Exhausted, his eyes red-rimmed, Alex walked beside the river. He had worked day and night for a month, and now he was drained. He was due to move into his own house, but he waited for Edward to return, waited in trepidation and anger, combined with disbelief. The first two days of sifting through his brother’s files had been an eye-opener, but then it went beyond that. Edward Barkley had amassed a vast network of companies, many offshore, with so many people, so many illegal transactions, that Alex was stunned that his brother had got away with it. The frauds were like a spider’s web, weaving and interlocking. There were fake firms as fronts, covering insurance policies in Panama, Brazil... classic cases of ships losing cargoes, the losses obviously fictitious. In one case Edward had sold a cargo of olive oil to a small company at a very low price. The ship had put to sea and blown up, but as well as the insurance payment Edward had been paid for the cargo. Two more ships had supposedly gone down with their cargoes, only this time the ships didn’t even sink — oil streaks were left on the ocean, but the ships sailed into a port, were repainted, renamed and sold... and that was just one of Mr Edward Barkley’s scams. The list was endless, from small-time fiddles to big-time fraud. The details of the pay-offs read like a telephone directory: government officials, Lloyd’s underwriters, Stock Exchange runners. Edward had so many illegal businesses that Alex could hardly keep count.
The building firm employed two hundred men, and it paid wages for two hundred, but Edward actually had over five hundred men working for him on the construction side alone. He found it as beneficial to save two pounds as he did two million.
The Barkley Company actually owned only the fifteenth floor of the tower block, the rest belonged to different companies — but all those companies were, in fact, owned by Edward. Alex had seen turnaround businesses before, but this was on a different scale, in a different league... and the money was being constantly shifted, like dogs on a racetrack. The property developments were vast, the net spread right across London. Blocks of apartments were bought, given a lick of paint and sold again within days. Edward seemed to have a monopoly on blocks of flats coming up for sale — leaseholders were bought out, and the buildings were sold at three times the purchase price with vacant possession. Edward was pushing the property boom forward, but he held on to large areas of prime building land. To enable him to do this he had to have a very fast turnover on the properties.
Car parks appeared on bomb sites, bringing in an incredible amount of cash. Some of the takings were declared, the rest was diverted into housing developments. How could tax officers know how much money a car park took each day?
Alex went through lists of numbered companies in detail. They were on separate sheets, and were obviously smaller than the others Alex had examined. They had no names as such, simply code numbers, and it was obviously all some kind of fraud. The business ranged from toiletries to household and fancy goods for the wholesale trade. Under the heading of ‘Outlets’ were the same businesses again, plus over fifty warehouses dotted all over South London. Then there were scrapyards, transport companies, delivery companies... Alex calculated that the number of staff required to operate all these must run into hundreds. There were no names, no payroll details, no accounts. The scrapyards collected anything from household waste to industrial and government assignments. He began checking each one to try to make sense of it, and details of more fraudulent transactions began to emerge.
Many of the proceeds Edward had ploughed into housing estates, but no accounts were attached. Alex kept on matching tax numbers, and realized that Edward had been using false numbers and channelling goods in quick buy-and-sell transactions that, taken together, were so immense Alex could only surmise that he had been handling cash flows of between one and two million, and recorded none of it.
Miss Henderson buzzed through to Alex’s office. ‘Mr Edward has just returned, sir. You asked to be informed immediately.’
‘Thank you, Miss Henderson.’
Alex checked his watch, looked around his office. The whole room had been redesigned, with hi-tech equipment: telex machines, calculators, direct lines to the Stock Exchange, all modern and economical, streamlined and efficient. Alex pressed his fingertips together, drew a deep breath. He was going to have a showdown, and he wouldn’t back off.
Edward’s office door was ajar, the keys dangling in the lock. As Alex entered, he turned and waved for him to sit down. He was on the telephone, so Alex sat in a heavy leather wing chair and surveyed the room. He had not been in the office before, the door was kept locked. There were the same heavily built panelled walls, a carved stone mantel with a false coal fire, and a plum-red carpet. The desk was massive, with huge claw feet. A couple of wing chairs were the only other furniture in the room. The desktop was empty apart from a row of telephones. Alex smiled to himself at his brother’s obvious taste for the old-fashioned, old-world style of living; the room could have been lifted straight from the manor. Somehow it matched Edward — he was so tall, his frame running slightly to fat, but his shoulders were like an athlete’s. The ever-present cigar was sticking out of his mouth. ‘Fine, tell them we’re not interested... Yes, tell them that. They refused the first offer, tell them it goes down every week they delay, it’s up to them... Maybe, but I also happen to know the company’s going bankrupt, so we’ll see how they react... fine, call me.’
Edward replaced the phone and went to the fireplace, twisted a carved lion’s head on the mantel. ‘I had this made, you like it? It’s my safe.’
The safe was concealed behind a portrait in oils, and Alex thought the subject was the Duke of Wellington.
Edward removed some files from the safe. ‘Right, this is it, more or less. It’ll take time for you to sift through them all, but you’ll have to. The accountants are listed along with the documents — different man for each section, but you’ll take responsibility for them overall.’
He went back and forth to the safe, stacking ever more files on the desk. Lights flickered on the phones, but Edward paid them no attention. ‘Got something for you, one for you, one for me... had ‘em made specially.’
He opened a drawer in his desk, took out a small leather case. ‘We’ve changed our names, but we must never forget where we came from. Whenever things go bad — God, hope they never do, but if they ever should, this’ll help. One look at it’ll make things all right, because we can never go back — we never want to, but I’m not ashamed, it’s necessary.’
Alex couldn’t think what he was working up to and was surprised when, for a brief second, Edward looked vulnerable. He went to stand by his brother’s side.
Edward continued, ‘Remember Dad saying about how they buried the Romanies’ precious things with them? Well, I buried her necklace in the grave.’ He opened the small leather box, and unwrapped some tissue paper. ‘I went back, about a month ago, dug it up — I made it all neat again, so don’t worry. I had these made up from the gold, one for you, one for me.’ He held out a small gold medallion on a fine gold chain. Alex turned it over — it was only the size of a sixpence, and engraved on it was the single word, ‘Stubbs’. Edward slipped his own on and tucked it down inside his shirt collar. ‘Put it on, after all the trouble I went to get it. Go ahead, put it on.’
Without a word, Alex slipped the chain around his neck.
Abruptly, Edward sat down in his leather chair, swung around and tapped the files on the desk. ‘South Africa’s wide open, doing a few deals, should have some good results by next week... They still live in fucking mud huts. We start a housing project over there... Alex my old son?’ Receiving no reply, he looked searchingly at Alex. ‘Something wrong? What’s up?’