Chapter 296: Withdrawals II

Raj rang at 10 on the Saturday night, from the cab office.

"You have not answered a text since Thursday," he said.

"I am putting some money of mine somewhere safe. It takes all night, and I have to do it myself."

"What money?"

"Money I have had for a while. I am moving it somewhere nobody can get at it but me."

"Do it right," said Raj, "and go to bed after," and went to fetch a fare.

The 14th send did not show.

The first 13 had come up inside half an hour each. The 14th sat there as sent and nothing more, at 1 in the morning, and still at 2.

A twentieth of everything I had left was somewhere between my kitchen and the rest of the world. There was nobody I could ring at 2 in the morning and ask.

Had I typed the code wrong? I checked it against sheet 14, letter by letter, with my finger under each one. It was right. Had the sheet printed wrong? I could only check it by typing the key into a machine, and I had promised myself that key would never be typed anywhere.

I stood at the sink and ate dry cereal out of the box, and the clock on the cooker said 2:20, and then 2:35.

At 20 to 3 it came up, all of it, as if it had never been anywhere else.

I sent the last 6 one at a time and did not sit down again till they were all there. The kitchen smelt of hot printer and toast.

On the Sunday afternoon I wiped the new laptop 3 times over and took the hard drive out of it.

I took the hard drive and the printer into the yard and put a hammer through both, until there was nothing left inside either of them that could remember anything. crack. crack. The woman next door looked over the fence with a peg in her mouth and went back to her washing.

On the Monday we took the 9:40 into Fenchurch Street. I had both sets of sleeves in a document case on my knees, and Margaret would not let me put it on the rack.

She read the vault’s terms and conditions all the way to Barking, turning the pages with one finger.

The vault was a short walk from the station, under an office block in a side street, down a flight of stairs with a brass rail.

The man at the desk looked at my passport and my 2 bills with my address on them. He looked at Margaret and Maureen and did not ask who they were. The form for the box had a space for a second keyholder. I left it empty, and Margaret watched me leave it.

I had taken a box for a year, as long and as wide as a filing cabinet drawer. He had one key and I had the other. clunk of the big door. scrape of the drawer coming out of the wall.

He put the box on a table in a small room with no window.

"Take as long as you need, Mr Mercer," he said. "Press the button by the door when you are finished, and I will come and lock up with you."

"Does anybody ever open them without the customer?" said Maureen.

"Not while I have worked here, madam. Only with a court order and a locksmith, and I would be standing in the room."

He went out and shut the door.

I started laying the first set of 20 sleeves into the box, flat, one on top of the other.

"Explain it to me," said Margaret. "Not the computer. The paper. What is on it?"

"A lock and a key. Every sheet has 2 codes on it. The short one is the lock. Anybody can see it, and anybody can send coin to it. The long one is the key. Whoever has the key can move what is behind the lock. If I lose it, nobody can give it back."

"And a court?"

"A court can open this box, and then whoever the court hands the paper to has the key."

I laid the last of the 20 in. "If one of these gets wet or lost, the other 19 are still here. If this place burns, the second set goes somewhere else."

"Where?"

"I have not decided."

"Decide it this week."

She was standing with her back to the door. Maureen had the only chair.

"Why does it go into a cellar this week?" Margaret said.

"Because last Thursday a company in Tokyo told me nearly 800,000 of my dollars could wait 2 weeks. And a laptop can be stolen out of a house, or stop working one morning. Paper in a cellar does neither."

"It should have been in one 2 years ago."

"Yes."

I took one more sheet out of the case. It held only the locks, the 20 short codes, typed in a list.

"This is for you," I said, and gave it to Maureen.

"What do I do with it?"

"Any morning you want, type one of those into a website and it shows you what is behind it. You can check every line against your book. You cannot move a penny of it."

Maureen held the list in both hands.

"Like the money Margaret put in the articles," she said. She folded the list once, along the middle, away from the codes, and put it inside the front cover of the green book. "Good."

Margaret had been looking at the steel drawers in the wall behind me, rows of them, every one with 2 keyholes.

"If you die, Sam, nobody opens this box until a court grants somebody the right to deal with what you left," she said. "That can take a year. Nobody touches what is in it in that time. Not your family, not us. Have you made a will?"

"No. I have never written one."

"Write one this week. Our solicitor in Chelmsford has a strongroom. The second set goes in there, sealed, with a will. Write a name in it. I do not need to see it."

"I will see him on Wednesday."

"Tuesday," said Maureen. "Leave it till Wednesday and you will think about it all Tuesday night."

I locked the box. The man from the desk came back and turned his key, and the drawer went back into the wall.

I wrote it on the Tuesday afternoon in Chelmsford, in a room with a fan going on the windowsill. The solicitor and his clerk watched me sign, and the second set of sleeves went into a brown envelope with the will, and the envelope was sealed with the date written across the flap.

On the Friday at 4 o’clock Maureen read the day’s figures off the bank’s page on her screen and wrote them on her pad. The 20th morning from London had come in at 11.

She turned to page 1 of the green book. Margaret was in the doorway. I had the chair by her window.

Maureen uncapped the pen she had been doing the wages with and went along the line over the pencil, word by word, from the month to the academy.

Then she picked up the rubber from beside the calculator and rubbed out the 2,000,000. shff shff shff. She blew the crumbs off the page into her other hand and dropped them in the bin.

In the space where the pencil had been, she wrote in ink: 1,487,960.22. Tokyo’s first half had come home as fewer pounds than I had counted on when I sold it.

"That is what came," she said. "That leaves 512,039 pounds and 78 pence. 500,000 of it was Robbie’s block. The 12,039 and 78 comes off Kieran’s fencing."

She turned the pen round in her fingers.

"None of it is on this page. It is not in pencil either. It is nowhere in this book until it is in the bank, and when it comes, it gets a new line on the day it comes."

"Agreed."

She ruled a line under it with the edge of her calculator.

Somebody rang the bell on the reception desk, ding, and kept a finger on it. Priya went down. We heard her voice on the stairs, and a man’s voice, and the front door going. A van reversed out of the car park, beep beep beep.

Priya came up with a stiff white envelope in her hand.

"Leicester," she said. "One of their drivers. He wanted a signature. I signed." She put it on Maureen’s desk in front of me.

The crest was on the back flap. I opened it. One sheet, folded in 3, on thick paper.

LEICESTER CITY FOOTBALL CLUB Friday 28 June 2013 · by hand For the attention of the Chairman, Tilbrook Town Football Club Leicester City Football Club makes the following offers. Neither fee is paid in instalments, and neither depends on appearances. Jamie Vardy · 4,500,000 pounds Harry Maguire · 3,500,000 pounds If these offers are acceptable, we ask for permission to speak to both players. We would also welcome a conversation about Riyad Mahrez and N’Golo Kanté. We would be grateful for your reply by 5pm on Friday 5 July. Chief Executive

I read it and passed it to Margaret. Margaret passed it to Maureen.

"It is a proper offer," Margaret said. "All of it on registration, and an answer by next Friday. They want you to know they can pay it on the day."

Maureen did not pick up a pen. She did the sum in her head and put the letter down on top of page 1, over the new ink.

"8 million," she said. "That is the Bovril End, and a million over."