‘You could say that,’ says Em. ‘He’s dead.’
‘Oh.’ He takes a sip of Sleepytime. ‘Naturally?’
‘No. Someone shot him.’
Wolfgang nods, unsurprised. ‘Do I need to be worried about this?’
‘We don’t know. Has anything unusual happened to you recently?’
‘I broke up – you say this phrase, broke up? – with my fiancée, due to a disagreement over my personal habits.’
‘I meant in relation to your work.’
‘Oh. No, that’s all normal.’ He really is very relaxed. I’m starting to think maybe Wolfy’s mug contains something a bit stronger than herbal tea.
‘Sorry,’ I say, ‘can I just check what your work is exactly? The companies …’
‘Excuse me for asking, but you are … authorities?’
‘No.’
‘All right then.’ He’s quite trusting – then again, looking at us, we hardly look like professionals. He takes another sip. ‘So, firstly, I haven’t done any of this for three years. Mr David – he did not fire me, but he did not send me furtherwork, you understand? He, uh, ghosted me?’ It will never cease to amaze me how good the average German is at idiomatic English. ‘It caused me a little financial trouble back then, due to some commitments I had made. When I asked for the outstanding money, he sent it, but with no words, no thanks for years of work. So I was disappointed in him, which is why I do not mind telling you all this now.’
‘OK.’
‘Can you tell us how it worked, Wolfgang?’ Em smiles at him, encouraging, although Wolfy doesn’t need much uncorking.
‘It was simple. Mr David sent me a document, I sign it, he pays me a thousand euros. We did this maybe … two hundred times?’
‘He paid you two hundred thousand euros just for that?’
‘Well. There is work. I have to change the names a bit, maybe the address a bit, maybe the signature a bit. But yes.’ He shrugs. ‘Other people earn more for doing less. But not many, I suppose.’
‘So it’s a trick?’
‘I believed what Mr David was telling me, which is that he wanted to protect his clients because there were security risks for them. It was not safe for them to keep these companies in their own names and they wanted to stay safe.’
‘And,’ Em asks, barely suppressing her excitement, ‘do you have the list of real names? The people who actually owned all these companies?’
Wolfgang frowns. ‘No. Of course not. That would not be the point.’
All four of us sigh. Em swears under her breath. Wolfgang stares off the screen, rather fuzzily, and seems lost in reflection. One of those awful Zoom pauses stretches out for a while, in which everyone takes a second to reflect that this is how they’re spending their one wild and precious life.
Wolfgang pipes up again. ‘No, I do not know the names of the owners.’ He pauses. ‘But I know the name of the man who does.’
28
Five minutes later, we’re off the Zoom, and with Jonny’s aid we’ve ordered the biggest pizza available on the dark web. He’s even flexed one of his rules and is allowing himself full Coke instead of Diet. We’re feeling festive.
‘OK, so let me repeat it back so I understand it,’ I say. ‘Davy was laundering money for various people around the world, we don’t know who.’
‘Yes,’ says Jonny.
‘He secured the properties by speaking to motivated sellers, and gave them an extra motivation by slashing his commission if they did it off the books of Harcourt and Wallace. Then his solicitor from the firm did that end of the transaction under the table.’
‘Right.’
‘But he needed his clients – the buyers, the potentially money-laundering ones – to buy the places via complicated companies owned overseas.’
