‘Bingo.’
‘So in order to avoid naming them on the register, he used Wolfgang as his cardboard cut-out, and Wolfy pretended to be the ultimate beneficial owner of all these firms in exchange for some cash.’
‘Yes.’
‘Andthatis why nobody talked to us when we went door to door, Em! They were all Davy’s buyers, the ones who bought through these shell firms! No wonder they didn’t want to say anything! And the two people who know the names of the clients are Davy Harcourt – deceased – and this guy whose name we have here.’
‘Yeah,’ says Jonny, looking at the name Elle wrote on a Post-it note as soon as Wolfgang said it. ‘Marshall Rivers.’
Wolfgang told us before signing off that his principal contact had been a man named Marshall Rivers, and that Rivers was the one who actually set up the companies. He had only ever seen Davy and Rivers on the same screen once, during his first call with both men, but he had been in contact with both about different elements of the transactions. Rivers handled the paperwork, he said, and the payments. I guess Davy wanted to keep at least one bit of the process free of his fingerprints.
As for why Wolfgang was telling us this … He seemed quite glad of the opportunity to avenge himself on theemployer who’d gone AWOL on their little arrangement and never told him why. There’s a chance he was lying to us, I know, but Jonny had done some searching in real time and found a bit of evidence that seemed to corroborate the story. It’s also possible Wolfy was so baked his disclosure filters had melted.
‘Hey,’ Jonny says now. ‘Bad news.’
A bit of the room’s fizzy mood ebbs away through invisible cracks. Elle pauses the Harry Styles song she’s been trying to persuade us to get into.
‘What bad news?’
‘This Marshall Rivers, the one who organises everything. He’s in Nevis.’
‘Nevis like Ben Nevis?’
‘Nevis like small, underpopulated Caribbean island Nevis.’
‘Oh.’
‘Yeah. I’ve been doing a bit of digging’ –doing something useful while Al’s been banging on about how he finally gets it, I sense – ‘and Nevis is a great place for an offshore structure.’
‘How so?’
‘It’s basically impenetrable. The data’s probably kept in a discreet server in the capital and not online. There’s no way of legally getting it, and the only way would be to physically break in.’
‘Can’t you just …’ I wiggle my fingers.
‘Not if it’s not online. You can basically memory-hole your entire fortune there for a few payments to the right people. All perfectly legal.’
‘There’ll be a government computer you can access, right?’
‘Nevis authorities don’t have access to bank information. You’d need a court order, which I would guess we’re not likely to get.’
‘Shit.’
‘Yeah. They have a lot of regulations designed to make the world feel comfortable parking anonymous money there.’
I know what Em is going to say next even before she opens her mouth.
‘OK,’ says Em. ‘So we go to Nevis.’
‘Don’t be stupid,’ I say. ‘We’re wanted for questioning about a murder. I think they have rules about leaving the country.’
‘They’ve only got your name,’ says Em. ‘And Jonny’s prints. Nobody’s interested in me yet. They’d be going off a physical description, and I doubt they’d manage that.’
‘So who’s going?’ I ask. ‘You and Elle?’
‘Oh, not me,’ says Elle. ‘Not with my allergies.’
‘You can come with me, Al. We’re more experienced at getting our way. We might need some of your breaking-in skills.’
