that haven't been very kosher, and he's been fiddling the company books to cover his losses. It looks like he's been bringing lots of new business for the company when in fact the new business is bleeding them dry. He's involved with hedge funds that have been buying up loans that have no hope of surviving. The people that have borrowed the money have a snowball's chance in hell of servicing the loan and some eighty percent of them will default and my darling husband has been buying up these bad loans, what a dickhead."

"So how will you get out of this?"

"I've been doing my own investing, but I've been investing in lower yield lower risk stocks and, while they may fluctuate a little, when push comes to shove they will be the ones to survive, and make a profit. What I've also done is invest in some profitable real estate ventures, like this community for instance. I own the land, it's been in my family for years, I own the construction company that provided the infrastructure and built the houses. These were then sold and we made a huge profit on our investment. Once sold we had no further involvement in the financial side of things, so if an owner is unable to service his mortgage it's not us that gets hurt. Many of the houses were sold on Robert's recommendation to his friends, many of whom are in the banking and finance industry and many of them are now unable to service their mortgages. By looking at this development you wouldn't realise that over half of the houses are on the market. There will be no sign-boards up around here, all houses will be sold by private treaty, otherwise if the world at large knew what was going on the value would drop into the cellar. And if the world at large were to investigate a little deeper they would wonder that if the banking sector hot shots were going down the tubes what hope has the rest of the world."

"I assume that because you're telling me this you want me to help in some way."

"You assume right. What I want you to do is to string Robert along for another couple of weeks, tell him that you think that you might have discovered who I'm having my affair with. I need a little extra time to set things up. Do you think you can do that? Oh, and by the way, I hope you aren't expecting to get paid when you finish his job."

"I was assured of payment but now I suppose that you're going to tell me otherwise."

"I don't know what you charge but a quick calculation of the time that you've already spent on this job would tell me that if you charge any more than twenty cents and hour he doesn't have enough in his account to cover the cost." This was certainly news that I didn't want to hear. "But not to worry, if you help me in this I'll see to it that you're adequately compensated."

"In that case I guess that I'm no longer working for your husband, unofficially of course." I didn't like changing horses mid-stream but common sense tells me that if the horse you're on his heading for deep water with insufficient floatation it's time to bail. "A quick question, if you've gotten rid of all his clothes and papers, won't he notice them missing when he gets home?"

"Of course he will, but he's obviously forgotten to tell you that he's gone away for two weeks. You'll probably have an email waiting for you that explains that business has called him away and that any information should be forwarded by email. He thinks that you'll assume that he's actually overseas and won't bother tracking him down, but the truth is that he is shacked up with his girlfriend, working on conning her out of her money."

"How do you know all this?"

"I know my husband and it's not the first time that he's pulled this stunt, but it will be the last time. I don't suppose that you're interested in doing a hit on him"

"No, castration I'll do, facial modifications are something of a specialty but I draw the line at actual termination."

"A girl can hope. Ah well, back to plan A."

This was one weird family. The husband, and my initial client, was accusing his wife, who now seems to be also my client, of infidelity while he is himself involved in a relationship outside the marriage. It also seems that, if his wife is to be believed, that he is seeking to gain from the dissolution of his current marriage while turning a profit from his new relationship. Methinks I should investigate both sides of this family.

My first port of call was to a friend from my police days. Freddie was one of the pioneers of computer hacking, back when it was an amusing diversion for geeks and before it became a serious criminal matter. We had busted him for borrowing funds from the banking system without their knowledge. He avoided jail time by volunteering to teach the banks how naive and vulnerable they were and how to be more security conscious. He also helped the police from time to time to track some of the more professional computer criminals. The police looked the other way when he indulged in a little profitable research. If anyone knew how to follow an individual's banking paper trail it was Freddie.

The last time that Freddie had seen the light of day must have been a decade ago, around the same time that he had his last home cooked meal if the empty pizza boxes and Chinese take away cartons that littered what I supposed was his kitchen were anything to go by, He was drinking coffee from an instant coffee jar probably because it was easier to pour hot water into the jar than to find a cup. I explained that I wanted the banking records of both Robert and Phileda Farncombe. He took another sip of coffee and his face contorted in disgust at its taste. "Piece of piss, I don't know why these banking types bother trying to hide their records, it could be because they think that they are smarter than us. When they find out they're not they'll shit themselves. Tomorrow." He waved a dismissive hand in my general direction so I left it to him and went home at, for the first time in a month, a reasonable hour even after stopping by Hakim's rent-a-curry for a beef vindaloo.

I watched the crap on TV for as long as I could stand it, which wasn't long, before hitting the sheets with the first of Stieg Larsson's Millennium trilogy that I'd bought some time ago and hadn't found the time to read. Sorry Stieg, it's not you or your book, but tiredness caught up with me and I fell asleep at about page twenty.

There was an email waiting on my computer in the morning from Robert advising that he had been called away unexpectedly on business and could I forward any findings to his email address. He superfluously included his email address, obviously having not reached the 'reply' button section of the instruction manual. I composed a carefully worded reply telling him that I might at last have the evidence that he wanted, but that it would take some time because, to get the information meant either doing something illegal, which I had no intention of doing, or following correct and legal processes, something that could not be rushed.

This led to a flurry of correspondence, the first message being from him authorising me to proceed with the illegal but quicker method. I responded by pointing out that any evidence gained could not be used without implicating me, something that I was not about to let happen. His response was a message re-iterating his instruction and guaranteeing that I would be in no way implicated. To which I replied that he was in no position to make such a guarantee and that if he wanted me to proceed he would have to place in a trust account, from which I alone could draw, sufficient funds that would allow me to live until such times as I could find suitable alternate employment because I would have my license revoked and be unable to continue in my present industry. I added that all work for him would cease until either I had confirmation of the funds placed in the trust account or his instruction to continue my investigations using legal methods. Instructions to proceed followed.

It was mid afternoon before I found myself once more in the dark bat's cave that Freddie inhabited. "These are very strange people."

"In what way?" I already knew that there was something odd happening.

"There's money travelling all over the world, from here to the Cayman Islands, from the Caymans back to here and then off to the Caymans again before returning here, and at each step of the journey there is a cut out making it difficult to trace."

"But you managed to trace it. Tell me all."

"It seems that Phileda Farncombe has money of her own and a lot of it. Some of this money of her own is transferred to an account in a Cayman Island bank. From that bank regular payments are made to his bank here. Some of this money is transferred back to a different account in the Caymans and some funds from that account are transferred back here to an account that she knows nothing about. The money that is not transferred from his account here to the Caymans goes through his company books as legitimate income and it is this money, little that it is, that is taken into consideration in the advent of a divorce."

"I can understand her having an account that he knows nothing of, she doesn't want him getting his sticky fingers on in the case of divorce, but these funds that bounce back and forth between her and him, that's something worth looking into." I thanked him, left an envelope with the agreed fee on his desk and left. I had people to see and questions to ask.

I rang Phileda to set up a meeting. "We have to talk."

"You sound angry. What have I done to upset you?"

"It's not something that I can discuss over the phone, you never know who might be listening."

"You think Robert has hired someone to keep an eye on you do you?"

"I wouldn't put it past him. Now here's what I want you to do, drive to the underground car park at the Central Mall, in the corner furthest away from the entrance you'll see a small silver coloured hatch, one of those little Korean buzz boxes, taped to the driver's side rear wheel arch you'll find the keys. Drive it out of the car park, you'll find a parking ticket on the front seat, and turn left, follow that road until you reach the Parkview Motel, I'll be waiting for you in room 26. Have you got all that?"