Lawyer Flense and Annag Duncan’s joint flight

Lawyer Flense and Annag Duncan’s joint flight turns a familiar gesture of workplace courtesy into the prelude to betrayal. After Flense absconds with a large portion of Duke and Breitsprecher’s funds, Annag goes with him; their departure exposes both the company’s financial vulnerability and Lavinia’s failure to recognize the attachment growing between her trusted assistant and her lawyer.

The Courtesies Before the Escape

At the end of a tiring day, Flense offers to drive Annag home, presenting the offer as a simple convenience because her home is on his way. Annag gathers her bags and accepts. The gesture is part of a larger pattern later recalled by Dieter: Flense praised her cookies, brought her little bouquets, smiled at her, and drove her home after long meetings. Each action looks modest on its own, but together they mark a sustained attentiveness that Lavinia and Dieter had not returned.

Dieter suggests that Annag was smitten with Flense’s attentions, while allowing that Flense may also have felt affection for her. The account does not establish the precise nature or terms of their relationship; it presents Dieter’s explanation after their disappearance. What it does make clear is the contrast between Flense’s courtship-like gestures and the employers’ habitual assumption that Annag’s work and loyalty required no recognition.

The Disappearance and Its Cost

The news arrives as a shock: Flense has left the city and the country for parts unknown, taking a substantial amount of Duke and Breitsprecher money, and Annag has gone with him. Their shared departure links personal intimacy with corporate betrayal. Flense’s embezzlement is not a theft from Lavinia’s personal property, as she initially laments, but a raid on company assets; the distinction matters even as the loss strikes at her sense of family inheritance and business continuity.

Lavinia is especially wounded by Annag’s participation. She remembers giving Annag a job when she had nothing and interprets the escape as a betrayal of that act of trust. Her anger is directed not only at the missing funds but at the reversal of the employer-assistant relationship: the woman she believed she had helped has left with the lawyer who stole from the company. Lavinia clenches and unclenches her hands as she voices her anger, then resolves to have Pinkerton’s search for both fugitives and to see them imprisoned.

Dieter’s explanation complicates Lavinia’s sense of the betrayal without excusing the theft. He points out that neither he nor Lavinia had praised Annag, while Flense had noticed her and offered attention. His account makes their neglect part of the conditions in which the attachment took shape, though the narrative does not suggest that Lavinia’s failure to praise Annag caused or justified the embezzlement. Lavinia resists the suggestion that Flense’s attentions reflected genuine affection, and the episode leaves that question unresolved.

Separate Trails and Unequal Fates

For months, the fugitives’ whereabouts remain uncertain. Pinkerton reports rumors placing Flense in Peru, Athens in Georgia, Glasgow, and Buenos Aires, but none yields firm evidence. Lavinia continues paying the steep monthly detective bills and insists that the search go on. The scattered sightings stretch the escape across a widening map, making their disappearance feel less like a single departure than a prolonged evasion.

Eventually, Flense is tracked to an alley behind the Mulo Rojo restaurant in Valparaiso, where he is found dead, stabbed and robbed. The discovery closes his trail, but not the question of Annag’s fate. There is no word of her; she has disappeared into the wilds of Scotland, a place the narration describes as one where no stranger dares go. The two who fled together therefore receive sharply different narrative endings: Flense’s flight ends in a reported death, while Annag remains absent and unaccounted for.

Betrayal, Attention, and the Limits of Knowledge

The episode binds financial misconduct to an intimate relationship without reducing one to the other. Flense’s attentiveness to Annag is recalled through specific small acts, while the company’s loss is measured in stolen funds and Lavinia’s effort to pursue the fugitives. The contrast exposes how personal recognition can exist inside an exploitative hierarchy: Annag was valued by Flense in ways her employers had failed to express, but the narrative offers no basis for treating that attention as proof that the escape was innocent or that the relationship was equal.

The account also withholds what cannot be known. Dieter can speculate about Annag’s feelings and Flense’s, but neither is present to confirm his interpretation; Pinkerton’s reports never establish Annag’s destination with the same certainty as Flense’s final location. Her disappearance leaves the relationship’s emotional history incomplete, even as the company’s financial and personal losses become unmistakable.