Page 28 of The Impossible Fortune (Thursday Murder Club Mysteries #5)

‘Mr Benson,’ says Davey Noakes.

‘Mr Noakes,’ says Bill Benson, pulling the cage door shut. ‘All aboard.’

The Compound lift starts to descend. He’s an old miner, Bill Benson. A John Grisham pokes out of the pocket of his heavy jacket. Nice enough guy, does twelve-hour shifts down in the deep. You can’t get down here without his say-so.

How many times has Davey been down here since he first met Holly and Nick? As many times as Davey has secrets.

And Davey has a lot of secrets.

He looks at his notebook, and smiles. How can forty years ago feel like yesterday?

Davey had been unusual in the late eighties.

Most drug dealers, if they kept records at all, kept them in notebooks just like the one Davey is holding right now.

Writing down all the numbers, all the deals.

Then they’d lock the notebooks away in a drawer, and go to prison for many years when the police found them.

Davey was ahead of the curve though. He kept all his records on a computer. An IBM PS/2. A museum piece these days. People laughed at him, called him all sorts of names, like ‘The Disco Nerd’, but ‘Ravey Davey’ was such a strong nickname it couldn’t be toppled.

And Davey had been right. His little computer really was the safest way to keep a secret.

As the years went by, the other criminals caught on.

That’s the march of progress for you. You’d see armed robbers in East End boozers with copies of What Computer?

. Davey moved to Macs. By the turn of the century everyone was keeping everything on their computers.

Log it all in, encrypt it, build a firewall around it, then build another firewall around that.

All the way up to around the year 2000, if you knew what you were doing with a computer, the police couldn’t touch you.

But then the computers all started talking to each other, and, before you knew it, your phone started talking to your computer, and your fridge started talking to your phone, and you willingly paid for a device that recorded everything you said and sent it to a server farm in the middle of the Nevada desert, just because it was easier than switching the radio on by yourself.

Davey realized before most people that the trusty iMac on his desk in Sussex might as well be in an internet café in Vladivostok.

If Davey could break into bank computers in Adelaide and government computers in Kinshasa – and he had done both – he knew that armies of people just like himself anywhere in the world could get inside his computer whenever they chose. Computers were no longer safe.

And so it was that, around twenty years ago now, just when his competitors were buying bigger and fancier computers, confident in their forward-sightedness, Davey bought a stack of notebooks and started writing everything down instead.

The whole thing had gone full circle, and Davey had been ahead of the curve the whole way.

But where do you keep your notebooks?

And then he met Holly and Nick. The two of them were shiny and brand-new in those days, but, most importantly, they knew what he knew: that if you wanted to keep a secret, you didn’t keep it on a computer.

Davey liked them, and liked what they were offering.

They’d bought a hole in the ground, and they’d turned it into a gold mine.

The Bitcoin, though, that really was ahead of its time.

Davey needed a couple of different safes for a couple of different companies.

Always keep everything separate. And for one of the safes the Bitcoin seemed like a neat idea, a cheap workaround, and a fun gamble for them all.

When he’d pivoted from party drugs to online fraud, Davey had started getting paid in Bitcoin from time to time.

It fascinated him. He wondered if it might fascinate Holly and Nick too.

It did. They were canny, and they were happy to take a risk.

Twenty grand was it, at the time? And look at it now?

Holly and Nick must have thought their risk had paid off spectacularly.

Their grins when they came to see him. Davey’s had a few good paydays in his time, but nothing like three hundred and fifty million.

He’d say they were lucky buggers, but they took the risk in the first place, didn’t they?

So that wasn’t luck: that was backing yourself.

Perhaps a bit of good fortune too, you always need that, but they had to take the credit.

Either way, that meeting had given Davey an awful lot to think about. How to play it? What move to make? And that’s fine, that’s part of the job; if being Davey Noakes was easy, anyone could do it, and it wouldn’t be half as profitable, would it?

The cage reaches the bottom of the lift shaft, and Bill Benson opens the doors. He ushers Davey out.

‘After you, Mr Noakes.’

‘Much obliged, Mr Benson.’

They each press their thumbprints in turn on a pad, then scan their retinas, and the door to the vault opens. A small room, containing a couple of hundred safes. God knows what was in them, but Davey bets a lot of them contain either a fortune or a prison sentence.

The meeting with Holly and Nick had been on the Tuesday. He’d had a day or so to think things through, certainly. To work out his next move.

And then the phone call came. And that was a real stroke of luck for Davey Noakes.