And then he stood by the door afterwards and shook nine hands, including mine, and said: “Thank you for coming,” in exactly the voice he used at our wedding when he thanked my aunt for the salad bowl.
That is the only moment in all of this when I have been properly frightened of him. Not angry. Frightened.
Because I understood, standing in that doorway with my hand in his, that the man can do a whole event from the outside of himself, and that he had been doing it, on and off, for nine years, and that I had watched him do it at an altar and cried about it.
The money.
I reported it.
A hundred and eighty-two thousand, seven hundred, taken from a company with nineteen staff and a pension scheme, through a vendor account he set up himself in 2020 and signed off himself under the delegated authority my father gave him in the January of 2021, eleven weeks before my father died.
I sat with my auditors on the twenty-ninth of October and I told them everything, and then I asked what my options were, and the senior partner said: “You haven’t got any. You’ve got a duty.”
So it went to the police, and to the insurer, and to the board.
Grady was dismissed on the third of November. He was charged in the March. He pleaded guilty in the June and got fourteen months, suspended for two years, plus a compensation order and two hundred hours.
The judge said, out loud, that it was the most sympathetic set of facts he had seen attached to a charge like that in some years, and then he said that it did not change what it was.
I agree with both halves.
And here is the thing that people find hardest, which I will say once: I would have paid for Imelda Foyle. Immediately. Without a conversation.
Twenty-nine hundred a month is not a sum that would have registered against that company, and it would have been the easiest money I ever signed off, and he knew that too.
He did not steal it because he needed it. He stole it because taking it meant he did not have to explain what it was for.
And the staff, who I had to tell, and who I had been dreading more than the police.
Nineteen people. Some of them have been with that company since my father was thirty.
I did it on the fourth of November, in the boardroom, standing up, and I got eleven words in before I had to start again.
And what I said was: my husband has taken a hundred and eighty-two thousand of company money over five years, it has gone to a care home, he has been dismissed and it is with the police, and I found it myself and I reported it myself and if any of you want to ask me anything you can ask it now or you can come and find me.
Nobody asked anything in the room. Four people came and found me afterwards.
And the one I think about is Deb, who does the service charges and who has been there since 1998 and who taught me how to read a rent roll when I was fourteen.
She came into my office at about five and shut the door and said: “Love. Did he know what he was taking it for?”
And I said yes. His mother.
And Deb sat down on the arm of my father’s old chair and said: “Right. Well. That’s the worst version, then.”
“Because if he’d been buying a boat you could hate him and be done.”
She was there four days later when I signed the compensation order paperwork and she has never mentioned it again.
Verity.
We are not friends and we have never pretended to be.
She is thirty-two and she still lives four hours away and she is still engaged, to a man called Pell who has known about the visits since 2019 and who drove her, sometimes, and who I have met twice.
Seven years. Fifty-something round trips. And she has never once asked Grady for anything and never once told me, because — and she said this in the car park, flatly, like a woman reading out a delivery time —
“It wasn’t mine to tell you. And I wasn’t going to be the ex-girlfriend who rings the fiancée.”
Which I have thought about a lot, because she is right, and because it also meant that a woman I had spent four years being quietly cold about was the only adult in the whole arrangement.
I sent her flowers after the funeral and she sent me a message saying please don’t.
We speak about three times a year.
And my father, who is the reason any of this was mine to lose.
Ellis Marlowe ran that company for twenty-six years and he gave Grady Foyle delegated signing authority in the January of 2021, which is the door everything else walked through.
People have suggested to me, more than once and usually kindly, that my father was a poor judge.
He was not. He was a man of sixty-eight who had just been told what was wrong with him, and he was putting his affairs in a state where his daughter would not have to do everything alone, and he chose the steadiest person in the building.
And he was right about the steadiness. That is the awful part. Grady Foyle is genuinely the man who turns up when your car won’t start. Both things are true and they were true at the same time for five years.
My father died on the ninth of April, 2021. Eleven weeks after signing that authority.
And the last full conversation I had with him, in a hospice room, included the sentence: “You’ve got a good one there, Wynnie.”
