Silent Money Read online

  Michael sat back and watched the two of them in action. Manning lit his pipe and flicked through the barber’s bank accounts while Audrey concentrated on the calculations. She was a jolly-hockey-sticks sort of woman. Probably early thirties, but looked a lot older.

  ‘Hmm, yes, hmm yes,’ Manning said at regular intervals, writing down a sentence or two. Michael answered a few questions about the account, clarifying some file notes that weren’t clear. When Manning picked up the Alba Transport file, Michael did his best to feign indifference as the ‘hmms’ were higher in pitch, and the sentences he was writing turned into paragraphs.

  ‘Seem to make a pretty penny, these chaps.’

  Michael glanced at the file as if to remind himself.

  ‘Yes, if that’s what it says.’

  ‘And they’re about to expand, you say?’

  ‘Yes, I think so. That’s what Mr Mason told me, at least. Big acquisition plans. I only met the proprietor for a few minutes because Mr Mason had to dash off for a meeting. They’ve opened a second account to deposit any excess cash in hand to earn a little interest, which has just one transaction so far. You can see it here.’ He leant over to point to the transfer amount. ‘Might become an important customer, so I presume Mr Mason wanted to show we try to do our best for them.’

  ‘This chap runs a tight ship,’ Manning said, puffing on his pipe. Michael found the acerbic smoke suffocating, nauseating. He was beginning to regret his earlier cockiness at volunteering his new operation for scrutiny.

  Manning paused, then wrote some notes on his pad. ‘Yes, remarkable. If he carries on like this, he’ll do very well with his plans.’

  ‘Hmm. Audrey, be a dear and do this one next, will you?’ Manning said as he put down the file. ‘Just popping off to the little boys’ room, back in a minute.’ He picked up the third file, the car dealership, laid it on top of his notes and left the room.

  Michael was desperate to see what he had written, but that would mean moving the file. After a short while Manning returned and read through the third file quickly. A noticeable lack of hmms.

  By three o’clock the audit was over and Michael, Manning and Audrey filed into Mason’s office to go over the conclusions.

  ‘Well, Ian,’ said Manning, ‘that’s it over for another year. Everything checks out – your branch keeps excellent records. And Michael here is on top of all the detail. Made my job easy. I might even be able to catch the earlier train.’

  ‘Saves me a lot of time, does Michael,’ said Mason. ‘Does a great job.’

  Michael remained impassive, refusing to acknowledge Mason’s condescending praise.

  ‘You’ve got your Michael, I’ve got my Audrey. Wonderful girl, saves me from learning all this new-fangled computer stuff.’ Mason and Manning laughed together, as if Audrey and Michael weren’t in the room. Audrey gave Michael a sympathetic glance. It made him feel even angrier.

  Manning turned to acknowledge them. ‘If you’ll excuse me, I’ll get Mr Mason’s signature on the compliance forms. Would you be a dear, Audrey, and wait outside? And good to meet you, Michael.’

  Michael took that as a sign that he too had been dismissed.

  He was heading back to his desk when he caught Audrey looking at him. The slightest of glances, but it was enough. He smiled back.

  ‘How long does this take?’ he asked Audrey.

  ‘Five minutes, maybe ten. Unless they get talking, in which case I can be standing here forever.’

  ‘We can’t have that. Let’s have a coffee and you can tell me about that calculator you were using. Never seen it used before, very impressive. Sits in our office gathering dust, I’m afraid. It’s portable enough that you can carry it from room to room, and it’s able to do even long division in an instant? Remarkable.’

  Michael wasn’t the least bit interested in calculators or Reverse Polish notation, but their conversation served its purpose. By the time Manning emerged from Mason’s meeting room, he had Audrey’s home telephone number and a promise to meet up in Edinburgh the following week. Another source of vital intelligence was on its way to being secured.

  Michael watched as the pair left, Manning clutching his briefcase and the documents that meant, despite specific scrutiny, he regarded Alba Transport as an account beyond reproach.

  So that was it. A once-a-year superficial glance at a fraction of the bank’s customers. The response to every query unquestioned, unchallenged. A virtually non-existent taxi firm doing business on a scale that would mean they should be seen on every Glasgow street, and no one was batting an eyelid.

  It was time to expand the operation.

  chapter seven

  Michael met Ron the next day at a park bench in the Botanic Gardens, on a rare sunny Glasgow lunchtime. A few people were picnicking on the lawns, pretending it was warm.

  ‘We had our annual internal inspection at the bank and I had a couple of auditors from our head office take a good long, hard look at Alba Transport,’ he told Ron. ‘Didn’t suspect a thing, they went on about what a well-run company it appeared to be. It’s amazing what you can make people believe if you position it right.’

  Ron’s eyes narrowed. ‘You had them look at my business? I thought the key to this was to keep a low profile.’

  ‘It was the perfect test of whether this is going to work,’ Michael replied. ‘And if there had been any suspicions I would have been on the inside of the investigation, able to tip you off. It would have been a lot easier to pull the plug on the operation while it’s still early days. Call it a necessary calculated risk.’ Michael shrugged to signify the discussion was over.

  Ron was having none of it.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘A risk that I might get caught. You shouldn’t have done it, Michael. Not without telling me first.’

  A couple walking by turned to see what the ruckus was.

  ‘Keep your voice down,’ Michael hissed. ‘There was a risk for me as well, Ron. If anyone had checked the microfiche records, they would have found the current set of bank statements had been faked. Only someone in the branch could have done that.’

  ‘It’s not the way it should be, that’s all I’m saying. We shouldn’t have secrets.’

  ‘No secrets? Then let me ask you this. What’s the story about the ten grand you moved out of the transit account into a bank account I didn’t recognise? Have you been freelancing?’

  That put Ron on the defensive. ‘I was paying back a favour. It’s Billy Carlisle’s money. A mate. We go back a long way. He came into a wodge of money and I said if he opened a bank account to stash it, I’d pay it in for him, so he’d have no worries about trying to bank the cash. Less our commission, of course. My turn to take a calculated risk, if you like. I can trust him to keep his mouth shut, but I wanted to know if punters would be up for our deal before I approach the real gangsters. To make sure I wasn’t going to make an arse of myself asking some of Glasgow’s hard men if they’d trust me with their money.’

  ‘And you did this without asking me?’ Michael shook his head. ‘That doesn’t happen again. I need to know about everything that’s going through your bank account before it happens. You don’t decide anything on that side of the operation.’

  ‘Billy’s okay. And it’s my bank account.’ Ron stabbed a finger at Michael. ‘I don’t like how you think you’re in charge of everything, all of a sudden. It was a partnership you offered me, remember? I’m not your fucking skivvy.’

  Michael’s tone softened. ‘You’re right. You run the street operation; I don’t want anything to do with that. But I run the banking side. I say when we do business, how much the process can cope with, and how we do it. And that means you don’t pull another stunt like that without me giving the okay.’

  A few seconds’ silence, then Ron said, ‘So, what happens next? Put an ad in tomorrow’s Glasgow Herald saying we’re open for busi
ness?’

  ‘Not quite. I’m doing some research about how we go from cottage industry to major-league operation. With a conscientious, hard-working accountant who works in the bank’s audit department. And I’ve got something going on with one of my student customers. Her father is high up in the Fraud Squad and doesn’t mind confiding to his prospective son-in-law what the police are looking out for from dodgy banking. Between the two of them, I’m going to learn every scam in the book and every trick we can play to keep one step ahead.’

  ‘Meanwhile, I’m to meet the city’s criminals in dark alleys to convince them to trust us with their money? It sounds like I’ve got the raw end of the deal.’

  ‘We each do what we’re good at. I want to get as much information as quickly as possible, and this seems the best way to do it. We’ve had the audit, so we don’t have to worry when Alba’s turnover goes through the roof. You get on with making your contacts and let’s make some money.’ Michael offered his hand to signal the end of the meeting. It was the first time they had shaken hands.

  * * *

  It was a gradual start, but soon the cash started to pour in. The proposition was simple: a client handed over their money and got eighty per cent of it back as a cheque, which they were able to pay into a bank account of their choosing, no questions asked. This bank account was never to have any connection to their regular banking. That way, if any client were to end up in jail, the money would be safely waiting for them when they came out – as long as they kept denying its existence. And if they did decide to grass and the operation had to be closed down, they’d have the wrath of the rest of the clients who used the scheme descend on them, and on their friends and relatives on the outside. It was to be a private club for professional operators who wanted to keep cash hidden and who would spend it discreetly; hotheads and nutcases need not apply. Ron was the scheme’s only visible face; Michael stayed hidden in the background.

  With Audrey, Michael portrayed the image of a hard-working, but slightly dull bank employee, someone whose job was their life and whose conversation was limited almost exclusively to talking shop. Right from the start, he had told her about Mary, and that he wanted their relationship to be platonic. Things would be less complicated that way. He vaguely mentioned to Mary that he saw a business colleague after work when he went through to Edinburgh on some banking errand, name and gender unspecified, and left it at that. Weighing up the risks and benefits of asking Audrey to sleep with him, or telling Mary more about her, had been a matter of calculation, like any other business assessment. Feelings didn’t come into it.

  His decision about Audrey turned out to be a smart one. If she was disappointed that he showed no inclination to make the relationship any more than a social, work-related acquaintanceship, she never showed it. It made it easier to keep their discussions about banking, rather than having to expend any effort on finding common emotional ground between them. Audrey turned out to be a gold mine of information about the ways people were using banks to hide their money: import-export operations, with an overseas accomplice creating inflated invoices and then banking the surplus to send back to the launderer; taking out an insurance policy and then instantly redeeming it and receiving a sanitised cheque; changing pounds into foreign currencies and back into pounds, starting off as cash and coming back as a cheque. Audrey’s knowledge was encyclopaedic. And mainly theoretical. The number of times a customer had been identified and arrested for using any of these techniques in the two years she’d been an assistant auditor could be counted on the fingers of one hand.

  He had to work hard to look interested in their other topics of conversation. Audrey was a keen member of the Woman’s Institute and had a passion for needlework, neither of which Michael found it easy to feign interest about. She was a devotee of Sidney Devine, and was moved to tears every time she heard him sing ‘I’m Nobody’s Child’. Michael decided it was best not to get into discussions about Shostakovich and the works of Frederick Nietzsche.

  After the meetings, which invariably took place at Audrey’s favourite tea shop in the Royal Mile, Michael would make notes of everything she had told him, to be filed away for future use. For the moment the plan was to keep things simple, running the new operation as a sideline, using Ron’s business as a cover. As long as he kept learning, he’d stay working at the bank, and he liked being around to pick up any whispers of suspicion. One day he would experiment with the new schemes that Audrey had told him all about. One day. In the meantime, he’d remain, to all appearances, a dutiful and diligent bank employee.

  Mary’s father was also full of useful and encouraging information. Sunday lunch was becoming a ritual, and Michael noticed with amusement that there was usually an extra family member invited along to size up the man in Mary’s life who was making so much effort to get to know the family. All for a few brief, precious minutes with Mary’s father when Michael invariably steered the conversation to whatever fraud cases were in the news. He was guarded at their first few meetings, but Michael explained that bank fraud was a particular interest of his; that he was hoping an opportunity would open up for him to move into that part of the bank’s business. He complained about how frustrating it was that banks were being short-sighted in resisting efforts to becoming more proactive in fighting crime.

  ‘Well, Michael, you’ll be pleased to hear that the banks are coming around to your way of thinking,’ Mary’s father said one Sunday lunch. ‘This is supposed to be completely hush-hush, but the Chief Constable had a meeting with all the Scottish banks’ managing directors the other week. They met to discuss setting up a voluntary code of conduct to report financial crime. Stick to your guns, Michael. You’ll be finding lots of opportunities to fight fraud soon enough.’

  Michael was on instant alert. ‘Excellent news, Mr Campbell,’ he said. ‘I’m pleasantly surprised. I’ve not heard anything about it, and we only had our internal audit people in the branch a few weeks ago. What is it we’re going to do?’

  The question was a little too direct. ‘Sorry, Michael. I’ve already said more than I should have. It’s meant to be known to only a few people at the banks. Take it as a nod as to the direction you should be taking when you’re thinking of your next move at the bank.’

  ‘Well, it’s kind of you to take me into your confidence. I’m flattered. Don’t worry, I don’t want to know any more. I won’t say a word.’

  He was straight on the phone to Audrey as soon as he left. Sunday afternoon was his time for sorting things out at home, he told Mary, and catching up with any unfinished work from during the week. This explained why he always rushed off after his chats with her father, and why he didn’t ask her back to the flat. In reality, it was when he did most of his money-laundering admin. Today, as always, there was a lot of pressing stuff to deal with, but this was something he needed to see Audrey about urgently.

  ‘I’m going to be busy on Wednesday,’ he told her from the first phone box he could find. ‘But how about tomorrow instead? I can be on the train at five if I get away early from the office. Be in Edinburgh just after six.’

  He was aching to find out if Audrey could fill in the blanks of what Campbell had told him, but waited until their evening together was almost over before bringing it up.

  ‘Has your job changed, or something?’ he asked as he settled up the bill. ‘I’m hearing something about Royal Clydeside being involved with the other banks to give more help to the police to fight fraud. Are you involved?’

  Audrey stopped munching her Tunnocks Teacake.

  ‘My goodness, Michael, how on earth did you hear about that? Yes, Mr Manning told me something, but he swore me to absolute secrecy. Told me I needed to know because we’d be getting more staff, but that at the moment he and I were the only two outside of the board to be let in on it. How on earth did you find out?’

  ‘Oh, I’d better not say. But you can probably guess. There’s only one per
son at our branch who would know what’s discussed in confidence at a board meeting.’ Might as well drop a hint that Mason can’t be trusted with secrets while I’m at it, Michael thought. ‘So, what’s going on? Sounds exciting.’

  ‘Well, I shouldn’t say …’ She waited for Michael to agree with her, but he said nothing, leaving it to her to fill the uncomfortable silence. ‘Oh, all right then. But promise not to breathe a word?’

  Michael held a finger to his mouth, smiling as his stomach tied itself in knots.

  ‘There was this big meeting, the managing directors of all the banks plus all the company secretaries. They’ve been getting some heat from the government to come up with an industry code of conduct to combat fraud and money laundering, so they got together to discuss what they could come up with, and how they might cooperate. It’s never been done before, apparently.’

  Michael maintained his fixed smile. ‘Seems extraordinary. And what did they decide?’ He tried to keep the stress out of his voice.

  ‘Michael, I shouldn’t be telling you this.’

  Michael remained silent again until Audrey found herself having to speak to fill the uncomfortable void.

  ‘It isn’t much really,’ she confessed. ‘We’re to check every business that turns over more than five-hundred-thousand pounds a year. If any of them have more than half their dealings in cash we go through their accounts with a fine-tooth comb, and can ask the other banks to check the details of any accounts they pay into. Mr Manning is all excited; he’s going to get another five like me working for him. Though there’s probably not more than a handful of the bank’s customers that size who do so much in cash.’

  Michael did a quick calculation in his head. Alba Transport was safe, but it wouldn’t be for long at the rate it was growing.

  ‘I hope it’s good news for you too, Audrey. Glad you told me, you need to make sure you do well out of it, if you and Manning are going to grow into a fully fledged department. It’s only biggish customers that are involved? I doubt it would affect many of my bank’s customers.’