The Real World- the Point of Death

by Laurence Todd

  I took another beer from the fridge and, after removing the cap, toasted Mendoccini as thoughts of some of the laughs, the good times and the scrapes we’d got into as teenagers flooded my brain. I remembered a school party we’d been at when we were seventeen. A very attractive girl, a girl in my year thirteen class at school I’d had my eyes on for a while, had appeared interested in me. We’d talked for a while and, just as she leaned in close and I was thinking, Wow, when did my luck ever get this good? and about to ask if she’d like to go off somewhere, just the two of us, she’d nodded towards Mendoccini and said quietly, Your friend’s really cute. You know him; do you think he’d go out with me? She knew I was his friend and she’d been sounding me out about him. This was the kind of impact he had on teenage girls.

  I slumped back down onto the couch and guzzled my beer. “Get the fuck outta the country, man, before they catch up with you,” I said softly to myself, blinking back a small tear.

  I meant it. Standard operating procedure meant I should have got in touch with the Branch office and reported the fact I’d been contacted by someone on Special Branch’s terrorist list. So far, I’d refrained from doing my duty, and I honestly couldn’t rationalise to myself why I felt like this. Smitherman would say that sentimentality and the efficient discharge of duty don’t go together, and he’d be right. But even realising this didn’t stop me spending several minutes attempting to make some sense of my thoughts, though all I succeeded in doing was making myself even more confused. I wished things could have turned out differently. Despite everything, I couldn’t switch off my feelings for him.

  *

  Taylor arrived home just past eleven twenty. She’d had a few large glasses of pinot grigio and was slightly giggly. I was sprawled on the couch, part watching television but mostly absorbed in thinking. I’d been struggling to concentrate on whatever it was I’d been watching, and my thoughts were still hazy after the earlier phone call, not helped by having had a few more beers. Seeing her walking across the room towards me, smiling and looking just as stunning as she’d been at lunchtime, brought me sharply back into focus.

  “Sally female,” I half-drunkenly exclaimed.

  “Whaaat?” She dissolved into a five-second burst of semi- drunken laughter. “Where did that come from?”

  “Don’t worry ’bout it, hun, tell you later.”

  She knelt down beside me, grabbed the remote, turned off the TV and started kissing me very gently while unbuttoning my shirt, as I untucked her beige blouse, unbuttoned her jeans and ran my left hand around her waist. She leaned up slightly and, through the mop of hair falling across her face, smiled in the way which sent my feelings for her into a vortex. I lightly brushed the hair off her face and just looked at her for several seconds, almost in awe of how lovely she was.

  If there’s such a thing as a perfect ten, she was it. With her sparkling eyes, fantastic hair, flawless skin and a smile to die for, she was a dream. If I’d ever seen anything or anyone more beautiful in my life, I’d long ago forgotten who or what it was.

  “God, you’re beautiful, Taylor,” I said very softly, pulling her closer.

  She smiled coyly, shaking her head. “You’re an idiot, McGraw,” she whispered sexily, and then she began running the tip of her tongue around my neck. “But you’re my idiot.”

  The beer hadn’t worked and I’d needed something to distract me from thinking about Michael Mendoccini and why he was in the country, which was mostly what I’d been doing since we’d hung up. Taylor provided the something, and tonight we loved each other so completely that, two hours later, I couldn’t even remember how to spell his name.

  S E V E N

  Saturday

  I realised there was another potential line of inquiry available to me before meeting up with Ian Harper. When I’d been part of the investigation into Neville Thornwyn, I’d discovered he’d been the instigator behind the robbery of a gun shop in Battersea, in fact not too far from where I was now living. The robbery had been made possible because of the complicity of the shop manager, Edward Priestly. He’d been found guilty of conspiracy to commit burglary and other offences and was now serving seven years in Brixton prison. At one time, he’d worked for Bartolome as a senior accountant and, I’d discovered later, had left the company under a financial cloud. But he’d also known Jeremy Godfrey and I wondered what else he knew about underhand financial machinations inside the company. I put this to Smitherman and he agreed a visit to Brixton could be beneficial.

  Contrasting the two prisons was instructive as I arrived outside Brixton prison. Belmarsh is relatively new, operational only since 1991 and equipped with modern, up-to-date facilities. From the outside, if you weren’t aware of the purpose of the buildings and the nature of the persons inside, you might think it was attached to a small provincial university. Brixton prison, by contrast, dates back to the 1820s and is built in the kind of neo-Gothic style which at one time was used to remind the populace of the awesome power the state could wield over its subjects. Brixton has a corrosive feel and the sensitive visitor can almost touch the weight of history when they enter through the outer gates and approach the main buildings.

  This wasn’t my first visit here for my work, but, every time I visit Brixton, an all-pervading sense of depression encompasses me, more so than at any other prison I’ve visited. I’ve wondered what Mick Jagger thought when he was sentenced to three months in 1967 and escorted through the gates of Brixton, before being released on appeal next day. One look at its grim, grey walls and the thought don’t let me be in here too long plays constantly in my mind.

  Security procedures had been noticeably tightened since my last visit; there were more thorough bag and body searches, and negotiating them took a few minutes. Once safely through, enduring a few evil stares from visitors in the reception hall who made me as police immediately, I was escorted along a series of corridors which hadn’t seen a fresh coat of paint since the final days of Queen Victoria and smelt of cheap bleach and pungent disinfectant, to the room where I’d be talking to Priestly. I was aware of the same sounds you hear in most prisons, the muffled shouting of inmates across the corridors from locked cells. I could almost smell the sense of loneliness and desolation which derives from living in small cells for any period longer than a weekend.

  The guard seemed impervious and stared ahead the whole time we were walking, saying not one word until we reached the admin building. At the end of a corridor he unlocked a door and said brusquely, “He’s in there,” then turned and walked away.

  Priestly was already in the room, sitting at a table, tapping his fingers impatiently, and looked up as I entered. I sat down on a cold, hard plastic chair. The room was small, windowless and austere, with few redeeming features. The overhead strip lighting was too bright and the walls had been painted a dull metallic grey. If the room was covered by CCTV, I couldn’t tell from where. There was a prison officer standing by the door, and I asked him to wait outside, to which, after the obligatory short period of staring at me without moving, indicating, in his view, he didn’t have to move if he didn’t want to, he reluctantly acquiesced.

  Edward Priestly was in his mid-fifties and his flab, grey facial colouring and poor skin tone suggested he’d never exercised a day in his life. He was short, his hair rapidly thinning, and overweight from too many good business lunches. He stared at me for a long few moments as I tried to get comfortable on the hard chair. He nodded at me, then finally realised who I was.

  “I know you. You’re the Special Branch detective who came to see me at the shop.”

  “That’s right,” I agreed.

  “I cooperated with their inquiries all the way down the line, but I’ve still ended up inside here,” he complained, making it sound like a miscarriage of justice had occurred. “I thought my cooperation would count for something.” He sighed.

  “Life just ain’t fair sometimes, is it?” I smiled at him. “Anyway, I wasn’t involved in the decision to prosecut
e.” He appeared not to like my flippancy, but I wasn’t here to listen to his whining, and I didn’t care about his being in prison.

  “So, why’d you need to see me again?” he asked.

  “I wanna talk to you about your time in your previous employ.”

  “Huh?” He’d not been expecting this.

  “You were a senior financial manager when you worked for Bartolome, weren’t you?”

  I could see the curiosity written across his face.

  “Yeah, senior accountant, working directly under the finance director.” He narrowed his eyes. “Why would you want to talk about this?”

  “Because I’m looking into allegations about a slush fund, a special account with money specifically set aside to bribe government officials abroad or top management in other companies, and I’m curious to know what you know about it.”

  His eyes briefly opened wide. Then he sat back, smiled and crossed his arms. His attitude immediately told me he was aware he knew something we wanted to know, and he’d be willing to trade for it. No information in prison is ever given freely. It’s always subject to negotiations and quid pro quo.

  “And what’s in it for me if I agree to talk about what I know?” He smirked knowingly.

  I’d been expecting this. No prisoner willingly talks to police unless there’s an inducement, especially in the case of someone like Priestly, who’d be used to negotiations involving compromises.

  “A good word on your behalf when parole comes around, police raising no objections to you being granted parole or a transfer to an open prison well before your due release date, that kind of thing. You got, what was it, seven years? With time off for good behaviour and what you’ve already served, you could be out in two, maybe even less. Think about it.”

  For several seconds he did, eyes moving rapidly from left to right as he thought. He looked at the wall for a few moments whilst he tapped his fingers.

  “Alright,” he agreed. “Anything to get out of here quicker. Do you know the bloke I share a cell with can’t even bloody read, for God’s sake? What is it you want to know?”

  The next fifteen minutes were very productive ones. Priestly had no definite proof of the existence of a slush fund, but he knew one was in existence. I’d asked how he knew this.

  “Well, put it this way: I can’t see radio waves either, but I know they’re there every time I turn Radio 4 on.”

  He then explained how he’d once heard the finance director approving a request to make a substantial payment to someone regarding the awarding of a contract Bartolome was negotiating to obtain.

  “Meaning what?”

  “The money paid to this person was never recorded on the company’s audited accounts. What does this suggest to you?” He grinned.

  He said he’d seen copies of the firm’s financial statements going back several years and had immediately realised there was far more money coming in and going out of the company than was being recorded. He was convinced it was poor accounting practices like these which’d come close to bringing Bartolome to its knees. Why did he think this?

  “Why? Because the only way any slush fund can be effective is through ensuring the books are kept in order. You can’t just put a sum of cash aside and label it slush fund.” He stated this like it was patently obvious. “Whoever’s controlling it has to make sure all money going out is accounted for every step of the way, as well as ensuring it’s recorded in such a way that its real purpose can’t be detected. It’s usually covered under headings like corporate hospitality.” He sounded like he was scoffing.

  Did he know of any payments to specific individuals or companies?

  “Other than the one I just mentioned, I don’t, no.” He shook his head and paused for a moment. “But I do remember, on a couple of occasions, looking at the accounts and mentioning to the finance director certain columns of figures just didn’t add up. I can remember saying to him there was this one particular transaction I couldn’t even begin to make any sense of. I remember the name of the other party, something like Cartillian. I remember this one because it was being paid into an account registered in Gibraltar, which was strange because we didn’t sell any weapons or do any business with companies registered there. I asked one of our top marketing people about it, but he just shrugged and said, Don’t worry about it, it’s all in hand, it’s okay, so what else could it have been for?” He raised his eyebrows and sat nodding for a few seconds, thinking about something.

  “Would this marketing person have been Charles Garlinge?” I asked on a whim.

  “It would, yes. You know him?” He seemed surprised.

  “I just know his name.”

  Priestly sat quietly for a moment. “The money going out and being paid in very often didn’t even come close to levelling up. I mean, if there’s one thing I do know how to do, it’s read and understand financial statements, and I knew something wasn’t adding up; excuse the pun. But Garlinge just said, Oh, it’s okay, we’re onto it, don’t worry about it, so I didn’t.” He nodded. “And it was this attitude which convinced me there’s something underhand going on. I mean, that’s partly why I started fiddling, because the books were kept so haphazardly. I thought to myself, there’s scope here, maybe they’re so haphazard they won’t miss a few quid.” He smiled to himself. “I mean, I’ve heard people talking about things like this, and it’s the worst-kept secret in the arms business you have to bribe your way into securing contracts, especially if you’re doing business in the Middle East, places like Saudi or Qatar, everyone knows this. I mean, honestly, do you really think Qatar would have got the 2022 World Cup but for bribery? But I don’t know any specific examples where I could name names. I wasn’t on the board, so I wasn’t usually a party to any strategic discussions. I do know, though, certain board meetings were held in closed session and, if there were minutes kept, they were never made known. What else could they be discussing?” He sounded certain. “Any independent forensic accountant with half a functioning brain who examined their books would deduce in a very short time there’s something askew with their accounts.”

  “How?”

  “How?” He laughed. “The absence of any receipts for entertaining, for one thing; entering into your expenditure account the spending of tens of thousands of pounds on clients but providing no evidence of where or how the money was spent, or even who spent it. I mean, that’s an obvious example. Even a trainee accountant who could pick his nose without falling over would be on top of this one. I was present at a couple of financial planning meetings when accounts were being compiled and there were no receipts or invoices of any income or expenditure, yet figures were being listed with gay abandon.” He shook his head, smiling like he was amused. “Money spent but with nothing to show for it doesn’t usually go down well with an honest auditor. You heard of Enron, the US energy company? Enron collapsed in 2001 owing God knows how many hundreds of millions of dollars because their accounts were a joke. They were running a gigantic scam and they got found out.” He grinned widely. “You should read the book about Enron, The Smartest Guysin the Room. It’d be funny if it wasn’t all true.”

  He sat back, chuckling to himself. He was on a roll. “That’s how they got on to me. Expenses I’d claimed proved to be a fiction, but of course they couldn’t just sack me outright because I knew too much. Not where the bodies were buried, so to speak, just that there were bodies someplace, so Godfrey arranges for me to get the job at Byzantium. In fact,” – he leaned forward – “using Byzantium was one way Bartolome managed to hide particular transactions they didn’t want listed on their books. They’d be logged into the accounts as having been bought by or sold to Byzantium, but what was really happening was the shop being used as a front.”

  “How do you mean?” I was interested.

  He sat up in his seat. “Byzantium’s accounts were used to hide moneys Bartolome wanted off the accounts. We were a subsidiary, so they could do this. An amount like a hundred grand could easily be
absorbed into Byzantium’s accounts, money which was probably paid out to someone for doing business. It was extremely useful for Bartolome to have an outlet like Byzantium available to hide certain sums of money they didn’t want anyone to know about.” He grinned inanely. “It’s known as off-balance sheet accounting.”

  “What would be a for instance?” I asked.

  He thought for a moment.

  “Okay.” He was still grinning. “We’d sell something like, for example, a box of shotgun cartridges to Bartolome, and we’d charge them thousands of pounds per box for an item which cost next to nothing, a few pounds at most. Some while later, we’d buy those same cartridges back and they’d charge us thousands. The thing is,” – he now looked serious – “these were only ever paper transactions. No actual products ever left the shelves. This is what’s known in the trade as transfer pricing. Multinational companies do this all the time to evade national taxes. And the good thing about this was, when the money we paid Bartolome to buy back what we hadn’t actually sold them went into their accounts, it was now clean.”

  He stopped, looked at me and asked if I was following him. I nodded; I was. Probably.

  “So the money they were supposedly paying us . . .” He paused. I thought for a moment.

  “Was the money they were paying out in bribes,” I stated.