Page 19 of The Impossible Fortune (Thursday Murder Club Mysteries #5)

‘And I can still do sit-ups,’ says Ibrahim, topping up his glass of wine at the contemporary upscale restaurant at Coopers Chase. ‘I still have both the muscle mass and the flexibility.’

‘I see,’ says Holly.

There is nothing Ibrahim likes better than somebody new to talk to, but Holly Lewis is not proving the easiest customer. But she has just been summoned to dinner by four pensioners, so perhaps that’s understandable.

Elizabeth brought him up to speed before the dinner.

Nick Silver had information. Somebody planted a bomb under his car and then Nick disappeared.

The lady opposite them, Holly Lewis, is Nick’s business partner, though even Elizabeth is currently hazy as to exactly what their business might be.

Storage. A very profitable business all round.

People always needed storage, didn’t they?

Ibrahim currently has some pots he’s not sure what to do with, for example.

Also, if Elizabeth is to be believed, Holly Lewis is one of three main suspects in the attempted murder of Nick Silver, so it’s possible he is making small talk with a psychopath.

Not for the first time.

‘You are very kind to come and see us, Holly,’ says Joyce.

‘I don’t know if it’s kindness,’ says Holly. ‘I want to find Nick. I thought perhaps you could help.’

‘Even so,’ says Joyce, ‘I baked you some brownies to say thank you.’

Joyce hands over a Tupperware box. Ibrahim notes that the box looks quite heavy.

‘They’re a bit dense, I’m afraid,’ says Joyce. ‘But I didn’t have a lot of warning you were coming, and I accidentally overdid it with the flour.’

Holly nods a thank you, and puts the brownies in her bag, Ibrahim noting the handle of the bag straining on the chair as they land.

‘Are you Joyce?’ Holly asks.

‘For my sins,’ says Joyce.

‘Joanna’s mum?’ Holly asks.

‘Yes,’ says Joyce. ‘I mean, more than just Joanna’s mum, a woman in my own right, but, yes. Are you friends?’

‘No,’ says Holly. ‘I know her by reputation.’

‘All good I hope!’ says Joyce.

Holly doesn’t reply.

‘Of course strength training is important too,’ says Ibrahim. ‘May I pour you a glass of white, Ron?’

‘Not this evening, thanks,’ says Ron. ‘Wedding headache.’

‘It really was a terrific wedding, Holly,’ says Ibrahim. ‘I’m so sorry you couldn’t come.’

‘Work,’ says Holly. ‘And once you’ve been to one wedding –’

‘You’re not married, Holly?’ Joyce asks.

‘Am I wearing a ring?’ asks Holly.

‘Well, no,’ says Joyce. ‘But Joanna says not everybody wears a ring, so I didn’t want to assume.’

‘Is Joanna wearing a ring?’ Holly asks.

‘She is,’ says Joyce.

‘I’ll bet,’ says Holly. ‘Good for her.’

Ibrahim is not sure he remembers the last time that Joyce met someone she was unable to charm.

‘No kids, Holly?’ Ron asks.

‘They’re not compulsory,’ says Holly.

‘Don’t blame you,’ says Ron.

‘Haven’t met the right man, perhaps?’ says Ibrahim.

‘Something like that,’ says Holly. She turns to Elizabeth. ‘They said you can help me find Nick?’

‘Yes, if you can help us, I think we can help you,’ says Elizabeth.

‘Nick tells me you work in “cold storage”, and I can’t quite get to the bottom of it.

In my line of work “cold storage” was where you kept corpses until it was politically expedient to return them to their mother country, but I’m guessing that’s not what you do? ’

Holly stops eating her broccoli tart for a moment. ‘No, that’s not what we do. We work for companies, individuals, and we look after the security of their computers or their files. Anything they want kept secret.’

‘Ah,’ says Ibrahim. ‘That’s what I suspected. Online security, firewalls, the cloud. I have read around the issue.’

‘The exact opposite,’ says Holly.

‘Yes, yes,’ says Ibrahim. ‘I thought as much, the exact opposite. Three hundred and sixty degrees.’

‘What do you mean, the exact opposite?’ asks Elizabeth.

‘We’ve all got so used to security being online,’ says Holly. ‘Financial details, corporate secrets, crypto trades, all hidden behind walls.’

‘Crypto is Bitcoin,’ says Joyce, tucking into her shepherd’s pie. ‘You mustn’t tell Joanna, but I lost fourteen thousand pounds.’

‘I don’t really know Joanna,’ says Holly. ‘I told you.’

‘Oh, she’s terrific,’ says Ibrahim.

Holly ignores him and continues her train of thought. ‘But at the very, very top level of security, because of hackers –’

‘Computer hackers,’ says Ibrahim, nodding wisely.

‘Companies and individuals turn to “cold storage”. Whatever secrets they want to keep, they never go near any sort of connected computer. Instead they use companies like us, and they store their documents, more usually their hard drives, with us. We physically lock them up.’

‘What’s the advantage in that?’ Ron asks.

‘It’s easier to keep out robbers than it is to keep out hackers,’ says Holly.

‘However well protected you might think your information is behind whatever firewall you’ve installed, there’s always someone in Russia, or Dubai, or Brazil, working out how to access it.

Whereas if it’s in a locked box, with an impossible combination in an unknown location, it’s a lot easier to protect. ’

‘So if you want to steal the secrets,’ says Ron, ‘you have to steal them physically?’

‘You do,’ says Holly. ‘That’s cold storage. And with the system we have in place, I would say stealing them physically is impossible.’

‘That’s very useful, Holly, thank you,’ says Ibrahim. ‘Confirms a lot of my thoughts.’

‘It’s been a tough day today, you understand that?’ says Holly. ‘I discover my business partner has gone missing, could be dead as far as I know. Then I’m told Joanna’s mum and her friends would be able to find Nick for me.’

‘We can certainly try,’ says Elizabeth. ‘Nick thought that either Davey Noakes or Lord Townes was trying to kill him. Does that sound reasonable?’

Holly looks away, looks back, then nods. ‘Very reasonable. They both knew.’

‘Knew what?’ asks Elizabeth. ‘That’s the piece of the puzzle we’re missing.’

Their desserts arrive. Along with another bottle of wine. Ibrahim does the honours.

‘You’re sure I can’t tempt you, Holly?’ he asks.

Holly hovers her hand over her glass. ‘Driving.’

Ibrahim nods. Very wise.

‘This whole thing is all about one single safe,’ says Holly. ‘The Compound is one room, a vault, and the walls are lined with safes. Each one about the size of a shoe box. Nick and I have one.’

‘What’s in it?’ asks Joyce, enjoying her Eton mess. ‘Jewels?’

‘It’s always jewels with you, Joyce,’ says Elizabeth.

‘One of our first jobs,’ says Holly, ‘was for a company –’

‘What company?’ Elizabeth asks.

‘We never ask,’ says Holly. ‘That’s one of our selling points.

We stored some bits and bobs for this company, and the yearly fee back then would have been twenty grand, something like that, and this company asked if we’d like to be paid in Bitcoin.

And we talked about it, and I was interested in that sort of thing, and Nick was interested, so we said why not?

We’ve got two hundred units in the vault, why not take a punt with one of them? ’

‘When was this?’ Elizabeth asks.

‘2011, something like that,’ says Holly. ‘And the twenty thousand price worked out at about five thousand Bitcoin, give or take, and occasionally you’d read something or other about it, but, really, we forgot about it. We stopped dealing with this company –’

‘Went to prison, did they?’ asks Elizabeth.

‘Probably,’ says Holly. ‘Didn’t need our services any more, certainly. We had these five thousand Bitcoin, or a string of numbers that represented our ownership of the Bitcoin, literally written on a scrap of paper in one of our files.’

‘That’s how it works,’ says Joyce. ‘It’s a string of numbers, not a real coin. They call it a key.’

‘I know that,’ says Ibrahim.

‘Sounds like a racket,’ says Ron. ‘Numbers on a bit of paper.’

‘All money is just numbers written on pieces of paper,’ says Holly.

‘A couple of years in, things started to get interesting. And these Bitcoin, which were worth about four pounds each when we first got paid, were suddenly worth forty each, and we had two hundred thousand pounds on our hands. We discussed selling them there and then, but we’re both gamblers, so we said let’s keep hold of them.

But we decided to use one of our safes at The Compound for the key.

Lots of people store these keys online, but hackers steal Bitcoin, and, you know, that’s the whole point of the company, so we locked it away.

Anyway, there was lots of toing and froing, the price was very volatile, but a couple of years later it went up to five hundred and fifty, and that single piece of paper was worth two point seven five million. ’

Ron whistles through his teeth. ‘Still a racket though.’

‘I say at that point that we should sell,’ says Holly.

‘But Nick says we hold on. That’s how it’s always gone.

One of us says sell, the other says hold on.

As I said, it was very volatile, and sometimes it would lose half its value in a week, but the peaks were getting higher and higher.

Knowing what we had locked away now, we agreed two things.

We’d sell only when both of us wanted to, and we’d figure out a way to stop one of us from ripping off the other.

So, from around 2016, there was no way that safe could be opened without authorization from both of us.

Nick can’t open our unit without me, and I can’t open it without Nick. That’s what we agreed.’

‘The six-digit codes Elizabeth was telling us about?’ says Ron.

‘Sounds like Nick told you a lot,’ says Holly. ‘I hope he was right to trust you?’

‘Might I ask,’ says Elizabeth, ‘what its value is today? If it was worth nearly three million then, what is it worth now?’

‘Varies day to day,’ says Holly. ‘It had a big peak a few years ago, about seventy thousand a coin.’

‘That’s when I bought,’ says Joyce.

‘But within a year,’ says Holly, ‘it was back down at sixteen thousand.’