"Page eight," he said, and tossed the bankbook at me.
I turned to page eight. It was the statement covering September 1993, which was the month when the Office paid Larry his hard-earned gratuity: £150,000, drawn on the account of Mills & Highborn, Trustees, of St. Helier, Jersey, wiping out an overdraft of £3,728.
"Do you have any idea at all," Luck demanded, "where, how, or why Dr. Pettifer got hold of one hundred and fifty thousand pounds sterling in September 1993?"
"None. Why not ask the people who made the payment?"
My suggestion annoyed him. "Mills and Highborn, thank you, is one of your old-fashioned, blue-chip, father-to-son Channel Islands law firms. Partners do not like talking to policemen and are not disposed to hand out customer information without a court order effective in the Islands. However—"
Upstaging him, Bryant placed his forearms on the table, squaring himself for combat.
"However," Luck repeated, "my researches do reveal that the same firm of trustees has also been paying Pettifer an annual salary, apparently on the instructions of certain foreign publishing and film companies registered in funny places like Switzerland. Does that surprise you at all?"
"I don't know why it should."
"Because the so-called salary payments were bogus, that's why. Pettifer never did the work. Foreign book royalties for books he didn't even write. Retainer money that didn't retain him. The entire structure was a figment from start to finish, and not a very competent one either, if you want my opinion. You haven't any theories to offer, I don't suppose, at all, have you, Mr. Cranmer, as to who might be going to all this trouble on the Doctor's behalf?"
I had none and was quick to say so. And I was appalled to confirm that the Top Floor's vaunted arrangements for paying Larry his Judas money could, as I had always suspected, be cracked open in a couple of days by one fanatical policeman with a desktop computer.
"There's a very funny thing about this firm Mills and Highborn which I might be permitted to share with you," Luck resumed with dinning sarcasm. "One of its fringe activities, so far as we can establish from certain sources, is channelling unofficial payments on behalf of Her Majesty's government." My world rocked. "By which I mean receiving large cash sums from Her Majesty's Treasury and turning them into other forms of disbursement"—sticking out his jaw at me on the word Treasury—"such as bribes for foreign potentates, such as slush funds for defence contracts and other so-called grey areas of government spending. You wouldn't know anything about that side of things. would you? Mr. Bryant and myself were somewhat enchanted by the coincidence, you see, of you being in Treasury and British government funds being siphoned off to Pettifer's Channel Islands benefactors."
In my wildest nightmares it had not occurred to me that Pay & Allowances Section could be so crass as to use the Larry laundromat for other, unrelated clandestine operations, thus multiplying to infinity the risk of compromising Larry and anybody else on the payroll.
"I'm afraid all this is far beyond me," I said.
"Maybe you'll tell us what isn't beyond you, then," Bryant suggested coarsely. "You being a high-ranking Treasury gentleman, which is about all we're allowed to know about you."
"I've no idea what you are trying to imply."
"Imply? Me? Oh, nothing, nothing, Mr. Cranmer-sir. That would be above my station. Very heady stuff, Treasury slush money, they tell me. Well, I can understand that. After all, if you're slipping a few million to some Arab shyster for helping you flog off your clapped-out fighter planes, why not slip yourself a few bob for being an English gentleman? Or slip it to your accomplice, better still?"
"That's a scandalous and totally untrue allegation.”
“Page thirteen," Luck said.
* * *
"Notice anything?" Luck asked.
It was hard not to. Page thirteen of Larry's bankbook covered the month of July 1994. Until the twenty-first of that month Larry's current account stood at upwards of £140,000. On the twenty-second Larry had withdrawn £138,000, leaving £2,176 to his credit.
"What do you make of it?"
"Nothing. He probably bought a house."
"Wrong."
"He invested it. What do I care?"
"On the twenty-second of July, having advised the manager of his intention by telephone two days before, Dr. Pettifer drew the entire sum of one hundred and thirty-eight thousand pounds in cash across the counter of his bank, in brown envelopes of twenty-pound notes. He refused to accept fifties. He had failed to bring a container, so the cashier had a whip round among the girls till one of them produced a Safeways carrier bag, into which the envelopes were stashed. The next day he paid one thousand pounds cash to his landlady and settled four outstanding bills, including his wine bill. The destination of the remainder of the cash—totalling one hundred and thirty thousand pounds precisely—is as of now unknown."
Why? I was thinking stupidly. What logic is at work here, when a man who is swindling the Russian Embassy of thirty-seven millions has to empty his own bank account for a hundred and thirty thousand? For whom? For what?
"Unless he gave it to you, of course, Mr. Cranmer," Bryant proposed from the head of the table.
"Or unless it was yours in the first place," Luck suggested.
"Not legally, of course," said Bryant. "But we're not talking legal, are we? More the thieves' code. You fiddled it. The Doc banked it. He was your winger. Your accomplice. Right?"
I disdained to reply, so he continued in his tone of laboured knowingness.
"You're a money bug, aren't you, Mr. Cranmer, sir? Magpie is what I like to call them. You've got a lot, but you want more. Way of the world, isn't it? You sit there in the Treasury all day, or you did. You see these big piles of money going here, there, and everywhere, and a lot of them doing no good, I dare say. And you say to yourself: 'Now, Timothy, wouldn't a little of that be better in my pocket than in theirs?' So you fiddle a bit. And no one notices. So you fiddle another bit. A bigger bit. And still no one notices. So as a good businessman you expand. Well, we can't stand still, can we, not in this day and age. No one can. Not human nature, is it? Not after Mrs. Thatcher. And one day an opportunity arises, let us say, for you to break into a certain foreign market. A market where you speak the lingo and have the expertise. Like Russia, for instance. So you pull the big one. You and the Doctor and a certain foreign gentleman of his acquaintance who calls himself Professor. Experts in your ways, all of you. But Mr. Cranmer-sir is the mastermind. The Mister Big. He has the class. The cool. The rank. Am I getting warm at all, sir? You can tell us. We're little people, aren't we, Oliver?"
When you are accused of monstrous things, nothing sounds so feeble as the truth. I had devoted my working life to protecting my country from its predators. Now I was being cast as a predator myself. I had never misappropriated a single penny entrusted to me. Now I was being accused of squirrelling large sums in the Channel Islands and paying them to myself by way of my former agent. Yet as I heard myself protest my innocence, I sounded like any other guilty man. My voice slipped and became strident, my fluency deserted me, I became as unconvincing to myself as to my accusers. Well, that's the way of it, I heard Merriman say: punished for the crimes we never committed while we get away with grand larceny somewhere else.
"We're only thinking aloud, Mr. Cranmer, sir," Bryant explained with elephantine sweetness, when they had heard me out. "No charges are being preferred, not at this stage. It's collaboration we're after, not warm bodies. You tell us where to find what we're looking for, we put it back where it came from, everybody goes home and has a nice glass of Honeybrook wine. Know what I mean?"