Chapter 6
— A Shell With No Bottom
Alpen Trade was a shell with no bottom. I learned that phrase from Wesley later, when he began to trace the money, but I understood the meaning of it long before I had the words. A shell is a company that looks real on paper and has nothing behind it. No yard. No workshop. No workers. No boats. Only a name, and an account, and invoices that arrive on time and are paid on time, month after month, for work that never happens. Alpen Trade was such a company, and it had been feeding on the Haversham Danube Line for two years, taking money that should have gone to real repairs, real crews, real boats.
Landon built it with Xavier Wexford, our chief financial officer. I say that now with certainty, though at the time I only suspected it, because the pieces fit together too neatly to be an accident. Xavier controlled the accounts. He approved the payments. He signed the invoices through, and he made sure no one else looked at them too closely. Landon gave the orders, and Xavier carried them out, and between them they created a system that was simple and, for a long time, invisible. An invoice would arrive from Alpen Trade for work on a boat. Xavier would approve it. The money would leave our account and enter theirs. And then, I learned later, the money would move on again, to accounts that Landon controlled.
Its genius, if you can call it genius, was patience. They did not take a fortune at once. They took a little at a time, in sums that looked ordinary, for work that sounded plausible. A pump here. A valve there. Hull work below the waterline, where no one could check without diving. Engine parts that could have been replaced, and might have been, for all anyone knew. Each invoice was small enough to pass. Together, they were large enough to drain the company slowly, like a leak in a hull that no one notices until the boat begins to sit low in the water. I had noticed the boat sitting low. That was why I had started to look.
Xavier had worked for us for many years, and I had trusted him. He was clever with numbers, and he was polite, and he always had an answer ready when I asked a question. I see now that his answers were too ready, too smooth, too practised. When I asked about a charge, he would explain it away with a technical term, and I would nod, because I did not want to seem as if I doubted a man I had trusted for so long. I trusted him, and he used that trust the way Landon used my love: as a door left open. Together, they turned my company into a source of money for themselves, and they did it while smiling at me across the boardroom table.
Landon needed the money, I believe, because he wanted a life larger than the company could honestly give him. He wanted houses and cars and a standing that did not come from work on the river. He had grown impatient with the slow, honest growth Nelson and I had believed in. He wanted everything at once, and he did not want to wait for it, and he did not want to earn it. Xavier wanted the same, or something like it, and he had the skill to hide it. Between them, they were a perfect pair: one to want, one to hide. And I, who had built the company with my husband, was the only person standing in their way, because I kept the logbook, and I walked the decks, and I checked the numbers.
The fraud was not only about money. It was about the boats. Every coin that went to Alpen Trade was a coin that did not go to a real repair. The Danube Empress needed new paint, and it was delayed. The Wachau Queen needed work on her hull, and it was put off. The Vienna Star needed an engine part, and it was ordered late. The boats were being starved while the invoices claimed they were being fed. I had seen the signs, and I had put them down to hard times, and to the cost of running an old fleet. I had not seen that the hard times were being made in my own office, by my own son and my own financial officer, for their own gain.
I kept asking myself how long it could have gone on if I had not looked. Another year, perhaps, until the company could no longer pay its crews, and Landon would have blamed the river, or the market, or me. He would have said the old boats were too costly to keep, and no one would have known the money for their care had gone to a firm that did nothing at all.
When I understood all of this, sitting by Kieran's fire with the river below, I felt a grief that was deeper than anger. I had raised Landon on those boats. I had taught him the numbers. I had shown him the agreement. And he had used everything I taught him to steal from the company I had built with his father. Xavier had helped him, and together they had built a shell with no bottom, and they had filled it with my company's money. But a shell with no bottom cannot hold forever. The money leaves a trail. The invoices leave a trail. And my logbook, kept for forty years, would show the world what had never happened, and what had.