A Place of Hiding (Inspector Lynley, #12)(200)

“We ran the hotel business on computers,” she said. “But Guy was old-fashioned when it came to his personal finances.”

“It does seem...” St. James searched for a euphemism. She supplied it. “Antiquated. Not like Guy at all. But he never caught on to computers. Push-button phones and microwave ovens were as far as he went before technology got away from him. But this is easy enough to follow, you’ll see. Guy kept good records.”

As St. James sat at the desk and opened the ledger, Ruth brought out two more. Each of them, she explained, covered three years of her brother’s expenses. These were not great, since the vast majority of the money was in her name, and it was from her own accounts that the estate had always been maintained.

In possession of the most recent ledger, St. James scanned it to see what the last three years had been like for Guy Brouard. It didn’t take long to note a pattern in how he spent his money during that time, and that pattern was spelled A-n-a-?-s A-b-b-o-t-t. Brouard had put out funds for his lover time and again, paying for everything from cosmetic surgery to property taxes to the mortgage on her house to holidays in Switzerland

and Belize to her daughter’s tuition at modeling school. Beyond that, he’d listed expenses for a Mercedes-Benz, for ten sculptures identified by artist and title, for a loan to Henry Moullin that he’d described as “furnace,” and for what appeared to be additional loans or gifts to his son. More recently, he’d apparently purchased a plot of land in St. Saviour, and he’d made payments to Bertrand Debiere as well as to De Carteret Cabinet Design, Tissier Electric, and Burton-Terry Plumbing.

From those, St. James concluded that Brouard had indeed intended to build the wartime museum initially, even to employ Debiere as its designer. But all of the payments that could have been even remotely related to producing a public building had ceased nine months ago. Then, in place of the careful accounting Brouard had been making, a list of numbers finished off the page and began another, ultimately being bracketed off together but without the single recipient being identified. Nonetheless, St. James had a fairly good idea of what that identification was: International Access. The figures corresponded to those the bank had provided Le Gallez. He noted that the final payment—the largest of all—had apparently been wired out of Guernsey on the very day that the River siblings had come to the island.

St. James asked Ruth Brouard for a calculator, which she handed over from a drawer in her brother’s desk. He added up the list of those debits that had been applied to the unnamed recipient. They totaled over two million pounds.

“How much money did your brother begin with when you two settled here?” he asked Ruth. “You told me he put nearly everything into your name but he did hold something back for his own expenses, didn’t he? Have you any idea how much?”

“Several million pounds,” she said. “He thought he could live quite well off the interest once the money was invested properly. Why? Is there something...?”

She didn’t add the word wrong since it was hardly necessary. From the very first, there had been little enough right about her brother’s postmortem finances. The telephone ringing saved St. James from having to make an immediate reply. Ruth answered it from the extension on the desk and handed the receiver over to St. James.

“You’ve not endeared yourself to your hotel’s receptionist,” Thomas Lynley said to him from London. “She’s encouraging you to purchase a mobile. I’m passing along that message.”

“Received. Have you unearthed something?”

“I have indeed. It’s an intriguing situation, although I don’t expect you’re going to be pleased to hear about it. It’s going to throw a spanner.”

“Let me guess. There’s no International Access in Bracknell.”

“Dead on. I rang an old mate of mine from Hendon. He works Vice in that area. He went round to the address that’s listed as International Access and found a tanning salon. They’d been in that location for eight years—the tanning business being evidently quite good in Bracknell—”

“I’ll note that for future reference.”

“—and they claimed to have not the slightest idea what my man was talking about. This prompted further discussion with the bank. I mentioned FSA to them and they became willing to part with some information about the International Access account. Apparently, money wired to that account from Guernsey was then wired onward some forty-eight hours later to a place called Jackson Heights in Queens, New York.”

“Jackson Heights? Is that—”

“The location, not the name on the account.”

“Did you get a name out of them?”

“Vallera and Son.”

“Some sort of business?”

“Apparently so. But we don’t know what sort. Neither does the bank. Theirs is not to question why, et cetera. But it’s looking like...well, you know what it’s looking like: something to whet the American government’s appetite for investigation.”

St. James studied the pattern on the rug beneath his feet. He became aware of Ruth Brouard next to him, and he looked up to see her watching him. Her expression was earnest but beyond that, he could read nothing from her face.

He rang off on Lynley’s assurance that wheels were in motion to try to get someone from Vallera & Son on the telephone, although he cautioned St. James not to expect any cooperation from the other side of the Atlantic. “If this is what it appears to be, we may be at a dead end unless we involve a strong-arming agency over there. Internal Revenue. FBI. New York City Police.”