To the Hilt (20 page)

Because of Wilfred’s presence we were silent on the way back to London, but spent the evening discussing nothing else.

Ivan was inclined to be glad that Norman Quorn hadn’t after all run off with the money.

“We misjudged him,” he said sorrowfully. “My dear old friend ...”

“Your dear old friend,” I corrected regretfully, “certainly did transfer the money out of the brewery. I’ve seen copies of about six huge withdrawals that he made just before he left. He did indeed, I’m afraid, send all the funds on their way to destinations still unknown.”

“But he didn’t go!”

“No. He died. He didn’t die on the rubbish tip. Someone put him there. Wherever he died, someone didn’t report it to anyone, but just dumped him.”

Ivan’s beliefs and intentions swung widely to and fro, but his chief instinct, as before, was not to make public the brewery’s loss. Norman Quorn dead, Norman Quorn living under palm trees ... it made no difference. The theft existed and either way would be covered up.

I said, “But don’t you care who dumped him? Don’t you want to know where he died?”

“What does it really matter? And as Norman was homosexual—” Ivan saw my surprise. “Didn’t you know? No, I suppose you didn’t, he was always discreet ... But, you see, suppose he died where it was
awkward
for someone... do you see what I mean?”

I saw.

“And it wouldn’t do Norman or the brewery any good to disclose his sexual preference or, oh dear, his theft.”

It was astounding, I thought, to find my starchy stepfather so tolerant of homosexuality, but my mother, who after all knew him better, took it for granted. “Quite a lot of Ivan’s friends,” she told me later, “were ‘that way.’ Delightful friends,” she added. “Good company always.”

Ivan asked me, “If we tell the police that Norman stole the funds and was homosexual, would it affect the creditors’ arrangements?”

“Well ... I don’t know. The creditors do know he stole the funds. They signed the agreements knowing that.”

“Well, then?”

“But they believe he skipped the country. They believe he’s alive. They believe the money is with him ... and it isn’t.”

“So?”

“So where is it?”

A long silence.

By ten in the evening Ivan was saying we needed someone else’s advice.

“OK,” I agreed. “Whose?”

“Perhaps ... Oliver’s?”

I said mildly, “Oliver would ask you what I, Alexander, suggested, and then give you an opposite opinion.”

“But he knows the law!”

I had been careful always not to belittle Patsy to her father. Oliver was Patsy’s man. So was Desmond Finch.

I asked, “What did Patsy think of Norman Quorn?”

“She didn’t like him. Always a sadness. Why do you want to know?”

“What would she expect you to do?”

Ivan dithered.

By midnight he had decided, in his law-abiding Jockey Club persona, that I should ask Margaret Morden whether Norman Quorn’s death made any difference to the creditors, and that I, not Ivan, should tell Detective Chief Inspector Reynolds that the now-identified corpse had been probably an embezzler about to leave the country.

“Probably?” I echoed with skepticism.

“We don’t know for sure.”

I thought he would have changed his mind again by morning, but it seemed my sensible mother had fortified his decision, as she agreed with it; so at nine o’clock Ivan, again in robe and slippers, instructed me to phone Leicestershire.

Slight snag. The policeman’s phone number was written on the tissue box. The tissue box was still in the car. I trailed off to retrieve it and finally reached the necessary ear.

“Tell me on the phone,” he commanded when I suggested meeting.

“Better face-to-face.”

“I’m off duty at noon.”

“I’ll get there. Where?”

“Do you remember the way to the mortuary? There then. It’s on my way home.”

I refrained—just—from observing that the mortuary was on everyone’s way home, and managed to trace Margaret Morden to hers.

“It’s Saturday,” she said tartly.

“I do know.”

“Then it had better be important.”

“The King Alfred Brewery’s Finance Director has turned up, still in England, but dead.”

“I agree,” she said slowly, “that that is Saturday news. How did he die?”

“Stroke or heart attack, the pathologist thinks.”

“When?”

“About the time he disappeared.”

She thought briefly and said, “Phone me in the office on Monday. And tell Tobias. But if what’s bothering you most is the status of the creditors’ agreements, my first impression is that they will stand.”

“You’re a doll.”

“No, I’m definitely
not.”

I put down the receiver with a smile and drove to Leicester.

The Chief Inspector’s reaction was as expected. “Why didn’t you tell me this yesterday?”

“The brewery has hushed up the theft.”

“The body,” he said reflectively, “was dressed in suit, shirt, tie, underpants, socks and shoes, all unremarkable. There was nothing in his pockets.”

“How did you identify him in the end?”

“One of our clever young constables took another look at the clothes. The shoes were new—on the sole of one was the name of a shop and the price. The shop was in Wantage, Oxfordshire, and they remembered the sale... Mr. Quorn was a regular customer. He was away from home, but a neighbor had the sister’s address.”

“Neat.”

“But what he was doing in Leicestershire ...” He shrugged. “It’s possible he died out of doors, in a garden. There were a few blades of mown grass in his clothes. That would jell with him falling back onto a barbecue of some sort.”

“Hardly the right clothes for a barbecue.”

He looked me up and down in amusement. “While you, sir, if I may say so, look more like a traveler.”

I acknowledged it in good humor.

“I’ll complete my case notes with what you’ve told me,” the policeman said. “It isn’t by any means unknown for people to get rid of bodies when they’ve died inconveniently. I appreciate your help. Give my regards to Sir Ivan. He looks so ill himself.”

It was by then three and a half weeks since Ivan’s heart attack (and four weeks and a day since Quorn had skipped with the cash), and what Ivan still badly needed and wasn’t getting was complete untroubled rest. I drove back to London and for the remainder of that day and all of the next kept the house tranquil with the telephone switched into an answering machine and with simple meals, cooked by me, that needed no decisions. I gave Wilfred the rest of the weekend off and did his jobs: it was all peaceful and curative and its own reward.

On Monday I went by train again to Reading and did the rounds of the offices.

Life had moved on for Tobias and Margaret, who were already dealing with the next unfortunates down the line, but they each gave me half an hour and information.

“Old Quorn’s dead!” Tobias exclaimed. “Then where’s the money?”

I said, “I thought you might be able to work it out.”

He gave me his best blank outer stare concealing furious activity within.

“I followed him to Panama ...” he said thoughtfully.

“How many stops to Panama?” I asked.

“Wait.” He turned to one of his three computer monitors, sorted out a disc from an indexed box, and fed it into a slot, pressing keys. “Here we are. Wire transfer from the brewery to a bank in Guernsey ... six transfers in one day, each from a different brewery account—it was as if he’d collected everything available into those six accounts; then he sent all six separately into the same account in Guernsey, but the bank there already had instructions to transfer the whole amount—multiple millions—to a bank in New York, which already held instructions to wire the money onwards to a bank in Panama, and that bank cannot say where the money went from there.”

“Can’t or won’t?” I asked.

“Quite likely both. All these banks have unbreakable privacy laws. We only know the path to Panama because Norman Quorn had scribbled the ABA numbers on some rough paper and neglected to shred it.”

“Remind me about ABA numbers.”

Tobias chewed a toothpick. “They identify all banks in the United States and roundabout areas like the Caribbean. They’re part of the Fedwire system.”

“Tobe—what’s Fedwire?”

“There are three huge worldwide organizations dealing with the international transfer of funds and information,” he said. “Fedwire—ABA included—is the Federal Reserve Bank’s institution. They have nine-digit routing numbers, so any transfer with a nine-digit code is likely to have been seen to by Fedwire.”

I sighed.

“Then,” Tobe said, “there’s SWIFT—the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication. And third, there’s CHIPS—Clearing House Interbank Payments System, which is operated also through New York and has special identifier codes unique to their customers, ultra secret.”

“God.”

“Take your pick,” Tobias said. “All the systems have identifying codes. The codes will tell you the bank, but not the account number. We know the brewery money went to a branch of Global Credit in Panama, but not into which account there.”

“But they must know,” I said. “I mean, they can’t have millions sent to them every day from New York. The amount, the dispatcher, the date ... they could surely work it out.”

“Perhaps, but it’s against their law to pass the information on.”

“Not to the police? Or the tax people?”

“Especially not to the police or the tax people. A lot of banks would be out of business at once if they did that.” Tobe smiled. “You’re an infant, Al.”

I acknowledged it. “But,” I said, “what if the money just sits in Panama forever, now that Norman Quom is dead?”

“It may do.” Tobias nodded. “There are billions and trillions of loot in unclaimed accounts sitting in banks all over the world, and you can bet your soul the banks profit from them and are in no hurry to look for heirs.”

“Henry the Eighth syndrome,” I said.

“What?”

I explained about gold church treasures hidden in fields.

“Just like that,” he said.

I left him pulverizing a toothpick over someone else’s problems and presented myself on Margaret Morden’s doorstep.

I told her what few details I knew of Norman Quorn’s exit.

“Poor man,” she said.

“So you don’t think,” I asked, “that the wages of sin is death?”

“Are
death, surely? And where have you been for the last fifty years? The wages of sin nowadays are a few years of full board and lodging at the country’s expense with a chance to study for a degree, followed by tender loving care from ex-prisoners’ aid societies.”

“Cynical.”

“Realistic.”

“What about the victims?”

“The wages of a victim are to be blamed if at all possible for a crime committed against her—I regret it’s often a her—and seldom to be offered compensation, let alone free board and lodging and a university education. The wages of a victim are poverty, oblivion and a lonely grave. It’s the sinners the tabloids pursue with their checkbooks.”

“Margaret!”

“So now you know me better,” she said. “Norman Quorn robbed little old widows of their pathetic dividends and I don’t give a shit if he died of a guilty conscience.”

“Little old widows are a bit mawkish ...”

“Not if you happen to be one.”

“Well ... if the little old widows’ dividends are languishing in a foreign bank somewhere, how do we find them?”

She said, “What’s in it for you?”

I looked at my hands. What could I say? She would consider it mawkish in the extreme whatever I said.

“I don’t mean that, Al. I’m in a bad mood today. I’m dealing with yet another deliberate bankruptcy whose sole aim is to dodge paying small-scale creditors, who may themselves go out of business through the loss. The people I’m dealing with will dump the suppliers in the shit, declare the business bankrupt and closed and go off and start all over again under another name.”

“But,” I said, “is that legal?”

“Legal, yes. Moral, you must be kidding. I’m not used to people like you. Go away and leave me to my disillusions.”

“I wanted to ask you,” I said, “about that possible trial run. Do you remember any of the trial’s destinations?”

She frowned, then, as Tobias had done, consulted one of her row of computer faces and tapped instructions into the keys.

“It’s possible,” she said finally, but with doubts, “that Quorn sent a fairly small sum to a bank on an island in the Bahamas, who forwarded it to a bank in Bermuda, who sent it back to Wantage. The transactions weren’t backed up by signed documentation, and half the information—like the actual account numbers—is missing. If the brewery’s money is in either of those banks, which is doubtful, you’re not going to find it.”

“Thanks a bunch.”

“Cheer up. First thing this morning I consulted your committee of creditors. The agreements they signed with you will remain unaltered by Norman Quorn’s death.”

I walked to the office of Young and Uttley, expecting to find it locked, but when I knocked and turned the handle, the door opened.

I walked in. The occupant that day wasn’t a skinhead or a secretary or Mr. Young with mustache or even the football coach Uttley, but a straightforward-looking man of about my own age dressed much as I was myself in jeans, shirt and sweater: no tie, unaggressive sneakers and clean hands. The chief difference between us was that he had very short light brown hair, while mine still curled on my shoulders.

I smiled at him slowly, and I said, “Hello.”

“Hello.”

“What’s your name?” I asked.

“Chris.”

“Chris Young?”

He nodded. “I’ve done a bit of let-your-fingers-do-the-walking for you,” he said.