Free Before We Met: A Novel by Lucie Whitehouse Page B

cover the interest on the loan before you even started to think about a profit. And Mark would regard something like a unit trust as a staid, long-term investment, she was sure, steady, not spectacular. No, he definitely wouldn’t have borrowed money to do that.
    Something higher risk, then, less regulated. Had he been spread betting? That was a quick way to get into serious trouble. You could open these accounts with an online broker, she’d read about them, where you started without depositing any money and just ran your account until they asked you to settle up, betting on things to go up or down half a point – shares, commodities, currencies, whatever was going – betting against yourself so you spread the risk, changing your positions every day, every hour, every few minutes, even. What if he’d got into that? She could imagine it, Mark online at the office, playing the market just for the buzz of it. He could have done that and made a miscalculation, or just have been called away to do something urgent without closing his position, and come back to find himself thousands and thousands in hock.
    But it needn’t be that, either: once you moved in the kinds of circles he did, there were countless ways to make and lose money. He knew so many entrepreneurs and speculators, and he was always talking about someone or other with a new project in the works who was looking for venture capital. Only a few days ago he’d been talking about a guy who was trying to raise cash to set up a TV production company, and last month there had been someone who was buying mining land in Brazil. What if Mark had decided to remortgage the house, empty his savings and invest in something like that? Well, if he had, shouldn’t he perhaps have mentioned it? ‘Pass the marmalade, would you, Han? Oh, and by the way, I’ve decided to put half a mill into a Kazakhstani oil pipeline. I’m having to remortgage the house but no need to worry your pretty little head about it, sweetheart.’
    In the quiet of the office she heard herself snort. Maybe that was it – the scale on which he operated surprised her less and less these days. Immediately, though, she remembered something else. About once a month in New York, he and a group of four or five friends had had poker evenings. Generally, Mark came home half-cut afterwards and she’d assumed that the poker was really just an excuse for them all to get together and have a few beers. One night, though, he’d got in some time after two and put fifteen hundred dollars on her bedside table and she’d realised that they played seriously. Teddy, who’d lost most of the fifteen hundred, Mark said, had been chilly with both of them until the next poker evening, when the tide had turned somewhat and he’d gone home a thousand richer at Ant’s expense, much to Roisin’s fury.
    What if this was down to gambling? Could something that had started off as a bit of a laugh have escalated into something more serious? Maybe when she thought he was at business dinners he was really at casinos. Maybe he’d had a big win and got addicted. On the other hand, was he really the kind of person to keep beating his head against a brick wall when he was losing? Would he do that, Mark, keep telling himself that the next big win was one more bet away – then one more?
    She turned away from the window, went back to the box-file and lifted the pile of paperwork out on to the desk. Nothing in the Coutts statement suggested he was gambling; there were no transactions with anything that sounded like a casino or a bookies or, as far as she could tell, any online gambling site. There were no huge cash withdrawals, either, just the £250 he took out once a week or so for newspapers and drinks and cabs. She set the statement and the mortgage letter aside and flipped quickly through the rest of the papers, looking for anything that related to debt – letters about loans or demands for payment. There was nothing, though. Even