Fallen Angel Chapter Thirty Eight
Bad Banker (Part Seven)
BANKSTERS HELD FOR RANSOM BY CUSTOMERS' CRUSADER
BIGGEST KIDNAP RANSOM EVER DEMANDED
BARCLAYS BANK – GIVE UP THE BONUSES OR YOUR BANKER WILL DIE
John spread the newspapers out on the coffee table, comparing headlines. "Every last one of them takes a negative view of the banker. They're making this a Robin Hood story; the kidnappers are being made into public heroes."
"Except the FT, John." The pink newspaper was flung across the room to land precisely in front of John.
BARCLAYS SHARES PLUNGE ON KIDNAP PLOT NEWS
"Well, yes. You'd expect that from the FT."
"The Financial Times is a great world newspaper, John. The finest example of a British company getting the global content right. It's objective, and it doesn't pander to public opinion."
"Maybe, but public opinion says Barclays should pay." The doctor gestured to the TV monitor behind his chair, where the ticker across the bottom of the screen showed the results of a poll.
BBC BREAKING NEWS- 10.19 BARCLAYS BANKER KIDNAP LATEST OPINION POLL- 67% OF PUBLIC SAY PAY UP
"They won't. They can't."
"Why not? If they've already allocated the money to bonuses, why can't they divert it to pay the ransom? Especially given that they are going to give it all back to the customers."
The kidnappers' second "press release" had gone live on the news wire services at 9am that morning. Once again, it was a copy of the e mail that went to the bank's CEO.
TO: THE CHIEF EXECUTION OFFICER
FROM: THE CONSUMERS' CRUSADERS
RE: RANSOM DEMAND
PAY THE £1.3 BILLION TO YOUR RETAIL BANK CUSTOMERS. DIVIDE IT EQUALLY BETWEEN ALL OF YOUR CURRENT ACCOUNT HOLDERS AND MAKE THE DEPOSIT. FT ADVERT SAYING THAT IS NEEDED BY WED CONFIRMING THIS, IF YOU WANT TO SEE WARREN ALIVE.
The news media had gone mad- every Barclays Bank retail customer would get just over £87 in their account. It didn't seem like much, but then there were over 15 million of them. It was a hugely popular idea. News channels did vox pop interviews of customers coming out of Barclays branches, most of whom came out with comments like "about time we got some of that profit back that the bankers have been making out of us for years."
Sherlock looked exasperated. "The bank can't just hand over the bonus pool to someone else because they are contractually obligated to pay those bonuses to staff. The staff will sue if they don't get paid. Taking the money away from the people to whom it was legally promised? Well- you complained when you didn't get the £50 you thought was yours because the cash machine ate your card. Imagine how you would feel if it were half a million pounds."
"Yeah- but that was my money."
"The bonuses are their money; it belongs to the staff who earned it."
"Bankers earn enough in salary; why do they need a bonus?"
The Consulting Detective just rolled his eyes. "It's just a different way of packaging their remuneration. If they didn't get it that way, then they'd have to be paid salaries much higher than they already are- and those would have to be paid, no matter how well the individuals did in any year. This way actually leaves more discretion in the hands of the bosses. How is it you can't understand that?"
"Bankers are greedy."
Sherlock dismissed this with a wave of his hand. "Don't believe everything you read in the newspapers, John. This is all just a smoke-screen. While the police are chasing around for an aggrieved customer who has a grudge against Barclays, they are not looking for the right people."
John crossed his arms. "So, if the van signs are to be believed, they should be chasing a load of computer geeks?"
Chambers had texted through the video clip that caught the white van from a sideways angle: "DDS: Digital Data Services" with a fancy logo, e mail address and phone number.
"Stolen. Just a means to get it into the Eversheds garage. The paperwork is replete with fake order numbers and forged signatures. It was enough to get them the permit to park overnight in the garage."
"What did Chambers come up with about the van, apart from the name on the side? Do we know where it went?"
"The van was stolen from DDS eight hours before it was parked in the south Wood Street garage. When it left the delivery garage on north Wood street almost twelve hours later, it was tracked by CCTV going north on Wood Street to the junction of London Wall, where it crossed the intersection and then went into another garage- this one belonging to 125 London Wall, the Alban building. The garage is not in use, given that the ground floor of the Alban building is currently unoccupied - nor has there been a tenant for almost a year. It's not on CCTV cameras, and there are no cameras in the garage, but deduction said that's where it was, and lo, and behold, even the City Police could find it." Sherlock let his sarcasm drip from the words.
"Anything found in the van?"
"Forensic say there is clear trace of the kidnap victim being in the back- fibres from his suit, and a convenient sample of blood left on the floor. I think the kidnappers wanted the van to be found, and for the evidence to show that they have the banker. Otherwise, the van is completely clean."
"So what do we deduce from that?"
"We? What do you deduce from that?"
It was a typical Sherlockian challenge to John. Throughout their work together, Sherlock would do this- provoke John into making a fool of himself. "Nope, not going there. You're the genius. You figure it out."
John had come last night home tired, hungry and a bit fed up with the tetchiness of Donovan. He complained in the taxi back that he wasn't sure what, if anything, he'd be able to contribute. Sherlock just plugged himself into the CCTV footage, and told John to go to bed. But once he was lying in bed, sleep eluded the doctor. Sherlock wasn't sure why, but he always knew when his flatmate was having a bad night from the creak of the floorboards, which betrayed John's restless movements in bed.
A little twitch of a smile appeared on Sherlock's face. "You're still angry. You didn't get your chance to thump someone. Or to use your medical knowledge on a body. There's no damsel in distress to motivate you, just a banker that you probably think deserves to be held for ransom. No guns or danger. I suppose you find this case boring."
"Well, I am beginning to wonder what I can possibly bring to this little party."
"If the puzzle itself is not enough to motivate you, then go do something else."
It was an off-hand, take it or leave it reply. And it irritated John. He rubbed his head and Sherlock watched his flatmate try to figure out what he could possibly say.
"Why do you think this is such a puzzle? It seems pretty straight forward to me. An ordinary citizen, a bank customer, gets pissed off and kidnaps a banker to get some free publicity." He gestured at the newspapers. "Once he's had his fun, he'll let the guy go, even if they don't pay."
"You're so sure of that?" Sherlock gave him his look. The one that irritated John so much- the slightly superior, I know everything, you silly idiot. He'd being recently giving John rather too much of that look for the doctor to truly appreciate it.
In a tetchy tone, John snapped, "Well, come on! It's not like a criminal gang would court this kind of publicity. And they're going to give the money away. It's a stunt. Instead of some shareholder getting profits or bankers getting bonuses, for once ordinary people, the customers, are going to get something. It's a victimless crime. Probably find this Nathanial Warren gets let out by the side of the road, or put in some sort of humiliating situation, and the story is all over."
Sherlock shook his head. "Sometimes I worry about the so-called ordinary people. If your description is actually how they think, then it's why criminals get away with murder, mayhem and theft on a global scale."
John took umbrage. "It's not how ordinary people think; it's how I think. That's what I believe."
"Then what use are you to me?"
John just got up and grabbed his jacket off the hook by the door and marched downstairs. "I need some air. Some ordinary air breathed in by ordinary people!"
oOo
It wasn't supposed to have been another case of the let's irritate John strategy. Decidedly not. Sherlock had been looking forward to doing some good, old fashioned crime solving with the doctor. But the case wasn't obliging his wishes. He sighed. He was just going to have to solve this one on his own.
Sherlock never thought of a crime the way John did. He started with the facts, deduced motive and then did the legwork to test the hypothesis. This was a good case in point; while the outward appearance of the crime looked like a robin-hood scenario, Sherlock doubted that any ordinary individual bank customer would have either the skill or the nous to put together such a carefully constructed plan. It reeked of layers upon layers of motivations, cloaking the real criminals, who were willing to manipulate the press to keep well hidden.
He knew with a high degree of certainty what had happened to the "contents" of the van. If he'd been the kidnappers, he would have transferred the captive into a car kept in the Alban building garage and then driven off to the nearest large commercial garage. It would take days to figure out which car had left the Alban garage. London Wall was an incredibly busy road. The CCTV cameras on the street focused on the junction with Wood Lane- the garage exit was not visible. Meticulous cross checking for hours of traffic, across four different roads of the intersection would be needed.
Even so, if Sherlock had been in charge of the kidnap, it would only be the first of two more moves. The Barbican Centre just up the road had over 800 spaces in six different car parks- all interlinked underground. Another transfer, and it would become statistically harder to trace every car's movements. There were no fewer than six other car parks within a mile of the Barbican. Move the kidnapped banker in the boot of a car from the Barbican into another public car park, switch cars again and it would be impossible to chase down all the possibilities. It was well over the police threshold of resources and determination. And someone knew that. As a result, the idea that this was an ordinary bank customer taking revenge for a bank error was preposterous.
Wonder if Moriarty is involved? Despite what Elizabeth Ffoukes had written, Sherlock was beginning to suspect this case was far more than it first appeared to be.
He considered the negative press that had accrued to Barclays over the past two days. The share price was down almost 8% at a time when the rest of the market- bank shares included- had risen almost 3%. So, a net loss of 11% of the market capitalisation of Barclays PLC. That was the equivalent of £3.85 billion, or three times the value of the bonus pool figure demanded in ransom. Who stands to gain from a fall of this amount? And it could fall further, too. If Barclays paid the ransom, then staff would sue- increasing the costs to the bank. The two hundred and forty institutional investors who owned significant numbers of shares would think about dumping even more of them, driving the price down even further.
Who gains when Barclays loses? Competitors were the obvious answer, but he doubted that any bank would be brave enough to engage in this level of corporate sabotage. The risks of getting caught were just too high for any board, or even a close cabal of management to agree to such an idea. Bankers as a breed were a rather stuffy lot, if exceedingly arrogant with it. He smirked, recalling the case of the Jade Hair Pin. Sebastian Wilkes, on the other hand, was just the sort of prat that might try something so stupid. He's not clever enough to pull it off. That said, others might be. No one inside Barclays could be involved. No matter how aggrieved an employee was, destroying the share value of your employer would be self-destructive. Even an aggrieved ex-employee would think twice about destroying the value of his or her own pension.
He stretched out on the couch and put his fingers together under his chin, tapping one pair after another, over and over. The self-stimulation seemed to quieten his mind, focus his thinking. Banks were big places. Barclays employed over 130,000 people. While by number, most of those were in the retail side, the real money spinners were in investment banking, which employed less than twenty percent of the staff. Nearly half the group's profits came from wholesale business, nothing to do with the sort of activity that people like John thought of when they heard the word 'banking'. And realistically, the number of people earning the bank the really big profits- and earning the big bonuses- could be narrowed down to less than a thousand. That was also true of Barclay's competitors.
So, who gained the most from a decline in Barclay's share price? Institutional investors were also in most cases customers of the bank. They bought services, as well as shares. If someone could entice a big customer away from Barclays as well as lead them into divesting their shares in the bank, then that could deal a mortal blow to its profits and prestige- maybe even lead other big investors to think twice. So, who would be after the institutional investors?
He spent a couple of hours trawling through financial websites. The largest institutional investor in Barclays was an American investment management company, managing five hundred and seventy three billion dollars of assets for just over 1,000 clients. So, high rollers indeed. Shift even a proportion of that company's investments and you could make a huge dent in confidence in Barclays. Put that money into another financial institution, and it would be a huge boost to that organisation.
If I were them… Sherlock never admitted to others that part of his deductive success was based on thinking about the problem from the point of view of the criminal. He instinctively knew that it would be seen as "a bit not good," to use John's ungrammatical phrase. So, he often found other ways to explain his thinking, ones that would not call into question his own morality. All his life, people had been telling him what was right and what was wrong; sometimes he listened and acted on such views, because it suited him. That generally meant it worked. Practical, logical. Otherwise, he couldn't be bothered. Too much morality smacked of judgmental sentiment, in his view.
Sometimes, he would take a stand or have a view, but it was generally based on his own experience. He thought the public attitude towards illegal drugs to be absurd, but would take a case on if it involved a bully who offended his sense of fairness, even if what was being done might not involve breaking a law. "Right" and "wrong" were elastic concepts, and he stretched them, sometimes on a whim.
So, putting himself in the kidnappers shoes, if he wanted to damage Barclays and benefit some other organisation, what better way than to make the real ransom demand simple? Forget about Barclays, but target an institutional investor and make the demand simply a case of shifting the money from one place to another. The investor doesn't 'lose' any money, but someone does really benefit. The longer they stall in making the transfer, the more the kidnappers bash Barclays, damaging the value of their real target's investment in the bank. Neat- and very, very effective.
To make it work, the real target of the ransom demand would have to have a vested interest in saving the life of the hostage. Who would have that sort of concern about Nathaniel Warren? He started digging into the man's family, his relatives and close business contacts.
Author's Note: because I am going away on holiday for the next twelve days and will be without an internet connection, I will be posting another chapter tonight.