2025-09-29 17:07:13
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Chapter Five Hundred and Thirteen
Henrik had arranged the room himself.Not the formal dining room, which would have imposed ceremony on something that needed honesty, and not the informal sitting room, which would have imposed casualness on something that required gravity. The library on the second floor, which was the room that Henrik had always used for serious private conversations, where the walls held books he had actually read and the chairs were arranged not for comfort but for the quality of being able to see everyone else's face clearly.He had asked Mrs. Valk to bring tea and then to leave and to ensure they would not be disturbed.They assembled at three in the afternoon. Clara took the chair to the right of Henrik's, which was her usual position and which she claimed without apparent consideration of whether claiming it was the right choice given the circumstances. Elise sat across from them both. Felix sat beside Elise. Lukas took the chair nearest the door, which was the appropriate position for someone
Chapter Five Hundred and Twelve
Lukas read the letter twice before he said anything.It was two pages, handwritten on plain paper rather than the estate's letterhead, the handwriting the slightly pressured script of someone writing quickly and without the care they might have applied to a more composed communication. The salutation was Dear Clara rather than the formal Mrs. Van der Meer, the intimacy of the address communicating something about the nature of the relationship Margot had believed existed between them.The letter was a plea.Margot wrote that Henrik had confronted her about the account discrepancies, that he intended to pursue a formal investigation, that she understood what a formal investigation would mean for her and her son and the life she had built over twenty-two years of service. She wrote that she was terrified. She wrote that she believed her relationship with Clara, cultivated across those same twenty-two years, had produced the kind of mutual understanding that might allow Clara to interven
Chapter Five Hundred and Eleven
The forensic accountants worked from a converted conference room in the estate's east wing, three professionals from a firm with the specific kind of name that communicated seriousness without drama, who had been engaged by the family attorneys and who brought to the financial records the expertise that Lukas had been applying his pattern recognition to as a substitute for expertise he did not have.He met with the lead accountant, a woman named Dr. Anneke Horstmann, on the Monday after the confrontation with Clara.She had been through the offshore payment records overnight."Tell me what you see," Lukas said.They sat across a table in the conference room with the payment documents spread between them and she walked him through what the financial architecture showed in the specific language of someone who had been reading corporate structures for twenty years and recognized their grammar the way a clinician recognizes a symptom constellation."Three layers of intermediary," she said
Chapter Five Hundred and Ten
Henrik did not send for Clara.He called her himself, from the desk, while Lukas was still sitting across from him, a brief call of four words: come to my study. The brevity communicated something about his state that Clara would have recognized, because forty years produced a fluency in the compressed language of brief requests.She came within ten minutes.She opened the study door and saw Lukas first, then registered that Henrik was at his desk rather than in the chair, the sitting-up-at-his-desk quality that he had not had for weeks now present and visible, and the combination of what she saw produced a stillness in her doorway that lasted a fraction of a second before she came fully into the room."Close the door, please," Henrik said.She closed it and took the chair to the left of the desk, the chair she had always taken in this room, and looked at her husband and then at Lukas and then back at her husband."Tell me what this is," she said."I have been reviewing the company's
Chapter Five Hundred and Nine
He sat with the payment record for a long time before he moved.The document was unremarkable to look at, three lines of accounting notation, a date, a reference number, an amount, a payee. The kind of record that existed by the thousands in a company the size of Van der Meer Enterprises, each one representing a transaction that had seemed at the time like ordinary business and that was now, in the light of everything assembled on Henrik's desk over the past three days, something other than ordinary.He looked at the dates again.He looked at them carefully, with the precision he brought to clinical timelines when the sequence mattered as much as the individual events, and what he found when he looked carefully was that the three months of payments from Clara's division of the company to the security firm corresponded exactly to the three months during which the firm had been providing his protection. Not approximately. Not nearly. Exactly.Clara had been funding his security through
Chapter Five Hundred and Eight
He worked through the weekend.Henrik gave him a room in the estate with a desk and access to a printer and complete quiet, and Lukas worked the way he had learned to work when a case required the systematic dismantling of its own complexity before it could be understood, the method that Caron had taught him early in his career and that he had applied to clinical problems and was now applying to something that was not clinical but required the same essential discipline.He read everything before he noted anything.Two full days of reading, moving through the records in the chronological sequence the forensic team had established, beginning four years ago and working forward to the present, the picture assembling itself layer by layer the way a diagnosis assembled from a case history, the individual data points meaningless in isolation and increasingly significant in proximity to each other.On the third day he began making notes.The offshore clinics came first, because they were wher
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