Chapter 33
Em and I don’t speak much on the flight home.
Firstly, we’re exhausted from the jet lag, and secondly, we slept together last night, which seems to have brought us to a bit of a verbal truce.
Now, I’ve led with the least important bit of news there, but the most scurrilous. I’m sure you are only interested in how the case is going. So here’s the worthy stuff:
As for the rest of the evening … We celebrated a bit at the bar with a round of St Agnes Slings, of course, then got some food, then another round of drinks.
Night fell around us, and we found a couple of empty loungers on the breezy side of the island, looking out at the Atlantic, and talked.
We weren’t drunk. We talked about anything and everything except our professional lives, we laughed, and we relaxed for the first time since this all began.
And slowly we stopped trading little barbs, until we both ran out of things to say, because we were avoiding saying anything bigger.
Finally, she drained her glass, stood, and announced she was going to bed.
I was flummoxed, trying to work out what I’d just said wrong, until she turned at the end of the sand, and asked:
‘Are you coming, then? Or are you going to sit out here moping all night?’
And that was that, and now we’re next to each other on the plane, and I’m struggling not to grin.
I’m feeling completely daft about how happy I am.
She’s not my girlfriend or anything. Once this is over, whenever that is, I’ll never see her, Elle or Jonny again.
But it did seem to – this isn’t a romantic way of putting it – resolve things between us, or rather to make sense of them.
There was a moment of clarity when she was asleep and I was staring up at the ceiling fan, feeling that pleasant emptiness and thinking: I’m glad I knocked on the door at Balfour Villas.
I mean, I’d prefer not to be wanted by the police, and for Mr Bowling Ball to have no idea who I am. But things could be worse.
No alarms go off at Heathrow, either, which is the second nice thing about today. That’s something. I bless Freddy for his passport, and for not upgrading to the biometric variety so I get through without being spotted with the wrong face. I’m going to try really hard to return it to him.
We walk through the airport masked, board the Piccadilly Line, and change at King’s Cross for Highgate. Em’s got a missed call from her sister and a voicemail, but we want to surprise them by turning up with the answer to all our prayers, so we hurry onto the next Tube.
At the other end, we stroll towards 17 Balfour Villas, chatting happily as we go. Like an idiot, I still don’t see anything wrong as we pass through the gate.
It’s not until we’re at the front steps that we realise the door is hanging wide open, the hall slicked with the rain that fell earlier and an air of abandonment about the entire place.
I breathe in to shout Jonny and Elle’s names, but Em’s a step ahead, because she grips my arm and whispers, ‘No.’
The wind rustles the foliage at either side of the house. We stand there, panicking, trying to work out if we’re about to be arrested. Or worse.
We mask up on the porch, for what little good it will do us, and hurry back to the street.
‘Where now?’ I whisper.
‘I don’t know. Let’s just go.’
Oh God. Bowling Ball must have turned up when we were away. He’s got Jonny and Elle somehow. He got them and he’s been waiting for us to turn up, and now he’s going to get us too. We pace along the street, back towards the station, not really thinking about anything at all.
Em gets her phone out and dials her voicemail, to hear the message Elle left.
‘I’ll never forgive myself if … I can’t believe …’ She stops and listens. ‘They’re … Oh, God.’ She stops walking, reaches out and flaps at me to stop.
‘What?’ She hangs up and walks out into the middle of the road. ‘Em. Where are you going?’
‘Thirty-four … thirty-six …’ She squeezes through another set of iron gates, left just a crack open.
Elle and Jonny are standing in the doorway of 38 Balfour Villas, looking like proud homeowners.
‘Hi!’
‘We set up a camera,’ says Jonny. Em runs up the steps and hugs her sister for about twenty seconds, while Jonny and I say hello, then wait for them to finish. Number 38 is even grander than 17, from the exterior.
Eventually Em pulls away from her sister. ‘You have to text telling me you’re safe the next time you pull something like that.’
‘Sorry. Jonny said I couldn’t. He used the term OPSEC a lot and I didn’t like to ask.’
‘Operational security,’ Jonny murmurs. Em hugs Jonny too, then stands back.
‘How was your trip?’
She looks around, and even though we can’t be seen from the street, she shoos the others into the house. ‘No. Not after what you’ve just put us through. First we get a drink.’
Two hours later, it’s mid-morning. So the clock says, anyway. My body’s been jet-lagged then briskly de-lagged twice in the last forty-eight hours. My circadian rhythm is thumping pretty far off the beat.
Number 38 is much blingier than the semi-abandoned 17.
Right now we’re in a tiled room decorated to look like the Alhambra.
Jonny says the house belongs to a famously thick mobile phone entrepreneur who just happened to be in the right place (Britain) at the right time (the late 1980s), and who is definitely in the Caribbean now, based on his social media feeds, perhaps on Nevis.
According to Jonny, it’s genuinely possible he’s forgotten about this place.
‘Amazing,’ says Jonny, fiddling with the metal strip on the floppy disk. ‘Genuine nineties shit.’
‘That’s great, Jonny. Any progress?’
Ten minutes ago, a young man from the internet turned up on an electric Chopper bike, dropped off a disk drive and took ￡50 away with him.
‘Give me a minute.’
‘What happened to you two, though?’ says Em.
‘Jonny says it was the man from when you went to Davy’s flat,’ Elle replies. ‘You’re right. He does look like a bowling ball, from the cameras. Pretty good-looking guy, although I’m sure he’s a hard man to love.’
‘He was actually there? At number seventeen?’
‘Oh, yes. He looked unhappy too.’
‘How did you get away?’
‘We were out. I was getting a haircut and Jonny was picking up Davy’s laptop from Nikola T.’
‘Who?’
‘Some computer specialist. Claimed he could get it open in half an hour.’
‘And did he? Jonny?’
Jonny is fiddling with the disk drive. ‘Nikola’s a bullshitter. Took him much longer than that. Do you want to hear about the laptop or this disk?’
‘The disk. Sorry. Keep going.’
‘But what about Bowling Ball, Elle? What did he do then?’
‘He went through everything he found. But thankfully Jonny had taken his phones and his computer when he went out, so there wasn’t much for him to go through. So he just smashed the place up a bit. Real temper on him.’
‘And left?’
‘Not straight away. Jonny’s cameras tripped on his phone, so he rang me at the hairdresser’s and said we had to find somewhere new to stay.’
‘Oh, God. So Bowling Ball might still be in number seventeen now.’
‘He isn’t,’ said Jonny. ‘He missed one of my gatepost cameras. He left an hour ago.’ We didn’t avoid him by much. I feel sick at the thought. Jonny keeps talking: ‘And now … we have the information on this disk. Open Sesame.’
The four of us gather round to see exactly what has been worth all this fuss.
It’s a table. The columns are simply labelled: property, date of purchase, purchase price, name of cover company, name listed on register, name of actual beneficial owner. Some names in that final column stick out. About half are British-sounding, half from everywhere else.
‘I know that name. He’s famous, I think.’
‘And her. She’s minor royalty.’
‘He had a Christmas Number One, I seem to remember.’
It’s a treasure map. All the people who laundered their money through Davy, and Wolfgang, and Marshall Rivers, over the years.
I feel so relieved that it’s real. There are dozens, hundreds of lines here, each one another thread of proof about what was really going on before Davy died and how he made his money.
The names are extraordinary. Captains of industry, philanthropists, celebrities …
every single variety of eminence is on there.
There’s even a bishop. All of them pouring dirty money into a magical funnel, and at the other end of it, cranking the handle to transform it into lovely clean houses in smart bits of town, is Davy. Was Davy.
‘Can you make copies, Jonny?’ Em asks.
‘On it already. But, I’m sorry, does this help us at all?’
There’s an awkward pause. I speak up. ‘Why wouldn’t it? Isn’t it everything we’ve been looking for?’
‘Well, it just proves beyond doubt that Davy was involved in money-laundering. But it certainly doesn’t show we didn’t kill him.
It’s not like it tells us which client he angered, or betrayed, or anything like that.
In fact, us having this is quite good circumstantial evidence that we did kill him so we could get hold of his money. ’
‘But we didn’t,’ says Elle.
‘I know, but the police might be a bit cynical about that.’
‘Ugh,’ says Em, speaking for all of us.
‘Maybe it was one of these people who killed him,’ says Jonny.
‘But we don’t know who. We also don’t know whether Rob Wallace found out about the laundering and had Davy killed to shut it down.
We haven’t nailed it. And if we go to the police with this list, they’ll take it off us, thank us, and then nick us. ’
There’s a long silence as the other three of us absorb the implications of this.
‘Actually, while we’re on bad news, what about Davy’s fees for all this work?’ says Em. ‘There’s no sign of those anywhere.’
‘Ah,’ says Jonny. ‘There, we have a bit of good news.’