‘Right as always, Elizabeth,’ says Joanna, which Elizabeth knows is designed purely to wind up her dear mother. ‘We know a couple of things. Heather Garbutt’s bank records were made available to the court, and, as far as we can tell, she didn’t see a penny of the ten million. There are no unusual outgoings, no big purchases. She stays in the same house, she drives the same car, her mortgage remains the same. If Heather Garbutt was the one laundering all this money, she hasn’t spent any of it.’
‘And what else?’ asks Elizabeth. She is distracted by her phone.
I have sent the photographs to Viktor Illyich. The clock is ticking. Two weeks. You kill Viktor, or I kill Joyce. Tick tock. Tick tock.
One thing at a time please, thinks Elizabeth. I’m solving a murder here.
Cornelius steps up again. ‘All in all it’s a pretty slick operation. The lawyers couldn’t untangle it in court, and I couldn’t untangle it. But the further back you go, the less sophisticated it becomes. That’s usually the way. The longer a scam goes on, the better the scammers get at hiding the money. So the earlier in the scam you look, the more chance there is of spotting a mistake.’
‘What sort of mistake?’ asks Ibrahim.
‘The most common one is this,’ says Cornelius. ‘Obviously you have to invent names for all these imaginary companies. The rookie error is to choose a name that has some significance for you, however tangential. Now, the first few payments, and this is in the early days of the scam, were paid to a series of secret accounts in Jersey, namely Trident Capital, Trident Investments and Trident Infrastructure International.’
‘We did a little more digging,’ says Joanna. ‘And we found another company registered in Jersey, called Trident Construction.’
‘And that company,’ says Cornelius, ‘is completely legitimate. Information publicly available.’
‘Trident Construction had only one director,’ says Joanna. ‘Can you guess who?’
‘Heather Garbutt!’ says Joyce, rising from her chair.
‘No, Mum,’ says Joanna, and Joyce deflates.
‘Jack Mason,’ says Ibrahim.
‘Jack Mason,’ confirms Joanna.
‘So money goes out of Heather Garbutt’s account, straight into an account run by her boss,’ says Ron.
‘Probably run by her boss,’ says Joanna.
‘And then disappears for good,’ says Cornelius. ‘Also worth noting too that when Heather Garbutt’s house is sold, it’s one of Jack Mason’s companies that buys it.’
‘Jack Mason buys Heather Garbutt’s house?’ says Elizabeth.
‘There are two further slip-ups,’ says Cornelius. ‘Very early on. A couple of payments that both go to named beneficiaries. Both seem to be fake identities, but, again, if they’ve been careless, those fake identities might give us a clue to somebody involved in the scam. One for forty thousand pounds is paid to a “Carron Whitehead”， and one for five thousand is paid to a “Robert Brown Msc”。 The first two payments that ever left the account. But, as the scam gets bigger, everything just gets locked down tight, and there are no more named beneficiaries. Heather Garbutt or Jack Mason must have worked out they needed to start hiding the money better.’
‘Carron Whitehead and Robert Brown,’ muses Elizabeth. She sees that Ibrahim is already writing down the two names in his notebook.
‘What a splendid job you’ve done, Cornelius,’ says Joyce.
‘And me, Mum,’ says Joanna. ‘I helped too. I’m not fifteen.’
‘Well, I already know you’re wonderful,’ says Joyce.