Hoffmann closed his eyes. When he opened them again it seemed to him that his office had shifted slightly on its axis. ‘That is not possible,’ he said. ‘I didn’t buy it. It must have been someone pretending to be me.’
‘But you paid for it yourself. Are you sure you have not forgotten?’
‘Paid for it how?’
‘By bank transfer.’
‘And how much did I pay?’
‘Ten thousand euros.’
With his free hand Hoffmann grasped the edge of his desk. ‘Wait a second. How could this happen? Did someone come into your shop and say they were me?’
‘There is no shop any more. Not for five years. Only a poste restante. These days we are in a warehouse outside Rotterdam.’
‘Well, surely someone must have spoken to me on the phone at least?’
‘No, to speak to a customer is very unusual these days. Orders all come from email.’
Hoffmann wedged the phone between his chin and shoulder. He clicked on his computer and went to his email screen. He scrolled through his outbox. ‘When am I supposed to have sent you this email?’
‘May third.’
‘Well, I’m looking here now at my emails for that day and I can assure you I sent no message to you on May third. What’s the email address on the order?’
‘A-dot-Hoffmann at Hoffmann Investment Technologies dot com.’
‘Yeah, that’s my address. But I don’t see any message to a bookseller here.’
‘You sent it from a different computer perhaps?’
‘No, I’m sure I didn’t.’ But even as he uttered the words the confidence leaked from his voice and he felt almost physically sick with panic, as if an abyss was opening at his feet. The radiologist had mentioned dementia as a possible explanation for the white pinpricks on his CAT scan. Perhaps he had used his mobile, or his laptop, or his computer at home, and forgotten all about it – although even if he had, surely some record of it would be here? He said, ‘What exactly was in the message I sent you? Can you read it back to me?’
‘There was no message. The process is automatic. The customer clicks on the title on our online catalogue and fills in the electronic order form – name, address, method of payment.’ She must have heard the uncertainty in his voice; now caution entered hers. ‘I hope you are not wanting to cancel the order.’
‘No, I just need to sort this out. You say the money was paid by bank transfer. What’s the account number the money came from?’
‘I cannot disclose that information.’
Hoffmann summoned all the force he could muster. ‘Now listen to me. I’ve clearly been the victim of a serious fraud here. This is identity theft. And I most certainly will cancel the order, and I’ll put the whole goddamned thing in the hands of the police, and my lawyers, if you don’t give me that account number right now so I can find out just what the hell is going on.’
There was a silence at the other end of the line. Eventually the woman said coldly, ‘I cannot give this information over the telephone, but I can send it to the email address given on the order. I can do it immediately. Will this be okay for you?’
‘This will be okay for me. Thank you.’
Hoffmann hung up and exhaled. He put his elbows on his desk and rested his head between his fingertips and stared hard at his computer screen. Time seemed to pass very slowly, but in fact it was only twenty seconds later that his email inbox announced the arrival of a new message. He opened it. It was from the bookshop. There was no greeting, just a single line of twenty digits and letters, and the name of the account holder: A. J. Hoffmann. He gawped at it then buzzed his assistant. ‘Marie-Claude, could you mail me a list of all my personal bank account numbers? Right away, please.’
‘Of course.’
‘And you keep a record of the security codes at my house, I believe?’
‘Yes, I do, Dr Hoffmann.’ Marie-Claude Durade was a brisk Swiss woman in her middle fifties who had been with Hoffmann for five years. She was the only person in the building who did not address him by his Christian name. It was inconceivable to him that she could be mixed up in any kind of illegal activity.
‘Where do you keep them?’
‘In your personal file on my computer.’
‘Has anyone asked for them?’
‘No.’
‘You haven’t discussed them with anyone?’
‘Certainly not.’
‘Not even your husband?’
‘My husband died last year.’
‘Did he? Oh. Okay. Sorry. Anyway, there was a break-in at my house last night. The police may want to ask you some questions. Just to let you know.’
‘Yes, Dr Hoffmann.’
As he waited for her to send him the details of his accounts, he leafed through the Darwin. He looked up ‘suspicion’ in the index:
A man may have his heart filled with the blackest hatred or suspicion, or be corroded with envy and jealousy; but as these feelings do not at once lead to action, and as they commonly last for some time, they are not shown by any outward sign…
With all due respect to Darwin, Hoffmann felt this was empirically untrue. His own heart was filled with the blackest suspicion and he had no doubt it was evident in his face – in his downturned mouth and sullen, narrowed, shifting gaze. Whoever heard of a case of identity theft in which the thief bought a present for the victim? Someone was trying to screw with his mind: that was what was going on here. They were trying to make him doubt his own sanity, maybe even murder him. Either that or he really was going mad.
He pushed himself on to his feet and prowled round his office. He parted the slats of his blinds and gazed out across the trading floor. Did he have an enemy out there? His sixty quants were split into three teams: Incubation, who composed and tested the algorithms; Technology, who turned the prototypes into operational tools; and Execution, who oversaw the actual trades. Some of them were a little weird, there was no doubt about that. The Hungarian, Imre Szabo, for example – he couldn’t walk down a corridor without touching every door handle. And there was another guy who had to eat everything with a knife and fork, even a biscuit or a packet of crisps. Hoffmann had hired them all personally, regardless of their oddities, but he did not know them well. They were colleagues rather than friends. He rather regretted that now. He dropped the slat and returned to his terminal.
The list of his bank accounts was waiting in his inbox. He had eight – Swiss franc, dollar, sterling, euro, current, deposit, offshore and joint. He checked their numbers against the one that had been used to buy the book. None matched. He tapped his finger against his desk for a few seconds, then picked up his phone and called the firm’s chief financial officer, Lin Ju-Long.
‘LJ? It’s Alex. Do me a favour. Check out an account number for me, would you? It’s in my name but I don’t recognise it. I want to know if it’s on our system anywhere.’ He forwarded the email from the bookshop. ‘I’m sending it across now. Have you got it?’
There was a pause.
‘Yes, Alex, I got it. Okay, well, first thing I can tell you right away: it starts “KYD” – that’s the Cayman Islands IBAN prefix for a US dollar account.’
‘Could it be some kind of company account?’
‘I’ll run it through the system. You got a problem?’
‘No. Just want to check it out, that’s all. I’d be grateful if you could keep this just between the two of us.’
‘Okay, Alex. Sorry to hear about your-’
‘I’m fine,’ cut in Hoffmann quickly. ‘No harm done.’
‘Okay, that’s good. Has Gana spoken to you, by the way?’
Gana was Ganapathi Rajamani, the company’s chief risk officer.
Hoffmann said, ‘No. Why?’
