Chapter 9
— Following the Money
Wesley began with the simplest question, and the hardest one: where did the money go? An invoice is only paper until it is paid, and a payment leaves a mark, and a mark can be followed, if you know where to look and you are patient enough to look there. He knew the river, and he knew the offices along it, and he knew the clerks and the bankers and the harbour officials who kept the records of who paid whom and when. He did not go to Landon, and he did not go to Xavier, and he did not ask questions that would make them suspicious. He went quietly, and he listened, and he asked for help from people who trusted him because he had piloted their boats safely through bad weather and narrow bends.
He started with Alpen Trade. He asked about the firm, and no one he spoke to had ever seen its yard, or its workshop, or its workers. He asked for its address, and the address led to a small office that was rarely open, with a sign on the door and no one inside. He asked for its bank records, and that was harder, because banks do not give their records to strangers. But Wesley was not a stranger. He was a pilot, and a Haversham, and he knew people who knew people, and he was patient, and he was careful, and he kept asking, in the right way, to the right people, until the records began to open to him, a little at a time.
The first records showed what I had already suspected. Money had left the Haversham Danube Line, month after month, in payments to Alpen Trade, for repairs that had never happened. The sums matched the invoices I had copied, line for line, date for date. It was a relief, in a strange way, to see it written down in a bank's own records, because it meant I had not imagined it, and I had not misread the accounts. The money had gone, and it had gone to Alpen Trade, and Alpen Trade had done nothing to earn it. Wesley wrote down every payment, and every date, and every sum, and he kept his notes in a safe place, because he knew, as I knew, that papers can disappear when they become inconvenient.
Then he followed the money further, and that was where the story grew darker. The money did not stay in Alpen Trade's account. It moved on, quickly, in large sums, to other accounts, and those accounts, when he traced them, led back to Landon. Not directly, not with Landon's name written plainly on them, but through a chain of transfers that a careful man could follow, and that a careless man would miss. The money that had left our company for phantom repairs had ended up, in the end, in accounts that Landon controlled. It had paid for the life he wanted, the life the company could not honestly give him, and it had done so while the boats went without the repairs they needed.
Wesley told me all of this on the telephone, in a low voice, as if he were afraid someone might be listening. He told me he had copies, and he told me he had kept them safe, and he told me he would bring them to me when the time was right. I asked him if he was certain, and he said he was, because the numbers did not lie, and the trail was clear, and he had checked it twice, the way I had taught him to check everything. I believed him, because he was careful, and because he was honest, and because he had no reason to lie to me. He had risked his own place in the company, and his relationship with his father, to follow that money, and he had found what I had hoped he would find.
I sat by Kieran's fire after that call, and I thought about what Wesley had found, and what it meant. It meant the fraud was not a mistake. It was not a misunderstanding. It was a system, built by Landon and Xavier, to take money from the company and put it in Landon's hands, using a firm that did no work at all. It meant the invoices were not only false, but part of a plan, and the plan had a purpose, and the purpose was theft. And it meant I had the beginning of the proof I needed: my logbook, which showed the repairs had never happened, and Wesley's bank records, which showed where the money had gone. Together, they told a story no one could deny.
But I also knew that bank records alone would not be enough. Landon would say the transfers were for something else, or that he had not known, or that Xavier had acted alone. I would need more: the original power of attorney, to show the sale of the boats was unlawful; the witnesses, to show what had been said and seen; the logbook, to show what had never been done. Wesley's work was the beginning, not the end. He had followed the money, and he had found where it went, and now we had to follow it further, into the hearing in Vienna, where I would stand and present it all, and where Landon would have to answer for what he had done.