Connections (41 page)

The biggest problem of a person with a lot of illicit cash is over at once if they can find a banker willing to take it. It goes through the system and comes out clean. As it is no doubt becoming clear from my story, Jethro did it for Tallinn.

Jones, during the period where Jethro was accepting ten to twenty million dollars a year from Tallinn, must have had to work like a dog to get rid of it – buying property and businesses in the UK, creating offshore accounts, hiding the money in Greek Cyprus. All the time he knew every move he made was illegal.

However, instead of heading for the airport, he loyally turned up at Eaton Square that night to help Strauss. Strauss must have told him of his sensible strategy. First, they would bury the worst and the easiest of the funds and secondly they would make a full disclosure of what they couldn't hide to the Bank of England. Jones must have seen that, dead or alive, Jethro was going to get the blame and one of his motives for offering his help may have been to minimise the consequences to his boss. Another, to reduce the amount of evidence against himself.

I'm no expert in all this, but what I heard was told me by a broker friend I met for a meal in the summer, when I thought all this was over. He said he thought that Jethro's association with Tallinn must have begun in the early nineties, as the recession took hold and full economic collapse began. Strauss Jethro Smith found itself in dire straits. Bank of England regulations state that only ten per cent of a bank's capital should be out on loan. Once the loans exceed twenty-five per cent the bank is obliged to inform the Bank of England of its position. The Bank, after investigation, can close it down.

My friend, whom we'll call Fred, said that at the time we were talking about Jethro was well over his ten per cent deposit protection fund, was probably over the twenty-five per cent absolute limit too. And had not informed the Bank of England, a fact masked in the Bank's records by a team of accountants, supervised by Henry Jones.

“
In that position, all you need,” said Fred, “is an unanticipated serious recession where even your sound money goes rotten. It's like going down a slide, whoosh, right down to the bottom. Next stop – bank closure – personal disgrace – possible trial and conviction.
”

Jethro knew he couldn't go on forever, playing games with the numbers. “In addition,” said Fred, “he must have been getting wind of a possible Bank of England Enquiry. I certainly was. There were whispers. All he needed was more rumours, the Bank of England poking its nose in and a sudden withdrawal of capital by investors. I'm guessing he would have needed a minimum of twenty million to clear this whole thing up. Or a smaller sum, with a guarantee that further smaller sums would be forthcoming regularly, making it safe for Jones to fiddle the books for another year.

“
Now I don't know,” said my friend, “who made the fatal introduction. Suffice it to say that Jethro and Tallinn met. And once Jethro decided to co-operate there would be only two further problems: getting the money into the bank and hiding it cleverly once it was there. It had to be moved, invested quickly. Jones would have been the man for that.
”

I was curious. I hesitated, then asked him, “How come you know so much about this?
”

He gave me a funny look. “Everybody does, dear boy. Everybody does,” he told me.

After the long night in Jethro's study on the night of the shooting, Strauss, having got all the facts out of Jones, must have decided on damage limitation. Looked at one way, Jethro's injury, nearly death, could be looked at as the best thing that could have happened for the bank. No more nasty money would come in now. They could clean up quietly and blame everything that wouldn't wash out on him, if they had to.

It was not long before poor old Dickie Jethro had been officially declared, at least
pro tem,
a human vegetable. Scapegoat duly in place, Strauss called in the Bank of England.

That was when I rang the happy trio in the South of France and said I thought Strauss had the situation sufficiently under control for them to return safely, though they should lodge a full account of what they knew with a solicitor, all dated and properly witnessed, just in case of any trouble. I didn't think, now it was all sorted and his boss was as good as dead, that loyal dog Jones would start any more murder plots to protect him. Nor was Tallinn likely to surface, if he had any sense, to make any trouble. He was now wanted in Germany for smuggling dangerous materials and in the UK for murder.

They were pleased at the thought of getting back, especially Joe, because of Melanie. So back we all came, fit, well and ready to take up once more the threads of our quiet lives.

What a bugger, William, though, when it all started up again. You could call it an unfortunate coincidence, sheer bad luck and so forth. In the circles in which you move you probably are. It's a good explanation, if no one wants to take responsibility. In fact it was a case of dangling threads, something not attended to, something everybody hoped, if they didn't look, would go away. That and the fact that this is a small world, and getting smaller. Everybody knows somebody who knows somebody else. You're only six handshakes away from the President of the United States,
they say. Not just you, William, anybody; that's the theory. It's official. It's called the Six Degrees of Separation.

So – Adrian Drake was the husband of Fleur's friend Jess. He was a journalist. In June he was in Peru on a story when he bumped into Tallinn, drunk, in a bar in Lima. He knew what he looked like. After all, he was the man who'd supplied the pictures of Tallinn for Fleur and the others. He'd later heard, very confidentially, from his wife, about what happened on the evening Fleur's father was shot. He had no problem in recognising our boy.

He stepped up and said hullo, carefully. That's how you would say hullo to a man like Tallinn, whether he was drunk or sober. Drake spoke Russian – he'd studied modern languages at Oxford – so that helped.

Tallinn, probably feeling a bit depressed and isolated, started talking. A sad tale, which he told Drake during three long alcoholic evenings in workmen's bars in Lima. Drake soon realised he had a scoop in Tallinn and Tallinn told him, vengefully, to go ahead and write his story. Drake returned to London with the material for four long features, which were later syndicated in other European countries and in the USA.

The papers' lawyers were careful, of course. Strauss Jethro Smith was never named, or Jethro himself. But those who knew that world found it easy to work out who Tallinn's banker was. MPs weighed in, so did the German Government, still smarting about the refusal to hand Tallinn over into their jurisdiction in a timely manner. There was talk about a possible collapse of Strauss Jethro Smith if they were obliged to surrender the millions of pounds they held in Tallinn's name – as they would have to if the money was proved to have come from a criminal source. However, Strauss had anticipated this, and had covered it. A Bank of England Enquiry had earlier proved the firm to be on a solid basis, largely as a result of Jethro's efforts.

Tallinn, on the other hand, had engineered Iran's nuclear capacity, and half of Europe and the Middle East wanted vengeance. There were questions and protests from many different quarters. Thinking quickly, the British Government announced
a Bank of England Enquiry, to be held privately, not open to press or public, but which would produce a report of its findings after a thorough investigation. They smacked together a committee consisting of everyone and his dog and put you in charge, William. There's still a lot of noise, of course, but Parliament still isn't back from their long summer hols, so there can be no public answers until it is. And when the serious bullets start flying in the autumn, William, I think your position will be uncomfortable. It's still being discussed in the papers, and it's lighting up the Internet. I'm not sure the Government will be able to lay the matter to rest between the pages of your report. You'll be implicated in the disaster. You know my feelings about this business – it never goes away.

There were four articles in all. They came out in the Sunday broadsheet Drake worked for in July and August. All dynamite, but lucky timing, for some, with Parliament in recess and the directorate of the Bank of England, also largely absent, agreeing by phone and fax from Long Island, Tuscany and Thailand to set up their reassuring Enquiry.

I was a happy enough man before Drake's accidental encounter with Tallinn. When I came back from my break after the shooting of Jethro I got back to work. And while I was away I'd met Colette – light of my life. I don't deserve her. I'd seen Dominic, Joe and Fleur a couple of times. I felt like their jolly old uncle. Fleur had managed to hang on to her job and Dominic and Joe, though fired from the City job after the unexplained absence, got new jobs with a contractor working for a housing association. Fleur had even come to an accommodation with her old creditors, making arrangements to pay some of the debts off gradually. She told me that since the shooting she'd seen nothing of the Jethros.

In June she called me and told me that Adrian Drake was writing a series of articles about Tallinn. The first dealt with his early life and entry into the mafiosi, with the help of his friend, the local mayor. The next dealt with the build-up of his trade, the drugs, the routes and his arrangements with the members of
the Russian Duma, the military and the Secret Police. In the final two features Drake described Tallinn's dealings with a British banker and his realisation that his support network inside Russia had collapsed and his erstwhile helpers were selling him out; how he'd run to London and sought the protection of his business partner, the banker, who'd organised official help for him. He had been guarded by men who had been instructed, he claimed, to disappear when a group of hired hitmen came to kill him.

And he had described to Drake the scene at Eaton Square when he'd shot Jethro. It didn't matter to him. He was wanted for everything but incest all over Europe and the Middle East already. One more crime was no skin off his nose.

This part of the story, the shooting, had to be carefully handled by Drake and his paper, but the articles caused a furore. What Drake didn't reveal, the Internet did. Shock waves reverberated all over London and some, no doubt, reached other capitals, where other bankers were taking on dodgy mafia money while blind eyes were turned.

Drake told us all about it one evening, after he got back from Lima. It was extraordinary, he said, sitting with Tallinn night after night, in smoky bars full of music and loud conversation, listening to his story. An articulate man, he said, and intelligent. You could see why he'd been successful. But Drake said there was something about him he'd come across in other, similar men. He was completely cold, emotionally distanced like all men who take others' deaths for granted. Drake said he was frightened all the time, afraid that at some point in the conversation Tallinn would just lose it, and kill him on the spot. He said he knew that since Tallinn would never signal what he was going to do, he'd stand no chance. Or, he thought, Tallinn might wake up sober one morning, decide he regretted making his revelations and come round and kill Drake to get the recordings back.

On the last occasion they met, Drake said, he was so frightened of this he drank along with Tallinn, too scared to go home in case he woke up with Tallinn bending over him. He just collapsed across the table in the bar. Tallinn did the same. They woke up together next morning still where they'd been sitting the night
before. An old woman was mopping the floor round their feet. Tallinn had burst out laughing, Drake told us. He said he had a certain charm, if you didn't mind being charmed while the hair on the back of your neck was standing on end. Apparently they parted on quite good terms, had a final drink at the airport and exchanged hats just as Drake went through the check-in to get the plane back to London.

Later he was put under pressure to reveal Tallinn's exact whereabouts, but he wouldn't, and pointed out that in any case it was likely Tallinn would have moved on by then. It looked, from what Fleur had said, as if the day before Tallinn broke into Jethro's house and shot him, Jethro had raised three million for him, which he'd probably taken out of the country in bearer bonds. He had enough cash to go where he wanted.

I heard all this in Adrian and Jess's house in Highgate, in a long room with the windows open on to the garden. It was ten, but the light had not yet completely failed. Candles burned and there was a smell of roses from outside. Drake was lolling across a sofa as he spoke. His wife sat in a chair and Fleur, the only other person in the room, was on a cushion on the floor, hunched up with her arms around her knees.

“
For five years,” Drake said, “Tallinn's cash was flooding into Strauss Jethro Smith. It came into private airfields by private planes, and in small boats from Holland and France landing all round the coasts of Britain and Ireland. It came in container trucks originating from Zurich, Milan and Lyons. It even came in travellers' suitcases.” On one famous occasion two million dollars had been handed to a trawler captain from the deck of a surfaced Russian submarine off the coast of Norway.

One suitcase came out of Afghanistan on a donkey laden with rugs and saddle-cushions and then reached Britain peacefully in the bottom of a big brass pot which ended up in an antique shop in London. The owner of the shop was in debt and it was a one-off. He handed over the money; Tallinn paid him and never asked again.

Another couple of consignments were made part of a deal for
smuggling in illicit immigrants from Bangladesh. Tallinn was clever. He seldom used the same methods twice or the same people, which meant no one got used to his routes and no one got cheeky with him. “Who would have dared anyway?” Drake said, his face showing his own fear of the Russian.