The Yacht Party (Lara Stone)

One wall was covered with photos, maps, and print-outs of news items. It was a visual guide joining all of the threads of the case together. In a Hollywood movie, there would be surveillance pictures taken with a long lens, mugshots from the FBI files and the huge map of New York or Los Angeles with each crime scene joined together by a latticework of bright red thread. Lara had made do with smudged pictures from her ancient ink-jet printer and words – ‘Meyer’, ‘Yacht’, ‘Inner Circle?’ – scrawled on lurid yellow and pink sticky notes.

It was all a bit ad hoc but it certainly worked as a summary of the evidence they had gathered so far. More than anything, it showed how committed Lara was to the project. This was hours, days’ worth of effort, especially considering Lara had been to Paris and Monte Carlo in the interim.

‘Impressive,’ said Stella. ‘It’s not quite Mission Impossible, but it does cover what we know.’

‘Which isn’t much,’ said Lara, sounding glum. ‘You know, looking at this, maybe Eduardo’s right. Perhaps chasing Helen and Michael is a bum steer. After all, it was just one post-it note in Sandrine’s pocket. Maybe it was nothing.’

Stella gave Lara a sideways glance. Her boss looked exhausted, which wasn’t surprising given she had clearly sacrificed sleep to work on the story, but Stella knew she needed to rally her.

‘Remember that piece of advice you gave me when I started at the Chronicle?’

Lara burst out laughing.

‘Which bit? Don’t drink at lunch? Always use spell-check?’

‘You told me to listen,’ said Stella firmly. ‘You said most journos write a list of questions and stick rigidly to them, then wonder why they don’t get good answers. It’s the same here: we need to stop and listen to what the evidence is actually saying.’ Stella nodded towards the wall chart. ‘The answer is up there.’

Lara folded her arms and looked at the wall, deep in thought.

‘What do rich men fear the most?’ she mused.

‘Losing everything,’ replied Stella.

Lara grabbed her computer and sat down on the bed. Stella grinned, glad to see her boss back in the game.

‘We need to make a list,’ she said, tapping away. ‘All of the business interests Meyer and Sachs were involved with. See if we can find any that were going under or in danger of a takeover.’

Stella opened her own computer, smiling to herself: this was her chance to shine. She could admit she sometimes felt out of her depth with investigations but this was the one place she felt confident. Lara’s training had been old school: you read the cuttings, you phoned people up, you went and knocked on their door, but Stella was a digital native and for her, the answer to every question had always been a click away. It was just a matter of negotiating your way through the dark maze of the ‘net. It could be a rabbit warren of dead ends and distractions, but Stella felt it was the width of information that the internet could provide that gave twenty-first century reporters the edge.

They worked in silence, even after the pizza arrived. Stella had headphones on, picking at a slice of garlic bread as she scrolled through the data. It quickly became clear that the world of high finance – funds and money management – was quite secretive. There was very little detail about Meyer’s investment business other than it was super-exclusive and invitation-only. Sachs’s business was less opaque – but only just. There were more column inches given over to his philanthropic work – it seemed that everything Sachs touched turned to gold.

‘Either Michael Sachs’s hands are completely clean, or he’s very good at hiding the fingerprints,’ said Lara, without looking up.

Stella nodded, looking more closely at the picture of Michael Sachs that happened to be up on her screen, his arm around his wife Victoria, elegant in her Chanel and pearls. Stella read the caption:

ImpactAid benefit dinner, The Pierre hotel, New York. Victoria Sachs, founder.

Stella pulled up the ImpactAid website. According to the ‘About Us’ section, the charity was founded by Michael and Victoria Sachs twenty years earlier, although Michael was no longer listed as a board member or trustee. Stella scanned the charity’s good works: they had built clinics, dug wells and worked on literary programmes in Africa, then after the earthquake in Haiti in 2010, ImpactAid switched their focus to recovery efforts there.

Intrigued, Stella began researching the charity. To her surprise, Stella discovered that relief efforts in the country had been attracting a certain amount of flak in the press. Despite billions in foreign aid being poured in the country, many Haitians were still living in shanty towns with no running water, the implication being that misuse of funds, poor governance and political turmoil was widespread. ImpactAid hadn’t specifically been singled out, but Stella found it sad that so little progress had been made to help the Haitian people. Suddenly she stopped, fingers frozen on the keyboard.

‘British Aid Worker Killed.’

‘Lara, look at this,’ she said, swivelling her screen around.

‘Check out this news piece. An ImpactAid worker was killed in Haiti in a hit and run. Look at the name of the dead girl…’

‘Helen,’ said Lara.

Stella could feel her heart bumping. Something was telling her this was significant. She was already typing, searching up more stories relating to the girl’s death. Helen Groves… hit by a car while walking back to the ImpactAid bunkhouse…

Lara was back on her own computer and called out as she found another online news item.

Grieving Parents Blast Charity

The parents of an aid worker killed in Port-au-Prince have hit out at the lack of answers from police about their daughter’s death. ‘Nothing can bring our Helen back,’ said Ian Groves, father of the 22-year old Scot, killed in a hit-and-run incident. ‘But we want justice to be served.’

‘Charities such as ImpactAid are happy to have young people fly over to work for them, but when something goes wrong, they must help us find answers.’