they went back to the all too familiar hotel where a hurriedly arranged private room was hired and food and drink ordered while Alyce telephoned her mother to relay the news and Jordan returned to his suite to make an earlier- than-usual computer check that there had been no movement upon the existing shortfall enquiries, nor any new challenges. As an afterthought as he was actually leaving his suite, Jordan quickly dialled Lesley Corbin in London, who said she’d never had any doubt of the outcome and whom Jordan didn’t believe.
Jordan was back in his anti-climax depression when he got to the celebration, by which time Walter Harding had arrived and Alyce had passed on the court verdict. Also there were the DDK enquiry team who had never been called upon as well as some support staff from Reid’s office.
Harding approached Jordan the moment he entered the room and said, ‘Didn’t I tell you this was exactly as it would turn out!’
‘You certainly did,’ agreed Jordan. As well as a lot of other I-can-predict bullshit by which he’d become so irritated the previous afternoon that he’d switched off any attention to the man’s constant outpourings.
‘How’s it feel?’ demanded Harding.
‘I’m not sure it’s settled in.’ Jordan wished Alyce would break away form Reid so that he could excuse himself from the hospital administrator.
‘It was obviously nonsense from the beginning,’ insisted the man. ‘I guess you’re now going back to reality and England, where everything and everybody is normal?’
He’d never ever lived in reality, thought Jordan. Always the opposite, the unreality of living – being – somebody else, with somebody else’s name and persona. He said, ‘I’m not sure that’s an apt description, either.’ He saw Alyce had moved away from her lawyer and immediately excused himself to join her.
Alyce said at once, ‘I didn’t realize Pullinger was delaying the media release until tomorrow.’
‘Neither did I.’
‘By which time I shall be back at the house, beyond any camera lens.’
‘Is that what you’re going to do?’
‘There’s no better place to hide.’
‘For how long?’
‘For as long as I choose, although the judge put a pretty effective lid on it becoming a long-running saga, didn’t he?’
‘So what after you come out of retreat?’ pressed Jordan.
She smiled at the expression. ‘Regain my life. I’ve already arranged to get my place back on the board of the Bellamy Foundation.’
‘As well as?’
‘That’s as far as, for the moment,’ said Alyce. ‘There was something you were going to say, just before Walter arrived at the house yesterday?’
‘Maybe later,’ said Jordan. ‘Not now.’
‘Call me.’
Thirty-Two
Jordan tried the moment he got into his Carlyle suite the following morning, before even bothering to unpack after a delayed New York arrival from Raleigh. At the Bellamy North Carolina estate, Stephen – after having established who Jordan was – told him Alyce wasn’t there and that he didn’t know when she would be returning; she hadn’t given a date or a location, although he didn’t think it was Manhattan. Jordan told the butler where he was – even stipulating his suite number – and to pass on a message for Alyce to call if she made contact. And did the same when, despite the butler’s doubt that Alyce was in New York, he got the answering service at her West 84th Street apartment.
During the returning flight Jordan had scoured as many newspapers as were available at Raleigh airport. Both the New York Times and Wall Street Journal’s coverage was relegated to deep into the inside pages, boosted beyond the strictly limited factual release from Pullinger’s court by photographs of both Appleton and Alyce and the inevitable historical background of both families. Jordan was named only once, without either a photograph or an indication, even, of his English nationality. There was nothing in any international edition of any English newspaper collected for him by the hotel’s customer service department. He’d alerted Lesley Corbin during his earlier call from Raleigh and when he telephoned again she confirmed there was no reference either to the case or to him personally in any of that morning’s London editions. Neither had there been on any national British television or radio bulletin or any Internet news source she’d accessed.
‘Why should there have been?’ she asked him, rhetorically. ‘You were found not guilty of any involvement in the case.’
Jordan waited until after he’d unpacked before mounting his daily monitor of the Appleton and Drake computers. There was a further challenge, again from a Manhattan broker, to a shortfall on another of the earliest copper trades he’d raided, and evident growing alarm in the continuing email conversations between the two earlier questioned metal traders at their inability to discover the cause of their individual problems through any of the personal enquiries they had so far conducted. One, Colin Nutbeam, complained of not being able to look any further or differently than he already had and his colleague, George Sutcliffe, agreed that if they didn’t identify the cause of the disparities in the next twenty-four hours there was no alternative but to officially report it to their respective financial supervisors. From the now extensive communications between the originally challenged John Popple and his financial controller there were gaps indicating either personal interviews or internal telephone conversations, culminating the previous day in the latest email from the fiscal manager, not to Popple but to Alfred Appleton, asking for the earliest possible meeting upon his return from Raleigh to discuss an apparently inexplicable financial discrepancy in an onwardly traded pork belly future. In an attempt to trace the error before the requested meeting, the controller intended conducting an audit of every buy and sell contract in which Popple had been involved in the preceding six months. Until the matter was resolved it was suggested that a specific accounting be made of every buy and sell trade in which Popple had engaged.
Jordan unsuccessfully tried Alyce’s number again before leaving the hotel, delaying any more raids upon Appleton and Drake holdings until he had made room in the five bank accounts. Even though the banks were comparatively close to each other it took him almost four hours to move between them, keeping to the same strict routine. He first withdrew all but between $2,000 to $3,000 from each account, carrying the cash to the separate securities divisions, where in the locked seclusion of their individual private rooms he emptied the already well filled safe-deposit boxes into the two briefcases he carried with him.
Both for continued security against the unlikely irony of a street mugging and to necessarily relieve the physical strain of carrying the two now very heavy cases, Jordan hailed a taxi when he emerged from the last bank to take him back to the Carlyle hotel. There he re-entered the computers of Appleton and Drake and spent almost a further hour plundering previously untouched accounts, moving a total of $22,000 into the five banks in which he had been earlier that afternoon. There was no new correspondence in any of the Appleton and Drake sites he accessed, including the personal station of Alfred Appleton.
Jordan again got Alyce’s answering service when he tried the Manhattan apartment and Stephen insisted there had been no contact from her since Jordan’s previous call, promising to pass on his message and location the moment there was.
The low table in the suite’s sitting room was substantial, running virtually the entire length of the two couches it divided, but it was still too small to accommodate the money when Jordan tried to tip out the contents of both briefcases, even though he had mostly stipulated $100 notes every time he had made a cash withdrawal. Jordan worked carefully and with practised professionalism, assembling the money in individual, one-thousand- dollar bundles before moving the piles from the table to the floor to make room for what was in the second case. At that moment the haul amounted to $530,0000, which meant that after Pullinger’s reduced costs decision in his judgement that Jordan had more than sufficient to settle his account with Daniel Beckwith, even if the final bill exceeded the attorney’s ballpark figure of $250,000. Jordan managed to fit $10,000 in the suite safe, concealed inside the bedroom closet. Neatly stacked as the money now was it was easy to assemble in envelopes of $10,000 each to transport it all in just one briefcase to the cashier’s office, where he rented three more safe-deposit boxes
