Francis Nyasha Manley

I reread the letter twice, then carefully folded it and returned it to the envelope.

‘Is this another joke?’ Jessica said, her voice cracking.

‘I don’t think so. Francis said something to me, just before . . . just before he went into rehab. He said he’d done something for us. I didn’t really think about it at the time, he couldn’t have said anything I would have believed.’

Jessica massaged her temples with the tips of her fingers. ‘What does this mean?’

‘We’re safe,’ I said, and then, ‘We always have been.’ The thought brought a tough bark of laughter up from my chest, as I thought about the years of surplus fear, stockpiled against a disaster that could never have happened. It was typical of Francis, I thought, to make death no barrier to his disruptive influence. The idea brought a smile to my lips.

‘Safe from the police,’ she said, ‘but Augustus White . . . if Lisa gets this letter . . . do you think she’d tell him? Even if she doesn’t, if they sell the painting and nothing happens he might get suspicious. He’d come after us if he knew we’d cheated him, wouldn’t he?’

‘I would,’ I said, ‘if I was him. Imagine spending a decade showing select guests your most prized possession, only to discover it’s a fake. Those kind of people are at their most dangerous when they feel humiliated.’

‘Since when do you know anything about people like Augustus White?’

‘You don’t work in commercial law for ten years without meeting a few gangsters.’ I couldn’t resist the opportunity to give my job a gloss of danger.

‘But . . . but . . .’ Jessica was close to crying. She had let her guard down whilst she had been with me, and this latest revelation caught her unprotected; she had lain her weapons aside, set down her sarcasm and her self-control, and was now ambushed waking from sleep. I felt the implications of the letter shiver through me like a heavy blow, but I found myself uninjured. It was a blow against the tethers holding me down, and it severed them utterly.

‘I know what we should do,’ I said.

‘What?’ she said, looking to me in hope. ‘What should we do?’

I tried to let my feelings flow through me, without trying to control my words. ‘I want to take the good part of what Francis taught us, the part before everything else happened. I want to be free. I don’t have anything to live for here. I want to leave, to get away with the one person I still care for. It’s what we always dreamed of, only this time we’ve earned it. This time it won’t be stolen freedom, it will be ours by right. We’ll put our money together. What’s mine is yours. Eight hundred and twenty-five thousand. Do you realize how far that will take you in some parts of the world? We can leave, and we’ll never work again. I want to see South America, China, Australia . . . We can start new lives, start to breathe again.’