Woodpecker

Chapter 17 / John 4 / 2 x 2 x 2 Days Left

But this layering of registered companies went on and on, with no individuals named in any of the filings. So, he had done a check on the bank account of Cinereus and found regular cash flows and followed it down the tree of shell companies until it disappeared into nothingness. One company paying another company, down the chain until it reached Cinereus and then the only outflow was to Levitsky. It was like this whole structure was set up just to pay this one person and keep the source a secret. He'd spent days pouring over the bank records of each shell company trying to see if he could connect any of them to a person.

Then he spotted something odd in the transactions of one of the companies called Sinensis. On one day at the beginning of the year, a sum of twenty-two thousand pounds had been paid into the account, in cash, at a branch in London. When he'd pondered this, he tried to imagine someone walking around London with that amount of money on them. It was London, so it probably happened. But no. More likely was that whoever it was had walked into the bank branch, withdrawn the money, and then paid it straight into the account of Sinensis. His hunch turned out to be right. Four minutes prior to that transaction a Mr. David Cooke had walked in and withdrawn twenty-two thousand and two hundred pounds from his own account. Geering assumed the two hundred was for his personal use and the rest was this same payment. He couldn't prove it, but it was just the sort of small mistake that might finally break a case like this wide open.

Had Cooke gone to the branch around the corner to withdraw the cash it would have been all but untraceable. It never ceased to amaze John how even the most sophisticated operators always believed deep down that they were too clever to be caught. This was always their downfall.

The problem now is that this man isn't in the United Kingdom and so Geering has no jurisdiction over him at all. At this moment, as far as he can tell from travel records and internet research, he is sitting on the Caribbean Island of Tobago. This is an interesting choice because the mind is left to boggle what he might be doing there. As one of the most opaque tax havens in the world, it seems likely to Geering that the business interests that his sister spoke of on the phone, fall firmly in the grey area between what is legal and illegal. The sort of thing that only God can judge the morality of. Untouchable to law enforcement. Anyway, John is following his method to the letter and trying to find out as much about the background of this man as he can. But it was proving difficult.

David Cooke seemed to Geering to be like another ghost in this story. Just like Joshua Matheson he existed only in the physical sense, and not fully in anyone else's world. His sister didn't want to speak about him and told him very little. It seemed that they were strangers to one another, both having been sent off to separate single sex boarding schools at a young age. She confirmed where she thought he was though, confirmed that he was very wealthy, and confirmed in the most diffuse of terms that he had multiple business interests. But she didn't know what he did exactly. Geering did manage to get the name of the school that he had attended from the age of eleven up until he was eighteen. Cranbourne Park School in the Berkshire countryside near Windsor.

He had called ahead and spoken with the headmaster the previous day. It being twenty-seven years since Cooke left the school, he didn't think that there were any teachers that would have been around at the time. Nevertheless, the headmaster had said he was welcome to come down and look at the archives from that time. He'd pull out the old school reports and that sort of thing if he would find that useful. In half an hour Geering would know how useful it was.

******

Mr. Chadha the headmaster greets John warmly when he arrives. He is clearly a man used to dealing with people. He smiles with his eyes rather than his mouth, the corners creasing to folds behind his glasses. He tells John that he has prepared everything and after asking around has found someone that remembers David Cooke very well. A teacher emeritus that does supply cover for them occasionally happens to be there that week and is happy to answer his questions. Chadha says that he'll take John to him now. He's in the staff room.