The Marketmaker

32

The taxi fare to Dockenbush Farm was huge. I paid off the driver and steadied myself before walking up to the door. It was a warm summer night, with stars and moon illuminating the farmhouse in front of me. Pools of light spilled out of two downstairs windows on to the gravel driveway. An owl called from somewhere above and behind me.

Ricardo had known it was Jamie, I thought. As soon as I had told him about Francisco, he had worked it out. Alejo was Jamie’s account, ostensibly acting for a secretive Mexican family. But, in reality, Alejo worked for Francisco. Luciana had indeed been Francisco’s intermediary, but with Jamie, not Ricardo. She had known Ricardo wouldn’t do business with her brother. Now Francisco was scared and, through Alejo, was selling everything he had with Dekker Trust.

And Ricardo had let me know this, to give me a chance to get to Jamie first. I was sure I could rely on Ricardo to deal with Francisco.

I rang the bell.

It took a while before he answered. He had changed out of his suit into jeans and an old denim shirt. He leaned against the door.

‘Oh, it’s you. I thought someone would come, but I didn’t think it would be you.’

He reeked of whisky. His eyes were shining, but not quite focused. I had seen Jamie the worse for wear many times before. This looked like another one.

‘Can I come in?’

‘Sure.’ He led the way through the hallway, and into the sitting room. Music was playing: I recognized a Leonard Cohen album that I hadn’t heard since we were at university. It had been a favourite with Jamie for about a term, and then he had forgotten it.

He slumped into an armchair. A crystal tumbler of whisky three-quarters full perched on a small table next to him.

‘Have a drink,’ he said.

I fetched the bottle, and went into the kitchen for some ice. Several days’ dishes were piled in the sink, and used Marks and Spencer’s packets cluttered the work surfaces. Kate had been gone for ten days. The house missed her.

Jamie was staring at me as I returned. I sat opposite him. Leonard droned in the background.

‘Isabel’s free,’ I said.

‘Is she OK?’

‘Yes. Considering she spent two months locked up in a tiny space.’

‘Good,’ said Jamie. He looked up at me. ‘You know, don’t you?’

I nodded.

He sighed, and swilled his whisky around, before sipping some. ‘I’m glad they looked after her. They told me they would.’

‘By “they”, you mean Francisco?’

Jamie nodded. ‘How much do you know?’

‘I know that Francisco opened an account with Dekker Trust through you to launder money. The account was managed by Alejo in Miami, who you claimed worked for some rich Mexican family you’d known since you were at Gurney Kroheim. He did huge business with you. Then, I suppose, Martin Beldecos began to get suspicious.’

Jamie snorted. ‘He was a jerk. So officious! If he’d been like any normal compliance guy, we wouldn’t have had a problem. But he always checked on everything. And if he’d found proof, he would have gone straight to the authorities. There would have been no chance of getting Ricardo or Eduardo to cover anything up.’

‘Did he find anything?’

‘He was getting there. He wanted to visit Alejo in Miami after he’d been to Caracas.’

‘So you had him killed.’

Jamie bit his lip. ‘I didn’t want him killed. But Francisco insisted. I didn’t want him to do it.’

‘And me? What about me? You wanted me killed as well?’

‘No,’ said Jamie. ‘No.’ He shook his head, staring straight at me. He sighed. ‘Francisco wanted you dead. I’d told him how close you were to figuring out what was happening. When you mentioned you wanted to talk to me about a fax for Martin Beldecos, I looked for it in your desk and took it. But I knew you’d work it all out in the end.’

He gulped his whisky. ‘I told Francisco it had been stupid to kill Martin. It raised the stakes. Suddenly it wasn’t just a white-collar crime we were on the line for, it was murder. Two murders would be obvious. But he went ahead with it anyway. When I found out what had happened to you in Brazil, I was furious with him. But there wasn’t much I could do by then.’

I believed him. ‘So why did you kidnap Isabel?’

Jamie glanced up at me. ‘It wasn’t Isabel we were trying to kidnap. It was you.’

‘Me?’

‘Yes. It was the only way I could think of of taking you out of the picture and keeping you alive. I told Francisco it would give us time to cover our tracks and allow the trail to go cold. And if we hadn’t kidnapped you, Francisco would have had you killed by now. I knew you’d told Isabel a lot about what you’d found out, so it seemed a good idea to take her as well.’

I remembered telling Jamie I had discussed Francisco Aragão with her. And to think he’d told me I couldn’t trust her!

‘Besides, Isabel was the perfect cover,’ he went on. ‘It made it seem like this was a standard Rio kidnapping. And it worked, too. Even after you escaped, you were so taken up with the negotiations that you forgot about all the other stuff.’

‘Why didn’t you release her?’

‘I wanted to. But after the police raided the kidnappers’ hideout, Francisco wanted her killed. And the kidnappers themselves wanted a ransom first. It was a real mess.’ He looked up from his glass, willing me to understand. His face was pale and lined as he recalled the strain of the last few weeks. It was amazing I hadn’t noticed it before; he had hidden it well.

‘So that’s why the ransom demand dropped so fast at the end?’

‘Yes. But we reached a compromise. We’d keep her alive, but in captivity, and we’d let her family and Dekker think she was dead.’

‘All the time I was staying in this house, asking you what you thought was going on, you knew where she was?’

Jamie nodded. ‘At least I could keep an eye on you here. And when I saw you were getting nowhere with the authorities, I was relieved. Until I read the Bloomfield Weiss documents on Dekker you left lying around. I couldn’t let that go ahead. If Dekker had been taken over our little scheme would have been found out in no time.’

‘And you used Isabel to force me to get the takeover called off?’

Jamie stared at his glass. ‘It was worth a try. We had to do something.’

I sat back in the chair, drinking my whisky. Here, alone with Jamie, having a quiet drink in his house as I’d done so many times before, it seemed absurd that we were discussing money-laundering, kidnap, murder. Three months ago this part of Jamie’s life, what he did in the City between seven in the morning and eight at night, had meant nothing to me. Now I knew.

‘Why?’ I asked.

‘What do you mean, why?’

‘Why did you do all this?’

Jamie sighed. He stood up and refilled his glass, leaving just a small amount in the bottom of the bottle, which he tipped into mine.

‘One thing led to another. I mean, when Luciana told me Francisco wanted to open an account without Ricardo knowing about it, it seemed like a good idea. Of course I could guess where the money came from, but what did I care? It was new business, business that Ricardo couldn’t get for himself. And it turned out to be huge. You saw how much turnover Alejo did. We were so successful that Francisco kept on coming up with more and more funds. Of course I didn’t ask where he was getting them.’

Probably the Colombian and Venezuelan contacts Luís had heard about, I thought.

‘And I didn’t understand why Ricardo wouldn’t deal with Francisco. I mean, Ricardo wins business by breaking the rules. It seemed to me that not dealing with someone just because he had a bad reputation was a mistake. You can’t afford to be picky in this business.’

‘Can’t you?’ It seemed to me that, as in all things, Ricardo knew just when to be picky.

Jamie shrugged. ‘Well, you’re right. I made a mistake. It seemed easy at the time. Dekker is set up to confuse auditors and investigators. If bloody Beldecos hadn’t come along, we would have been fine.’

Jamie ran his hands through his hair. His face was gaunt and his eyes were staring. ‘And then it all went wrong. Especially when I let Francisco... deal with Martin. Then it went really wrong.’

He looked at me, staring. ‘It was weird, you know. It was like leading two completely different lives. Most of the time I was working normally, talking to you, being with Kate and Oliver, behaving like any other investment banker. And then I had all this other stuff going on that looked all the time as if it was going to blow up, but somehow I kept it all together. Until now.’

‘Until now.’

‘So what are you going to do, Nick?’

He looked at me, eyes pleading, what for, he didn’t seem to know. A way out, probably, a way out where he had been able to find none.

‘I don’t know.’ And I didn’t. It was too much to take in.

We sat in silence, his eyes fixed on mine. They showed a cocktail of emotions bubbling inside him: guilt, remorse, anger, fear, loneliness, self-pity. They were all there, agitated by the alcohol.

‘I need a slash,’ he said, and staggered to his feet.

I waited for him. The house was quiet, save for the owl hooting outside, and the scarcely audible tick of a clock on the mantelpiece. Leonard had ground to a halt. I sat immobile trying to sort it all out in my mind. How could Jamie, who had been such a good friend over all these years, have done this? To me. To himself. It was absurd. Incredible.

A thought drifted through my mind, like a cold gust of air, that made me physically shiver. It wasn’t absurd. It had happened. And, knowing Jamie as I did, I could see how. Jamie was ambitious, and he liked to take risks. And up till now they’d always worked. He was charming, intelligent, hard-working, the probabilities fell his way. He was lucky. If he could land Francisco’s account, and others like it, he’d build up his own business, get that million-dollar bonus, who knows, maybe even become another Ricardo one day. To him, money was money. The lives ruined and ended by the international drugs trade were an abstraction about which fuzzy intellectuals like me might worry, but not Jamie. He wouldn’t get caught. Not Jamie.

The same with Luciana. He could seduce Ricardo’s wife and get away with it. No one would catch him. Not Jamie.

But he had been caught. By me. And what was I going to do about it?

I heard Jamie come back into the room. I turned. The glass slipped from my fingers as I saw what he was carrying.

A shotgun.

He walked over to where he had been sitting, and swung the barrel towards me. His eyes were staring straight at me. The emotion that had been brewing in them seemed to have frozen into a fixed intensity. God, he’s going to shoot me, I thought.

‘Jamie. I’m your friend. Let me help you,’ I said.

He raised the gun towards me, hesitated, then swung it back towards his face.

‘No!’ I shouted.

But he pulled the trigger.