“I know that. Someone switched them at some point between the money leaving here and reaching me in London. I want to find out who.”
He clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth. “I trust the people who get the shipment from here to the port.”
“Who are they?”
“My brother and his team.”
“And from the port? Who puts the container on the ship who would also know the money is there?”
He shook his head. “No one. Once the money is in the container, it’s just the shipping company who deals with it. We only need people on either end. It doesn’t matter whose hands it goes through between there, as long as the money remains hidden. Could someone have accidentally come across it?”
I pressed my lips together, my nostrils flaring. “No. This was no accident. This had been planned in advance. The money was switched out. You think someone would just happen to have bundles of badly forged bank notes on them?”
Something else occurred to me. Why bother to switch out the notes instead of just stealing the money? It had to be someone on this side, someone who wanted to make it look as though the money was still in position when it was put in the container. Why else would they have bothered?
Rasmus shrugged. “Okay, maybe it was planned, but the cargo staff might have stumbled across one of our previous shippings and planned for the next one.”
He was right. That was a possibility, but it did make our job near impossible. We’d have to get the names of everyone on that ship and interrogate each of them.
It was easier to start with the brother.
Even if he wasn’t directly involved, he might have seen someone acting strangely, or even have a contact who might have either heard something or been the one who’d made the switch. I wasn’t going to give up on this just yet.
“I need to know where to find your brother.”
“Why would I give you that information?”
“You’ve got off lightly, Rasmus. You were paid for goods I did not receive. I am well within my right to either demand my money back, or make you pay in other ways. Do you wish to continue working with me? If so, I need your brother’s whereabouts.”
He hissed air through his teeth. “I don’t need to keep working with you. I will have other buyers.”
I arched an eyebrow. “You think anyone will work with you once I spread the word that you’ve sent me an inferior product? People listen to the Cornells, Rasmus. I can destroy your reputation within a day.”
His lips pinched with displeasure, but I could tell I had won.
“Very well. Kaspar lives fifty kilometres away. If you have a phone, I can show you his location on a map.”
I handed over my phone for Rasmus to pinpoint where we needed to go. Like our current location, it appeared to be in the middle of nowhere.
“Don’t you people believe in living in cities?” I said.
“Half of Estonia is forested. Where better to live when you don’t want to be noticed?”
He had a point.
I jerked my chin in a nod to my brother and cousin, and we left Rasmus and his men and went back to the car.
“He’ll warn his brother that we’re coming,” Leo said.
“If we get there and he’s run, we’ll know he is guilty.”
I did a three-point turn and followed the track back down to the road. I only had the directions Rasmus had plugged into my phone, and I hoped I wasn’t making a mistake in trusting that he hadn’t fed me a whole heap of bullshit to get rid of me. I was placing my bets on him prizing his business ahead of his family.
I didn’t like that we’d been gone for so long. I hoped the women back at the hotel were all right. Of course they were. Hallie was probably several cocktails in by now and was enjoying the time away from me. I wondered what she might have told Jodie about me. Would Jodie report back to Leo? There wasn’t much to report, to be fair, though I still experienced an inkling of guilt at letting her cry on the floor, and at spying on her in the bath. I shook the feeling away. I wasn’t the type to feel anything at all. It was safer that way—made life far easier. Emotions were for idiots.
Thirty minutes later, and I found myself driving back up another, almost identical, dirt track. It opened on to a clearing with a wooden cabin positioned in the middle.
“These men really know how to get back to nature,” I commented.