Chapter 47: Source of Funds I
Danny got his bag off the lounger, went to get changed, and did not feel remotely like a man who had won anything.
The lift took eleven seconds from the third floor to the fortieth.
He spent all eleven looking at the ceiling, because the mirrored wall had him in it and he wasn’t ready for that conversation yet.
He was still hard.
That was the immediate and undignified fact of the morning. Forty floors of glass and marble, and a grown man standing very still in a lift in gym shorts, willing his own body to be sensible.
His own body declined the request.
The shower didn’t help either. He put it on cold first, which he’d read somewhere was the answer and which turned out to be a lie invented by people who had never tried it.
Then warm. Then a hand, quick and businesslike and joyless, forehead against the tile.
It took about ninety seconds, and afterwards he felt worse instead of better, which he hadn’t expected.
He stood under the water a while with his eyes shut.
The thing he kept circling was that he didn’t know what had happened. Not the mechanics. The mechanics were extremely clear and would be available to him in high definition for the foreseeable future, thanks very much.
He meant he didn’t know what it was.
Twenty-eight years old and no filing system for it anywhere.
He’d been kissed and dumped and once, memorably, slapped in a beer garden in Lewisham. A girlfriend at nineteen for eight months. Another at twenty-three for five.
Then years of being too skint and too tired to be anybody’s anything, which turns out to be its own kind of celibacy nobody writes songs about.
Nothing in all that covered a woman he’d met three times arranging herself on a mat. Or what a man is supposed to do with his hands when somebody comes apart underneath them and he has a girlfriend across the river.
He hadn’t touched her. Not in the way it counted.
He’d knelt there with his hands exactly where she’d put them and hadn’t moved an inch.
Which was either the decent thing, or the most technical piece of self-deception he’d ever managed, and standing in a shower that cost more than his mum’s rent he genuinely could not work out which.
You knelt down, though.
There it was. She’d asked. He’d had a second and a half to say no.
What he’d said was two minutes.
He turned the water off. The flat was very quiet, the way it always was.
He had a solicitor at eleven and a café to buy and absolutely no useful conclusions available to him, so he did what he’d always done with a thing he couldn’t solve.
Put it in the drawer. Shut the drawer. Go to work.
The drawer was getting full.
Getting dressed, he understood something about himself that would have embarrassed him if there’d been anyone there to see it.
He knew when to be which man now.
Round the estate, round Jodie, he was jeans and a jumper and himself. Town was a solicitor and a lease, so town got the armour.
The long charcoal overcoat Jodie had dug off the Uniqlo rail. The fine crew-neck with the collar just showing. The boots.
Forty quid a jumper. Six hundred for the lot.
And in the right postcode it didn’t read as six hundred quid. It read as a man who didn’t have to try.
A courier on a scooter got sent round the back. A quiet man in a good grey coat got the door held for him, because the coat said belongs, and nobody in a nice part of town ever checked the label on that.
His phone went while he was doing his boots, and the name on it fixed the whole morning in about a second and a half.
right well I’m at work and I’ve already done a stupid thing, Jodie had written. told Nadia we’re seeing each other. she SCREAMED. actually screamed, in the stockroom, and now everyone thinks something’s happened.
He typed back one-handed with a boot in the other.
something has happened.
don’t be smug it doesn’t suit you. anyway now Steve’s being weird with me which is hilarious, he keeps saying "so you’ve got a fella then" like a man in a soap. four hours til break. this is the longest day of my entire life.
Danny stood in his own hallway grinning at a phone like an idiot.
He noticed how little effort the grin had taken. He also noticed how much effort everything on the third floor had taken, from beginning to end.
He put that in the drawer as well, and went to see a solicitor.
Priya Anand’s office was up a narrow staircase beside a dry cleaner’s on the Clapham Road.
One room. A window that didn’t open. A filing cabinet with a dead plant on it, and the warm chemical smell of other people’s laundry coming up through the floorboards all day long.
She had reading glasses on a chain and a biro through the buttonhole of her cardigan, and a photograph on her desk turned at an angle where she could see it and you couldn’t.
Downstairs a machine went thump-thump-thump through its cycle. The dead plant trembled very slightly in time with it.
Danny liked her within about nine seconds, which was inconvenient, since he’d come there to lie to her.
"Sit down, you’re blocking my light." She didn’t look up. "Kettle’s there, tea’s rubbish, I’m not making it."
He sat.
"Right." She licked a thumb and turned a page. "A café."
"That’s it."
"Lovely." Flatly, and meaning it entirely, which he was learning was how she said everything. "Outright, no lending, from savings."
"From crypto. I was in early, sold up."
It came out of him smoothly, which was the part he hated.
Four days ago the same sentence had stuck in his throat at his mother’s kitchen table. Now it arrived on time, in the right tone, from a man in a good coat.
The ease of it told him something about who he was becoming that he’d have preferred not to know.
She didn’t blink. Didn’t even pause. Just carried on reading.
She’s heard it before. That’s what that is. She’s had a hundred blokes sit in this chair and say crypto and she’s stopped bothering to react to any of them.
Danny discovered, sitting there, that a woman not reacting to your lie is a good deal worse than one who does.
"You’ll have records."
"Records."
"Mr Flynn." The glasses came off. "I’m not the tax man and I’m not the police. But I can’t act on a purchase this size without a source of funds I can evidence, and that’s my licence, not your café."
She let that sit for a second.
"Crypto means the exchange. The statements. The buys and the sells, wallet addresses, and I want to see it land in a bank with a normal trail before it goes anywhere near this lease."
The glasses went back on.
"All there, no problem, you’ve a café by spring. Not there, I hand you the file back and we shake hands and no hard feelings. Fair?"
The machine downstairs thumped. The plant trembled.
"I’ll get you what you need," Danny said.
"Good. By Wednesday."
She started writing, and he watched her do it.
There was a fine crack in the plaster running up the wall behind her head. Somebody had drawn a small pencil arrow next to it with a date, 2019, presumably to see whether it was getting worse.
"Can I ask you something?"
"You can ask."
"Why here?" He didn’t mean it rudely and she didn’t take it that way. "You’re good at this. You could be in one of those places in town with the glass and the receptionist."
"I was in one of those places in town with the glass and the receptionist. Eleven years of it." She kept writing. "Do you know what I did there? Moved enormous sums of money between men who already had enormous sums of money."
The pen went down.
"Every single one of them in a hurry. Not one of them ever said thank you."
She sat back.
"Here I do wills for people who’ve never made one. Divorces. First flats. Last month I did a lease for two women opening a dog groomer’s and they cried in that chair you’re sitting in."
"Right."
"Actual crying. Over a dog groomer’s." A small shrug. "My husband keeps saying we should do a café. He never will, he’s fifty-six and frightened of the oven."
She looked up, and the dry manner had a whole person behind it for a second.
"But it’s a good thing to want, a café. A room where people sit. World’s short of them."
And Danny, who had climbed a narrow staircase specifically to lie to a stranger, sat in the chair two women had cried in over a dog groomer’s, and felt the lie sitting in his mouth like a coin.
"It’s for my mum," he said.
Because it was true. Because it was the only true thing he had on him.
Something moved in Priya’s face and went straight back to business. She pulled a form across the desk.
"Then let’s get it right. Wednesday, Mr Flynn."
He sat on the Vespa outside afterwards and didn’t start it.
Got the phone out and didn’t say anything to it. Just looked at the dark screen, the way you look at somebody when the thing you need is the thing you can’t ask for out loud.
The gold line came.
[ She is good at her job, sir. ]
[ You chose well. ]
"She wants a trail," Danny said, low, to a phone, on a pavement in Clapham. "There isn’t one. It appears. There’s nothing behind any of it."
A pause. Longer than usual.
[ There is now, sir. ]
He opened his email because something told him to.
And there it was.
An exchange account in his name, opened when he was twenty-three and washing pans in a kitchen off the Old Kent Road. Small buys, a few quid at a time, of a coin worth pennies then.
Seven years of nothing at all.
Then, these last weeks, the sells. Statements. Wallet addresses. Transfers landing in an HSBC account that suddenly had a longer memory than he did.
Seven years of a life he had not lived. Tidy and complete and false, built so a woman with a dead plant and a pencil arrow could hold it up to the light and find nothing wrong with it.
His stomach did something complicated.
It was exactly what he needed. It had also reached back seven years and put itself inside a bank.
He’d asked for money once, on the worst night of his life. Everything since had arrived without him asking, and he was starting to understand there was a difference between a gift and a hook, and that you generally found out which one you’d taken much later.
It didn’t ask me. That’s the thing.
It didn’t say, Danny, would you like seven years of history. It didn’t wait to hear what I’d have said. It just went and did it and told me afterwards.