Chasing the Bullet

By Tom Holden

At the height of the global banking crisis in 2008, Reuben Freeman finds himself at the centre of a complex web of intrigue and double dealing involving his greedy bosses at the bank where he works, his exotic lovers, the lacklustre police force and a gang of ruthless organised criminals. His investigations in to a series of murders and frauds take him on an increasingly desperate search across multi-cultural, twenty-first century London, as he attempts to apprehend the masterminds behind a string of murders and financial corruption. Repeatedly betrayed and double-crossed, he finds that he can only rely on a couple of loyal members of his team, his French lover, her girlfriend and himself or can he?

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse UK
• Release date: Mar 30, 2012
• ISBN: 9781467890540

Book preview

1

R EUBEN FREEMAN GAZED at the view downriver. His eyes followed the Thames as it snaked around Canary Wharf, flowed past the O2 arena, and glided through the Thames Barrier. The morning sunlight glinted on the steel and glass buildings, and in the distance wind turbines turned against the clear, blue sky.

Reuben looked to his right and took in the sight of Greenwich Naval College, resplendent on the other side of the river. Turning to his left, he took in the view back up to the City: the Gherkin and Tower Bridge stood out on the skyline. From the twenty-fourth level of the building, he really did have the most fantastic panoramic views across London.

At six feet tall with an upright stance that only a career in the army could produce, Reuben Freeman looked fit and strong for a man who had just turned forty-eight. With his brown hair and dark brown eyes and tanned complexion, he looked a picture of good health.

He reflected on all that had happened over the past two days, from the time the phone rang as he was leaving his office on Monday evening. He had thought about letting it go to his voicemail, but in the end, he had answered the call. On the other end of the line was the desperate voice of a manager.

‘Reuben, I need your help,’ the manager said. ‘There’s a man coming to reception in a few minutes. I want you to arrest him.’

So Reuben went down to the deserted reception area that resembled an empty airport waiting lounge and waited with the increasingly desperate manager, until finally he realised what Reuben had known all along.

‘He’s not coming, is he?’ he said to Reuben with his head in his hands.

‘No,’ said Reuben, ‘because he doesn’t exist. You’ve been conned. You’ve been dealing with a fraudster. This is the last place on earth he would ever come to. Let’s go back to my office, and you can tell me all about it.’

For the next three hours, he listened to the ins and outs, the whys and wherefores, as the manager told him his version of events. They parted at midnight, agreeing to meet up again the next morning.

Reuben liked to start work early. At 7.00 a.m. he could walk around the office largely undisturbed, get a double espresso—none of this frothy, milky stuff for him—and enjoy some genuinely constructive thinking time, which was rare in the bank these days. Today, though, he had things to do. He sighed at the prospect of what lay before him this particular Wednesday morning.

Firstly he had to suspend the unfortunate manager as soon as he arrived at work and send him straight back home. Then he would accompany the director for corporate banking, David Morris, up to the City to meet with his counterparts at the Japanese bank that had recently received six million pounds from one of his corporate banking customers.

Reuben read through the initial investigation report once again. A manager in Morris’s department was introduced to a prospective customer at a business reception. They had gone on to develop a business relationship by phone calls and emails, copies of which had now been retrieved. As the relationship developed, an account was opened and funds received. The customer had placed considerable sums on deposit with the bank. Unfortunately, the manager never bothered to check with whom he was dealing. He granted substantial overdraft facilities to the customer. And last Friday and this Monday, in payments of two million pounds, a total of eight million pounds left the account. The bank was looking at a net loss of six million pounds. One bright spark in the department had managed to stop the final payment leaving the account, saving a further loss of two million pounds.

At 9.00 a.m., Reuben met Morris in the reception hall and they stepped out of the main entrance and into the taxi that was waiting to take them up to the City.

At that time of day, it was a slow journey, winding through streets full of traffic. In the taxi, the Morris was relatively positive, chatting about how they should approach the meeting.

David Morris, the director for corporate banking, regarded himself as an honourable man. He was sure his counterparts at the Japanese bank would understand his position and repay the amounts they had received on the previous Friday and Monday. After all, they were honourable men as well.

Not in a million years, thought Reuben. They will remain inscrutably polite and protect their customer with their lives.

On the return journey, Morris just sat in the back of the taxi, silently shaking with frustration and fury over what had happened.

At the meeting, his Japanese counterparts had behaved as Reuben had anticipated: with inscrutable politeness, handing out their business cards with both hands and bowing as they were taken. The meeting took place in a wood-panelled room with a huge, oblong mahogany table running the length of it.

The meeting did provide one memorable moment when the chief executive of the Japanese bank remarked to his counterpart, ‘For five years we have banked with you. This is the first time I have actually met anyone from your bank.’

After that, there was little more to add. The Japanese gave nothing away. They even refused to admit that the customer involved was actually their customer.

David Morris left the meeting tight lipped, with Reuben by his side. They walked back out to the street to hail a taxi. The heavy August heat rose up from the pavements and reflected off the walls of the buildings as the sun beat down from the clear, blue sky.

Reuben looked about him and breathed in deeply. The smell of greed rose up from the gutters and filled his lungs. He felt a deep sense of foreboding. It was August 2008.

2

R EUBEN SPENT THE next couple of days on the investigation into where the funds may have gone. He met with members of the law-enforcement agencies, but they could offer little assistance. They had bigger fish to fry. The simple fact was that the money had gone and they were not going to get it back. Likewise, the hapless manager had gone as well. The bank did not tolerate mistakes like this. Reuben’s biggest challenge was explaining what had happened to his boss, the recently arrived Bruno Sanchez.

Half-French and half-Spanish with limited English, he had joined the bank at the start of 2008 and was still finding his feet. A technician with a background in risk management, he found the nature of Reuben’s work both fascinating and exasperating. He was fascinated by the minute details of his investigations, constantly asking how so and so did this or that. At the same time, he struggled to cope with the regular flow of embarrassing incidents that no one seemed to be able to prevent.

Reuben was still working out how best to deal with him. Short and skinny with close-cropped, greying black hair and round metal-rimmed glasses, he looked like a middle-aged Harry Potter. There was a curiously unkempt air about him. He seemed to wear the same clothes every day and had an irregular working pattern, often staying in the office to midnight and beyond, even though he apparently had a wife and three kids at home. Around the office, the women seemed to be completely taken with him. Reuben struggled to understand what they saw in him. Did they want to mother him, or was it the sultry French accent that attracted them? He suspected it was the latter.

‘Why did the manager not check the identity of the customer?’ asked Sanchez when Reuben first briefed him on the case.

‘He was taken in by the fraudster and failed to do the necessary check. These people can be very plausible,’ replied Reuben.

‘But the checks on the manager and review of what he was doing—these also were not done?’ continued Sanchez.

‘We still need to interview one of his line managers who is currently on vacation. However, there has clearly been a serious breakdown in control,’ confirmed Reuben.

‘Keep me briefed on this case. This is the sort of incident we must eliminate if this bank is to become world class,’ concluded Sanchez as he returned to work on the mind-boggling spreadsheet that was displayed on his computer screen.

‘Will do,’ said Reuben as he got up and walked out of the office.

While walking towards the lifts, he reflected that one feature of his meetings with Sanchez was that it was impossible to develop any sort of meaningful conversation with him. Initially he had suspected this was due to his limited English, but increasingly Reuben suspected that these staccato exchanges were how he conducted every conversation. There was no attempt to discuss the situation more widely or explore different possibilities. Reuben felt reluctant to offer his opinions whilst he was still working out if he could trust Sanchez.

He decided to go for a walk to clear his head and buy something for his lunch.

3

G OING FOR A walk at lunchtime in Canary Wharf did not offer a lot of variety. Generally, Reuben stayed underground and followed the same route each time: down the escalator, through one shopping arcade to another, turn round, back through another shopping arcade, and back up the escalator. Sure enough, all the shops were still there. There were a couple of squares surrounded by skyscrapers that he could walk round, but if he wanted any variety at all he had to head down to the river.

That was where Reuben was going today. When he had first separated from his wife, he had rented an apartment in Canary Wharf for a year, thinking that living close to work would help him change his lifestyle. But all it led to was working even longer hours—starting earlier and finishing later on the pretext that it only took a few minutes to walk home. He also found that after the early evening, the area was dead, and at weekends the repeated closure of the rail links due to engineering work made it like living on a deserted island.

After the family house was sold as part of the divorce settlement, Reuben decided to use his share to buy somewhere new to live in central London. At around the same time his parents had passed away in quick succession, leaving him with a modest inheritance. He pooled his savings and, after viewing a couple of times a brand-new apartment near London Bridge, slap bang in the middle of the South Bank, decided to take the plunge and buy it. The area was up and coming as a location for urban living. It was buzzing all day and all night long, full of life and entertainment, and still only a short journey to work. He loved it.

As he reached the riverbank, he gazed out on the boats ploughing up and down. It was another hot day, and standing on the riverside he caught the blast of the stiff breeze that was blowing downriver. He thought back to when he was still married and the day he had returned home at lunchtime, gone upstairs to the bedroom, and immediately known something was amiss. He remembered sitting down on the side of the bed, his hand covering his mouth in shock. It was the smell of cigarette smoke that gave the game away. Neither he nor Mary smoked so there was only one conclusion. Suddenly, a whole sequence of events and feelings that had been at the back of his mind for months fell into place. The indifference Mary showed towards him, the lack of intimacy, and the distance that had grown between them. His response had been to work harder, stay out more often with friends, and become more self-reliant. He had not suspected that things had gone this far. Mary was having an affair. The sudden sense of betrayal hit him in the pit of his stomach like a blow from a rifle butt.

It did not take Reuben long to work out who she was sleeping with. Peter. He was the only one of their close friends who smoked. Mary and Peter had always gotten on well. They liked playing board games, which Reuben hated. They liked gardening, which Reuben hated. They liked reading the Sunday newspapers, which Reuben hated. How long had it been going on?

Reuben had initially felt the bitterness of betrayal followed by a sense of release that had left him light headed. That sense of release was still with him today. If anything, it had grown stronger. Looking back, he had to acknowledge that his relationship with Mary had run its course. She had moved on, just as he had too.

He sat down on a bench and tucked into his pastrami sandwich. It tasted delicious.

4

I N WEST LONDON, not far from Paddington Station, Yang’s Pawnbrokers was experiencing a steady increase in business. In fact, Mr Yang had noticed a steady increase in business for the past two years. As savers stood in queues outside the neat, shiny branches of Northern Rock, anxious to remove their money, he noticed an increasing number of people coming into his rather dowdy, battered-looking shop to pawn their watches, their jewellery, their posh clothes, and other artefacts. After years of struggling to build up his business since arriving in the United Kingdom sixteen years ago, Mr Yang finally felt he was getting somewhere. He had what everyone wanted when times were hard, namely cold, hard cash.

He lifted his head up as a young man came into his shop and with his one good eye fixed on the Rolex watch around the man’s left wrist. Mr Yang recalled his favourite saying: In the kingdom of the blind, the one eyed man is king.

He smiled at the young man who took the watch off his wrist and offered it to the pawnbroker.

‘How much will you give me for this?’ the young man asked.

Mr Yang took the watch and examined it carefully, putting his magnifying lens up to his good eye to check its authenticity. The young man shuffled from one foot to another, sniffing and rubbing his nose, clearly ill at ease in the unusual surroundings.

‘Five hundred pounds,’ said Mr Yang.

The young man was clearly crestfallen.

‘Can’t you do better than that?’ he said. ‘Cost me thousands. Bought it in Dubai.’

Mr Yang showed no emotion, saying simply, ‘I have six of these already this week. Price is falling as we speak, simple law of supply and demand.’

The young man was desperate. ‘Okay,’ he said, ‘five hundred.’

Mr Yang filled out a docket and handed it to the young man. Then he counted out twenty-five crisp twenty-pound notes on to the counter. The young man picked them up, turned, and hastened out of the pawnbrokers.

As the door closed, Mr Yang smiled to himself as he held up the watch. I will sell for thousands, he thought as he put the watch alongside the other six Rolex watches in the glass cabinet on the corner of the counter. The British never try to barter or haggle over how much money they will take for an item. They think it is beneath them. They are repressed by their class structure.

Times had not always been so good for Mr Yang. He had arrived in the United Kingdom on Wednesday, 16 September 1992, the day