Three thousand miles away in London, a shadow moved through the basement archives of the Croft European Division.
Malcolm Fotheringham picked the lock of the storage cage with a tension wrench. His accounts were frozen, and auditors were swarming the upper floors, but Malcolm knew this building better than anyone. He knew where the bodies were buried–or in this case, where the paper lived.
He bypassed the digitized files, knowing Alistair would have scrubbed those. He went to the physical manifests from ten years ago–the year Alistair “died.”
He pulled a dusty box labeled *LOGISTICS: 2014*. Inside, buried under shipping invoices for stage equipment, he found a ledger bound in black leather.
He flipped through the pages. It wasn’t just shipping records. It was a transfer log. Large sums of money moved from Croft shell companies to a holding firm in Zurich called “The Syndicate.”
Malcolm traced the dates. The transfers continued monthly for the entire decade Alistair claimed to be rotting in a dungeon. And the signature authorizing the receipts wasn’t a kidnapper’s. It was Alistair’s unique, jagged scrawl.
“Got you,” Malcolm whispered, shoving the ledger into his coat. Alistair wasn’t a victim. He was the banker.