Exposure (39 page)

Helene lurched from fury to lethargy and back. Sometimes she felt like screaming and sometimes she accepted that it was a fee payable to Charlie for a job well done. And, in the end, had it truly been her money? She had extracted the promise of it from Frank with a lie. Who, in fact, had committed the fraud in the first place? In her darker hours, she wondered how deep had become the man’s relationship with the Matsumotos.

She was grateful that her per diems and money earned from interviews had remained untouched. It was a gesture that seemed thoughtful. But it still wasn’t quite the nest-egg that she had anticipated. Early retirement was now an impossibility. And there had been no further communication from Charlie – the man she wasn’t sure she could think of as ‘Charlie’ any more.

Nor could she tell the world the full story of the Gene Genies or of Smiling Clive Jackson or of the secrets that lurked within the Federal Reserve banks. Neither could she write about Kazuma, Hassan, the Matsumotos, or even Bill Bailey with impunity. The list of events and people that she could never mention grew unfeasibly longer.

But Helene did have one weapon: she was a writer after all. And if she couldn’t write the facts, there was no-one stopping her from writing fiction – at least, she didn’t think so.

So one day, when the first frost of a hard winter had sprinkled icing onto her rose bushes, Helene sat down at her computer. Her hands hovered over the keyboard, and then she began to write.

Have you ever listened to a stranger’s conversation at an airport, or on the bus, or on a train? I did. And it changed my life...

THE END