“Karl.” Nothing. “Karel. Keir.” Nothing. Nothing.
Dirk made some coffee, taking the long route round his kitchen, in order to avoid coming too close to his bank statements, now that he had put them down. Viewed in a certain light, the entire structure of his adult life could be seen as a means of avoiding opening his bank statements. Someone else’s bank statements—now that was a different matter. He was rarely happier than when poring over someone else’s bank statements: he always found them to be rich in colour and narrative drive, particularly if he’d had to steam them open. But the prospect of opening his own gave him the screaming heebie-jeebies.
“Keith,” said the voice, hopefully, nasally. Nothing.
“Kelvin.” No.
Dirk poured his coffee as slowly as he could, for he realised that the time had finally come. He had to open the statements and learn the worst. He selected the largest knife he could find and advanced on them, threateningly.
“Kendall.” Silence.
In the end he did it almost nonchalantly, with a sadistic little flick-slit movement. He quite enjoyed it, in fact, and even felt fashionably vicious. In a few seconds the four envelopes—his financial history of the last four months—were open. Dirk laid their contents out before him.
“Kendrick.” Nothing.
“Kennedy.” The tinny little voice was beginning to get on Dirk’s nerves. He glanced at the corner of the room. Two mournful eyes looked at him in silent bewilderment.
As Dirk at last looked at the figures at the bottom of the last sheet of paper, a kind of swimmy feeling assailed him. He gasped sharply. The table began to bend and sway. He felt as if the hands of fate had started kneading his shoulders. He had imagined it was bad, in fact for the last few weeks he had imagined little else other than how bad it might be, but even in his worst imaginings he had no idea it might be this bad.
Clammy things happened in his throat. He could not possibly, possibly be over £22,000 overdrawn. He pushed his chair back from the kitchen table, and for a few moments just sat there, throbbing. £22,000 ...
The word “Kenneth” floated mockingly through the room.
As he rapidly cast his mind back over what he could remember of his expenditures over the last few weeks—an ill-considered shirt here, a reckless bun there, a wild weekend in the Isle of Wight—he realised that he must be right. He could not possibly be £22,000 overdrawn.
He took a deep breath and looked at the figures once more.
There it was again. £22,347.43.
There must be some mistake. Some terrible, terrible mistake. The chances were, of course, that he had made it, and as he stared, trembling, at the paper he realised, quite suddenly, that he had.
He had been looking for a negative number and had therefore assumed that that was what he was looking at. In fact his account stood at £22,347.43. In credit.
Credit ...
He’d never known such a thing. Didn’t even know what it looked like. Hadn’t recognised it. Slowly, carefully, almost as if the figures might fall off the page and get lost on the floor, he sifted through the sheets one by one to try to find out where on earth all this money had come from. “Kenny,” “Kentigern,” and “Kermit” slipped by unheard.
It was immediately clear that it was regular amounts that had been coming in, once a week. There had been seven of them—so far. The most recent one had come in the Friday before last, which was as far as these statements went. The odd thing was that though the amounts were regular, they were untidy amounts, similar each week, but not exactly the same. The previous Friday’s payment was £3,267.34. The previous Thursday’s (they had each come in at the end of the week, three of them on a Thursday, four on a Friday) was for £3,232.57. The week before it had been £3,319.14. And so on.
Dirk stood up and took a deep breath. What the hell was going on? He felt that his whole world was spinning very slowly in what was, as far as he could judge, an anticlockwise direction. That prompted a vague recollection that the last time he had drunk any tequila, it had made his world spin slowly in a clockwise direction. That was obviously what he needed if he was going to be able to think about this clearly. He rummaged hurriedly through a cupboard full of dusty nine-tenths empty bottles of half-forgotten rums and whiskies and found some. A half-full bottle of mezcal. He poured himself a finger in the bottom of a teacup and hurriedly returned to his statements, suddenly panicking in case the figures vanished while he wasn’t looking.
They were still there. Irregularly large sums regularly paid in. His head began to swim again. What were they? Interest payments that had been accidentally credited to the wrong account? If they were interest payments, that would account for the fluctuations in the amounts. But it still didn’t make sense for the simple reason that over £3,000 interest a week represented the interest on two or three million pounds and was not the sort of thing that the owner of such an amount of money was going to allow to be misplaced, let alone for seven weeks in a row. He took a pull on the mezcal. It marched around his mouth waving its fists, waited a moment or two, and then started to beat up his brain.
He wasn’t thinking rationally about this, he realised. The problem was that they were his own accounts, and he was used to reading other people’s. Since they were his own, it was in fact possible for him just to phone up the bank and ask. Except that, of course, they’d be closed now. And he had a horrible feeling that if he phoned them up, the response would be “Whoops, sorry, wrong account. Thank you for bringing this error to our attention. How stupid of us to imagine that this money could possibly belong to you.” Obviously he had to try to work out where it was from before he asked the bank. In fact he had to get the money out of the bank before he asked them. He probably had to get to Fiji or somewhere before he asked them. Except—suppose the money continued to come in?
On reapplying his attention to the papers, he realised something else that would have occurred to him straightaway if he hadn’t been so flustered. There was, of course, a code next to each entry. The purpose of the code was to tell him what kind of entry it was. He looked the code up. Easy. Each payment had reached his account by international transfer.
Hmmm.
That would also account for the fluctuations. International exchange rates. If the same amount of a foreign currency was being transferred each week, then the variations in the rate would ensure that a slightly differing amount actually arrived on each occasion. It would also explain why it didn’t arrive on exactly the same day each week. Although it only took less than a second to make a computerised international transfer of money, the banks liked to make as much fuss as they possibly could about it so that the funds would swill around profitably in their system for a while.
But which country were the payments coming from? And why?
“Kevin,” said the Irish-Swedish voice. “Kieran.”
“Oh, shut up!” shouted Dirk suddenly.
That provoked a response. The small border terrier lying, perplexed, in a basket in the corner of the room looked up excitedly and yipped with pleasure. It had not reacted at all to any of the names that the elderly computer on the table next to it had been reciting from a text file of babies’ names, but the creature obviously just enjoyed being told to shut up and was keen for more.
“Kimberly,” said the computer. Nothing. The dog with no name looked disappointed.
“Kirby.”
“Kirk.” The dog slowly settled back down into its basket of old newspapers and resumed its previous posture of baffled distress.
Old newspapers. That was what Dirk needed.