None of the cabinets was locked. Everything inside looked like client files, dated, cross-referenced, open and aboveboard, a model of what a solicitor’s files should look like. I flicked through the drawer given over to Vernet. There was a lot, but he was their solicitor. There should be a lot. I decided to snoop around first. If I didn’t find anything else, I’d go back and photocopy what was there. I sighed at the thought. Nothing in Wright’s desk drawers. Nothing on his shelves except law books, and behind one a bottle of whiskey. So he drank. A quick look at his complexion would have told me the same thing without a breaking-and-entering charge.
I went back into the outer office. More files, all innocent looking. I opened a coat cupboard. Big surprise. Coats. There was a briefcase at the bottom that I tried. Locked. I thought for a moment and went and got the keys Helena had given me. All were too big. I put my head around Wright’s door. “Mother, do you have a briefcase key on your ring?”
She didn’t look up. “In my bag,” she said, in the same tone of voice she used to use when I was at school and couldn’t find a clean shirt.
I got her bag and found the keys. At first I thought it wasn’t going to work, but I jiggled the lock while I turned it gently, and it gave with a snap. Bingo. In the front flap was an address book, with numbers and initials. In the case itself were three files, all unlabeled. “I’m going to photocopy this,” I said.
“Mmm,” replied Helena. She had lines of code scrolling across the screen, and was intent.
I photocopied the pages, and returned them carefully to the files in the same order. Then I refilled the paper tray of the photocopier from a stash I found behind the machine, so no one would think anything was different from the way it was left on Friday. I was quite proud of thinking of that, which was worrying. Becoming a good burglar hadn’t been part of my life plan.
Helena was still engrossed, so I looked around the outer office, idly snooping. She was right, Kenneth Wright appeared to be doing extremely well for himself. All the chairs were leather, upholstered to within an inch of their lives; the two desks were solid mahogany. They were all reproduction, but reproduction didn’t mean cheap. New got up to look like old costs just as much as old. I sat in the secretary’s typing chair, swinging myself back and forth, opening and shutting her desk drawers. The top one held office supplies. In the next were personal bits and pieces—stray items of makeup, ibuprofen, contact lens fluid—and at the bottom old steno pads, and an engagement diary for 2007, discarded and buried under a spare pair of tights that had come unrolled and were wrapped in close embrace with a chocolate bar that had turned white with age. I closed the drawer. The remaining drawers were what you would expect. Everything labeled, everything in apple-pie order.
Helena pulled a memory stick out of the computer and put it in her bag. She switched off the power and said, “That’s everything. Let’s go.”
We were halfway down the hall when I said, “Hang on. Wait.” I ran back to Wright’s office and rebroke and reentered. I opened Tiffanie Harris’s bottom desk drawer and grabbed the diary. Plenty of people keep old diaries, but either you keep them all, or you keep only last year’s. Why keep one five-year-old diary? I shoved it in my bag, relocked, pushed the gloves and keys on top of the diary, and was standing on Philip Mount’s doormat, all in less than a minute. “Tell you later,” I said. I was out of breath, not with rushing but with excitement, even if I wasn’t sure what I was excited about.
An hour later, as Helena and I idly played “Great books you’ve never read,” Philip Mount arrived, looking much worse for the wear after his late night. He was a tall and pale, still boyish-looking, with excessive care paid to his floppy mouse-brown hair. He wore studiedly “dress-down” weekend clothes, but the ironed crease down the front of his corduroys indicated his soul wasn’t really into casual. Twenty minutes later we all left together, me with my booty, and with a new libel lawyer. I wasn’t quite sure how I was going to get that one past Selden’s.
* * *
We took the copied files back to Helena’s. She suggested that we didn’t want Jake arriving unexpectedly at my flat, and having to explain how we’d got hold of the files.
“I don’t think he’d arrive without ringing first,” I said. “It’s not like that.”
“That’s a shame. You could do a lot worse.” She thought about it. “You have done a lot worse.”
“Thanks, Mother. Your vote of confidence is always welcome.”
“It’s not a vote of confidence you need, it’s a long, hard look at your life. You’ve cocooned yourself in your little publishing enclave: you see the same half-dozen people endlessly, you never step outside into the real world. The worst is, you’re happy that way.”
She had blindsided me again. I hadn’t seen this coming. “What is this—Pick on Sam Week?”
Helena was unruffled. “You’re fine now, but how are you going to be in twenty years? I’m not, as you know, someone who thinks any man is better than no man, but you’ve just shut down the emotional side of your life, and it’s not healthy.”
“And you’re such an expert,” I retaliated feebly.
“Yes, I am. I’m an expert in living with an emotional life, and in living without one, and I know which is better.”
I turned to stare at her. We’d never discussed her break with my father, and we’d definitely never discussed her private life after the divorce. I wasn’t sure that I wanted to now. In fact, I was absolutely certain I didn’t. She sensed my withdrawal and put her hand briefly on mine. “Don’t worry. I’m not going to ‘share’—I haven’t taken to watching Oprah in secret. It’s just that you should think about where you’re going.
“Now.” Her voice returned to its usual briskness. “What I’d like to do is set up the computer, so that everything Wright does gets backed up. On the first run through of the files it would be useful to separate out everything mentioning Vernet; everything mentioning property transactions; and then anything that doesn’t indicate clearly what it is: files that have no client names, documents without subject lines or reference numbers. Will you do that?”
I nodded dumbly. I thought I could probably be trusted to shuffle papers. Everything else in my life was open to question.
Helena left me with the paperwork spread out at the kitchen table while she went to set up whatever illegal surveillance operations she had learned God knows where. I switched on the radio. The coffee was dripping slowly through on the hob and the smell filled the warm room. The rain beat against the windowpanes. If only I were reading the newspaper, instead of criminally acquired legal documents, it might even have been a pleasant way to spend a Sunday morning.
We sat at the table for the next six hours, slowly going through everything. Helena was the legal mind, but my editorial training was helpful, too. Papers that were not obviously linked I could see, by style, by approach, by the way they were worded, actually belonged together. Gradually we put things in order, and the story was easy to read. This was where the money laundering on all the UK property deals—deals that were processing up to £100 million a year—was coming from. Kenneth Wright was the source.
I got up and stretched. Helena looked as fresh as when we’d started. “The computer will be useful, but it’s really not necessary. I’m going to summarize all of this, and write a précis, and then we can hand it all over.”
“To whom?”
“To the police. NCIS, I imagine. But we’ll go through Jake. He might as well get the credit, and anyway, he can organize a warrant and the documents can be reacquired legally. What we have here is information, but it’s not evidence because it’s not admissible.”
“What about Conway?”
“I’d thought of that. I think you should ring him. I don’t want to trigger any warning bells around Wright—he can’t be allowed to slip through the net—but at the same time, it would be no bad thing for Conway to know that Cooper’s aren’t the only solicitors in the City.”
I squinted
at her in disbelief. “You robbed an office—”
“Burgled, dear. There was no removal of property. It wasn’t robbery.”
I shrugged irritably. “You burgled an office, then—you burgled an office to entice a new client?”
She looked genuinely shocked. “Of course not. I did it to help you; to see if we could find information that would lead to a murderer; because I don’t like Kenneth Wright; and—” her mouth narrowed—“and because if dishonest solicitors are allowed to operate, they weaken the rest of us and, pompous as it may sound, they destroy the fabric of society.” Then she gave a small, catlike smile. “If, in the course of acting on those reasons, I bring in an extremely important new client, well, I won’t turn him away.”
I wouldn’t have believed most people who made a speech like that, but I think any of Helena’s friends would. She is amusing, she is tough, but she is also a person who believes in things like “the fabric of society.” In a way, so do I, although I am less confident than she that it has not already been destroyed.
She went back to work and I made sandwiches. It was only five, but we’d skipped breakfast for burglary, and lunch had slid past without us noticing. Helena took a sandwich in her left hand, and went on making notes with her right, while I tried to be useful, tidying the documents back into their original order. Underneath them all was the diary. I flicked through it idly. Whatever foggy idea had made me go back to grab it had dissipated, ending up merely as a question: Why would anyone keep a single engagement book? It was odd, but was “odd” enough? On the spur of the moment I’d thought so. Now I wasn’t so sure. Still, given that I’d stolen it, ignoring it seemed even sillier than my initial excitement.
So as Helena continued to write without a pause, I flicked through the diary. It was a diary. It had appointments. Not exactly a hot news flash. Why had Wright kept it? I made lists of dates, lists of initials, lists of names. Then I swapped them about, like some kind of jigsaw puzzle. But it was a jigsaw where all the pieces were the same color. I pushed them about again. And the colors clarified. I said, “Do you still have a copy of the manuscript?”
Helena looked up out of a fog of concentration. “Manuscript?”
“Kit’s.”
“On the third shelf above my desk, in a blue folder.” She was already back at work, the words unreeling themselves under her pen.
I trotted up to her study and came back with the manuscript. I’d read it when Kit delivered it, but I hadn’t begun to edit it, and I had only an imperfect recall of the details he laid out. After ten minutes I reached for a pen, too, and Helena and I sat in the gathering gloom, both writing as if lives depended on it.
It was near midnight when I sat back, easing my cramped back. Helena kept writing. “Mother,” I said.
“Mmm. Just a minute.”
“Mother.”
She caught my tone and stopped writing. She looked at me and paid attention properly. “What? What is it?”
“Wright killed Alemán.”
She looked vaguely toward the files, small frown lines appearing between her brows.
“No, it’s here. I took Wright’s diary for 2007. It’s all here.” I pulled my notes toward me again. “Look.” I went through the diary, showing how the entries matched up with the files we had taken that showed the extent of the property deals, and, more importantly, with the manuscript. “It’s here. Wright has a series of appointments that are only indicated by a time. All the other appointments in the book are indicated either by name, or by initials. The ones that are indicated only by a time are always together in a bunch: two in one day, or three in two days, but never spread through a week. They are interspersed with other appointments, though, and those ones always have initials or abbreviations. The initials are sometimes straightforward, and I’ve matched up a few with the files.” I nodded toward the copies of Wright’s documents. “In the ones I can’t match are two that recur: ‘FStH’ and ‘Br.’ They only come when he has the appointments that are indicated by time.” Helena looked encouraging, so I went on. “The appointments link by date with the files. They are before each of the four big property deals that took place in Britain for Vernet that year.”
“I don’t understand, though,” she said. “What’s that got to do with murder? We know already from the files that he has been laundering money through the UK property.”
My mother was quick, and she wasn’t seeing it. I began to have doubts. “What do ‘FStH’ and ‘Br’ say to you?”
She considered. “‘FSTH.’ Nothing. ‘BR.’ Still nothing.”
“Not ‘FSTH,’ all run together. ‘FStH.’ And ‘Br.’” I spelled them out. Helena squinted at the book and gave a dubious murmur, so I prompted. “If ‘St’ is for ‘Saint,’ then how about Faubourg Saint-Honoré, where Vernet’s offices are?”
“That puts him in Paris. We’ll be able to check that, but surely it’s not unusual that one of Vernet’s British solicitors should go to Vernet’s office.”
“Not unusual, no, and he did that regularly. It’s always in the diary as ‘Vernet,’ followed by a name or initials. And the day before ‘Vernet’ appears there are always travel times marked in. Wright usually went by train, but there’s the occasional flight, too. That’s always marked before and after a ‘Vernet’ entry. When ‘FStH’ appears, there’s no indication that he’s in Paris.”
“Mmm,” she said, thinking. “But how do you get to Alemán’s murder from there? This still has money laundering written all over it.”
“If ‘Br’ is ‘Bristol’…”
“Where is this going, Sam? He can’t have been in Paris and in Bristol on the same day.”
“No, but he can have been in the Faubourg Saint-Honoré and at the Hotel Bristol—coincidentally, on the Faubourg Saint-Honoré—on the same day.”
She nodded, not convinced. “Then what?”
“That confirms that he’s in Paris. And it gives him meetings with people he’s not willing to indicate even by initials, in a city he’s not willing to indicate, although he does at other times.”
“And then?” She was not doubting now, but not willing to jump to a conclusion, either.
“The days that he’s there match up with either the commencement of the property deals for the most part, or with their failure, when Vernet pulls out suddenly and the money comes back from Wright’s clean solicitor’s account. There are no similar visits when the deal proceeds smoothly.” I was getting more sure as I laid out the connections. “This is the important part, though. There are another three ‘FStH’ trips that don’t link to any deals we’ve found in the files. The first comes the day before Alemán was killed. There’s a notation next to it: ‘1/3.’ The day after there’s another meeting indicated by time, and another ‘1/3.’ Then there’s one final one, four months later, also a time and ‘1/3.’”
“A street and flat number? A meeting from one to three o’clock? I can’t see why you’re linking this with Alemán.”
“Or one-third. A fraction. A payment that is made one-third on the day before Alemán died, one-third the day after, and one-third—”
She broke in. “How do you explain the last third, if that’s what it is? If you’re a contract killer, you don’t wait months to be paid.”
“You do if you’re going to get more if the inquest produces a verdict of accidental death. The ‘1/3’ is noted the day after the inquest. That’s not all. A week before Alemán’s death, there’s an A with a circle around it. The next day, there’s a meeting without initials.”
Helena sat, thinking. Then she looked back at her notes, and spoke slowly, piecing it together. “Wright was not working with Intinvest in any of their money-laundering scheme. That’s why Conway and Lambert-Lorraine are focusing on the false invoicing coming out of Eastern Europe. And that’s why the material Diego Alemán brought them doesn’t refer to the property scams. Intinvest is not involved in those. This is a separate operation, run by Kenneth Wright on his own, probably with so
meone inside Vernet.”
I picked up again. “Exactly. Then Alemán comes to see Wright, which is the circled A entry. Either he has found out, and threatens to expose Wright, or he has found out and wants to be cut in on the deals. The next day Wright is in Paris meeting his contact, and a week later Alemán is dead. The inquest verdict has nothing to do with Wright’s money laundering, but is simply a result of Vernet, entirely unknowingly, using their PR power to muffle any subsequent questions in order to protect their reputation. However, Wright and his contact have promised a bonus to their hitman if no charges are laid, and they pay it after the inquest.” I knew I was on the right track now. “The clincher is the thing we’ve left out all along: the missing manuscript. From the beginning we knew that stealing it from the courier was not an attempt to destroy the work, otherwise Kit would have vanished earlier, or the manuscript would have been taken before it got to his typist. It was an attempt to see the book.”
“And why does that point to Wright?”
It wasn’t often I moved faster than Helena. “You told me, right at the beginning.”
“I did?”
“What happens to a solicitor whose name is brought to NCIS’s attention, money laundering is proved, or even just strongly indicated, and the solicitor is found not to have reported it?”
“Of course.” Helena stood up. “If Wright was named in the manuscript, even if his tracks were covered substantially better than he has in fact managed to cover them—” she gave a contemptuous look at the papers littering the kitchen table—“even then, he would be reported to the Law Society, and probably struck off. It’s more likely that they’d keep after him and he would, eventually, end up in jail.”
“That’s got to be the answer. The manuscript theft makes no sense otherwise. After the publication of Kit’s book, Intinvest, or any money laundering run by professionals, would simply close up their operation at Vernet, and move on somewhere else. From what I heard at Conway’s meeting, what Intinvest was doing was not unusual in method—it’s not as if they wanted to keep the way they were washing the money secret. It didn’t matter to them. It was business, and if this business folded, they’d begin operations somewhere else. And as far as consequences go, even if arrests are made, with an operation running out of Eastern Europe and Italy, they’ll game the judicial system until everyone concerned grows old and dies in their beds. No one of any importance would ever go to jail. So why kill someone?”
A Murder of Magpies Page 20
