“Bank statements, credit card bills, utilities…” Alice laid out the papers on her coffee table, next to the bottle of wine and homemade chocolate torte Julian had brought as comfort food. “What am I missing?”
“Just this.” Julian came into her sitting room, bearing a corkscrew and thick sheaf of pages from her printer. “Miss Alice Love’s credit report, fresh off the presses.”
“Pass me that.” She reached up. Julian held out the wine opener. “No, the other one.”
“Not so fast.” He collapsed heavily on the sofa. “I should look first, find out what we’re dealing with. Some of the statements I see at work are all over the place.”
“Fill me with confidence, why don’t you.” Alice took a large slice of cake, but her stomach was twisted too tightly with nerves. She picked at it, anxious. “Well? The bank said there had to be something going on for my score to have slipped so low.”
Rodney had been flustered, yes, but on that he was certain. With a rating like hers, she’d be lucky to even get a tiny overdraft, let alone a hundred-thousand-pound mortgage. Somebody had taken another loan out in her name, and nobody had known the difference. Alice felt another surge of terror. There could be thousands more pounds of debt out there.
“Hmm…” Julian frowned, flipping through the pages.
“Is that a good ‘hmm’ or a bad ‘hmm’?” Alice watched him carefully, but the seconds ticked by without any further comment. “Please, Jules. I’m dying here!”
He looked up. “Don’t panic,” he started, voice cautious.
She panicked.
“What? What does that mean?” Alice snatched the list from his hands. The very long list. She held her breath as she scanned the details. Names of banks and credit card companies jumped out at her: not just major ones, but firms with names like CreditLoans4U and BadCreditPlus. There were loans, and credit cards, and unauthorized overdrafts stretching back almost two months.
“How much is it?” She gazed at the dense print, aghast. All of this, in her name!
“We’ll start contacting the companies right away,” Julian told her in a low, soothing voice. “And inform them what’s happened. The sooner we get the process going, the better.”
“But how much is it?” The numbers were blurring in front of her eyes.
Julian sighed. “As far as I can tell, around sixty thousand pounds. So far.”
Alice felt her mouth drop open.
“I…You can’t…I don’t…!”
“Like I said, we’ll straighten this out,” Julian told her, a reassuring hand on her arm. Alice struggled to listen, blood pounding in her ears. “I’ll find someone at my firm, or maybe Stefan knows something. But you should be prepared for it to take a while.”
Alice could only whimper: “I think I need that corkscrew now.”
***
“You know, I’m surprised they haven’t started chasing you yet,” Julian said thoughtfully, after Alice had numbed her panic with two glasses of wine and they’d broken down the worst of the fraud. “Although it’s all pretty recent. Most of these only have one or two missed payments.”
She shivered. “I still can’t believe I didn’t know it was happening.”
Of everything, Alice wondered if her ignorance was the worst. All this time, she’d taken these ordinary things for granted: she opened a bank account, she paid her bills, she filed away her statements every month in the big black file marked “banking.” But now it turned out it wasn’t safe or secure at all. The most boring parts of her life were wide open for anyone to just stroll in and take—everything.
Julian looked at his phone, restless. “We should probably wrap this up. Yasmin will be over at my flat soon, with the first of her stuff.”
Alice stopped. “She’s moving in?” Her problems faded, just for a moment, as she looked at Julian in surprise. “When did this happen? I mean”—she recovered—“congratulations. You didn’t say.”
Julian seemed flustered. He ran one hand over the crown of his head, from his neck to his forehead, flattening his hair in an awkward clump. “It wasn’t exactly planned. We were talking, and she said how she never saw me, and I said something about her living on the other side of the city, and then the next thing I knew…” He gave a small shrug. “It’ll be good, I think. Got to try it sometime, right?”
“Of course, I’m sure it’ll be great for you.” Now it was Alice’s turn to be reassuring. “And you’ll finally have someone to cook for!”
Julian made a face. “Not exactly. Yasmin doesn’t really do butter, or oil.” He paused. “Fats of any kind, really.”
“Oh.” Yasmin had been with Julian for close to six months now but was still something of an enigma to Alice. She did something terribly important involving foreign buyouts at an investment bank and was forever slipping away from drinks or dinner with her BlackBerry to cajole somebody about sell rates in honeyed tones. Alice liked her, in the vaguely pleasant way she liked most of Julian’s girlfriends. Anything more was a wasted effort. But anti-butter? That didn’t bode well.
“Thanks for the help, anyway.” Alice set aside the papers and showed him to the door. “I really appreciate it.”
“It’s nothing.” Julian pulled her into another hug. “I just hate that some bastard would do this to you. You’ll call if you need anything else?”
Alice nodded.
“Hang in there.”
She closed the door behind him and slowly sank back against the hard frame. That was something she hadn’t even begun to contemplate, what with the panic and terror and rush to discover the true extent of the damage. But now that those were out in the open, the question wrapped itself around her brain.
Who had done this to her?
Rodney and Julian said that it had to be criminal gangs, taking advantage of her perfect credit rating and large savings account, but Alice couldn’t understand it. Intercepting her mail, forging her signature—even if they’d been hunting through her rubbish for months and hacking all her online accounts, it was all unnervingly personal. The things they would have had to know about her to carry on, undetected, all this time: her date of birth and contact details were only the start of it. To even access a report of her current account by phone, Alice had often had to list her mother’s maiden name, random security words, town of birth, or the name of her first pet (a sadly short-lived hamster called Snuggles). How could someone know those things?