Chuck fumbled with his papers, and Ruth had to remind herself that it was probably quite intimidating for this green new boy to be interrogated by his de facto boss. She remembered what it was like those first few months in the Washington office, how terrified she had been of Isaac Grey and all the other grizzled old-school print guys. Chuck obviously had a sharp mind – he had graduated summa cum laude from Yale – but that didn’t mean he was good under pressure. Still, she liked him, and you didn’t see many academic high-flyers scrambling to get into the inkies these days. With so many tempting openings on Wall Street or in Silicon Valley, who in their right mind would jump on to the sinking ship of print journalism?
‘Take your time,’ she said kindly. ‘It’s not an exam.’
Chuck looked up from his notes and gave her a weak smile. ‘Sorry, just a little disorganised.’
‘Well, let’s skip the back story,’ she said. ‘We all know that Asner basically promised the punters a huge return on their money, but he didn’t bother to invest any of it.’
Chuck nodded. ‘Yes, it was a pyramid scheme: he’d use the money from new investors to pay supposed “profits” to people further up the scheme, and seeing the big returns, the original people invested again. And so it went, round and round.’
‘Well the thing I’m interested in is the who, not the how,’ said Ruth, pouring more wine into her glass. ‘I spoke to a woman in Surrey, the wife of an ordinary accountant, who lost everything in the Asner scam. Is that common?’
‘Yes, almost a quarter of the victims were what you’d call ordinary investors,’ said Chuck, flipping through his notes. ‘Asner made his investment seem incredibly exclusive, but he allowed a lot of feeder funds from London, Paris, Madrid to join in, and that’s how mom and pop investors got caught. They were caught up in the hype, flattered to be allowed in – the headlines make you think it’s all billionaires who can afford it, but I think a lot of people will lose everything because of Asner.’
r /> Ruth nodded thoughtfully.
‘Which brings me to the big question: how was Asner killed?’
‘It was a prison fight about three months ago,’ said Chuck, pulling out another sheet of notes. ‘The official account is that two Russian thugs were having a brawl and Asner was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time – got stabbed in the neck with a shiv: a makeshift prison knife.’
Ruth leant forward on her elbows.
‘And what do you think, Chuck? Do you think that’s what happened?’
Chuck shrugged and sipped his wine. ‘If you’re asking for my gut reaction, I’d say that sounds very convenient. A lot of very rich, very powerful people lost money with him. Moguls, oligarchs, some even say organised crime syndicates used the scheme as a way of laundering cash. None of these people are the kind who like to lose money.’
‘So you think someone had him killed? For revenge or punishment, maybe?’
Ruth didn’t expect an answer, of course, she was simply talking it through, weighing up the facts, but she also respected Chuck’s opinion. She knew the pages and pages of notes spread out in front of him were the result of hours of diligent research: telephone calls, first-hand interviews, digging out documents and court reports – the proper way, not just half an hour surfing the net.
‘I think it’s highly likely someone wanted Asner dead,’ said Chuck. ‘And it’s the easiest thing in the world to have somebody killed in an American prison.’
‘Who’s been watching too many episodes of The Sopranos?’ said Ruth.
‘A bit before my time,’ said Chuck.
God, he must have been in junior high when that started, thought Ruth, feeling horribly old.
‘No, a life sentence means life in the States,’ continued Chuck, ‘so what’s to stop some guy who is already serving a hundred years from stabbing some fat old banker? It’s no skin off his nose and he could probably get a few cartons of cigarettes out of it.’
‘So the money,’ said Ruth. ‘Where did it all go?’
Chuck tapped the table with one finger.
‘That’s the billion-dollar question – literally, as it happens. Of course, a huge chunk of it funded Asner’s lifestyle. He had homes around the globe, a fleet of vintage cars, a private jet, a multimillion-dollar art collection, all the usual stuff.’
‘Nice for some,’ said Ruth.
‘Yes,’ agreed Chuck, his confidence growing as he warmed to the subject. ‘But here’s where it gets interesting. No one knows how much went into the Asner fund exactly, but it almost certainly ran into the billions. When Asner was finally caught by the SEC, he was extremely helpful with the authorities, telling them all about his bank accounts and properties around the world, but the Securities and Exchange Commission says they only recovered something like four hundred million.’
‘So where did the rest go?’
‘Exactly. There are endless conspiracy theories about it; it’s like Blackbeard’s treasure. But it’s logical that a cunning, manipulative crook like Asner would have planned for the possibility of getting caught. He would definitely have buried some gold somewhere.’
Ruth was drawn in by Chuck’s enthusiasm. She usually found financial news quite dull – God knows she’d had to listen to enough of it with David – but the Asner scandal was like a blockbuster thriller: wealthy victims, pantomime villains, jets and limos, even the tantalising hint of pirate treasure. But juicy though it was, Ruth had a story to put together. This was a murder case, not a profile of a financial meltdown. Peter Ellis’s involvement with Asner was little more than a footnote, just another layer of the tragedy and bad luck that the Ellis family – specifically Sophie Ellis – had been forced to endure. Unless she could find something more, of course.
‘Okay, so let’s get back on track with the Riverton case,’ she said, turning to signal to Hayden, the Welsh barman, for another bottle. ‘How deep is the connection between Asner and Peter Ellis?’
Chuck pouted and pulled out a black and white picture of some young men in mortar boards and gowns.