Page 80 of (Not So) Mad About You

She was walking back to her flat through the park when her phone rang.

It was silly, but every time it rang Alli thought it might be Bea. Every time she woke up, she thought Bea might be there beside her. Sometimes she turned around and almost caught sight of Bea out of the corner of her eye.

It was like being haunted by someone who wasn’t dead and she didn’t really understand it. She knew that she had feelings; she knew that those feelings probably went deeper than she thought. She didn’t know what she was supposed to do about them now that her calls weren’t being answered. There was every chance that she wasn’t going to see Bea again. She tried not to think about that.

“Hello.” She picked up her phone but kept walking. The sun felt nice on her skin.

“Alli?”

It took her a second to place the voice. “Charles?”

“Yeah, I’m sorry it took me a while to get back to you. I know you called me. But what with the kids and the investigation and everything, I’ve been up to my eyeballs in it. It’s not that I didn’t want to talk to you.”

Alli laughed. “Are you sure?”

“Are you laughing?” He sounded suspicious. “That doesn’t sound like the Alli I met.”

“Well, some things are a bit different now.” She took a deep breath of fresh air. “I’m, um, trying to be different. Be a bit healthier, less intense.” She had to have another deep breath. “And, um, working on the anger.” It still didn’t feel quite natural to say that out loud, but she was working on it.

“God, yes, it must be even worse for you. But I’m glad you’re getting the help you need. Was there something I could help you with?”

Alli’s first call had been long before all this. It felt like years ago, even if it had only been a couple of weeks. In fact, she could barely remember why she’d called Charles at all, unless it had been another escape attempt. “No, actually, I think I’m doing alright. It’s nice to hear from you, though. I had a coffee with Izzy the other day.” She should call Izzy, apologize, do better by her. She would, she decided.

Charles laughed. “Kind of like war veterans. You’ve been through something. Though I suppose we’ll be seeing more of each other at some point.”

“We will?” asked Alli, confused.

“Obviously. With the investigation and all, you know.”

And things started to fit together a bit better. She remembered why she’d called Charles. He’d had a phone call and lost his temper about something, and she’d wanted to know what. And now, now, he was acting oddly too. He’d mentioned an investigation twice now. “Charles, what’s going on?”

“What do you mean?”

Okay, let’s start at the beginning, she thought. “You had a phone call at the program, and then you left. Can I ask you what that phone call was about?”

“The investigation, obviously,” Charles said. “Well, the beginnings of it, anyway. It wasn’t being investigated right then, but my lawyer got things rolling.”

Alli stopped in the middle of the footpath. “What investigation?”

There was a pause. “You mean you haven’t heard?”

“Heard what?” She was getting a little irritated, and she made herself breathe more evenly.

“It’s all a scam,” Charles said. “A kind of benefit fraud, I suppose. Or maybe just government aid fraud. There’s a lot of money in it, apparently.”

“In what?” Alli asked, afraid that she already knew but wanting to be sure.

“You might want to sit down,” Charles told her.

In the end, it all came out. Luke was a conman, a scam artist. The program was a slightly elaborate form of fraud. The government sponsored a certain amount of the money to run the program and then paid a certain amount per person who attended. Luke was pocketing that money, running up costs on credit cards and banking the actual cash.

“That’s not the worst of it,” Charles said.

“I don’t know, that’s pretty awful,” said Alli. She could feel herself getting angry. She’d done the stupid program, she’d lost her job because of the stupid program.

“The other participants? They were fakes,” Charles told her. “Luke needed to pad the place out to claim the maximum amount of funding that he could. So he paid people to come and do the program.”

“They were lying? Izzy? Marcus? The rest?”

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