33

Paula was sat at a small Formica-clad table tucked into a small recess of the main corridor that led to the staircase and the priests’ sleeping quarters. Perched on the table was a small laptop, which was dwarfed by a boxy, black printer that squatted beside it.

Paula sat down and ran a finger along the top of the printer.

‘You need a new cleaner,’ she said.

‘Our Martha’s a gem so she is, but she won’t come near this desk. She thinks computers are the work of Satan and just touching it will be enough to pull her down into the depths of hell.’

‘Bless,’ said Paula and switched the laptop on. ‘I’ll just check your browsing history to see if you are indeed under threat of that very thing.’

‘Are you going to explain what you’re up to?’ asked Joe at her shoulder. An image appeared and Joe said. ‘You’ll need my password, or you won’t get past that screen thingy.’

The screen thingy was an image of a brass smiling Buddha, with a lined-off blank rectangle across his capacious stomach where the password went. Paula placed the cursor inside the rectangle and shifted to the side so that Joe could type it in.

‘Very Catholic,’ Paula said nodding at the image.

‘We like to be inclusive here at St Matthew’s.’ Then, ‘Don’t you watch me,’ he said as he slowly pressed on a series of keys with the index finger of his right hand.

‘Is that how you type?’ Paula asked.

‘What’s wrong with my typing technique, Mrs Gadd?’

‘Don’t you do the Parish newsletter?’

‘Indeed I do construct that wondrous message of hope and enlightenment.’ Joe had finished typing, so he pressed enter.

‘Must take you all week,’ Paula said as the screen came to life. She brought up the internet search engine. ‘How good is your connection?’

‘Connection?’

‘You do have the internet?’

‘Course we do. We’re not living in the dark ages.’ Joe rested a hand on Paula’s shoulder.

‘But you’re living in mortal peril for your soul according to Martha.’

‘I make a quick act of contrition every time I switch this machine on.’

Paula laughed, felt a surge off love, reached across and patted Joe’s hand. Without looking she knew he was smiling. No words were needed. They both understood. Affection given and gratefully received.

‘A series of numbers…’ Paula typed. ‘That I found in a notebook in the Bute cottage.’ She finished. Waited for a response and was given a new screen branded with a high street bank. She paused to consider what her next step should be. ‘A notebook that I destroyed after reading and memorising a chain of numbers…’ She explained as she typed. This was just like her own home banking screen. Just a different bank. And entering it all was surprisingly easy.

A new screen appeared, asking for the first, third, fourth and sixth number of a security number – and the third, fifth, sixth and tenth letter of a password. She faltered. Should she be doing this? Did she want to find what might be here? Whatever it was might have led to the deaths of two people already. She felt a flutter of nerves in her stomach and took a deep breath. Whatever was going on she needed answers. She couldn’t stop now.

Certain that this was part of a trail of clues that Thomas had left for her, the answer to the required parts of the security number, and the password were, she hoped, going to be straightforward. She made a leap of intuition and, using her fingers, she worked out the numbers that corresponded with Christopher’s date of birth and then entered them for the security number. Then she did the same with his Christian name, typing in R … S … T … E for the password.

The computer screen froze, a small circle turning in the middle, showing her that her request was being processed. She held her breath. The screen changed…

And they were in.

‘Oh my God,’ she said. That was almost too easy. She sent a silent thank-you heavenward to Thomas.

Joe leaned over her, his head moving nearer the screen and she could feel the heat from him on the skin of her cheek.

‘Is that what I think it is?’ he asked. Joe slammed down the lid of the laptop as if the detail on the screen had just burned his eyes. ‘What in the good Lord’s name is going on, Paula?’

‘I … I…’

‘Don’t tell me you don’t know.’

‘I don’t,’ she said. ‘I honestly don’t.’

‘And how did you work out where you needed to go just from a series of numbers?’

‘The numbers were written in a pattern. A series of six numbers followed by another eight. Just like the series printed on the bottom of each of my cheques.’

Joe turned and walked away. Paula reached behind the laptop, dislodged the cables, lifted the machine up, slung it under her arm and followed him.

They ended up back in the kitchen. Paula sat the laptop on the table between them. At which Joe made a small note of surprise.

‘It’s portable, Joe. That’s why it’s called a laptop.’

‘Pfft. I knew that.’

He clearly hadn’t even considered it.

Paula lifted the lid and the screen they’d been studying reasserted itself. It was a statement page from a major British high street bank. It showed one deposit of one million pounds paid in two years earlier. One withdrawal of one hundred thousand pounds a week before Thomas died and another for the remaining balance the day after he died.

‘What are we looking at?’ Joe asked, worry etched into his face. There was something else there. Something beyond the worry of Thomas and why he had a notebook that led to this bank account. He bit his lip, and Paula thought he wasn’t quite ready to spill.

‘That,’ she said and held a finger over the top of the screen. ‘What does that mean to you?’

Joe read. ‘Ballogie Holdings.’

‘Quite a distinctive name, eh?’

Joe looked at her and nodded. ‘We grew up in a flat on King’s Park Road. At the corner of Ballogie Street.’ He looked completely baffled. ‘Why would you have the numbers to an account in your head, an account that bears the name of a street near where I grew up?’ Then his face changed as a thought occurred.

‘What do you know, Joe?’ Paula asked quietly.

He rubbed the skin under his nose with the length of his index finger.

‘Joe?’

‘I really don’t know what this is all about, Paula. That was one million pounds in there. Why would Tommy have access to that sort of money?’

‘There’s nine other accounts. If they are all the same, that means ten million.’ She heard a tremble in her voice. ‘We need to go to the police,’ Paula said.

‘No,’ shouted Joe, and closed the laptop lid again.

‘Joe, I think people have been murdered because of this. There’s a very serious amount of cash in here. What do you know? If you don’t spill I’m leaving here and going straight to Stewart Street.’

He crossed his arms and legs and swivelled in his seat so that his knees were pointing away from her.

‘Joe?’

‘I can’t.’

‘Joe. You said to me earlier about your gambling…’

‘I can’t, Paula.’ He looked at her with desperation.

‘Let’s go back to that conversation.’ She leaned towards him. ‘You got in too deep with gambling debts…’

‘And Tommy said if he did a favour for some people they could make it go…’ He put both hands on the table. ‘Except…’ He pointed at the laptop. ‘You think Kevin and Elaine died because of all of this?’

‘It’s too much of a coincidence to be otherwise.’

Joe rubbed at his face, enough that Paula heard the rasp of skin over bristles. ‘Dear God, what have I done?’

‘You haven’t done anything, Joe.’ She thought about the possible sequence of events: Joe got into debt, and somehow Thomas, with his business acumen and knowledge of the financial world was brought into the picture to sort it out. There was a lot of money involved here. Could Thomas have been their target all along? Might Joe have been singled out, then manipulated to give them, whoever they were, access to Thomas? ‘It looks like other people took advantage of something…’

‘But if it wasn’t for me…’ His eyes were bright, begging. Help me, they were saying. Help me make sense of this.

He leaned back in his chair. Now he couldn’t look her in the eyes. ‘Who knows better than me that confession is good for the soul, eh?’ He titled his head back and looked upwards as if looking for divine intervention.

Then he looked her in the eye as if permission had been granted.

‘As I said the debts got crazy, and this guy turned up. Sat in that chair where you are now.’ His eyes darted around the room as if the exact words he needed were eluding him. ‘Said I was to call him Moscow, cos that’s near where he came from.’ He took a deep breath as if to acknowledge his own naivety. ‘And I’m thinking, I’m a priest. He’s not going to do anything dodgy to me is he? He said he knew I had family that could help me get rid of the debt. I got angry at that. No way did I want the guys involved. Then he explained that if Tommy provided them with a certain service, the fee for this service would equal the amount of my debt.’ His eyes filled up. ‘To my shame, I weakened. Called Tommy. He came round. Quickly caught on…’ Joe’s eyes clouded now as he looked into the distance, as if he could see and hear Tommy sitting right there in front of him. ‘And between them they came up with a plan to clear it completely.’

‘Just how much did you owe?’

‘I don’t really know,’ he shrugged. ‘The guys I owed would add interest and then I would go double or quits and then they would add more interest.’ He closed his eyes. ‘It came to hundreds…’ he paused, ‘…of thousands.’

‘Holy shit, Joe.’

‘Believe me, before they started to add all that interest stuff my debt was in the low thousands. It just escalated so quickly. It was bewildering.’

‘So, this plan. What was it?’

‘I didn’t really follow it. Tommy and, latterly Kevin, were the key parts of it.’

‘Kevin?’

‘Well, Tommy’s business really. The idea was – I’m grasping here you understand? – The idea was that, for a certain length of time, a legitimate business held the cash – God knows where it came from – out of the reach of the authorities. And then it would be moved on.’

Paula sat with that. Then she recalled the news bulletin she’d heard the day that the two police officers came to visit her. Something about a money-laundering scheme that took advantage of the Scottish financial system.

‘As I said earlier, Joe you weren’t to blame for any of this,’ she sought to soothe his conscience as her mind worked through the implications.

‘I wasn’t?’

‘These people were aware of an anomaly in the Scottish system that allowed money to be moved completely legally, right?’

‘Right…’ Joe scratched his chin.

‘And they needed someone with the legitimacy to make it work. And the acumen to know how to work it.’ Paula paused to allow Joe to catch up. ‘Understand?’

‘I’m not thick, Paula. Just…’ his smile was self-deprecating ‘…stupid.’

‘I don’t completely understand the machinations of the way the movement of the money works – you’d need a degree in accountancy to follow that – but I can see that, somehow, when your debt was sold on to the wrong people they identified you and were able to link you with Thomas.’

‘Successful businessman and oh so very legitimate here in Scotland,’ said Joe as his eyes lit up with understanding.’

‘Yeah. You build up debt in the casino? The wrong people get to hear about it and buy it off them. You then owe them the money and they charge astronomical interest. They fabricated the extent of your debt to get to the real target.’

‘Thomas?’

‘They would have accepted anyone in his position, I’m sure. As I said, they needed a successful businessman to make their scheme work.’ She sifted through her memory to see if she could recall any of the details about the news item she’d seen. ‘Shell companies…’ she said out loud. ‘Wait a moment. There must be something about it online.’ Paula gave herself time to recall some more detail. ‘Could this be something similar to that? It would be too much of a coincidence if it wasn’t. Give me a second. I was distracted when the news was on or I’d remember it better. Shell companies. Something about shell companies, whatever they are.’

‘Right.’

Paula turned her attention back to the computer. Brought up a search engine and typed shell companies … money laundering … Scotland. The search engine presented a number of choices and she clicked on the first one. It was from a major Scottish newspaper and it told her she had access to four articles before she needed to register. She clicked on the more likely article and read. ‘These shell companies were registered in Scotland and some fake loans were used to take about one billion dollars from the Moldovan Government.’

‘What?’

‘Yeah, here we go.’ She pointed at the screen and read out loud. ‘It talks about straw men directors – whatever that is – who own offshore companies. And as I said there’s something about the Scottish system that allowed this to happen.’ She shook her head. ‘Most of it is beyond me to be honest.’ She leaned forwards. ‘Do you think this Moscow guy … is Moldova near Moscow? Anyway, this is it. I’m sure of it. Your Moscow guy was doing something very similar with Thomas.’

Joe just looked at her wide-eyed with shame and guilt.

‘I’m certain of it.’ Paula said. Then she lifted the lid of the laptop and slowly and methodically worked through each of the string of numbers and passwords in her head. In all of them the same pattern was repeated. A one million deposit was made. One hundred thousand was withdrawn, and then the day after Thomas died the remainder was removed.

‘Wow,’ said Joe. ‘You were storing all that in your head?’

‘For some reason I thought that was safer than walking about with that notebook.’

‘Impressive work, Mrs Gadd.’

Paula shrugged. ‘Fat lot of good it does us. There’s nothing left in any of those accounts.’ She tapped the screen with a fingernail. ‘But somewhere in that short string of transactions is a reason to commit double murder.’