‘Sounds lovely. I’ll have the same.’
I walked the few yards into the apartment and went into the kitchen to fix the two spritzers, but I didn’t go straight back outside. Instead, I went into the master bedroom and took out the packet of Henri’s board papers from the bedside drawer where she’d put them.
Atherton, Bradley and Partners, Attorneys at Law was printed across the top of an accompanying letter that gave the details of the Christmas Eve meeting to be held at their offices. I found a notepad and copied down the address and telephone number. I tore off the sheet and put it in my pocket.
I skimmed through the stack of papers, looking for any financial accounts that might indicate the identity of the company’s accountants, but there was nothing. In fact, the board papers appeared to be very sparse for the main annual meeting of the directors of such a big organization. Henri had clearly been right when she said that most of the discussion and decisions were taken at the management board level and the main board was only there to rubber-stamp their findings.
I glanced briefly at the documents pertaining to the sale of the Hong Kong end of the business. The amount of money being paid for it made me whistle. I reckoned the Reynard family would soon be moving further up the Sunday Times Rich List, some considerable way further up.
I put the papers back how I’d found them in the drawer and took the drinks out to Henri, who hadn’t moved an inch.
‘Lovely,’ she said, taking one of them. ‘Thank you.’
We clinked our glasses. How perfect was this?
I decided not to tell Henri that I intended to go home the following evening. I would make up some work-related excuse in the morning and then try to slip away before Martin even realized I had gone. I certainly wasn’t going to spoil our last wonderful day together in this paradise.
Stingray City was everything that Henri had made it out to be, with not a single street or building to be seen. This particular city’s blocks were nothing but water.
In the middle of North Sound, at least a mile from the nearest point of dry land, we stood waist-deep on a barely submerged sandbar while scores of stingrays swam around us, gliding back and forth between our legs like mini delta-winged bombers, their soft undersides caressing our skin like velvet.
By holding small pieces of cut-up squid we were able to make them follow our hands in circles in the water, even to swim right onto our outstretched arms to lie with their prominent staring eyes just inches from our faces.
A stingray had killed Steve Irwin, the Australian conservationist and broadcaster, and their very name implied danger. But here they were, acting like pets, playing with us and seemingly enjoying the experience as much as we were.
Our captain, the weather-beaten local from whom we had chartered the boat, told us that, more than fifty years ago when he was a young lad, the local fishermen used to bring their catch to the sandbar to clean and gut it, where the water was calm and they were able to throw the fish waste into the sea.
The stingrays would gather to feed on the fish scraps and soon the fishermen were organizing trips for locals to see them and Stingray City was born. And so it had continued, with both the humans and the stingrays apparently very happy with the arrangement.
‘This is now the most visited tourist attraction in Cayman,’ Henri said. ‘There would have been masses of boats and literally hundreds of people here earlier, all on organized tours from the cruise ships. It’s like Piccadilly Circus in the rush hour from about ten in the morning until about four in the afternoon almost every day of the year. Then they go back to their ships and sail away.’
I looked around us at the empty sea, with only our boat bobbing gently at anchor nearby.
‘It was a good call of yours to come later,’ I said.
It had also given me the opportunity to phone Atherton, Bradley and Partners, Attorneys at Law, and ask them who were the accountants for Reynard Shipping Limited. Not that it had been a satisfactory call.
‘I’ll put you through to Greg Sherwood,’ the operator had said.
‘And who are you, exactly?’ Greg Sherwood had asked when I’d repeated my request to him.
‘Just someone who wants to know.’
There had been a distinct pause from the other end of the line.
‘I am sorry,’ he’d said eventually. ‘Cayman law does not permit me to give out that information to persons not directly involved with the company.’
I had no way of knowing if he’d been telling me the truth or not. Either way, I would have to be satisfied with just writing to the company at their registered office. They could forward it to their accountants if they wanted.
Henri and I stayed on the sandbar a while longer, enjoying the stingrays, until the sun started dipping rapidly towards the western horizon. Then we climbed back on the boat and set course for the shore as the darkness descended across us like a falling blanket from the east.
Henri and I stood in the bow of the boat, in each other’s arms, and watched as the lights in the hotels and condominiums on Seven Mile Beach began to twinkle brightly.
‘It’s so beautiful,’ Henri said. ‘I don’t want to ever go home.’
Neither did I. And especially not five days earlier than originally planned.
The phone was ringing in the apartment when we arrived back just before seven.
Henri answered it.
‘We’d love to,’ she said. ‘Shall we meet you there?’ She listened. ‘OK. We’ll be ready.’
‘Who was that?’ I asked as she put the phone down.
‘Uncle Richard,’ she said. ‘He’s asked if we would like to go out to dinner tonight with him and Aunt Mary. There’s a new restaurant they want to try. They’re picking us up in an hour.’
‘Is Martin coming?’ I asked.
‘Uncle Richard didn’t say so. I got the impression it was just the four of us.’
Henri hurried into the bathroom to shower and change while I opened my laptop and logged on to the internet. I was still in the shorts and T-shirt I’d been wearing on the boat, but it would only take me a few minutes to change.
There was an e-mail from Quentin:
Jeff,
A few more thoughts about our friend Martin Reynard. I called a solicitor friend of mine who deals with tax affairs for offshore companies. He says the new rules on tax residency are catching out all sorts of people who thought they were safe and now find they’re not, mostly because of how the tax authorities are interpreting the UK ties rule in their new Statutory Residence Test. Some, who thought the new system meant they could stay in the United Kingdom for up to 120 days each year, are actually only allowed to stay here for 90, or even for only 45. There was also something else he said that might be of interest — it seems that some companies are also finding themselves in trouble because of a director inadvertently becoming UK tax resident.
I typed ‘UK tax residency for companies’ into the internet search engine. The result was most revealing:
A company is generally treated as tax resident in the United Kingdom if it is either incorporated in the United Kingdom or, if not, if the boardroom control is exercised in the United Kingdom, or a majority of its board members are UK tax residents.
Reynard Shipping Limited was not incorporated in the United Kingdom. Martin had moved its registration to the Cayman Islands three years ago.
I could hear Henri singing in the shower.
I went quickly into the bedroom and looked again at the packet of board papers in the bedside drawer. They included the minutes of the last meeting, held in Singapore the previous September. The minutes recorded those board members present: Sir Richard Reynard (Chairman), Martin Reynard (Managing Director), Henrietta Shawcross, Greg Sherwood and Alistair Vickers. There had been no apologies for absence. So the Reynard Shipping Limited board of directors comprised just those five.