This page contains a breakdown of our investigation, and how we were able to find Mr. Reilly. Our investigation began by locating Mr. Reilly’s whereabouts from the moment he was last seen at your office.
At this point it became clear the nature of the criminal acts committed but as you have urged us not to contact Challaid Police, as did Mr. Reilly, we have not yet done so. Despite finding Mr. Reilly we have since continued to investigate the case and have discovered that Miss Marrufo was assisted by a Mr. Arturo Salamanca, a twenty-two-year-old Costa Rican national who had earned residency through twelve months’ work in Challaid several months ago.
As you know the money was transferred to a small bank in San José where it was collected in cash on Saturday evening. Miss Marrufo and Mr. Salamanca traveled on a direct flight from Challaid International Airport the morning after the theft (Saturday) and so would have collected the cash themselves, us not finding Mr. Reilly until Sunday evening. While the money has not been recovered we do not consider the case closed, and can work with colleagues in San José to recover it should you so instruct us.
We were called in on Sunday morning, nearly 40 hours after Walter Reilly walked out of PINE Insurance on Sheshader Road with £45k from the pension pot. They hadn’t realized it was gone until it was withdrawn from a bank in San José on Saturday and wasted the next 12 hours with their own security trying to recover the money in the hope the news would never leak out. This made it much more difficult for us and we assumed Reilly and the money would be out of the country already, in San José, something we made clear to PINE executive director Roxana Gilbert when we met in her office. She made it clear that the priority was finding Reilly; she didn’t seem to believe he would have stolen from them. Mrs. Gilbert believed finding Reilly would find the money, and she obviously hoped to avoid the reputational damage they would receive if they had to report the missing cash in their accounts. The company has had bad PR lately, told off by a parliamentary report, and secrecy mattered more than the cash, although she didn’t say so.
The first step was working out where Reilly had gone with the money because even he wasn’t stupid enough to return to his own home with it. He was, fortunately, stupid enough to use his railcard, which took him from Bank Station to Three O’clock Station on the 17:52 train on disappearance day, Friday. We were able to find this out after Sholto made contact with source #S-61 who used access to the database showing every journey using a registered card.
A man fleeing the country with his bags packed was unlikely to walk the streets of Whisper Hill so we assumed he had either been collected at the station or had taken a taxi. As usual the taxi drivers were a total nightmare and had to be bribed excessively to open their usually flappy mouths, the only time they ever do shut up is when you need info from them. We paid £100 to recipient #362 to find out who had been working on the evening in question and another £200 to recipient #363 to tell us where he had dropped Walter Reilly. He informed us he was certain he had dropped the man in our picture on Woodbury Drive and that he remembered him because he was a “twitchy bugger.”
We were skeptical but it only took a short time of checking with people living on the street to find someone willing to tell us that Reilly had been a regular visitor to flat #3-9, and that he wasn’t the only man who was. The neighbor, who made no attempt to hide the grudge she harbored against the resident, informed us that a young man stayed in the flat with the young woman who was the only listed occupant but he always left before Reilly arrived and returned only when he had left. The neighbor named the occupant as Filis Marrufo, a Costa Rican national who has not yet completed her 12-month employment period that would enable her to claim citizenship. From the research into her we’ve done it doesn’t seem as though she works at all, and may have a “paper job,” a fake job created by criminal gangs to trick immigration officials into thinking she’s earning citizenship here.
We attempted to gain access to the flat but there was no response so we called the owners, Harbour Housing, who sent a member of the staff round with a key. She let us in and we found Walter Reilly sitting in the living room, the curtains drawn, cut and bruised and drinking from a bottle of vodka. He was the only person in the flat and a quick search revealed no sign of the money, just his packed bags.
When the Harbour Housing employee left the room to inform her employers their flat had been abandoned and to check if any rent was owed, Walter Reilly told his story to Sholto and me in the living room. He informed us he had met Filis Marrufo at a nightclub some three months previously and that despite the 24-year age gap he had thought she loved him. She appeared to know no one else and was lonely and unhappy in Challaid, wanting to return home to look after her sick mother (he actually somehow believed this) but needing to earn money first. He claimed that stealing the money from PINE Insurance was his idea and that he had planned it all alone. When he arrived at the flat with the cash he found she was not alone, and that she had another long-term lover. Marrufo and Reilly had booked seats on a flight to San José the following morning, the 07:15 flight, and he had already sent the money ahead and could collect it when they arrived. Marrufo’s lover is Arturo Salamanca, a 22-year-old Costa Rican national with a joint Scottish passport, and he too had bought a ticket on the same flight, unbeknown to Reilly. Marrufo and Salamanca beat Reilly and held him in the flat at knifepoint through the night, flaunting their own sexual relationship in front of him, making him watch them as they had sex and mocking his stupidity. He claims that in the morning they drugged him and left for the airport as he passed out.
While he was clearly drunk, full of self-pity and conflicted about how much he wanted to blame Marrufo, it is our belief that he was mostly telling the truth. Most likely Marrufo picked up a dunce like Reilly who would buy her gifts and help her with cash when needed, and would have looked for ways to exploit him further. When she expressed a desire to find money to return to Caledonia she was probably hoping for him to come up with cash to help her, and likely pushed him toward the plan to steal the money, although he carried out the actual theft all on his own. Marrufo and Salamanca saw their chance and took it.
There is no doubt the money is now in San José, along with Marrufo and Salamanca. We have alerted Corvus Security, the detective agency we cooperate with in the city, and are ready to take the next step in the job of recovering the stolen money. We now await a response from PINE Insurance.