Cut Out

by Marcia Woolf

  Dawn shifted uncomfortably behind the wheel. She turned to look at Ollie in the back. He scratched his ear.

  “Not exactly. If you must know, the day before she disappeared she contacted Ash Kumar and told him there was a file containing details of payments made to people who’d appeared on the Alphabet Game, but she hadn’t been able to match up the payments with the source of funding. You have to remember, Cookie, she was working as a PA. Same as you. There’s a limit to how much you can poke around without being too...”

  “Yeah, tell me about it. I wish you’d told me this earlier. That file – the one Susie was interested in – it’s missing.”

  “Missing! How do you know that?”

  “Because I was trying to find it. One of the very many exciting jobs I get to do there is filing. I found a note that Susie had written – I can’t remember exactly what was on it now, but she’d put it at the bottom of the filing tray. It looked like it belonged with the Alphabet Game papers, but the file wasn’t there. People take files away all the time and bring them back. I didn’t think it was significant. I imagined that anything in there would be legitimate. I mean, if you were defrauding people, why would you keep a file? Surely you’d not be keeping a list of all the details?”

  “Never mind that. Can you retrieve that paper and let us know what’s on it?”

  “It’ll still be where I left it.”

  Ollie looked puzzled.

  “How can you be so sure?”

  I laughed.

  “If I wanted to hide something from a man who worked in an office, I’d put it in the filing tray. That’s why they hire people like me, to do the crap admin. Susie wasn’t an idiot.”

  “Right. Well, off you go then.”

  Ollie patted me on the head, and I slapped him on the arm. Then he swung out of the back seat and headed off into the station, waving over his shoulder. Dawn turned the key in the ignition.

  “I’ll drop you near the tube.”

  “I really don’t want to do this, Dawn.”

  She pulled out into the line of traffic headed west.

  “You got yourself in there. Not all fun and games now, is it?”

  I looked to see if she was joking, but her face was set against the oncoming traffic.

  “Does Ollie know, that we know he’s been talking to Jack?”

  “I haven’t said a word. I’m afraid that one’s down to you as well.”

  “Don’t you think it’s material to the investigation?”

  “You want us to find out if Jack’s responsible for sending a hit man to have you killed, or have Ollie killed? Really?”

  I thought about it. It was starting to get up my nose, the number of times I’d had a conversation with DI Sayler and she’d been right about stuff. Jack could kiss his parole goodbye if he had tried a stunt like that. He’d be middle-aged and bald by the time he got out. I wondered if he had that sort of contact: if he’d got the means to contract a killer at such short notice. If he was angry enough, he’d be determined enough. There was no doubting that I’d crossed a line, but had he really wanted me dead?

  “Dawn, Ollie needs to know that it’s a possibility.”

  She pulled up outside Bank Station.

  “Fine. Well, we can discuss it later. I don’t know what’s worse: you telling him Jack’s tried to have you both killed or Ollie finding out I’ve been checking up on him at the prison. We’re supposed to trust each other.”

  “You weren’t checking up on him, specifically. It just came to light.”

  A taxi sounded its horn and Dawn gestured to me to hurry up and get out. She steered back into the traffic, and for a moment or two I stood watching as the Panda got swallowed up into the lines of cars. I was on my own.

  I hurried into the office at a minute past nine. Not that anybody noticed. Apart from Lucy Fleming, they were all in Nilsson’s office having their usual Wednesday morning team meeting. It seemed pretty insensitive to me, what with Leach’s glass-fronted office empty and the lights off. I fired up my PC and started on the work in my in-tray. I was surprised when Lucy trotted over and leaned towards me conspiratorially.

  “Are you okay?”

  I nodded, hoping she’d go away.

  “It’s awful, isn’t it? Poor Simon.”

  I nodded again. She sighed and rested her arm on the partition next to my desk.

  “I wonder why he did it.”

  I stopped typing, realising she wasn’t going to return to the reception area without more of a conversation.

  “No idea. He seemed fine to me.”

  “Yes, to me too.”

  Then she stopped, suddenly embarrassed.

  “Oh, I forgot. Your mother’s funeral. I’m so sorry. Was it...”

  “No, it was fine. She’d been ill for a long time.”

  “I didn’t realise. ”

  “It's not a thing I talked about.”

  I tried to look like I was busy and needed to get on, but she stayed, hovering. It was only when Nilsson’s office door opened and the team started to file out that Lucy retreated to her place, leaving me wondering if I’d misunderstood her. Maybe she wasn’t so bad after all.

  Later in the morning I had the chance to start hunting around in the files, under the pretext of looking for some financial statements. I knew where the statements were; neatly piled under a notebook on my desk, so that if Nilsson started demanding them I could appear efficient, but in the meantime I searched as inconspicuously as possible. The note Susie had left was, as I’d predicted, still at the bottom of the filing tray. Discreetly, I removed and scanned it as instructed, saved it to a folder called office procedures; another place I doubted Nilsson or any of his associates would be likely to come across it, but from where Ollie’s IT guys would be able to retrieve it should the original be ‘mislaid’. I printed off a copy, and when I got the opportunity I read it again, paying more attention this time.

  Proj. Alpha. Payments from Licht. Bank. Ref: Mayhem, Rosemary, Orient Express, Doyle, Ferdinand. Scarlatti?

  On the reverse, she’d written: Not Colorado, Benjamin or Dogger.

  I knew straight away that some of these, Mayhem, Orient Express and Colorado were project files. Probably that’s what the others were, too. What did Licht Bank mean? The only thing that came to mind was the Bank of Lichtenstein where I knew CBIB held accounts, but there was a mountain of stuff in the system relating to bank transactions that I doubted I could access and was pretty sure I wouldn’t be able to understand anyway. Since Susie seemed to have discounted Colorado, Benjamin and Dogger, I decided to take a look at project Ferdinand, which was helpfully lying on top of the folders to be returned to the cabinet. I flicked through the various sections, until I came to a page that was different. Neatly hole-punched and placed inconspicuously towards the back of the file, it contained a list of names and, next to each one, a row of figures: bank account numbers and sort codes, and next to each of these a number expressed as a percentage. None of the names meant anything to me, and I wondered if the page had been misfiled, but then I noticed in the bottom left-hand corner of the sheet Susie had written in her familiar script July #1. When I got a few minutes to myself towards the end of the day, I made a copy of the page, scanned it to the same office procedures folder, and returned the file to its proper place in the cabinet.

  When I got back to the flat, Ollie had let himself in using the spare key I’d had cut and was already viewing as a mistake; and he and Dawn were sitting in the kitchen, looking right at home. She’d made herself a coffee. He’d already opened a bottle, and slid a glass towards me.

  “Good day at the office, dear?”

  Dawn rolled her eyes. I ignored him and took off my coat.

  “I’ve been looking.”

  “And?”

  I opened my handbag and pulled out the copies of Susie’s note and the page from the Ferdinand file.

  “This is what Susie was working on. All these are project names. I think Licht. Bank refers to Bank
of Lichtenstein – CBIB hold a lot of client accounts there.”

  “I bet they do.”

  “Yeah, well. That’s the wonderful world of international finance for you. This page was in the Project Ferdinand folder. Susie’s written something in the corner. I think she’d got this page from somewhere else, made a copy and hidden it in Ferdinand near the back where nobody would come across it.”

  The two of them pored over it, heads almost touching across the table. I looked in the fridge for some olives.

  “Was this it?”

  “Oh, forgive me. I only managed to find one page. No, there’s probably a load more. I just need to go through some of the other files to look for them. This page only covers July. If these are the names and bank details of Alphabet Game winners, and these are their bank details, then I think the percentages refer to the proportion of money they got in July from the investment pot. You’ll have to track some of them down and see how much they received. If I’m right, you’ll be able to work out the size of the pot.”

  I took a sip of wine and eyed them both over the rim of the glass. Ollie started counting the names on the list.

  “Thirty-two names. That’s not even a year’s worth of winners, if they run the show every week.”

  “Correct. But we don’t know which winners these are. They could be from anywhere, not necessarily the UK. And since I don’t know which July is referred to in Susie’s note, it could be from the first year the show was on TV. Maybe that’s what the number one refers to: the first July. So if you work out how many weeks there were from the start of the show to the first July, that might tell you something.”

  Dawn stared at me.

  “You mean there could be hundreds of pages like this?”

  “S’possible.”

  Ollie gave one of those low whistles that I always think of as stagey.

  “Okay, we’ll get onto this first thing tomorrow. Won’t take us that long to track down the beneficiaries. I have to say though, even once we’ve found out who these accounts belong to, and even if we can confirm the amounts they received in whichever July this represents, there’s nothing to prove that they got the wrong amount.”

  I shrugged. That was always going to be the main difficulty. People who are getting free money tend not to worry about whether they’re being ripped off or not. Dawn was doodling on her notepad. I fetched some breadsticks and salami, and she started on them without paying any attention to what was going into her mouth. I watched Ollie to see if he’d noticed but he was still totting up the percentages on the Ferdinand list. Eventually Dawn said, “So, the TV companies are paying their money into CBIB’s bank account – or Nilsson’s bank account – or an account anyway, and then the money comes out of this Lichtenstein account – which may or may not be the one that the money was paid into in the first place – and the programme winners get something every month paid into their accounts.”

  Ollie waved his hand at her: he was still totting it all up.

  “Yes,” I said, “but you can soon find out which account the TV companies paid into, can’t you?”

  She nodded and continued, “and then Nilsson invests the money and every month he pays the dividend out to the winners in proportion to the amount they won, and that’s what’s recorded on this sheet. I wish I knew what this meant, though.”

  She pointed to a note in the margin. It looked like Susie’s handwriting, but I couldn’t be sure. Zero log on all. There were lines radiating out from it linking to some of the names.

  “So he’s using the TV companies’ money to invest, he’s paying out the dividends to the winners, and taking a percentage for himself. Sounds like a standard fund management agreement to me. I mean, aside from the fact that the winners are taking it all on trust, they don’t know how or where it’s invested or whether they’re getting their fair share. He’s not doing anything illegal, is he?”

  Dawn looked disappointed. I feared she’d just marked me down as the disingenuous face of capitalism.

  “The TV companies say he charges two per cent. Standard contract. Two per cent to cover administration costs and currency fluctuations.”

  Ollie sighed and started re-counting the percentages.

  “Shall I fetch you a calculator?”

  He glared at me and pushed the paper across the table to his colleague.

  “No. I’ve done this twice and I got the same number both times. Here, Dawn, you check it.”

  We waited.

  “Eighty-nine percent.”

  “Exactly.”

  “So where’s the other eleven per cent going?”

  I had an idea.

  “These names – the ones with the zero log comment – their share adds up to eleven percent, doesn’t it? It must mean these are the ones who are missing out.”

  We looked at each other. I went for the calculator.

  “Okay, the Alphabet Game has been running since when? 2012? And in how many countries?”

  “Twelve now, counting the UK.”

  “And it’s on every week of the year, give or take the odd week. So that’s six years and twelve countries, one winner every week – gives us approximately three thousand, seven hundred and forty-four winners. And if each of them wins an average of, say, ten thousand pounds, that means the TV companies have paid Nilsson a total of....”

  I hit the multiply button and turned the calculator round so they could both read it.

  “Thirty-seven million, four hundred and forty thousand.”

  Dawn shook her head.

  “Go on, check it. I admit that’s probably a bit over the top, because not all the countries have syndicated the show for as long as six years. Plus there’s the exchange rates to consider. However...”

  I took the calculator back and started tapping again.

  “Let’s assume that Nilsson, what with being a brilliant investor and all, manages to get a five per cent return on his money. He usually gets much more, but we won’t be greedy. So, every year he accumulates a dividend pot of one million, eight hundred and seventy-two thousand. Then, according to old Project Ferdinand here, he distributes eighty-nine percent to the lucky winners, which leaves eleven per cent to go into his pocketbook – two hundred and six thousand pounds, or thereabouts, completely free of charge and entirely funded by the TV companies. That’s his cut.”

  Ollie frowned.

  “It’s not much, is it? I mean, it sounds a lot, but for a guy like that, who’s turning round multi-million pound companies, that’s not even six months’ salary, is it? Seems like a lot of work and a hell of a risk for a couple of hundred thousand.”

  “That’s very true.”

  I refilled my glass, took a sip and winked at him.

  “So what do you reckon is really going down here, Mr Detective?”

  Ollie thought for a few minutes while I phoned for the inevitable takeaway and Dawn carried on working her way through the bar snacks. After a while he said, “This only came to light in the first place because some of the winners started getting smaller and smaller returns. So the likely thing is he’s been diverting a bigger and bigger percentage into his own pocket. He got greedy.”

  “There’s another possibility,” I said, “because I don’t think Nilsson’s stupid enough to get greedy. What about the secondary market? CBIB has investment clients, pension funds, family trusts and so on, and Nilsson has a reputation for making them a lot of money. It would be really helpful to him if he could sell on any of his clients’ investments that weren’t performing well. But to do that, he needs a buyer. So he sells any failing deals, the ones he’s not proud of, into the portfolios he manages for the Alphabet Game winners. Their returns go down, and his big clients get to keep the money-makers. He’s shoring up his reputation, buying out his own bad investments using someone else’s money.”

  Dawn tipped the last pretzel into her mouth and ran a finger round the bowl picking up crumbs. She hadn’t said anything for a while and I think we were both startled wh
en she spoke.

  “It’s your classic pyramid, though. Even if he is palming off his crap deals onto the little guys, the longer the show runs, the more winners there are, the bigger the investment pot... and he could be making a lot more. He can’t lose. What happens when you ratchet up the percentage?”

  Ollie did a quick calculation on his notepad and we all stood staring at the numbers on the table. Then the doorbell rang.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Wednesday 26th November

  Any Friend of Yours

  I opened it, expecting to find the pizza delivery – and there instead was Dirk.

  “Hey.”

  I’d completely forgotten about our Wednesday evening assignation; hadn’t booked a table or anything. He realised straight away and burst out laughing.

  “You forgot, right?”

  Before I could make any kind of excuse, the actual pizza delivery guy turned up and stood there behind Dirk, looking like he thought he’d come to the wrong flat. I waved some cash at him and he handed me the pizzas, then went back down the stairs with a very odd expression on his face. I guess Dirk’s cashmere coat and elderly Louis Vuitton case didn’t quite sit with the idea of two large Pepperoni specials and a Marinara.

  “Come in. I’m sorry – I’ve been at work today. I’ve got some friends round.”

  “What’s up with your lights?”

  Dirk squinted up as they flickered on and off, like the power was dipping.

  “No idea. They’ve been doing that for days.”

  Dirk left his case and coat in the hall and I led him into the kitchen, trying hard not to let any of the pizza boxes slide out of my grip. Dawn and Ollie looked pleased to see the food and frankly astonished to see Dirk coming in behind me.

  “Dawn, Ollie. This is Dirk Brenninkmeijer. He’s an old family friend. Dirk, this is Dawn Sayler and Ollie Sullivan.”

  They all shook hands and Dirk, bless him, didn’t utter a word about the fact that Dawn was in uniform. Talk about awkward. I cut the three pizzas into slices and put them onto serving plates while Ollie opened another bottle and fetched Dirk a glass. Dawn was busy scooping up all our notes and the calculator and shoving them into the dresser drawer. After a couple of minutes of polite chat, during which Dirk explained how we knew each other, he asked about Jack. Ollie looked alarmed and Dawn just stuffed another slice of pizza into her mouth and tried to look like she had no idea who we were talking about.