The Scottish Banker of Surabaya - By Ian Hamilton Page 0,82
his brow and trickled around the tape on his eyes, coursing down his cheeks and settling around his collarbones. She looked down and saw moisture on his shins and the tops of his bare feet. She wondered if he had peed himself already, but there was no odour.
“Andy, this is Ava Lee, though I imagine you’ve figured that out already.”
He tried to speak but she reached out, grabbed his knee, and squeezed. “No, don’t say anything yet. You need to listen to me first.”
He nodded.
“Good. Now the first thing you need to understand is that this isn’t personal. I know that may be hard for you to believe, but it’s the truth,” she said as calmly, as softly as she could. “This is business, Andy. You are here because of the bank. I have clients in Canada, in Toronto, who lost more than thirty million dollars doing business with your bank branch there. So I’m here and you’re here because we need to talk about the bank and the branch and the way you conduct your affairs.
“That doesn’t mean that I’m not angry about what happened two nights ago, but you know what, Andy? I’m a big girl, and I’m prepared to put personal feelings aside as long as we can have an intelligent discussion about Bank Linno. Nod if you understand.”
He nodded, without conviction.
“Okay, that’s good. Now I’m going to start telling you about my clients and the fund they invested in, and the cretin who worked for your bank who made off with their money. Do you have any idea what I’m talking about?”
Cameron shook his head.
Ava moved away from him and began to walk in a wide circle around the chair. “The fund was called Emerald Lion and it was operated by a guy called Lam Van Dinh. Have you heard of it, or him?”
He shook his head again.
“Well, it wasn’t really a fund, was it. More like a bank account at Linno that was opened for Lam by Fred Purslow. You have heard of Purslow?”
There was slight hesitation and then a slight nod.
“The thing is, Purslow seems to have conned Lam into opening the account on the pretext that the money was going into a fund operated by your bank, a fund called Surabaya Fidelity Security. It paid a modest and steady rate of interest on the money until about six or seven months ago, when the payments stopped. Purslow seems to have left the bank and Toronto at the same time. Now, Lam was understandably upset and paid a visit to the branch, where he met with a man called Muljadi, who as far I know was the Canadian operations president, and another guy, named Rocca. They told Lam in reasonably quick order that they thought Purslow had scammed him and asked him to back off while the bank looked into it. They even paid him a month’s interest on the fund’s money to buy some time — as good as an admission of liability in my mind. What do you think of that? Is the bank liable?”
Cameron shrugged.
“We can come back to that,” Ava said. “Let’s finish the story first. So a couple of weeks go by and Lam doesn’t hear from your guys. He’s about to take matters elsewhere when he is informed that Purslow and a friend of his have been killed in Costa Rica . . . rather nasty deaths at that. Panicked, Lam runs back to the bank and finds it closed. No one. Nothing. As he’s leaving the building, he’s picked up by a couple of thugs — hired by the bank, I’m presuming — who tell him that if he wants to end up like Purslow then he should keep pursuing the money. Lam is no hero, far from it. He leaves town too, although not to anywhere as exotic as Costa Rica.”
She paused and stood still behind Cameron. She saw him tense. “It’s only fair to tell you that I’ve made several assumptions about this mess. I believe, first of all, that it’s entirely possible Purslow orchestrated this fraud on his own and without the knowledge or consent of the bank. I believe that when he left the bank, he took the money with him, probably to Costa Rica. I believe that the bank found both him and the money, in no particular order, and had him killed. I believe that the bank then decided to treat the money as its own and to screw over Lam