PART 1 — 12:07
I did not open my eyes.
I lay in that bed and listened to a woman of sixty-six go through my case in the dark, and then I heard the catch go.
And then her, from about four feet away, very quietly, into a phone:
“It’s in her bag. Ring it in at six. She’ll be finished by breakfast.”
Then she went out and the landing went quiet.
I am Corinne Vask. I am thirty-six and I have been married to Rufus for seven years, and in all of that time his family have taken the fact that I do not say much for the fact that I do not know much.
Lavinia Vask is the sort of woman who can finish somebody in a room while passing round a plate.
Her son is Rufus. He is the chief executive of the Ashmont Group, which is the hotel business my father built from one place at Marnsea in 1987 and which I inherited in 2021.
Lavinia runs communications.
And fifty-two per cent of it is mine.
They call me the decorative shareholder. Lavinia has said it to my face at a table with eleven people at it and everybody laughed.
What nobody in that family has ever bothered to find out is that I did eleven years as a forensic accountant before I married Rufus Vask.
At dinner that evening I had said I was flying to Ardmere in the morning.
“Business again?” said Lavinia, and did the eyes.
“Just a meeting.”
And Rufus laughed and said: “Leave the money to people who understand it, love.”
And I smiled at him and said of course.
I lay there until I could not hear anything at all. Then I got my phone off the nightstand.
There is a digital clock on my dresser that is not a digital clock. I put it there in the September after I worked out that somebody had been in that bedroom four times while I was out.
I pulled the feed up.
And there she was. Silk dressing gown, no light on, the inner pocket of my carry-on open.
She took a small dark thing out of her own pocket and put it in and did the zip.
Then she stood in my bedroom with her phone to her ear and said: “Rufus. It’s done. Make the call at six.”
I lay in the dark in my own house and watched a woman say my husband’s name.
He was twenty feet away down that landing. Asleep, as far as I knew.
Seven years.
And they were not trying to embarrass me. You do not ring airport security to embarrass somebody.
They were going to have me stopped.
I watched it through twice and then I rang a number I had been given in the August and had not used.
“DI Varrick.”
“It’s Corinne Vask. It’s happened.”
He woke up inside about two words.
“What’s happened.”
And I said: “My mother-in-law has just put something in my bag.”
He did not ask me whether I was sure.
That is the thing I have gone back to. A man who had met me twice, on a phone at half past midnight, and the first words out of him after that were: “Don’t touch the bag. Don’t touch the case. Don’t get out of bed yet.”
Then he asked me whether anybody else in that house was awake.
I said I did not know.
And he said: “Right. I’m going to stay on this line and you’re going to stay exactly where you are, and I’ll tell you when to move.”
Forty minutes. I lay in that bed in the dark with a phone against my ear and a man in a car somewhere talking to me every couple of minutes about nothing much.
At one point he asked me what my father’s hotel was like.
I have thought about that since. He was keeping a woman talking in a dark bedroom with the people who had just done that to her asleep down the landing, and he did it by asking about a hotel in Marnsea.
PART 2 — SIX O’CLOCK
What I thought was in that bag was a weapon.
That is what you think. A small dark thing, a phone call about security, six in the morning.
It was not a weapon.
Varrick’s people took it out of that case at twenty past one in the morning in my own kitchen, with two of them there and the whole thing filmed.
It is a memory stick.
And what is on it is about nine thousand Ashmont records. Guest data, bookings, card tokens, the commercial terms on eleven contracts.
Which is not a thing you get stopped for at a desk.
It is a thing you get stopped for when somebody rings in beforehand and says a director of that company is on a flight to Ardmere with the client database in her hand luggage.
They were not going to have me arrested for carrying something dangerous.
They were going to have me taken off a flight for walking out of my own company with its data.
And then I would have been eleven hours in a room somewhere explaining myself, and my phone would have been gone, and by the afternoon there would have been a line in the trade press.
I did not go to the airport.
At six o’clock I was sitting in my own kitchen with DI Varrick and a woman from his team and a solicitor, and my case was in an evidence bag on the table.
At four minutes past six a call was made to the airport’s reporting line.
I had thought a great deal, between one and six, about whether I wanted to be in that kitchen when it happened or whether I wanted to be upstairs.
Varrick asked me twice. He said I did not have to sit through it and that nobody would think anything of it.
And I said I would sit through it.
Not out of toughness. Because I had spent three years being told, in that house, by two people, that I did not understand things — and I was not going to be sent upstairs in my own kitchen on the one morning it was all actually happening.
My solicitor sat next to me. She is called Nye and she is about fifty and she wrote almost nothing down for the first two hours.
At about half five she asked me, very quietly, whether I had eaten anything since dinner.
I had not. So a solicitor I had met once made four pieces of toast in my own kitchen at twenty-five to six, and two police officers and I sat and ate them, and nobody said anything about anything.
It was not made from a withheld number. These people are not professionals. That is the thing people get wrong about this whole story — they think it was clever, and it was not clever, it was just vicious and it was done by two people who had never once been told no.
And at about twenty to seven Lavinia Vask came downstairs in that dressing gown to find four people in her son’s kitchen.
The four minutes past six is the part I could have done without seeing.
Varrick had the reporting line flagged, so it came through to a laptop on my own kitchen table.
It is not a long call. Ninety seconds, maybe.
And it is not Lavinia’s voice and it is not Crosby’s. It is a woman I have never heard before and have still not been told anything about.
She gives my name. She gives the flight. She says she works there, she’s on the board and she says the words client database twice.
And she is good at it. That is what finished me. There is a little pause in the right place and a bit where she sounds uncertain about whether she should be ringing at all.
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