She went noticeably pale. ‘How about the directors? Could it have been in their names; Chandler and Hickok?’
‘Senora, I cannot look through all my customer files …’
‘Wait a minute,’ I said, fairly heavily, forcing him to turn his attention back to me. ‘Did that company ever have an account here?’
When he broke eye contact, he gave me my answer. He confirmed it with the tiniest shrug. This one said, Okay, you got me.
‘Yes, it did. But it is closed now.’
‘How much was in it, who were the signatories and when was the money moved out?’
He tried to look at me as if I had asked him something preposterous. ‘Senor, I cannot tell you any of those things,’ he laughed.
‘Would you rather tell my other friend?’ I asked. I produced Fortunato’s business card from my pocket and handed it to him. ‘Be sure that if you don’t give us some answers, he will be here to ask you.’
The manager studied the card for a long time. ‘Listen,’ I said. ‘I understand that you might be concerned about the effect on your bank of the publicity attached to an incident like this. But we are talking about a lot of money, and we are not just going to walk away. We are going to find out what we want to know. Please, let’s do it the easy way.’
He gave one last shrug to himself as much as to us. This was his What the hell! model. Then he looked at the screen once more. ‘The account was opened in June and closed in November. The opening balance was one billion, six hundred and fifty-six million pesetas, and it was almost the same when it was closed; it gathered twelve million pesetas in interest during the time it was open. There was one large payment made from it, of ten million pesetas, and a couple of smaller ones.
‘The money was transferred electronically to a bank in Nassau, in the Bahamas. The authorised signatories on the account were the people you mentioned, Senor Chandler and Senor Hickok. There was also a third signatory, Senor Josep Toldo; he has an office where we send all the account details.’
‘What’s his address?’
‘I cannot give you that; that I can only tell your policeman friend, if he ask. This man, Senor Toldo, he is a lawyer, and if you go to see him he may think that I sent you. He could make a lot of trouble for me.’
I understood that, so I didn’t press it. I was well chuffed with what we had got out of him as it was, and tracing the lawyer wouldn’t be hard. My elation lasted till we stepped back out into the narrow street and I saw the expression on Susie’s face. It looked like a stone mask. She might not have blown the entire Gantry fortune, but being taken for two million is going to hurt anyone.
‘Do you know what happened to me last month?’ she asked me, tugging her new designer overcoat closed tight against the cold. ‘A magazine in Edinburgh voted me Scottish Businesswoman of the Year. A fat bloody lot they knew, eh?
‘Business failure of the year; that’s more like it.’
I slipped my arm around her waist and headed her back towards El Cort Ingles. ‘Come on, wee one,’ I said, in what I hoped was my best ‘cheer up’ voice. ‘There are other people involved in this too, and they were supposed to be pretty smart. Are you bankrupt? No you’re not. . Not by a long shot. Are your shareholders going to demand your resignation? You are your shareholders.
‘The worst that’s going to happen is that you’ve generated a capital loss to offset against a capital gain somewhere along the way.’
She snorted. ‘Huh. You’ll be singing “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life” next. I believed them, Oz. I really thought I was a business whiz kid. Now I know I’m anything but, and soon the whole world’s going to know about it. D’you think the newspapers aren’t going to find out about this?’
‘Get your PR people to handle it. They’ll get you a decent press.’
‘Maybe, but everything I’m trying to forget will get raked up in the process; my Lord Provost, Mike, maybe even the fact that Joe’s my real dad.’
‘No way anyone’s going to find that out. Jack Gantry’s name’s on your birth certificate, isn’t it?’
She conceded that point as we stepped back into the hypermarket and took the lift up to the top floor cafeteria.
We found a table with a fine view across the city and ordered lunch, plus a bottle of Vina Sol. Susie had decided that the hair of the dog was a must. As we sat and sipped it, waiting for our food, she looked at me. ‘What do you think, then? What do we do now?’
‘First, you call Ann Hay or Joe. Tell them what we’ve found out and have them contact the other investors. . they’ve got to be informed. Then we turn my friend Captain Fortunato loose on this man Toldo.’
‘Captain Fortunato? Your friend?’ She didn’t even try to hide her surprise.
I didn’t bite. ‘Why shouldn’t he be?’
She gave me a long look.
‘You’ve heard of him, though?’
‘Yes. Prim mentioned him to me once.’
‘What did she tell you about him?’
She eyed me up, unsure about me, unsure of what I knew.
‘Oh, you know; girl talk.’
‘What? Like when I left her they had a fling, but it collapsed when she found that she was in the club? That sort of girl talk?’
‘Mmm,’ she murmured. ‘She finally told you, then.’
‘Finally,’ I said. I didn’t like the thought that Prim had told anyone, even Susie, before me.
‘You don’t mind, then?’
‘It was none of my business then; it’s none of my business now.’
She looked at me again, out of the corner of her eye. ‘You don’t mind, then?’ she repeated.
‘Of course I fucking mind!’ It burst out of me in a shout that startled the woman at the next table, never mind making Susie jump; I lowered my voice. ‘We come back here on our honeymoon, and one of the first people we meet is a guy whose kid she had aborted. This might be amiable old Oz you’re talking to, but there’s a limit.’
‘So how come you say he’s your friend?’
‘First because I concentrate very hard on not thinking about it, and second because, apart from the fact that he had a wife at the time, there’s nothing I can blame him for. I can’t blame Prim for what happened either, only myself, but I don’t like the way I found out about it.’
‘Does that mean that you’re going to tell Prim about what happened this morning?’
‘It might.’
‘Bullshit.’
I glowered at her.
‘That’s it,’ she teased me. ‘Show me those hairy eyebrows. You’ve just proved something I’ve suspected for a while. No wonder you’re a hit in the movies.
‘You’re a natural, sunshine, a consummate actor. Amiable old Oz, as you called him, is a part you’ve chosen to play; the saintly youth that everyone loves and who can do no real wrong. But inside you’re just as tough as the next guy, and probably a hell of a lot tougher. When it suits your book, you can be really brutal, but you get away with it because people look at you and think “Oh, but it’s nice smiley Oz, so it must be all right.”
‘For as long as I’ve known you, I’ve been waiting for you to drop your guard, and now you’ve done it.’
I carried on looking at her, not smiling, not blinking. ‘You’re talking about someone I don’t recognise,’ I told her.
‘If you could hear the coldness in your voice, you’d recognise him. “We all wear masks, kid.” That’s something else the Lord Provost said to me. “Most of us look in the mirror without knowing who we really are, deep inside.” He did, though; he could see his inner man. His problem was that he didn’t realise that, deep inside, that man was a monster.’
‘And what about Susie Gantry?’ I asked her. ‘Who’s she?’
‘I’m like you,’ she answered at once. ‘On the outside, I’m light and cheerful and user-friendly; a lot of my business success is built on that, I’m sure. I’m everybody’s flavour of the month. But behind it all, I’m hard and cunning and ruthless and, sometimes, not very scrupulous.
‘I’ve only ever met one person who I reckon was the same however you looked at them, inside and out.’