Howard Linskey - The Dead

‘Good morning gentlemen,’ he said, his jowly face contorted into a yawn.

‘Sorry, am I keeping you up?’ I asked.

‘Not at all dear boy, as ever I am hanging on your every word. I’m just a little pooped, that’s all,’ and he yawned again, ‘a late night,’ and he smiled enigmatically, ‘with a friend.’ Then he elaborated, ‘It was Vaughan Williams at the Sage.’

‘Good was he?’ asked Kinane.

‘What?’ Baxter didn’t do anything to hide the incredulity in his voice. Kinane just assumed he hadn’t heard the question.

‘Vaughan thingy; was he any good?’

‘You’re not serious Joe? The man’s been dead for half a century.’

‘Eh?’ it was Kinane’s turn to act confused, ‘well I don’t know who he is, do I? I was only asking.’

At this point Baxter should have shut up, but he carried on digging and I let him.

‘Don’t tell me you’ve never heard of him, that’s tantamount to an impossibility. He was the greatest English composer of the twentieth century…’

‘Listen Baxter,’ interrupted Kinane. ‘I don’t have the time to listen to some poncin’arsed, classical shite like that. I like proper, non-wanky stuff; Dire Straits and Sting and a bit of Fleetwood Mac,’ before adding, ‘something you can tap your fingers against the steering wheel to when you’re driving, like normal people.’

‘Alright lads,’ Palmer said, ‘don’t get your knickers in a twist. We picked Baxter up for a reason and it wasn’t to talk about concerts.’

‘It’s done,’ Baxter told us curtly.

‘What is?’ I asked him.

‘That which you asked me to do.’ He had clearly gone into one of his sulks. ‘A cast-iron, fool-proof and entirely legal… ish … cash transfer that has enabled us to place a very significant amount of money beyond the grasping arms of Her Majesty’s Inspectors of Revenue, ergo the tax man, into an offshore account at a highly-accommodating little bank in the Cayman Islands.’

The Caymans was invented for people like us. The place is the fifth largest financial centre in the world after New York, London, Tokyo and Zurich, holding assets of eighteen trillion dollars on deposit. Why? Here’s a clue; in the capital, George Town, there are eighteen thousand corporations registered in one building alone. They don’t even try to look legitimate. And who is responsible for ensuring the Cayman Islands plays fair and doesn’t launder money? Well, the place is still an overseas territory of the UK.

‘You’ve done it then?’ I asked Baxter disbelievingly.

‘Yes,’ he told me smugly, as he awaited my congratulations.

‘No hitches?’ I asked.

‘None.’

‘The entire five million?’

‘The whole bloody lot.’

‘Well done,’ I told him. This was good news and I felt in need of some, ‘Palmer, turn the car around and head for the Quayside.’

‘Where are we going?’

‘For lunch,’ I told them, ‘at Cafe 21.’

I never tire of Cafe 21, even with Baxter as a lunch companion. Maybe it’s because I don’t own the place, so I can relax there.

Baxter was characteristically verbose throughout our meal but he’d earned the right to be pleased with himself and regale us with tales of his life before joining our firm. He liked to tell the story of his difficult childhood; how he struggled to fit in as a boarder at his famous, old public school. The way Baxter told it, he was a precociously gifted child, a sensitive soul who was bullied relentlessly because of this obvious potential for greatness. From there it was an upward trajectory that took in Cambridge, then the City, where his genius for numbers was ruthlessly harnessed until he was deemed surplus to requirements and ‘cast adrift’ as he put it. He was actually arrested for embezzling millions of pounds of client money, in a fraud so Byzantine in its complexity it was only discovered at all because of the credit crunch. The old, long-established broking house he worked for was running out of cash. They had to resort to digging into their reserves to fund them through the crisis, which was when they realised there was a large black hole. Henry Baxter got six years and did three.

I’d read about the case in the papers but it was Amrein who really put me onto him, when Baxter was about to emerge from prison. The complex nature of Baxter’s fraudulent transactions, coupled with the extraordinary web of companies he managed to set up to launder his ill-gotten gains, making them virtually tax free, made him just the kind of man I was looking for. I needed someone who could move money around and Baxter could do it with not a little elan. Palmer called Baxter a math-magician, a phrase our accountant loathed, which is why Palmer kept on saying it to his face.

I doubt Baxter would have signed up with us at all if it wasn’t for the ARA. The Assets Recovery Agency took him apart and clawed back virtually everything he had stolen. He couldn’t have been more bitter about that.

‘So you know all about this smoke and mirrors, city-boy, swank-wank stuff then, do you Baxter?’ asked Kinane.

‘If you mean, can I explain the difference between a collateralised debt obligation and a credit default swap then yes, I can,’ he smiled, ‘whether you will be able to grasp that difference is another matter.’

I interrupted before things got more heated. ‘Perhaps, Baxter, your time would be better employed explaining to the boys exactly how you lifted five million of our ill-gotten pounds out of the country, cleaned it, laundered it and only paid three per cent tax.’

‘Three per cent?’ asked a baffled Palmer.

‘It’s very simple dear boy,’ explained Baxter, ‘I merely adapted a model already favoured by some of the super-rich in our country,’ and he waited till he was sure he had our full attention before continuing, ‘I set up a partnership trust and registered it in Jersey. The partners in the trust, who just happen to be us, meaning subsidiary companies we own that operate under a variety of names, all contribute sizeable sums of money, totalling five million pounds, which amounts to the combined profits of our legitimate businesses, with a very sizeable chunk of illegitimate takings thrown in.’

‘You mean the drug money,’ said Kinane.

‘We then take that five million and invest it into our partnership trust, which buys a dividend from an offshore company we already control. That dividend actually costs fifty million pounds because it is worth fifty million… only it isn’t, because it is entirely fictitious. That’s the bit of the scheme I adapted.’

‘Come again?’ asked Palmer.

‘You spent five million pounds on something with no profit?’ asked Kinane, who had already lost the thread completely.

‘It isn’t real,’ confirmed Baxter, ‘nor is the forty-five million pound loan we took out to buy that fake dividend.’

‘So it’s a fake loan, with fake interest and fake repayments to purchase an imaginary dividend.’ I explained.

‘I don’t get it,’ said Palmer, ‘if it’s all fake then what do we get out of it?’

‘Tax relief,’ I told him.

‘Is that all?’ asked Kinane.

‘Is that all?’ snorted Baxter, ‘we have just laundered five million pounds into an offshore account and it cost us just one hundred and fifty thousand pounds tax, plus transaction fees, meaning we keep four million, eight hundred and fifty thousand pounds, which is now nestling in a bank account in the Cayman Islands.’

‘If we’d paid Corporation Tax at twenty-four per cent, it would have cost us one-point-two mill.’

‘So Baxter just saved us over a million quid?’ asked Palmer.

I raised my champagne glass to Baxter, ‘hence lunch at 21.’