The Unbecoming

Chapter Eight: what he found

James did not call Ken.

He sat with the phone in his hand for a long time after writing that single word in his notebook, and then he set the phone down, because calling Ken was not what this moment required. Ken would deflect. Ken would charm. Ken would do what Ken had apparently been doing successfully for years, which was to present a version of events so smoothly that the person hearing it would find themselves, against their own better judgment, halfway to believing it before they’d had time to think.

James did not want Ken’s version.

He wanted the truth, and the truth was not something Ken was likely to volunteer.

So he did something he had not done in years. He picked up the phone and called Marcus Webb, who had been the firm’s head of internal compliance for over a decade and who owed James nothing in particular except the quiet, accumulated loyalty of a man who had been treated decently for ten years by someone who could easily not have bothered.

“James.” Marcus sounded surprised. James rarely called. “Everything alright?”

“I need a favour,” James said. “And I need it handled quietly. No paper trail beyond what’s strictly necessary, and nothing that goes near my sister or anyone in the family until I’ve seen it myself.”

A pause. “This is about Ken.”

“This is about Ken.”

“What am I looking for?”

James looked out of his window at the dark January street, the wet pavement holding the orange light of the streetlamps in long, broken reflections.

“Everything,” he said. “Financial records. Client files he’s had access to. Anything that’s crossed his desk in the last three years that’s gone through a personal solicitor rather than the firm. And anything anything at all connected to a business called Aurora’s. A bakery in Notting Hill.”

Another pause, longer this time. Marcus was good at his job, which meant Marcus was good at hearing what wasn’t being said.

“How quietly,” Marcus said, “and how soon.”

“As quietly as it can be done properly,” James said. “And as soon as it can be done properly. In that order.”

-----

It took eleven days.

James went about those eleven days with the particular, careful normalcy of a man holding something very still so it wouldn’t spill. He saw clients. He had his usual Thursday sessions though not with Amanda, not that week. He had called her on the Friday after the session that had ended early, and the conversation had been brief and difficult and entirely necessary.

“I think,” he had said, “given everything, we need to pause our sessions. Not end them not yet, not until we’ve both had time to think about what’s appropriate going forward. But I don’t think I can sit across from you next Thursday and pretend I’m only your therapist when I’m actively making decisions about my nephew that directly affect you. That’s not fair to either of us, and it’s not safe for you.”

“Okay,” Amanda had said. Her voice had been careful, the way it had been in the office. “Okay. I understand.”

“I’ll find you someone good,” James said. “Properly good. Someone who can pick up where we left off without ” He had stopped.

“Without you,” Amanda said quietly.

“Yes,” James said.

There had been a silence on the line that neither of them filled.

“James,” she said. It was the first time she had used his first name. It landed somewhere in his chest with a weight he had not expected. “Whatever you find out. Whatever it is. I need you to know I’m not asking you to do anything about it. I didn’t tell you any of this so that you’d”

“I know,” James said. “I know you didn’t. But I can’t unknow what I know, Amanda. And I wouldn’t want to, even if I could.”

He had ended the call before either of them could say anything that would make the next eleven days harder than they were already going to be.

-----

Marcus came to James’s flat on a Tuesday evening with a leather folder that looked, from the outside, entirely unremarkable.

“You should sit down,” Marcus said, which was not something Marcus said.

James sat down.

What Marcus laid out, over the following hour, was not a single piece of wrongdoing. It was a pattern and patterns, James knew from nineteen years of professional practice, were almost always worse than isolated incidents, because patterns meant a person had done something once, found it worked, and kept doing it.

There was a junior associate, three years ago, whose work Ken had taken credit for on two major filings not dramatically, not in a way that would ever show up as misconduct on paper, but consistently enough that the associate had eventually left the firm for a competitor, quietly, without explanation, the way people leave when they’ve decided a place isn’t worth fighting for. James remembered her. He had thought, at the time, that she’d simply found a better offer.

There was a personal investment fund money from family trusts that Ken had access to as a beneficiary that had been moved through a series of accounts in a way that wasn’t illegal, exactly, but was structured specifically to obscure how much of it had been spent and on what. A significant portion of it, Marcus’s research suggested, had gone toward maintaining a lifestyle considerably beyond what Ken’s actual salary would support. Restaurants. Trips. A watch James recognised, with a small cold jolt, as one he had seen Ken wearing at Christmas.

There was a pattern of small, deniable cruelties toward people with less power than Ken assistants, junior staff, people whose jobs depended on not making a fuss. Nothing that had ever been formally reported. Several informal complaints that had been quietly smoothed over, in each case, by someone senior deciding it wasn’t worth the disruption to address.

And then there was Aurora’s.

Marcus had found it through the personal solicitor a man named Halloway, who handled what the file euphemistically called Ken’s “private matters” and who had, eighteen months ago, lodged a document with his own firm’s records office. A partnership agreement. Backdated. Purporting to grant Kenneth Keller a forty-nine percent ownership stake in a business called Aurora’s Bakery, Notting Hill, in exchange for an initial investment that the document claimed had been made in cash and was therefore, conveniently, untraceable.

The agreement bore a signature.

Amanda Klein.

James looked at the signature for a long time.

He had seen Amanda’s handwriting. She wrote notes sometimes, in their sessions reminders to herself, things she wanted to come back to. He had seen the particular slant of her A, the way she crossed her T’s with a small flourish at the end, like the pen was reluctant to leave the page.

This was not her handwriting.

It was close. Close enough, he imagined, to pass casual inspection close enough that if you weren’t looking for the specific small things that made a signature someone’s own, you might not notice. But James had spent three months watching this woman write things down in his office, and he noticed.

“It’s forged,” he said. His voice was very quiet.

“That’s my assessment too,” Marcus said. “I had it looked at by someone independent discreetly and they agree. It’s a good forgery. Good enough to survive a cursory look. Not good enough to survive an actual contest, if someone with resources decided to contest it.”

“What’s the timeline,” James said. “What’s he planning to do with it.”

Marcus hesitated.

“There’s correspondence,” he said. “Between Halloway’s office and another solicitor acting, it looks like, for a third party. A woman named Kendra Price.” He paused. “The correspondence discusses a buyout. Ken’s stake the forty-nine percent the forged document claims he holds being transferred to Miss Price as settlement of a debt. The numbers discussed make it clear the bakery’s owner wouldn’t be able to afford to buy the stake back herself. The correspondence is dated three weeks ago. It references a thirty-day window.”

James did the arithmetic with the cold, precise speed of a man whose mind had spent nineteen years learning to hold terrible things steady enough to look at them properly.

Three weeks ago. Thirty days.

Nine days remained.

“He’s going to take her bakery,” James said. “And give it to the woman he cheated with.”

“That’s what it looks like,” Marcus said.

The room was very quiet.

James sat with the folder open on the table in front of him the forged signature, the correspondence, the careful architecture of a plan that had clearly been built by someone considerably more capable than Ken, someone who had understood exactly how to construct something that would survive long enough to do irreversible damage before anyone thought to look closely.

He thought about the bakery. He had been three times. He remembered the smell of it butter and vanilla, the particular warmth of a room where things were made by hand with care. He remembered the hand-painted sign. He remembered asking, on his third visit, almost without thinking about it, what the name meant, and the young woman behind the counter Bisi, he would learn her name was later telling him, with the casual familiarity of someone repeating something she’d said many times, that the owner’s mum was called Aurora, and the bakery was named for her, and wasn’t that lovely.

He thought about Amanda standing behind that counter, three weeks from now, being told that nearly half of it wasn’t hers anymore. That it never really had been, according to a piece of paper with her name forged onto it. That the only thing she had left that was entirely, unambiguously her own the thing she had built from nothing, named after her mother, rebuilt with her own hands over the last three months while sitting across from him every Thursday talking about exactly this kind of theft was about to be taken and handed to the woman who had helped destroy everything else.

Nine days.

James closed the folder.

“I need you to do something else for me,” he said. His voice was completely level. It was the voice he used in his most difficult sessions the voice that came from somewhere very calm and very certain, the voice that arrived once a decision had actually been made and there was no longer any use in feeling the weight of making it.

“Anything,” Marcus said.

“I need the partnership agreement examined by our best forensic document people properly, this time, with everything documented to evidentiary standard. I need Halloway’s records pulled, formally, the moment we’re ready to move. And I need to speak to Kathryn Rhodes.”

Marcus blinked. “Rhodes? From litigation?”

“She’s a friend of Amanda’s,” James said. “I believe she doesn’t yet know any of this is connected to her firm. That’s about to change, and I’d rather she heard it from someone who can explain it properly than stumble into it some other way.”

“And Ken?”

James looked toward the window. Somewhere out there, across the city, in an office on the fourth floor of a glass tower in Canary Wharf, his nephew was almost certainly going about his evening with no idea that nine days had just become considerably fewer than he thought.

“Not yet,” James said. “Ken doesn’t get to know anything until everything is already in place. He’s had every advantage his entire life and used every one of them badly. This time, for once, he doesn’t get a warning.”

He stood. He walked to the window and looked out at the wet street, the orange light, the ordinary indifferent city going about its evening.

“Nine days,” he said, mostly to himself.

“Nine days,” Marcus agreed.

“That’s enough,” James said.

It would have to be.