Connections

by Hilary Bailey

  “That Russian was the plutonium smuggler, wasn’t he?” said Hugh.

  “Yes,” she said. “Everybody knows everything, these days, don’t they?”

  “No. Everybody knows something. Nobody knows everything. I recognised him from his picture in Die Welt. Very dangerous guy. Attractive, though,” Hugh mused. It started to snow again. “Not my type, really. You wouldn’t ask him, ‘Is that a gun in your pocket or are you pleased to see me?’”

  “It is, I’m not and I’m going to kill you,” Fleur said in a Russian accent. They started laughing. “Oh God,” said Fleur, “I’m on the run, it’s snowing and my father’s in a hospital, probably dying. What’s so funny about that?”

  They had reached Victoria Station, where a few people loitered. There were some buses and a short rank of taxis, but the place seemed to Fleur frighteningly cold and deserted.

  “I’ll wait with you,” he said, and they stood by the bus stops, far away from the stationary police van.

  “This is very nice of you, Hugh,” Fleur told him.

  “Dickie was rattled on that trip to St Lucia,” he told her. “As soon as we arrived he and Jones got a flight back. Men like that are always having crises, of course – but I smelt trouble even then. What’s it all about?”

  “Keep quiet about it, but I think he’s been laundering money for August Tallinn, the Russian.”

  “Ah,” said Hugh. “That makes sense,” he added. “He’s not the only one doing that sort of thing. We – the art dealers – are the people who get the money when it makes its next move. By the time we’re getting paid, by cheque or banker’s draft, the money’s usually half clean. But before that it’s been taken out of suitcases and bounced into the system. If your father dies it’ll be bad luck. He won’t have done anything the other big banks in the City don’t do.”

  There was a tooting noise and across the street was the van, with Dominic leaning out of the window. Fleur gave Hugh a kiss and ran to it.

  She and Dominic sat on sacks in the back. Joe was driving with Sam Hope beside him. Fleur told them what had taken place that night in Eaton Square.

  “Don’t worry,” said Sam. “We’ll go down to Dover and you can take the ferry to France. No one’s going to be looking for you yet. With luck, all this will be resolved in a week or two. But if you stick around now someone may get hysterical and decide to stop you from talking. Or you’ll get arrested on the grounds that they need someone to blame. Stay clear for a bit, let the tale come leaking out, embarrassing everybody, let them work out the heroes and villains, then you can come back. You haven’t done anything wrong, after all.”

  There was a silence until Fleur, who realised she had got a lot older in the past few months, said, “Does that make any difference?”

  Twenty-Nine

  So there we are, ladies and gentlemen of the Enquiry, and William.

  I hoped, as I told the others, that after a flurry it would all settle down. And it seemed to. And I thought it was over. But as I’ve said before, this was the story that would not die. Now, eight months later, here I am on the move again, and this time it may be for keeps.

  Here we were with a Bank of England Enquiry, the neatest, discreetest solution to the problem that wouldn’t go away. Foreign investors are disquieted about the stability of our banking and political institutions; there are money markets all over the world who wouldn’t mind the City of London disgraced and found unreliable, and all that lucrative business coming their own way. But we need it ourselves, don’t we? It represents such a large proportion of national earnings.

  You’ll note that by February the small people – Fleur, Dominic, Joe, and I won’t exclude myself from the group – had been forced to flee because of the big guys: bankers, senior civil servants and their masters, and a big-time, wealthy drug dealer and his former allies in the Kremlin.

  Getting mixed up in all this meant Dominic and Joe had to disappear without telling their boss, knowing he would probably sack them and that this might precipitate them back on to the streets, or into petty crime with all its repercussions. Joe had been forced to part with Melanie, too. Fleur had failed to get to the end of her computer course and missed the first crucial discussious at the film company and the meeting at the firm which was supposed to help her sort out her creditors. And I wasn’t happy myself about having to disappear at short notice because of the actions and fuck-ups of others. I was still hesitating about starting the countdown towards vaporising Hope Vansittart, but I knew if the auguries were bad over the period following Jethro’s shooting, I’d have to. It was a classic example of that game of barons and peasants which is British life. Barons fight. Peasants starve.

  It wasn’t all bad. I went to where I went to, met up with old friends who will remain anonymous and caught some sun. I kept an eye on CNN and an ear on the World Service, spoke to people in Britain and chatted to the young folk who were making the best of it in the South of France, where an unusually early spring was beginning. They were quite happy, especially Dominic and Fleur who gave up pretending they only fell on each other’s bones from time to time because they were too hard up to rent a video. Melanie’s mum even let her come away on a weekend break to France to see Joe – the down side being, the rest of the family came too. And back home Veronica took the problem at HVPS as a cue to stay home and redecorate her house. So our panic-stricken flight had its good side. Maybe, all in all we had had a better time than those at home who’d created the necessity for it.

  As you’ll know, William, ten days after the shooting one of the party ratted, and gave the police an account of what really occurred on that night in Eaton Square. I don’t know who it was or why. It can’t have been the servants because all the housekeeper saw was Tallinn coming through the window and demanding that the alarm be turned off. After that she and the others hid in the kitchen. Could it have been the Keiths, ready to back Jethro as long as he was of advantage to them, then keen to dissociate themselves from a possible scandal and disgrace? Was it Haussman, taking some kind of revenge, or trying to overturn Strauss and pick up his business? Or Maria Haussman, mindlessly going to the cop shop with an English-speaking friend and demanding justice, just to get her necklace back? It might even have been Sophia, dreadfully upset about her husband and ready to disobey Peter Strauss’s orders in order to see Tallinn brought to justice.

  Whoever blabbed, for whatever reason, the police couldn’t just ignore the information. And a lot of sweat must have appeared on brows in high places and there must have been more of those tedious letters from the Germans implying a lack of brains and energy when it came to the hunt for the Russian. Because the informant had, knowingly or not, told them that the troublesome August Tallinn was still in the country, so what, for want of other evidence had been defined as a disturbed robbery and shooting, with a strong chance the perpetrator would never be caught, suddenly had to turn into a man-hunt for Tallinn.

  Earlier, Peter Strauss, helped by Henry Jones, had done a good job of burying as many bodies as possible in the time available. Jethro had survived the operation but it was genuinely hard for the doctors to say at that time exactly how bad he was, harder still to predict whether he’d improve or deteriorate in future. I hear he’s in Athens, wheelchair-bound, his mind a blur, being tended devotedly by his wife who is, in turn, being loyally supported by her own family. Unfit to appear before your committee, it hardly needs saying.

  The night of the shooting must have been a bad one for Peter Strauss. His was the counting-house area of the bank. He was the senior man. He knew what came in and went out and had a duty to know the rest, though the investments were Dickie’s responsibility. But on that night, he must have realised he didn’t know what was going on. And on that night, having been through a scene where he had known he himself might have been killed, and not knowing whether Jethro would live or die, he had to confront the only man who could tell him what Jethro had done and take him through the labyrinths Jethro had created – Hen
ry Jones.

  Jones must have suspected, as time went on, that a moment such as this would come, and now it had. The mystery is why, when he heard Jethro was in hospital undergoing an operation which might prove fatal, he didn’t do a bunk. He must have thought that, with Strauss, he could get through it, save the bank and save his own reputation and that of the boss he adored. Strauss must certainly have told him that, though Strauss was probably more concerned for himself and the bank than he was for Jones.

  The figure of ten per cent of all money going through the banking system being money earned through drugs may be a conservative one. The US system demands of banks that they declare deposits of over ten thousand dollars but that doesn’t work. The British have an honour system, which doesn’t work either.

  The Drugs Traffic Offences Act of 1986 only asks a British bank to turn in a suspiciously wealthy customer if they “knew or had strong reason to suspect” the funds came from illicit sources. It’s not hard to mount a legal defence against a law so loosely worded. A normal person might think neither Strauss nor Jethro could reasonably claim they had no suspicions about Tallinn, when he kept on turning up with enormous quantities of cash. But the law’s a funny thing, William, and an expensive legal team might be able to get away with just that defence.

  The biggest problem of a person with a lot of illicit cash is over at once if they can find a banker willing to take it. It goes through the system and comes out clean. As it is no doubt becoming clear from my story, Jethro did it for Tallinn.

  Jones, during the period where Jethro was accepting ten to twenty million dollars a year from Tallinn, must have had to work like a dog to get rid of it – buying property and businesses in the UK, creating offshore accounts, hiding the money in Greek Cyprus. All the time he knew every move he made was illegal.

  However, instead of heading for the airport, he loyally turned up at Eaton Square that night to help Strauss. Strauss must have told him of his sensible strategy. First, they would bury the worst and the easiest of the funds and secondly they would make a full disclosure of what they couldn’t hide to the Bank of England. Jones must have seen that, dead or alive, Jethro was going to get the blame and one of his motives for offering his help may have been to minimise the consequences to his boss. Another, to reduce the amount of evidence against himself.

  I’m no expert in all this, but what I heard was told me by a broker friend I met for a meal in the summer, when I thought all this was over. He said he thought that Jethro’s association with Tallinn must have begun in the early nineties, as the recession took hold and full economic collapse began. Strauss Jethro Smith found itself in dire straits. Bank of England regulations state that only ten per cent of a bank’s capital should be out on loan. Once the loans exceed twenty-five per cent the bank is obliged to inform the Bank of England of its position. The Bank, after investigation, can close it down.

  My friend, whom we’ll call Fred, said that at the time we were talking about Jethro was well over his ten per cent deposit protection fund, was probably over the twenty-five per cent absolute limit too. And had not informed the Bank of England, a fact masked in the Bank’s records by a team of accountants, supervised by Henry Jones.

  “In that position, all you need,” said Fred, “is an unanticipated serious recession where even your sound money goes rotten. It’s like going down a slide, whoosh, right down to the bottom. Next stop – bank closure – personal disgrace – possible trial and conviction.”

  Jethro knew he couldn’t go on forever, playing games with the numbers. “In addition,” said Fred, “he must have been getting wind of a possible Bank of England Enquiry. I certainly was. There were whispers. All he needed was more rumours, the Bank of England poking its nose in and a sudden withdrawal of capital by investors. I’m guessing he would have needed a minimum of twenty million to clear this whole thing up. Or a smaller sum, with a guarantee that further smaller sums would be forthcoming regularly, making it safe for Jones to fiddle the books for another year.

  “Now I don’t know,” said my friend, “who made the fatal introduction. Suffice it to say that Jethro and Tallinn met. And once Jethro decided to co-operate there would be only two further problems: getting the money into the bank and hiding it cleverly once it was there. It had to be moved, invested quickly. Jones would have been the man for that.”

  I was curious. I hesitated, then asked him, “How come you know so much about this?”

  He gave me a funny look. “Everybody does, dear boy. Everybody does,” he told me.

  After the long night in Jethro’s study on the night of the shooting, Strauss, having got all the facts out of Jones, must have decided on damage limitation. Looked at one way, Jethro’s injury, nearly death, could be looked at as the best thing that could have happened for the bank. No more nasty money would come in now. They could clean up quietly and blame everything that wouldn’t wash out on him, if they had to.

  It was not long before poor old Dickie Jethro had been officially declared, at least pro tem, a human vegetable. Scapegoat duly in place, Strauss called in the Bank of England.

  That was when I rang the happy trio in the South of France and said I thought Strauss had the situation sufficiently under control for them to return safely, though they should lodge a full account of what they knew with a solicitor, all dated and properly witnessed, just in case of any trouble. I didn’t think, now it was all sorted and his boss was as good as dead, that loyal dog Jones would start any more murder plots to protect him. Nor was Tallinn likely to surface, if he had any sense, to make any trouble. He was now wanted in Germany for smuggling dangerous materials and in the UK for murder.

  They were pleased at the thought of getting back, especially Joe, because of Melanie. So back we all came, fit, well and ready to take up once more the threads of our quiet lives.

  What a bugger, William, though, when it all started up again. You could call it an unfortunate coincidence, sheer bad luck and so forth. In the circles in which you move you probably are. It’s a good explanation, if no one wants to take responsibility. In fact it was a case of dangling threads, something not attended to, something everybody hoped, if they didn’t look, would go away. That and the fact that this is a small world, and getting smaller. Everybody knows somebody who knows somebody else. You’re only six handshakes away from the President of the United States, they say. Not just you, William, anybody; that’s the theory. It’s official. It’s called the Six Degrees of Separation.

  So – Adrian Drake was the husband of Fleur’s friend Jess. He was a journalist. In June he was in Peru on a story when he bumped into Tallinn, drunk, in a bar in Lima. He knew what he looked like. After all, he was the man who’d supplied the pictures of Tallinn for Fleur and the others. He’d later heard, very confidentially, from his wife, about what happened on the evening Fleur’s father was shot. He had no problem in recognising our boy.

  He stepped up and said hullo, carefully. That’s how you would say hullo to a man like Tallinn, whether he was drunk or sober. Drake spoke Russian – he’d studied modern languages at Oxford – so that helped.

  Tallinn, probably feeling a bit depressed and isolated, started talking. A sad tale, which he told Drake during three long alcoholic evenings in workmen’s bars in Lima. Drake soon realised he had a scoop in Tallinn and Tallinn told him, vengefully, to go ahead and write his story. Drake returned to London with the material for four long features, which were later syndicated in other European countries and in the USA.

  The papers’ lawyers were careful, of course. Strauss Jethro Smith was never named, or Jethro himself. But those who knew that world found it easy to work out who Tallinn’s banker was. MPs weighed in, so did the German Government, still smarting about the refusal to hand Tallinn over into their jurisdiction in a timely manner. There was talk about a possible collapse of Strauss Jethro Smith if they were obliged to surrender the millions of pounds they held in Tallinn’s name – as they would have to if the money was proved to
have come from a criminal source. However, Strauss had anticipated this, and had covered it. A Bank of England Enquiry had earlier proved the firm to be on a solid basis, largely as a result of Jethro’s efforts.

  Tallinn, on the other hand, had engineered Iran’s nuclear capacity, and half of Europe and the Middle East wanted vengeance. There were questions and protests from many different quarters. Thinking quickly, the British Government announced a Bank of England Enquiry, to be held privately, not open to press or public, but which would produce a report of its findings after a thorough investigation. They smacked together a committee consisting of everyone and his dog and put you in charge, William. There’s still a lot of noise, of course, but Parliament still isn’t back from their long summer hols, so there can be no public answers until it is. And when the serious bullets start flying in the autumn, William, I think your position will be uncomfortable. It’s still being discussed in the papers, and it’s lighting up the Internet. I’m not sure the Government will be able to lay the matter to rest between the pages of your report. You’ll be implicated in the disaster. You know my feelings about this business – it never goes away.

  There were four articles in all. They came out in the Sunday broadsheet Drake worked for in July and August. All dynamite, but lucky timing, for some, with Parliament in recess and the directorate of the Bank of England, also largely absent, agreeing by phone and fax from Long Island, Tuscany and Thailand to set up their reassuring Enquiry.

  I was a happy enough man before Drake’s accidental encounter with Tallinn. When I came back from my break after the shooting of Jethro I got back to work. And while I was away I’d met Colette – light of my life. I don’t deserve her. I’d seen Dominic, Joe and Fleur a couple of times. I felt like their jolly old uncle. Fleur had managed to hang on to her job and Dominic and Joe, though fired from the City job after the unexplained absence, got new jobs with a contractor working for a housing association. Fleur had even come to an accommodation with her old creditors, making arrangements to pay some of the debts off gradually. She told me that since the shooting she’d seen nothing of the Jethros.