Has access to shared inbox with him
Shares Dubai bank account access
She’s written a second list beneath this one:
MORE QUESTIONS WE HAVEN’T WORKED OUT YET:
Where is ‘outbuilding’ full of £? Is that Dubai account?
What is deal with crap new properties?
Who killed Davy???
When can we stop doing this?
‘Yeah, good shout, Elle. OK, so Davy had clearly got out of his original money-laundering game,’ Em says.
‘What if Marshall Rivers and that German guy, Wolfgang, killed him? They teamed up to do it,’ I say.
‘Motive?’
‘They’d been cut out of his original scam. They wanted revenge.’
Em frowns. ‘Three years later, from several thousand miles away, with no prospect of getting at the money? I doubt it. It’s something to do with these new properties of his.’
We look at the map of the UK Jonny has drawn up on his screen. It shows all the properties on Davy’s second, more recent list. As you hover over each pin on the map, it brings up the Google Street View for that place. They include graffitied pillboxes; bedraggled terraces; flea-bitten apartments above rat-infested shops in no-horse towns. Places you wouldn’t want to live in; frankly, places you wouldn’t want to walk past.
‘They’re all mega-scuzzy,’ says Jonny. ‘Not one of them sold for more than £250,000. And those are the ones in London. The ones outside it, some of them were under a hundred grand. They’re some of the cheapest, nastiest places on the entire market.’
‘Why would you launder money through cheap properties?’ asks Elle. ‘If you wanted to do that, you’d just buy a block of flats, wouldn’t you? So all the rents ended up as clean money too?’
‘Elle, you have a brilliant criminal mind,’ I say, and she blushes. ‘And yes, you would. So maybe he wasn’t laundering at all. Jonny, is there anything else on his computer?’
‘Nothing. I’ve crawled all over it. There are no clues. No signs of who the beneficial owners are. No company names,even, for these places. Just the addresses. It’s like not even Davy knew what was going on.’
‘Wouldn’t he have had an offshorer for this part of the operation too, another Mr Rivers?’
Jonny shrugs. ‘Maybe. But there are no contacts, nothing in the inbox, no incriminating messages, no documents. It’s like it’s all been scrubbed from the other side.’ That gives me a little shiver. If even Davy hadn’t written it down, how the hell are we going to find out?
‘It feels like when we know what the trick was here, we’ll find out everything else.’
‘Maybe.’ He looks at the screen, and his eyes widen. ‘Guys.’
‘What?’
‘Did one of you open this up?’
We all confirm we haven’t touched Davy’s computer.
‘Then … OK. We’ve made contact.’
‘With who?’
‘With whoever Davy shared his inbox with.’
We look over his shoulder, at the draft that originally just saidhello, and to which Jonny added a secondHello.The page now looks like this:
hello
