44
Peggy had the bit between her teeth now. She had learned from the Personnel department at MI6 that Jasminder had not declared Laurenz Hansen as her cohabitee. Peggy guessed why – it was part of Laurenz’s exaggerated desire for secrecy. She suspected that he had put pressure on Jasminder to keep their relationship secret, and felt annoyed for her friend. Peggy was increasingly convinced that there was something wrong about Laurenz, and she was determined to find out what it was.
It took her just two days to put together a comprehensive dossier, but to her intense disappointment she found that she couldn’t fault the man. His credentials were all in order. His Norwegian passport was legit, and its details of date and place of birth (12 February 1974 in a village outside Bergen) had been officially confirmed by the Oslo Home Ministry, then (less officially) by the Lutheran Synod of Bergen, holder of the local parish records.
So far, so clear. Entering the UK, Hansen had supplied a local London address, in a street off the City Road in Islington. It was a new flat in a small modern block, let on a short-term lease signed by Laurenz Hansen. A credit-card check had found his rating unimpeachable: he used a Visa card in the UK, and an American Express Diamond card when he travelled. He banked in London with Lloyds, where he had a little over £26,000 sitting in a variety of accounts.
All of which was perfectly fine and untroubling, compared to the mystery Peggy uncovered when exploring Hansen’s employment record. He was a private banker – Jasminder had been clear about this when talking to Peggy about him – but it was proving awfully hard to find the bank. Each month £11,000 was deposited in his Lloyds current account from one in Zurich held by something called M. Q. Hayter & Co., but Peggy had found no record anywhere of any kind of financial institution, much less bank, operating under that name. Tellingly, too, Hansen’s lease agreement with the flat’s owner had asked for the name of his employer, but the line had been left blank.
Peggy liked to do a thorough job and was disappointed with her failure. ‘Why wouldn’t he put his employer’s name on the form?’ She and Liz were discussing the dossier in Liz’s office. Outside a brisk wind stirred the trees along the Embankment, and on the Thames a heavy swell made progress slow for a rusty barge, which was chugging upstream.
‘Who knows? Bankers are very secretive sometimes. No doubt for their own protection.’
‘You’d think the landlord would want to know. I gather the flat’s in a nice building; the owner would want to feel confident Hansen was good for the rent.’
‘You’re right, but if Hansen gave him six months’ cash as a down payment, his qualms would have gone away pretty fast.’
‘But why bother doing that unless he was covering his tracks?’
‘Hard to say. Could be a dozen reasons. I don’t want to jump to conclusions.’
‘That means you’ve got one in your head.’
Liz laughed. ‘You’re right! But I’m going to keep it to myself until we’ve dug around some more.’
‘I’m not sure where else to dig. I’ve checked every possible financial registry, but there’s no Laurenz Hansen listed in any of them. The Revenue haven’t anything on him either. He hasn’t filed for Non-Dom status here.’
‘Jasminder did tell you he had been moving around a lot.’
Peggy nodded. ‘Yes, she did, though she also made it sound as if he was always on top of things. The last thing a banker would want is trouble with the Revenue.’
‘I’m going to make a call or two,’ said Liz. ‘I’ll let you know if I find anything out.’
Liz had a little more experience of banks than she’d let on. Almost ten years ago – well before Martin Seurat had entered her life – she had had a relationship for almost a year with a Dutch banker called Piet. Her time with him had been fun, but never very serious – he had been in London less than in Amsterdam, and they had never spent enough continuous time together to grow close. The affair had ended when Piet met someone else in Holland, but Liz had never held that against him, and the two of them had remained friends even after Piet married his new girlfriend, Sylvia. On the rare occasions Piet came to London, he and Liz usually met up for a meal; once he had even brought Sylvia along, and Liz was pleased to find that she was extremely friendly and they all got on very well.
Then two years ago Piet had moved to London, with Sylvia and their new baby, to take up a post with one of the UK’s leading private banks. Since then, he and Liz chatted on the phone every few months, and twice she’d gone for Sunday lunch to their roomy house in Putney.
During their relationship, Liz had never told him what she did for a living, but Piet was intelligent and well informed and Liz could tell from their recent meetings that he had a pretty good idea. When she rang him now from her office, he was his usual cheerful, friendly self. ‘Sylvia and I were just talking about you,’ he said. ‘We want you to come to lunch soon.’
‘I’d love that. But I was ringing to ask a favour – a professional one. I’m trying to locate someone who’s a private banker in London, but I’m not having any luck. I’d rather not say why I want to know, except I wouldn’t want the man to learn that I was looking for him.’
‘Understood. What’s the name of the bank he works for?’
‘That’s the problem. All I know is that he’s paid from an account in Zurich held by something called M. Q. Hayter & Co. I know he works at the London office of an international bank, but if it’s this Hayter company, I can’t find any trace of it. So maybe it has another name and that’s just a salary account or something. The guy I’m looking for is apparently quite senior. He’s a Norwegian but based here. I think he may be the head of their office in London. Yet I can’t seem to find him.’
‘Give me a day, and give me his name. If he is a banker in London, I’ll find him for you.’
But when Piet came back to her, he too was empty-handed. ‘I can’t find him either, Liz. There’s no bank registered here called Hayter and no sign of your man. If he’s working in London then he’s working solo. He’s not employed by any bank.’
‘If you don’t mind my asking, how can you be so sure?’
‘When I was at Lehman, before they went bust – thank God I’d got out by then – we used to keep a register of bankers. We called it the “C Book”, and C stood for the Competition. The person in charge of the C Book changed every three months, because nobody wanted to do the job for longer than that – if it turned out you failed to list a new arrival to the banking game, you had to buy champagne for all the partners that Friday. Mind you, this was pre-2008.’
Liz laughed, remembering the mad excesses of those boom years. Bankers lighting cigars with £100 notes, or spending more than the average person’s annual wage on a single night out at a club.
‘Anyway,’ said Piet, ‘the C Book survived all the ructions and it’s still being kept up, and the penalty’s the same for missing a name. I called a friend of mine who has access to it and asked him to check. No Laurenz Hansen. No Hansen at all, in fact. As I said, Liz, if he’s working at a bank, I would have found him. I’ll let you draw your own conclusion.’
When Liz sat down with Peggy to review the Hansen findings, she said, ‘This man has covered all the bases very neatly. Except one. It seems he’s no more a banker than I am.’
‘Then why’s he pretending to be one?’
‘Probably because it’s quite difficult for the ordinary person to check, and it sounds impressive… I don’t know. Both perhaps. Jasminder swallowed it anyway. It’s quite a good cover – if you’re not expecting to come in contact with professionals like us. The banking world is impenetrable to most people. The City could be in Mongolia for all your average person understands it.’