Due Diligence

by Grant Sutherland

  Idly, I open and close the drawers: papers, clips, pens and pencils, the usual desk flotsam. Daniel wasn’t the most tidy person in the world but Ryan’s search has added an extra layer of disorder: loose papers are spilling from their folders and nothing is neatly stacked. The last drawer closed, I lean back and look around. This is it. The sole physical remains of one man’s entire working life: a few framed documents, mementoes of deals long forgotten, hang alone one wall; a cluster of mini national flags sprouts like flowers from a square of rubber foam on the shelf; and on the desk, a photograph of Celia and his two boys. A filing cabinet, a desk and a bin. This, I know, is not the life Daniel would have chosen.

  When we were boys he wanted to fly. At Eton his room was plastered with pictures of jets. But after taking his maths degree up at Cambridge, when he tried out for the Air Force, it turned out his eyesight wasn’t good enough. It was the great disappointment of his life. Then came the two years in my father’s old regiment, a false start, before he joined Carltons. He was a successful banker, and he enjoyed his success, but what could banking ever be to someone who’d once dreamed of jets? After joining us at Carltons, I never heard him mention flying again. Looking around his office now, I think I can feel something of what he still must have felt here: life passing unfulfilled, work a poor second best to a dream. Not an unusual story I suppose, but now, Daniel’s life over, it seems so indescribably sad.

  Concealed beneath the desktop there’s a hidden catch, I reach back there and flick it. A slim hidden drawer slides quietly out. I’d forgotten about this drawer, when Ryan came to do the search I never mentioned it to him. It’s where Daniel kept his personal documents, he showed it to me years ago when he made me an executor of his will. Inside the drawer now, I find half a dozen pages. The first four detail a plan he had for cutting back the number of our dealers; the plan would be wildly unpopular out in the Dealing Room, he’s right to have kept it well hidden. The fifth page is in his own handwriting, jottings of numbers beneath a legal firm’s letterhead. 500 K, five hundred thousand. And 1,000 C. Hundreds? He seems to have been shifting some assets around in his will. Curiosity piqued, I put this aside. The last page is different — yellow paper for some reason — and the first two words stare straight up at me. Odin Investments. My throat contracts. My heart thumps in my chest. Odin. And Ryan was in here., searching. My mouth goes dry.

  When Daniel mentioned the Odin deal to me last month, I warned him to leave it to me. But the conversation, like all my conversations with Daniel since November, was brief. Reading the single page now, I wonder just how much he knew. Does it matter? He certainly didn’t know what I told my father he knew, nor was he about to go public with the little knowledge that he had. I lied to my father. Daniel had somehow stumbled on the Odin deal, and that gave me the germ of an idea. Revenge. I meant to bring the weight of Whitehall and Westminster crashing down on Daniel’s head. But even in my most poisonous dreams I never wanted it like this. I am sure that I didn’t.

  The first four pages I return to the drawer. But I keep the one on Odin, and the other concerning Daniel’s personal affairs. Then I push the drawer in until the catch clicks into place. Cocking my ear, I listen for a sound outside the door. There is none, and I’m satisfied at first, then appalled.

  How is it, I wonder, that I came to this? How is it that I came to be a thief?

  9

  * * *

  Karen Haldane walks between the metal shelves of our back-office filing room, touching boxes. ‘August, August, August . . . September. You want December, yeah?’

  Yes, I tell her, I want the forex paperwork for December.

  At the end of the narrow alley, she turns and comes back along the other side. The shelves rise floor to ceiling, the cardboard boxes filling every inch of shelf- space. Here we keep the paperwork generated by Funds Management and Treasury: dealing-slips, fax confirmations, printouts from the Reuters trading system, queries on payment details, the lot. The quantity produced on a daily basis is staggering, all of it, for a time, stored here as a manual back-up for our computer files. Standing by these groaning shelves, it’s extremely hard to maintain faith in the pundits’ promises of the paperless office.

  Karen indicates one section with a wave of the hand. ‘December,’ she says. The boxes are colour-coded: red for equities, blue for money market, green for foreign exchange. As I pull down the first green box, she asks me with whom we have the problem.

  ‘Shobai,’ I tell her, flipping open the box. And immediately I’m lost again. The files inside are colour-coded too.'

  She crouches beside me. ‘Details?’

  I hadn’t intended to tell her, but I could waste hours tracking the deals through all these boxes and files. So I give her the details of the two deals, the dates and amounts. She glances into the box and shakes her head. Then she stands and points to a green box up on the highest shelf. Reaching, I take the box down.

  ‘Why didn’t Shobai back-office call me?’ she asks.

  My answer is to shrug: who knows?

  Karen opens the box and runs a hand over the spines of the files, muttering. ‘Christ,’ she says.

  ‘Something wrong?’

  She pulls out some files, shuffling them. ‘Not in the right order. I’ll speak to Sandra later.’ Sandra, the back-office girl responsible for manual filing. Right now she has my sympathy. Karen pulls three files from the box. ‘The last week in December,’ she announces. ‘Spot deals in the Franc.’

  She hands me one file, props the second against the box, and keeps the third for herself. She assumes she’s staying, and offhand I can’t think of a good reason to dismiss her. So, back braced against the lower shelves, I open my file. Karen kneels by the box. For several minutes there is nothing but the sound of pages turning.

  Then Karen asks, ‘What did the DTI want?’

  I raise my eyes. She's still busily searching her file, but then she looks up.

  ‘It isn’t a big secret, Raef. The whole office knew within ten minutes of them walking through the door.’

  Great. How long will it be before the whole City gets to hear? I bite the inside of my lip, and then say, ‘They had a few questions about the early Parnells trade.’

  ‘Johnstone’s.’

  When I nod, she suddenly loses interest in her file.

  ‘Didn’t they want to see me?’

  ‘Preliminary enquiries, Karen. I told them our compliance officer's satisfied there’s nothing untoward. Okay?’

  She gives me a searching look. ‘Well what if your compliance officer is having second thoughts,’ she says.

  ‘You said all the personal accounts were clean.’

  ‘They are. I was thinking more generally.’

  ‘For instance?’

  ‘Mannetti,’ she says. ‘He’s an experienced fund manager. He knew damn well Parnells were on the Red List.’

  ‘He’s been away.’

  ‘Yeah, he has. He’s conveniently on holiday, completely out of touch, when it happens.’

  ‘Maybe that’s how it was.’

  ‘Yeah,’ she says. ‘Maybe.’

  Like Hugh Morgan, she's suspicious of every action and motive. It makes her good at her work, but the trait that can grow very wearying. Besides, I know that her nose was put out of joint when Mannetti was promoted onto the Audit Committee only months after he joined us: she had to wait two years for the same mark of trust.

  ‘Anyway, how come the DTI came in on it so quick?’

  Again I shrug. I tell her that if she wants to look more closely at the Johnstone deal, to go ahead. ‘But don’t spend too long over it.’

  A minute later I come to the end of the file. Nothing. I pick up the third file and start turning over the faxes, dealing-slips and payment details, the nuts and bolts of trade. The truth is I am grasping at straws. Half an hour ago Penfield called from the Bank to discover what progress I’d made; or rather, we had made, he still believes I have the benefit of Hugh’s professional ass
istance. Penfield wanted to know if we still thought we could get to the bottom of it by Friday. I told him we were certain we could, as big a lie as I’ve told for some time. He reminded me of the consequences of failure then he wished me good luck and rang off. But when he hears about the visit the DTI has paid us - and he will, quite soon - I’ll get another call from him. His tone then won’t be nearly so sanguine. In preparation, I’ve come up here to gather evidence of the progress we are supposedly making.

  My eye stops on the name in my file: Shobai. The next moment Karen hands me the details of a second Shobai deal that she’s found. We look them over: one trade for five million US dollars, the other for six, nothing exceptional, the Dealing Room does hundreds just like them each week. Karen wanders around to the next aisle of shelves. It sounds like she’s pulling down more boxes.

  I open the third file and find the other Shobai deal almost immediately. ‘Don’t worry,’ I call. ‘I’ve got it.’

  Laying all the paperwork side by side, I compare the details. The signature on each dealing-slip is different: no two deals done by the same trader. So much for my one brilliant idea.

  Karen comes back and looks over my shoulder. I ask her if she recognizes the signatures.

  ‘Ahha. And they’ve both got personal accounts. Do you want me to check them again?’

  I tell her that it can’t do any harm.

  Leaning over my shoulder, she points to another signature. It’s on so many pages in the file that I had stopped seeing it. Each one is countersigned by Henry Wardell.

  ‘I’ll check all three,’ she says.

  Henry. Now we really are grasping at straws. I drop the files back into the green box then reshelve it.

  ‘Do I get to know what this is about? Has Shobai made a complaint? I can call them.’

  I raise a finger. ‘Don’t. As far as anyone else is concerned, you’ve never heard of these Shobai deals. Check those personal accounts, let me know what you find, and that’s it. All right?’

  ‘Is this connected with Johnstone?’ She sees my surprise. ‘I mean,’ she says, ‘how often do we get any real trouble? Once a quarter maybe? And now the DTI come calling, and you’re up here, and both on the same day. Come on, Raef. I’m meant to be the compliance officer.’

  That she is. And as our chief compliance officer her access to all parts of the bank is second only to Sir John’s and mine. On Hugh Morgan's whiteboard, her name was up near the top of the list.

  ‘If you want to help, just check those personal accounts. No fanfare.’

  I lift the second box back into place, then I go around into the next aisle, intending to help her lift the boxes she's take down. She tells me to leave them, that she hasn't finished.

  I tap the Shobai papers in my pocket. ‘We’re all done.’

  ‘This isn’t Shobai.’

  And now I notice the labelling on the shelves beside me: not 'Treasury’, as in the other aisle, but ‘Fund Management’. Karen crouches and reaches into the first box.

  ‘I wanted to make a start before the DTI get serious. By the way, Stephen made a scene up here this morning. It wasn’t appreciated.’ She lifts her eyes. ‘Could you speak to him?’

  ‘Vance?’

  She nods. I ask her what kind of a scene.

  ‘Can you just tell him not to come up here,’ she says tightly. ‘He can send one of the secretaries.’

  Vance, I see, has really upset her. So I tell her that I'll have a word with him, but that I won’t be denying him access to this floor. She doesn't protest, she is apparently resigned to this decision already.

  Resting a hand on one shelf, I look along the row of boxes. It reminds me of the Bodleian and the hours I spent researching my thesis on Price Theory. I can’t even remember the title of it now, and the only thing I know about Price Theory I picked up during my stint in the Dealing Room.

  ‘Who comes in here?’

  ‘Sandra. Me occasionally, but mostly Sandra, she does the filing. Maybe one of the other girls if there’s a query.’

  ‘Anybody from downstairs?’

  ‘No reason to. Besides they don’t have a key.’

  ‘Who does?’

  ‘Just Sandra and me.’

  When I worked with Hugh on the Petrie case he never stopped asking questions. I’m trying to think like him now, to ask the questions he would ask, but it’s harder work than I imagined.

  ‘Karen, doesn’t anyone from downstairs ever come up here?’

  She pushes back her fringe and leaves her hand resting there. ‘Well, back when we were working on the new systems we used to come in here a bit.’ The significance of this escapes me at first. ‘We ran quite a few dummy deals, we had to see them through to the end.’ She gestures to the shelves. ‘But you mean more recently, yeah?’

  ‘Doesn’t have to be. You and who else? Someone from downstairs?’

  She looks at me as if I’m being particularly obtuse. ‘Yeah, someone,’ she says. ‘Daniel.’

  All roads lead to Rome. I frown. She bends and rummages in the box again.

  Was Daniel defrauding the bank? Though Hugh never said it to me, I’m sure that he suspects it: Daniel’s death, and the subsequent delivery of that note to Penfield, would arouse anyone’s suspicions. But knowing what I do, it seems to me no more than a distinctly odd coincidence.

  And I admit there’s a part of me that wants to believe Daniel was ripping off Carltons. There’s a part of me that cries out against him as a treacherous bastard, capable of any outrage; but all the while I know it just isn’t true. He had a side to him I chose not to see, I’m aware of that. The infidelity and the womanizing, I chose not to look at it straight: his business, not mine. But the other side of Daniel, his work as Treasurer, was beyond reproach. He was proud of what he’d achieved, and proud of his reputation for straight dealing: in fact most of his disputes with Vance arose from his failure to recognize that the direct and open approach wasn’t always the best policy out in Corporate Finance. At work, Daniel was honest; something I omitted to tell both Hugh and Inspector Ryan. But now, thinking back over the past few months, it occurs to me that Daniel tried several times to raise the subject of security with me. It was on the last of these occasions that he mentioned Odin.

  ‘Karen, when was the last time Daniel was in here?’

  ‘Months ago. I don’t know. September?’ Still kneeling, she studies the files that now lie open on the floor all around her. ‘That was the last dummy run through the new system.’

  ‘Did he ever ask for your key?’

  ‘No.’ She looks up. ‘Do you want me to recheck his personal account too?’

  I take a moment with that; then I nod.

  10

  * * *

  Ryan steps from Vance’s office into the corridor just ahead of me. He's so wrapped up in himself that he doesn’t notice that he isn’t alone.

  ‘Inspector?’

  He lifts his head, and without prelude says, ‘I’ve seen your wife. I’ll catch up with you later.’ He disappears away toward the lifts.

  Vance’s door is still ajar, and I slide my knuckles over it and enter to find him seated at his desk, staring into space.

  ‘I just saw Ryan,’ I say.

  Coming back to himself, Vance shoots me a warning look. Apparently, more bruises have been raised at this latest encounter. From what I can gather, Ryan hasn’t been satisfied with the answers he’s been getting from Stephen. That's why Ryan keeps going away then coming back for another round of questions.

  After giving Ryan my alibi for Wednesday night — I slept over at my father’s — I seem to have slipped down the list of suspects. But Stephen has no alibi: he was working late here at the office alone. The office is fifteen minutes’ stroll from St Paul’s Walk. And Vance and Daniel, as the whole bank knows, did not get along.

  As I pull up a chair, Vance gives me the new Parnells numbers from the top of his head; but I have the impression his mind’s elsewhere. While he talks, I browse throug
h the faxes on his desk. There’s one from McKinnon, he has accepted the Meyers’ final offer. Vance picks up another loose page from his desk and hands it across.

  It’s a memo from Henry Wardell about the bond issue we placed for CTL last week. Everyone thought we'd have no trouble getting the issue away in the market, but instead we’ve been left with half the underwritten amount still on our books. Going by Henry’s figures, our probable trading loss will be bigger than our fee. Bad news.

  ‘The last I heard, we were going to be beating the bids off with a stick.’

  ‘So Daniel said.’ Vance points to Henry’s gloomy assessment. ‘Henry appears to have other ideas.’

  One more headache to add to the catalogue, but by no means the worst of them. I put the memo aside and ask Vance if he’s heard from the Pamells board.

  ‘Not directly.’

  He digs among the faxes then hands me the longest, from Leicester and Partners. They send us one of these each evening: a copy of everything they’ve managed to get into the papers during the day, and a list of puffs in the electronic media. Vance has circled the relevant section in red. The late edition of today’s Evening Standard carries a quote from Richard Parnell in response to the Meyers’ final offer: Parnell says that he presumes the bid of 180 is a joke.

  ‘More of the same,’ Vance comments. ‘Richard Parnell’s going to fight it. Price isn’t the issue with him, he wants the family silver kept intact.’