More often in the past few weeks, Stone spent a restless night. Today he left his bed after a few hours’ fitful sleep, and it was still dark as he took his shower. Drying his legs, he stretched and felt his ankle. He recoiled – the heavy scar, deep into his flesh, was where he had been bitten by a slobbering dog. Right here in his bedroom. Just a year ago, the snarling animal had been held, hovering over him, by Xavier, a gang leader of thugs dealing in heroin and crack cocaine, from south of the river. Selling to crackheads in his patch was his speciality.
But it was the line in money laundering, racketeering, to wash white the proceeds from his street dealing, that he had dragged Stone into. The threat of nastiness – today it came as a demand for repayment of a quarter of a million pounds – was hanging over Stone like a noose which at any time could be tightened. Stone shuddered; the memory still felt very close.
He finished drying himself, dressed, and he then sat at the kitchen table with a mug of tea. Stone remained alert, nervous of the amorphous, invisible, drug dealing ring out there. He looked again at the bolts securing the back door and he peered through the window to the gloomy back garden. Right inside Marine House, he was satisfied that he was safe, but he still felt the lingering menace that Xavier and his cronies threatened.
Stone walked into the elegant sitting room and stretched on a large sofa to ease his pain. His second mug of tea he drank quickly, but the pain in Stone’s back was becoming insistent, more than just an ache. Taking painkillers, sometimes above the right dosage, had not helped; they just left him feeling tired. He tried to read a newspaper but could not concentrate and soon threw it onto the floor in frustration. Feeling restless, unable to sit still, he could put up with it no more. He rang for a private appointment with his doctor. The doctor would see him later today.
In his growing discomfort, he was fidgeting, and he walked into his study to fill his whisky glass. He picked up a black-and-white photo of a row of eight Victorian terrace houses in London’s East End. Stone liked to think of himself as self-made; he had pulled himself up over his sixty-five years by his own bootstraps and he handled the picture as if he could touch those houses. He had bought them out of nostalgia. The narrow road would always be sharply engrained on his memory. It was where he had been brought up by his mother and a mostly absent father who was an alcoholic. But he had sold the houses just six months ago after too many tenants defaulted on their rent payment.
Piled untidily on his desk were bank statements for the last year, and he flicked through them. They told him what he already knew. Just under £2 million, money from selling those properties stood out in a nice row just like the terraced houses. The seven figures stared back at him.
After shuffling the papers back into a tidy pile, he ran his hand through his hair. He was growing restless again as, even with selling his row of houses in London’s East End, he was still £500,000 short of the price the Jackson family were demanding for Marine House. And Lady Ruth Jackson had hit him on a soft spot about his money. Was he just a speculator trying it on?
He clumsily searched through a thin plastic file to find the papers with details of a secret account in Panama. Out of sight, he had squirrelled away a large bundle of US dollars, and they were what was needed to narrow the gap of half a million pounds to buy Marine House. Getting that money back to London was becoming urgent.
It was early in the day, but Stone called Roger Garon in his smart office on the tenth floor of a block in the City of London. Never a mate of Stone, Roger was just someone he had known for a long time and one of the few people he trusted.
‘Roger, I need to talk to you.’
‘Make it quick. I’m off to a meeting and I’ve got a taxi waiting,’ Roger said.
‘It’s my bank accounts in Panama. Dollars piling up. I need to get the money moved. Back to London. You know how I work, so how do I do it?’
‘What’re you up to this time?’ Roger asked.
‘I’ve got a big property deal bubbling. Getting hold of that pot of gold will help to fill the gap to pay for it,’ Stone said.
‘That’s not going to be easy if you need it quickly. How much have you got there?’
‘There’s $400,000 there. It’s serious money.’
‘Be very careful because any money coming from countries like Panama will attract immediate attention. Snoopers in high places do nothing else but look out for that sort of cash sloshing around into London banks. And they’ll ask some awkward questions if they find you at it. Like how you got it and whether you paid tax on it.’
‘You’re being negative. I’m not in the mood to listen to bad news,’ Stone said firmly. ‘I did a property deal in Sicily. I put some cash up with a mate to build apartments in the small town of Corleone. It was all looking good until I had a knock on the door of my rented villa late one night. The Mafia got interested. Have you ever worked with the Mafia, Roger?’
‘No, I haven’t. And you were naïve to get into building work in any Italian town. That’s always going to attract the stinging wasps to the light bulb.’
‘Yes, it was a large car with blacked-out windows and large bodies with dark glasses. But that’s history.’
‘Are you sure you want to tell me all this?’
‘Only that I got out of the deal. They paid me off in bundles of dollar bills. The money went straight through a London currency exchange bureau and was deposited anonymously into Panama. Easily done. It’s still there. Not forgotten.’
‘You walk into some crazy situations, don’t you? Laundering cash is explosive stuff if it ever got out. So, I’m going to keep my distance and pretend I haven’t heard what you’ve just told me about your misfiring business.’
‘My money’s hard earned, not laundered, maybe bypassed tax people somewhere but that’s different. So, you stay white, Roger. You always do,’ Stone taunted.
‘Yeah, so what? Somebody has to. But I’ve got to rush now. Give me time and I’ll check it all through for you. And I’ll call. I just remind you that you pay me a fee for counsel so listen carefully this time and don’t ignore my advice,’ Roger chided. He closed his phone.
It left Stone unsure. Maybe Roger was right, the dollars were stuck there forever. He ambled back to the empty, quiet kitchen. His body was shouting at him loudly. He could feel the pain reaching across his back; it was now too intense. The whisky bottle on the table offered strong temptation, but he resisted. More urgent than playing with money was going to see his doctor, and it was never going to be a good consultation if his breath was smelling of drink.
What would his doctor find?