Mendoccini

by Laurence Todd

  I agreed with him. There’s only one reason money is laundered and it’s nothing legal. Was this drug money? Money from groups linked to terrorism looking to cleanse it so it could be legitimately used for arms purchases?

  “So what’s Hemsley doing now?” I asked.

  “Still at the bank, keeping his head below the parapets and wondering if he did the right thing threatening to blow the whistle because they’ve moved him to other duties, routine stuff, until they’re sure they can trust him again.” Clements shook his head sadly, looking like a parent disappointed at something stupid a particularly bright child had done. “I didn’t realise our Nigel was so gullible; I mean, fancy being shocked at discovering shady dealings inside a bank. I’d be more surprised if there weren’t any.”

  “And you say he’s certain about what he told you.”

  “Absolutely certain.” Clements was emphatic. “He’s looked at the accounts and seen other documents about financial transactions between the bank and Chrenora’s and, in turn, its dealings with offshore companies. What would a shell company be doing having dealings with offshore companies, who also do business with a City merchant bank? That’s why Hemsley’s convinced books are being cooked for the wrong reasons.”

  “Okay, I’ll check out what Hemsley’s said, see if we know anything about it. I’ll also have to talk to Smitherman about what you’ve just told me, put him in the picture. If there’s the possibility of a Government minister being implicated, he’ll need to know. MI5’ll probably need to be tipped off, in case they need to get involved.”

  Clements’ face took on a horrified expression.

  “Don’t worry, I won’t tell him where this tip came from. I won’t upset him on your behalf. You can do that yourself.” Of that I was certain.

  F O U R

  Tuesday

  I arranged a meeting with Christine Simmons for late morning. She’d been an undercover agent in the operation against the Addley brothers and ultimately had played a pivotal role in foiling Red Heaven’s plot to cause explosions. Much of the evidence against Simon Addley had come from her. Without her and Colin Addley, the plan to cause explosions near the Albert Hall might well have succeeded. We agreed to meet in the café next to Foyles bookshop on the South Bank as it was near for both of us. Before that I spent some time looking at Karris and Millers’ website.

  It was as anodyne as I was expecting. Lots of pages outlining the bank’s three-hundred-year-plus history and its contribution to the financial health of the United Kingdom. There were pages of pictures of bank illuminati as well as sections describing what a merchant bank does. On the page headed Social Responsibility there was a section about the educational fund the bank sponsored and supported, trumpeting how much the bank had raised for this worthwhile endeavour and claiming many third-world children were benefiting from the funds the bank made available for this charity. The bank read as worthy as a church fête, yet Nigel Hemsley was claiming this bank was at the centre of another, less worthy, purpose.

  I also looked up Gerald Bradley. He was sixty-two, almost an elder statesman in a Government where the average age of Cabinet ministers was slightly less than fifty. He’d been an MP since 2001 and, prior to that, had been something in the City, working for Karris and Millers for many years before becoming an MP, though when he had left the bank he’d accepted a seat on the board as a well-remunerated, non-executive director. His fee just for attending a few routine board meetings per year plus attending the AGM was more than twice my annual salary. However, Roger Bradley was only thirty-four and hadn’t started at the bank until the year his father had been elected to the House of Commons, so they’d not been there at the same time, though I’d little doubt nepotism had helped secure the son’s position. I was becoming as cynical as Richard Clements.

  Gerald Bradley’s file recorded no black marks against his name. He was perceived as being scrupulously honest and fair and there were no suspicions he’d ever engaged in shady dealings whilst a banker. During the worst days of the Credit Crunch he’d worked as an advisor to Karris and Millers and his financial nous was credited with helping keep the bank from sailing too close to the rocks.

  He’d been positively vetted for his Government position and declared snow white. He was also very rich and this made him an unlikely candidate to be a fraudster. But history suggests the dreams of avarice encompass even those blessed by life with more than their fair share, so I didn’t discount him.

  Roger Bradley had graduated from Oxford the year his father was elected and had gone straight into merchant banking, rising to his current position of Executive Investment Manager where he oversaw part of the bank’s domestic investment portfolio, Nigel Hemsley’s section. He’d also been investigated by MI5 when his father was about to be appointed to an important role inside Government and nothing had been uncovered. He was being tipped for great things inside the bank.

  Yet Hemsley was convinced Bradley was engaged in money laundering and was the reason behind the fraudulent accounting, though he had yet to produce evidence to substantiate this. Was uncovering knowledge about this the reason why Josh Bryant had been killed? Had he found something someone at the bank wanted kept under wraps?

  I phoned a friend. Freddie Mullins was a detective based at West End Central whom I’d met after leaving Hendon and going into active service, and I’d learned a lot from working with him in my early days. He was healthily cynical about the role of the police in society and their often fractious and occasionally adversarial relationship with those they professed to serve, but this didn’t prevent him being a good officer with an exemplary record of important arrests. He was also scrupulously honest. I asked him what he knew about the death of Josh Bryant. He brought the case details up.

  “Someone found him lying in the gutter near Canary Wharf. He’d been in a pub and, when he was a few hundred yards away, someone whacked him from behind. From the deep bruising on his neck, he was hit bloody hard with something, broke his neck. My guess would be a sap or blackjack, something like that. He went down and clocked his head on the corner of the kerb, hit it with some force. Suffered severe head injuries, that’s what he died from.”

  “He wasn’t robbed, though, was he?”

  “Doesn’t appear to have been. His wallet and keys were still in his jacket pocket. The wallet had a couple hundred pounds inside. We didn’t find a mobile, though, and we don’t know if he was carrying anything else. Nothing’s been found. At present we don’t know if it was a robbery that went wrong or a murder.”

  “Unlikely to be a robbery if his wallet’s still there.”

  “Christ, you know, we even thought of that one all by ourselves.”

  “Anyone with him in the pub?” I ignored his jokey sarcasm.

  “The bar staff remembered Bryant coming in and talking to someone for a while. He left first, the other guy left soon afterwards.”

  “Do we know who it was?”

  “No. The pub doesn’t have CCTV, so we couldn’t check who it was, and nobody remembered him. Whoever it was wasn’t a regular.”

  “No suspects, I suppose?”

  “We spoke to everyone in the pub but no one there knew anything about the incident. Nobody knew either man. Couldn’t do a canvass as the area’s mainly offices and a few shops and it was late on a Friday evening. CCTV picked Bryant up walking along the road but didn’t capture the assault as it occurred in a dark spot where the cameras weren’t recording. We checked it for anyone looking suspicious but didn’t find anyone.

  “When we found out the vic’s identity and that he was an investigative reporter, we went into his background to see if he was a major-league slimeball who might’ve upset someone recently, as that would at least give us an angle to follow, but nothing came up. We looked at his past details but there’s little there giving us any motive. I’m wondering if there’s any connection between this and what he might be working on.”

  Without giving too much away and mentioning no name
s I told Mullins about Bryant’s investigating irregularities in the financial sector. I hinted broadly that money laundering could have been what Bryant was investigating and that he’d been asked to do some digging by someone on the inside who was concerned it might be occurring.

  “Is that why the Branch’s involved?”

  “We’re not involved yet. His name came up connected to something else we’re looking into. There’s nothing definite about it. I was just curious if anything was known about his killing.”

  “Other than that he’s dead, and it wasn’t from natural causes, nothing.”

  It was just before eleven when I crossed Westminster Bridge towards Waterloo Station and turned left by the Marriott Hotel and walked along the South Bank, past the queue for the London Eye and onwards towards the National Theatre complex. No matter what time of year, the area is always crowded with tourists, parties of foreign students, theatregoers and skateboarders. I’d not been to the National for a number of months, not since seeing Blair’s Britain, which was a delightfully satirical black comedy about the life and times of the ex-Prime Minister Tony Blair. We’d found it hilarious. I wondered whether Blair himself had seen it and, if he had, whether he recognised the political leader who’d been portrayed as a corrupt megalomaniac. The playwright had chosen not to mince his words about what he really thought of Blair and his decision to side with the USA and declare what was, in the writer’s opinion, an illegal and unjust war.

  I reached the stairs by Hungerford Bridge, where I spotted Christine Simmons sitting alone at a table outside the café underneath the Festival Hall. I stood and looked at her for a few moments. She was glancing at the Times and looked up as I approached her table, almost as if she’d sensed my arrival. I nodded. She already had a drink, so I brought myself a large lemon tea and sat at her table.

  There was no denying she was stunning. I’d thought this the first time I’d seen her; I’d gone to her flat to interview her when I was checking an alibi for Simon Addley. At the time I’d no idea she was undercover MI5, though I did think she was gorgeous and I saw no reason to change my view. Today she was wearing a figure-hugging dark sweater and a pair of well-tailored chino trousers. She had on a pair of dark-rimmed glasses which, with the way her hair hung around her shoulders, made her look even more attractive. She had the kind of clear blue eyes I could swim in and she was the epitome of radiance. Easy to see why Simon Addley had fallen so hard for her when she’d wormed her way into his life.

  She looked a lot more relaxed than the last time I’d seen her, which was when she’d been recounting the details of the evening leading up to the Addleys being arrested. Not an hour previously she’d shot and killed someone, a colleague inside MI5, but she’d still remained calm and professional as she told her boss and mine what had gone down. Her version of events had been accepted by her superiors and nothing Sergeant Collington or I had said wavered from her account, and, so far as I knew, she’d faced no legal reprisal for the death of David Kader.

  “So, how’s life in Special Branch?” She sipped her drink.

  “Some days, almost as exciting as the brochure says it is. What about you?”

  “Oh, you know, keeping the country safe.” She smiled. It was an easy smile, as though we were old friends catching up rather than two people who’d met whilst trying to stop terrorists blowing up the Albert Hall. Sitting by the Thames on a sunny day, looking at her and trying not to get lost in her eyes, was the best thing likely to happen to me all day.

  “What did you want to see me about?” Straight down to business.

  I resisted the temptation to say I just wanted to see you. “Off the record, has your office heard anything about money laundering involving banks here in the City?”

  “Anything specific?”

  I withheld names but told her about Clements’ talk with Hemsley and his concern the accounts were hiding funds derived from illicit sources. I mentioned the murder of Josh Bryant, who’d been investigating something pertaining to the accounts of this firm at the time of his death. I also mentioned the institution concerned had a connection with a Government minister; there was no suggestion he was involved in anything underhand and his name hadn’t come up, but as he was on the board where money laundering was suspected, MI5 ought at least to have the heads-up.

  “Which bank are we talking about?”

  “Karris and Millers.”

  “Your source works there?”

  “No. But the person with the concerns about this does. He told my source, who told me.”

  “I’m not aware of any ongoing investigations into this bank, but I can do a little probing,” she eventually replied. “I’ve a friend who looks into economic crimes. There’s so much money being washed, we can’t even begin to come close to estimating how much, but it’s colossal, and any little bit we can latch on to helps. I’m assuming you don’t want this made official?”

  “God, no. As discreet as possible. If you people have suspicions, that’ll give me some place to begin.”

  “What concerns, specifically?”

  “I’d be interested in anything relating to a firm called Chrenora’s. They do business with the bank I just mentioned. But, according to my source, they do lots of business with a shell company, which funnels money all over the place. Money goes into and out of its accounts but it doesn’t seem to be doing any business. This sounds like more than tax avoidance.”

  She nodded, absorbing what I’d told her. “I’ll ask around, see if we have any concerns.”

  “Another thing, again off the record?”

  She nodded. “Yeah.”

  “I have a source telling me the Guardian is in possession of details relating to the events pre-trial of your boyfriend Simon Addley.” I smiled lightly. At the mention of his name, she looked like she wanted to vomit. I didn’t mention New Focus had the same information. “They seem to know about Colin Addley being an informer and Kader and Reagan dying, though not the specific names or the circumstances. They might be planning to publish. Someone in your office been talking outside the classroom?”

  “Stimpson hates the Guardian at the best of times.” Stimpson was her boss at MI5 and a man I liked as much as a broken bone in my arm. “I don’t suppose you want to share the name of your source?”

  “Not at the moment.” She would understand why.

  I mentioned no names because I was trying to protect Clements. I was also hoping Smitherman didn’t get wind of this because, if he had even the smallest inkling Clements was in possession of such information, son-in-law or not, he’d throw him to the wolves head-first, and he’d starve them for a couple of days beforehand just to make sure they were really hungry. I didn’t count Clements as a friend in the sense Mickey was, but I was beginning to like the guy, and I didn’t want to see him come to grief. More than anything, though, I didn’t want Smitherman knowing we were becoming friends.

  “Again, if you could ask a few questions on the quiet, see who knows what . . .” I didn’t need to finish the sentence. She knew what I was asking her to do. “I’d owe you if you could help me out here.”

  I wanted to say I’d owe you dinner and a great night out, but this wasn’t the time.

  “We’re talking off the record?” she asked. I agreed.

  “There’s no need to ask any questions,” she said. “We have a source inside the Guardian and he told us about this last Saturday. Some junior operative in our section was pissed off about something and leaked wads of info about the trial to the Guardian to try and embarrass the department. They’re going nuts trying to find out how he even got hold of this information as it was classified. He’s getting kicked out but not prosecuted as no real damage was done. Our source was in on the receipt of this and he helped quash it at an editorial meeting yesterday afternoon. They won’t be printing anything about it.”

  “You’re certain about that?”

  “Yeah, very certain.” She smiled knowingly.

  She hadn’t mentio
ned New Focus. Had the person leaking this not mentioned it, or was it that she knew but wasn’t saying?

  “My source’ll be relieved at that,” I said.

  “Stimpson’s upset. He wanted the Guardian to attempt publishing, ’cause after Snowden he wants to see the paper in court. But that’s not gonna happen just yet, as our man at the paper helped prevent publication.”

  “Your source is placed that highly?”

  She raised her eyebrows and said nothing.

  She finished her drink. I walked back along the South Bank with her, which, after looking at her, was the next-best part of the day. Thames House was further along the South Bank and I left her by Westminster Bridge. I watched as she walked away, gliding with easy grace.

  I phoned Clements’ mobile and left a message telling him I’d talked to someone about what he’d told me relating to Hemsley’s allegations and I was waiting to hear back from this person. If it was established there were genuine concerns about the bank and its finances, this would help determine whether the Branch got involved in investigating. I thought I’d save the other news until I saw him. Make him sweat a bit.

  Smitherman phoned requesting my presence in his office. I’d been told he was in conference with someone when I’d called earlier, so I assumed this summons was in relation to my earlier call. I went upstairs, tapped on his door and entered, and was surprised to see two other people in the room besides Smitherman. I only recognised one of them, and it was someone Christine Simmons had just mentioned in passing: Colonel Peter Stimpson, MI5, a man I’d encountered on two previous occasions, neither of them exactly pleasant. He was Christine Simmons’ boss and it’d been to him she’d recounted the events on the evening leading up to the Addleys’ arrest. In previous encounters with him I’d found him to be a pompous and arrogant bastard, so far up himself he needed binoculars to look back and see daylight. He exuded all the arrogance derived from living and operating in the shadows, where your every utterance goes unchallenged and thus you can easily convince yourself of your own omnipotence. He exuded all the warmth of a dead halibut and, if Smitherman had been anything like him, I’d have transferred straight back to walking the beat wearing a flat hat.