The detective nodded. "Yes. I've got some shares in ITs; even though I might not be that fat a cat."
The fund manager smiled. "Good choice, as long as you're not with Tubau Gordon Oriental." He pulled his chair closer to his desk. "In the financial world, confidentiality is everything. We take that to extremes here. We have no cross-over between the staff in each of our divisions. Each operates completely separately, with no interchange of information to avoid the temptation of insider dealing. To ensure this, each division has a completely separate information technology set-up. There's no way you can cut into seventh floor data from this level, and there's no way that I, as a corporate manager, can access any of it directly."
"I'm beginning to guess the consequences of the fire," said Steele.
"I'm sure you are. The damage upstairs was total. The entire IT system of Tubau Gordon Oriental has been destroyed, and with it all of our computer records for its current financial year, which has been running since January the first."
"Don't you back up?"
"We back up on to a separate mainframe, outside the network, but that was also located on the sixth floor. It's gone too."
"Paper records?"
"Yes, and all reduced to muddy ashes. The only paper that survived the fire was in rolls in the staff toilets."
"So what have you lost?"
"As I said, we've lost everything; the current investment position of every one of the clients of Tubau Gordon Oriental. We'd have to go back as best we can and rebuild every transaction to the beginning of the calendar year. That would take God knows how long and even then we'd only have an approximation. We will have to ask every company in which we're invested to issue duplicate share certificates, but with the settlement system we'll never know what was in the pipeline, since we do our own trading. It's impossible; in practice, all that we can do is credit everyone with everything they had at the time of the last audit and take it from there. It's a disaster of unthinkable proportions."
"What about previous years? Has all that gone too?"
Dolan looked up to the ceiling. "No, thank God. Once our audits are all completed we archive the records of each year in a secure data warehouse. On top of that we archive our computer records on a six-monthly basis. Had it not been for the fire, that would have happened on Tuesday."
Steele felt a flutter in the pit of his stomach, but kept it to himself. "How many Far East trusts were there?" he asked.
"Three public; Japanese, Chinese, and new markets."
"Three public, you said?"
"Yes. There was also one private trust located upstairs, and managed under our corporate umbrella. It's a family trust; not a unique situation. This one belongs to the Candela family."
"As in…?"
"Yes, it's David's. It used to be managed within Candela and Finch, but he switched it here a few years back, because he liked our security systems and our in-house trading facility. Ironic, is it not?"
"It sure is," Steele conceded, impassively. "When you began," he continued, 'you said that investment trusts were more or less all you did. What else is there?"
"We have a currency section," said the chief executive, 'speculating on the global money markets. That was on the sixth floor; it's gone too.
Never rains, eh."
"That's what we find." The policeman waited until he felt that he had all of Dolan's attention once more. "So why were you about to pick up the phone?" The silence continued, for several seconds.
"Because," came the reply at last, "I have just finished a reconciliation of our total assets; investments and cash in the bank and in transit. It's difficult, given the missing Oriental portfolios, but by my calculation, we're thirty million out… on the downside."
"Bloody hell," Steele exclaimed.
"That's an understatement."
"Will it finish you?"
"No, it won't, but it will send our share price floor-wards and make us a snip for any predators that are out there." Dolan stood up and walked to the window of his office; he gazed along the Western Approach
Road, at nothing in particular.
"So, inspector," he asked, 'are you going to call in the cavalry?"
"I'm going to call in the fire brigade, first off."
"I have done already. And I've called in independent experts. I did that on Sunday. They both agree that the fire started in a computer terminal that was left on over the weekend to receive incoming faxes … a normal procedure, and that there is no evidence of it being deliberate. Someone seems to have been dead lucky, Mr. Steele."
"So far," the policeman retorted. "I'm going to need a list of every person employed on the sixth floor with the skill to make thirty million disappear without being caught. Obviously, that will include the manager of the Candela family trust."
"I wouldn't bother with that, inspector. David manages it personally.
It's another of his many skills."
Sixty
"How'd you like to stay in Buffalo and be my chief of detectives?" asked Bradford Dekker.
"No offence, sheriff," Skinner replied, 'but if I stayed here, I'd be after your job. Elected people trying to manage policemen are the bane of my life back home; if I lived here the only way I could handle it would be to become one myself."
"If the voters of Erie County knew all that's happened over the last couple of days you could run as the Taleban candidate and still get elected."
Bob pulled over a kitchen stool and sat on it, glancing out of the window. With the phone to his ear, he could see Jazz playing in the garden, with Trish watching over him. "So it's over, is it?" he asked.
"Yes. Poor old Candy Brew is downstairs right now in conference with his attorney, that's if the woman can get him to stop sobbing for long enough to listen to what she's got to tell him. When Madigan and I walked into his office he looked at us and burst into tears, and he's been like that most of the time since."
Dekker sounded elated, understandably. "The hair and skin samples matched his," he continued, 'like you said they would, but we didn't need to throw that at him. We didn't need to throw anything at him, in fact. He told us the whole story as soon as we sat him down in the interview room. Hero worship can be a deadly thing, Bob, when it goes to extremes. Mr. Brew had more than a crush on Ron Neidholm; he was downright in love with him. His house is like a shrine, an absolute shrine. He's from Chicago, originally, but he volunteered to us that he took a job in Buffalo because it was Ron's home town. His obsession was no secret either. It was a standing joke among the staff in Waterside Library, and among some of the borrowers as well. We've re-interviewed the Bierhoff woman; she admitted that she didn't just happen to mention Sarah and Ron to him, she did it to wind him up."
"Bitch," Skinner snarled.
"And how. She drove Brew right off the rails; he admitted to us that he went to Neidholm's house to ask him if it was true and if it meant that he wouldn't play football any more. The victim invited him in and took him through to the kitchen, because he said he was about to start fixing a salad. He said that he was expecting company. Candy's story is that when he confronted him, asked him straight out, Ron was evasive at first, suggested very politely that it was none of his damn business. But he persisted, and finally the big guy lost his cool. He told him that he had had a lifetime of guys like him, who thought that football was the only thing in the world, and that finally he had had enough. He wanted a normal life, among real people with a wife and kids, and no more freaks like Brew' Dekker was excited, now, in full flow; at last he paused for breath.