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Chapter 31: The First Case
publish date:
2026-07-15 07:46:11
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IF YOU LOVE ME, DIE FOR ME Chapter 76: The Eleanor Question
POV: MadelineIt started on a Thursday evening, which was not a dramatic day to start a fight on, which was perhaps why neither of us saw it coming.Jeremy had been on calls most of the afternoon, the particular kind of calls where you can hear from the other room that something is being worked out but the working out has not yet finished. I was at the kitchen table going through the Doyle trial preparation notes Donovan's office had sent over, making margin notes in the way I had when I was revising for exams at twenty-two, which was the last time anything had felt this much like something you could fail.He came in at seven and made tea without asking and put a cup in front of me and sat across from me and had the expression he wore when something was sitting with him that he had not yet found the right words for."Tell me," I said."Sheila Grogan called," he said. Grogan was the prosecution barrister."About your evidence.""About my mother's evidence," he said.I put down my pen.
IF YOU LOVE ME, DIE FOR ME Chapter 75: The Charge Read Aloud
POV: MadelineThe Doyle hearing was on a Tuesday.Not the trial, which was months away and would be a separate and significant undertaking. The preliminary hearing, where charges were formally read in open court, and the defendant entered his plea.Jeremy came with me.We sat in the public gallery of a Dublin courtroom on a Tuesday morning in November, and we waited.Francis Doyle entered from the side door accompanied by his solicitor and sat in the defendant's position with the uprightness he had apparently not lost, the particular bearing of a man who had decided that whatever happened in this room, he would not give it the satisfaction of seeing him diminished.The judge entered.The court was called to order.The registrar began to read.The charges were twelve in total: the fraud charges and the money laundering charges and the regulatory offences that covered nine years of Marshfield Capital and the five-jurisdiction network and Aldbrook Financial and everything else the cooper
IF YOU LOVE ME, DIE FOR ME Chapter 74: Dara's Last Week
POV: MadelineDara's flight home was on a Sunday.She spent the Saturday before it doing what she always did on the last day of a visit, which was to say she worked until four in the afternoon and then abruptly stopped and announced she was taking herself to dinner and that I should come.We went to the place by the river that she had been going to twice a week for a month and had told me was the best restaurant in Dublin without apparent irony.We ordered, and the wine arrived, and she looked at me across the table with the look she got when she was about to say something she had been holding until the right moment."Tell me," I said."The Singapore office," she said. "The financial intelligence division I have been building. I spoke to the partners last week.""About.""About formally constituting it as the Asia-Pacific arm of the Accountability Project," she said. "Not a separate allied operation. A formal arm. With the Crawford name on the door and the full methodology behind the
IF YOU LOVE ME, DIE FOR ME Chapter 73: After the Case
POV: Roisin CallahanSol asked me to dinner on a Wednesday.He said it the way he said everything that was not case-related, which was to say very briefly and without elaboration, looking at the table rather than at me, in the manner of someone who had decided to say a thing and was committing to having said it before any second thoughts arrived."There is a place two streets from here that is supposed to be good," he said. "I have been meaning to try it. Wednesday is apparently quiet.""All right," I said.He looked up from the table."Yes," I said, which was what I had meant by all right but which I recognized he needed to hear clearly.We went on Wednesday.The place two streets from the Crawford office was small and warm and did the kind of food that suggested someone in the kitchen cared about getting it right rather than getting it done, and we sat across from each other at a corner table and ordered things and talked the way we had not talked in six weeks of sitting across from
IF YOU LOVE ME, DIE FOR ME Chapter 72: The Witness
Jeremy's POVThe prosecution contacted me on a Thursday.Not about Francis Doyle, at least not directly. About the Whitman Holdings board, about the board dinners, about the specific occasions on which Doyle had been present in the company of the three board members now cooperating with prosecution authorities.I was a witness.Not a character witness, not initially. An evidentiary witness. Someone who could place Doyle in specific rooms at specific times with specific people.I gave my initial statement to the prosecution's barrister on a Friday morning in a conference room in a building I had never had reason to enter before. The barrister was a woman named Sheila Grogan who had the kind of efficiency that came from having asked the same kinds of questions many times and understanding exactly how to extract accurate information from a person who was trying to be helpful without overreaching.She asked me to describe the board dinners.I described them.She asked me to identify, from
IF YOU LOVE ME, DIE FOR ME Chapter 71: The Crawford Method
POV: MadelineBea had been waiting for a project.I had not fully understood this until I asked her to help build the Crawford Method framework, and she appeared in the Dublin office the following Monday with twelve pages of notes she had clearly been developing since the conversation in the kitchen, which meant she had started before I had asked, which meant she had seen where we were going before I had named it."You knew," I said."I had a working hypothesis," she said."You could have mentioned the working hypothesis.""You needed to arrive at it yourself," she said, with the directness that was Bea's most consistent quality and her most occasionally irritating one. "It would not have been the same if I had handed it to you."I looked at the twelve pages.The framework she had built was thorough and practical and organized around four principles that she had extracted, she said, from observing every case Crawford had handled since its opening.The first principle was documentation
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