‘Jonny says it was the man from when you went to Davy’sflat,’ 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.
