Web of Lies by Sally Rigby (best book club books of all time .txt) 📕

twelve months.’ Yates ran his finger around the top of his empty glass. ‘Look, I’m not proud of this, but … even though I’d lost my licence I still drove. I know it’s bad and I regret it. It’s not something I’d ever contemplate doing now.’

‘You were young and didn’t think through the consequences of your actions. We all did things at that age that we later regretted. Is that what Donald blackmailed you over?’

Seb sucked in a breath. Extracting the information was proving much harder than he’d thought it was going to be. He was having to go through it one piece at a time.

Yates shook his head. ‘If only. It’s much worse than that. Much, much, worse. We were out one night, just me and Donald, and had both been drinking. I was tipsy, not totally out of it, but had drunk enough not to be fully in control. We were on our way home from the pub when I hit something. Initially, we thought it was a cat, so I stopped the car further up the road and we went back to look.’ Tears formed in his eyes, and he blinked them away. ‘It wasn’t an animal at all. It was a person. A young woman. She was still alive. We could hear her moaning. It was dark, though, as it was a country road with no lighting, and she couldn’t see us.’ Yates leant forward and rested his head in his hand. ‘I panicked. I’d just hit a person and could’ve killed her. I was way over the limit and couldn’t afford to be caught because I’d go to prison. Drunk, knocking someone over, and driving without a licence. They’d throw the book at me. We ran back to the car and drove off, stopping at a phone box a mile down the road and phoning for an ambulance.’

Nausea pooled in the pit of Seb’s stomach. How on earth did the man manage to live with himself after doing that?

‘Do you know what happened to the woman you hit?’ he asked, forcing his voice to sound calm and non-judgemental.

‘Yes. She was a student, and news of what had happened to her was all over campus. She ended up in a wheelchair and came back to uni the following year to continue with her degree.’

‘You should have gone to the police,’ Seb said, his voice flat.

‘It’s easy for me to admit that now, as a responsible adult, but I didn’t and although they interviewed lots of students at the time, they didn’t ever question me or Donald.’

‘There was hardly any CCTV back then, or smartphones which could be tracked. You wouldn’t have got away with it now. You were lucky,’ Seb said.

‘If you can call it that. I’ve lived with what I’d done my entire life. I can still hear her moaning in pain as if it happened yesterday.’ He gave an empty laugh. ‘It’s actually cathartic to tell somebody about it now. I ruined that poor girl’s life and I’ll never forget it. But at the time, I was young and all I could think of was what would happen to me. What my parents would say if I ended up in prison. How my life would be over. At the time, it seemed like I had no choice.’

‘This type of crime might well have been tried in a magistrates’ court, and not the Crown Court, which means the statute of limitations on the crime would most likely have expired and Donald couldn’t have done anything to you, if he tried.’

Yates’s eyes widened. ‘But even if I couldn’t be prosecuted, just bringing it out into the open would have damaged my work. I’d have lost clients. My marriage might have ended. My kids would never have spoken to me again. Everything I’d worked for over the years would have been destroyed. I had to do as Donald asked and lend him the money, but you’ve got to believe me, I had nothing to do with his death. I promise you.’

Seb was inclined to believe him. It would have been hard to fake the reactions he was having.

‘After you paid Donald this first amount, did he come to you for more?’

‘No. He knew it would have been impossible for me to get it. He realised I couldn’t just give him a never-ending supply of money as it had to come from somewhere, and I wouldn’t have been able to get another loan from the bank for that amount. My business is doing well, but not that well. I assume that’s why he started blackmailing other people. I asked when I’d receive dividend payments on the money I’d invested, and he made up some excuses as to why I wasn’t going to get any. I didn’t bother to pursue it. There was no point.’

The man had visibly relaxed in his chair. He’d been holding this inside for decades, and now it was out. But Seb couldn’t feel sorry for him. What had happened was inexcusable at whatever age the man had been.

‘Did you discuss why he used the money to invest, giving you documentation and dividends, rather than just taking it for himself?’

‘Oh, yes. Donald was very clever about it. He said that by doing it that way it meant he could claim it was a legitimate investment, should I threaten to go to the police about him. Then it would have been his word against mine.’

‘Although if you had reported him, the police might have looked closely at Donald’s business and the whole Ponzi scheme would have been discovered sooner rather than after his death.’

‘I wasn’t to know that. Donald must have done it as a scare tactic. And it worked.’ He hung his head.

‘Why did you tell Pauline that you only gave Donald a hundred thousand pounds?’

‘I hadn’t planned on telling her at all, and it was only after his death that I admitted it, in case it came out that we were creditors. Telling her