Chapter 38
Chapter 38:
The investigation took fourteen hours.
Nigel — efficient, discreet, mildly terrified of his employer in the best of times and wholly terrified now — assembled a team of three and worked through the night.
Data recovery. Phone records.
Email logs. Interview transcripts from colleagues at the design firm. Security footage from the office building.
A timeline, cross-referenced and annotated, of every documented interaction between Bridget Nolan and Lara Ashworth from the day they’d met.
The results arrived at Callum’s desk at seven forty-three in the morning, in a manila folder that was thicker than a quarterly earnings report and contained, in its pages, the complete anatomy of a con.
It started with the approach.
Bridget had identified Lara within her first week at the company — not as a friend, not as a mentor, but as a target. The internal logic was straightforward: Lara dressed well, spoke well, moved through the world with the unconscious ease of someone who had never worried about money. She was connected. She was generous. She was, in the particular vocabulary of people like Bridget, an opportunity.
The poverty story was fabricated. Not entirely — Bridget was from a village, and her parents had worked away from home — but the details had been artfully rearranged. The parents who “abandoned” her had, in fact, paid for her university education. They’d funded her studies in painting and design. They’d given her enough — not luxury, but enough — and Bridget had taken the “enough,” borrowed a substantial sum on top of it, cut off all contact, and constructed, in Halcombe, a version of herself that had never existed: the orphan, the survivor, the fragile girl who needed saving.
The tears were a technology.
Bridget had deployed them with the precision of an engineer: calibrated to the audience, timed to the moment, designed to produce a specific response. She cried when Lara was watching, to activate compassion. She cried when Callum and Declan were watching, to activate protection. She cried when she was alone — this was noted in the report, in a section that quoted a colleague who’d overheard Bridget rehearsing in the office bathroom — to practice.
And then she’d met Callum and Declan. The report documented the shift — the moment Bridget’s strategy pivoted from using Lara to replacing her. She’d seen Callum in person and recognized him from the financial magazines she read. She’d seen Declan and recognized the racing posters that had once papered Halcombe’s bus shelters.
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And she’d understood, with the instantaneous clarity of someone whose survival instincts were more finely tuned than most, that these two men were the real prize.
What followed was a campaign. The report laid it out in chronological order, each entry dated and sourced, each piece of evidence tagged:
The hand injury.
Deliberate.
Bridget had positioned herself near the kitchen door, waited for Callum and Declan to be within earshot, and closed her own fingers in the hinge. The colleague who’d witnessed it from the hallway had noted that Bridget checked to make sure the men were watching before she screamed.
The trophy. Not an accident.
Bridget had requested to deliver the Beaumont Award herself — had volunteered, had insisted — and the struggle over the crystal had been engineered. She’d gripped it tighter when Lara reached for it. She’d let it fall at the precise moment Callum and Declan rounded the corner.
The flowers. This was the entry that made Declan’s hands shake when he read it.
Bridget had been an intern under Lara for six months. She had sat in meetings where Lara’s medical accommodations were discussed. She had been present when the office sent out its annual allergy memo. She knew — had known from the beginning, had known with absolute certainty — that Lara was asthmatic. That Lara was allergic to pollen. That filling a house with wildflowers would trigger an attack.
She had done it on purpose.
The report noted, in the dry language of an investigator who had seen many things and was surprised by few, that Bridget’s internet search history from the week prior included queries for “severe asthma attack duration,” “pollen allergy hospitalization risk,” and “can asthma attacks be fatal p>
She had wanted to know if it could kill her. She had looked it up. She had read the results.
And she had filled the house with flowers anyway.
Callum set the report down. The manila folder sat on the coffee table between two cold cups of water that Bridget had made the night before, and the juxtaposition — domestic kindness and documented malice, hot water gone cold beside evidence of calculated cruelty — was the kind of detail a novelist would have invented and an investigator merely recorded.