Three days after my twin sons were born, my husband brought twenty-two members of his family into a hospital room and offered me two hundred thousand dollars to sign away my marriage, my children, and my right to ever ask about their company’s accounts. They expected me to cry. I read every page and signed all of them.

PART 3 — WHAT I FOUND, AND WHAT I DIDN’T DO
I still had access. That is the single most important fact in this entire business and it is the least dramatic.

When they moved me to marketing nobody removed my read permissions on the accounting system, because removing permissions is an IT ticket and nobody raised one, and for fourteen months I could see everything I had always been able to see.

I did not touch a single thing. I want that stated plainly because the first question Beatrix Nwankwo asked me was whether I had ever made an entry, and the answer is no, not once, and that is why none of this ever became about me.

Over eleven weeks, in the evenings, I read four years of the client trust account.

The pattern is boring and it is the same pattern every time.

Transfers out of the trust account into the operating account, described as management fee true-ups, in amounts that were not management fees. Then transfers back in, weeks later, in round numbers, from wherever they had come from that month.

It is called lapping and it is the oldest thing in the world and it works until the day somebody wants their deposit back at the same time as somebody else.

At the point I stopped counting, the trust account was one million four hundred and eleven thousand dollars short of the deposit liability the company was carrying.

Four hundred and eleven units of tenants’ money.

Both signatories on that account are Caspian Thackery and Adelaide Thackery.

I went to Beatrix Nwankwo in the July at six months pregnant, and she brought in a forensic accountant called Mira Kazan, and the two of them spent nine weeks turning eleven weeks of my reading into something that would survive being looked at.

And then Beatrix told me to do nothing.

That is the part that mattered and it is the hardest thing anybody has ever asked me to do.

She said: you are six months pregnant, you live in a house owned by his family, you are employed by his mother, and you have no income of your own. If you file anything now, you will be out of that house inside a week, and they will spend the next two years telling a court that you are unstable and vindictive, and you will be fighting a custody case from a rented room.

She said: have your babies.