Alice

‘It all started off fairly innocently,’ Alice said, taking a swig from Gallagher’s bottle of Coke. The sergeant had taken pain relief for his back and was looking a bit perkier. Alice wondered just how many pills he was popping every day and if he was in a technically fit state to be in charge of the station.

‘He has a good entrepreneurial head on him, does Harry – can spot an opportunity a mile off. He could see in the early nineties that land was being rezoned left, right and centre in Ireland. The demand for houses and commercial property was growing and developers wanted to build.

‘The thing was, nobody was lending big sums back then. So Harry took risks. Started throwing money at the non-established development firms and getting it back with good interest when their builds were flipped. All very legal, all very profitable, even if the construction projects were built on the back of corrupt planning decisions. You with me?’

‘I’m with you,’ Gallagher replied.

‘In your dreams. Anyhow, in the latter part of the decade, other banks started to move in on the act. It didn’t matter. Harry had a loyal customer base. He’d his pick of investors in HM Capital and his borrowers had good credit ratings. He was already expanding his horizons, looking at property markets abroad. Italy, Spain, Portugal – countries like Ireland, with pockets of greedy little politicians happy to zone land for development. The builders just needed the backing. Harry was personally agreeing to loans all over Europe. And guess how he usually sealed the deal?’

‘How?’

‘With a golden handshake for him and a line of coke off a hooker’s arse.’

‘You’re shitting me!’ Gallagher’s eyes widened. ‘He’s a cokehead?’

‘A functioning one, it seems. Enough for the thrill, not an addict. He liked dipping in and out of the high life. And he wasn’t just lending money either. He made investments on behalf of the bank without his board’s say-so. Even went in with the mafia in Naples.’

‘No way.’

‘Seriously. HM Capital invested €10 million in the hotels built by the Arnolfi family, including a controversial one on Capri that had no planning permission. He made €15 million back, a 50 per cent return. Only 25 per cent of it went to the bank, a percentage of which went to him anyway, through his CEO shareholdings and bonuses.’

‘Where did the rest of it go?’

‘To him.’

‘And that wasn’t legal?’

Alice sighed.

‘No, Sarge. Investing your bank’s profits in mafia business and siphoning off the profits of your deals is not legal. There were lots of episodes like that, which were all corrupt as the next and probably would have come to light anyway, even if everything hadn’t gone belly-up.’

‘But nobody gave a crap back then because everybody was making money?’

‘Precisely. Bear in mind, people weren’t just investing in HM Capital because there was a good return to be made. They – especially his friends who put in millions – were investing in Harry. Harry could spot a good deal. He was the man. He was CEO of a bank guaranteed by the Central Bank and the financial regulator, and he was running it like this was his bumbag of cash in a Las Vegas casino. But the dice rolled well for him, so that was all okay – up to a point.’

‘What point was that? Hang on. Doherty! Turn that match down or, so help me God, I will rip off your head and shit down your neck! Sorry, Moody. I can’t face a headache on top of everything else today. Isn’t he meant to be working on stuff for you?’

Alice waited for Gallagher to settle back down in his chair.

‘He is. Right. Well, Harry was clever, but he got cocky and took way too many chances. Buoyed by his European successes, he went east. Russia.’

‘Now, even I know you never do business with the Russians.’

‘From what? The movies? Dear God, sometimes you’re like a bad parody of yourself.’

‘Leave off.’

‘Stop interrupting me! Anyway, in 2000 he invested with some fella called Kuznetsov. This chap had been in the ascendancy in Russian oligarch circles before Putin came to power. There was talk of him buying an English premiership team. Nobody knew then how long Putin was going to be in power, but this lad wasn’t in his camp. He was waiting for Putin to be put out. ‘Course, the big man stayed in charge.’

‘So what happened to Harry’s investment?’

‘Flushed down the Volga. By December 2000, Kuznetsov was gone. As in, gone. He’d done a runner – God knows where – leaving all his investments to be taken over by the state and his creditors up shit creek. Harry had put in €25 million from HM Capital.’

‘Wow. There’s a hole on your balance sheet.’

‘Indeed. Easily plugged in the years that followed, though. It just required some creative accounting for the auditors’ sake. If that had been it, fair enough, but Harry made a few more reckless decisions. Like somebody losing at poker who keeps throwing down the chips.’

‘I suppose with your own personal bank able to cover the losses, it’s not too worrying. Speaking of chips, let’s send Doherty out for food. My appetite is coming back. You?’

‘I’m starving.’

They sent Doherty off with a list and relaxed back into their chairs.

‘So, Harry is making stupid decisions during the noughties, but enough good ones to counter the bad. He’s also not so thick that he can’t see little blips in the market in the mid-noughties. That’s why he steps out as CEO of HM Capital in 2006 and into the role of chair, which removes him from the firing line when the shit hits the fan. The High Court jury bought that one hook, line and sinker.’

‘How, exactly,’ Gallagher interrupted, ‘when he was clearly up to all this shit in the preceding years? Why wasn’t he done for all the illegal loans and investments?’

‘Oh, all of that is just background crap that our guys know about. It wasn’t part of the prosecution’s case. There’s no proof of what Harry was up to – unless you can find where he put all the money he was making and establish the paper trail. And our guys weren’t going after him personally. They were going after him as an executive of HM Capital. The prosecution focused on the incidents they did have paper for – the loans and accounting discrepancies in the 2006–2009 period during and after the crash. The CEO then wasn’t as clever as Harry at hiding stuff. To be fair to him, the place was in meltdown anyway. By that stage Harry wasn’t an executive director, although, according to Sam Carter, he pulled the CEO’s strings like Jim Henson.’

‘Who?’

‘Jim Henson? The Muppets? Christ on a bike. Anyway, to recap – and this is what you have a handle on already – the bank was loaning out money hand over fist from 2006 to 2009. Most of it was trying to shore up earlier bad decisions, but it was being loaned out on the basis of personal guarantees from developers. If the project didn’t work, the developer would have to repay the loan out of their personal funds. Except the developer’s own funds were actually a loan sitting in their account from another bank and disappeared as soon as HM Capital came calling – and so on. That was repeated across all the financial institutions. HM’s risk assessment was all shit and they were lending into a vacuum. They started selling on books of subprime loans—’

‘Wait. What’s subprime? I’ve heard that word so many times, but I’ve no idea what it means.’

‘Me neither, until about two hours ago. Subprime refers to loans that were made to builders and private individuals when there was a risk that they’d never be repaid. Not optimum prime loans, basically.’ ‘Oh, right,’ Gallagher said. ‘Why don’t they just call them bad loans?’

‘No idea. Because they want us to be confused, I guess. Anyway, the banks were selling packets of those loans to each other, and every time anybody came to look at the books they’d cook them, make those subprime liabilities look like assets, and so on – because a loan is an asset, do you get me?’

Gallagher nodded in a way that said he was completely in the dark but couldn’t cope with another explanation.

‘And that’s what our guys tried to get Harry on,’ Alice concluded. ‘HM was the worst of the banks when it came to all that shit. But our prosecution strategy didn’t work.’

‘This, my dear, has been a fascinating insight into the life and times of Harry McNamara, the banker,’ Gallagher said, holding out his hand for the brown paper bag from Romayo’s proffered by Doherty. The office was already filling up with the smell of cheeseburgers and chips drenched in salt and vinegar. ‘I’m kind of cheering for him – I’ve always liked a man who’ll go all out in a gamble. So, you’re thinking with all that in his past, Harry has a list of enemies as long as my dick. Yes, I can see why somebody would put a hit on him.’

‘And not just ordinary enemies, Sarge. He ran with dangerous lads, our Harry. Lads who’d knife you as soon as look at you. He got in over his head. Luckily, he always had the money to buy himself out.’

‘So if Carney was in one of these gangs – and we haven’t been able to make any link whatsoever, but let’s go with it – or if he was hired to kill Harry by somebody, isn’t there still a flaw in your theory, Moody? Why wouldn’t Carney just take whatever he was paid to do the job and fuck off ? Why do it in front of the wife and hand himself in? And, by the way, I presume you’re still running the background check on Carney and haven’t skipped straight to all this sexy banking shite?’

‘I told you, Doherty is helping me with that. There isn’t a whole lot to find out. The guy’s a loner. I figure if I track down Harry’s enemies I can trace a link to Carney that way. The only way I can see Carney doing this is for money. As for handing himself in, well, McNamara is infamous, Sarge. Whatever happened, it was going to be a high-profile investigation. I don’t know for sure, but I can only imagine that Carney has made a strategic decision to go this way and there must be a huge pot of money waiting for him if he pulls it off, rather than wait for us to catch him and get done for life. That, or he’s making some sort of point.’

‘That is such a leap I’m thinking of entering you in the Olympic long-jump team. You’re so determined to prove Carney is sane that you’re going insane. Can you really not accept the possibility that McNamara was just an unfortunate sap that karma came hunting? So, he was hated because of dodgy business deals. There were hundreds of bankers doing the same. Why him?’

‘Sarge, I haven’t even started,’ Alice said, holding up a chip and waggling it at him. ‘The personal stuff, remember? Harry’s problems started with money, but money brought other things. Power. Drugs. Women. It’s a very real possibility Harry pissed off somebody big time by hurting somebody close to them. Wait until I tell you the real scoop on Harry, the accusations that are so far under the radar not even our fraud squad colleagues know about them. This financial expert I met – well, she had family who worked with Harry. A girl called Nina. Sam gave me some real gems.’