Chapter 79 Building The Case Against Ashworth
Tuesday morning arrived with the particular clarity of a day that understood it was going to matter.
Zara was at her desk by seven. The city outside was still finding its morning voice, the early sounds of delivery vehicles and the first commuters building slowly toward the full noise of the day. She had been awake since five-thirty, not with anxiety but with the specific alert quality of someone whose mind had been working through a problem during the hours when the world was quiet enough to let it.
The problem was Ashworth.
Not finding him. Not connecting him to the network. Seline had done that and the amendment filing had done that and the three movements the previous evening had confirmed that he knew his name was known. The problem was building a case against him that was strong enough to withstand the legal defence of a man who had spent forty years inside the institutions that would be prosecuting him and understood their processes and their limitations better than almost anyone who would be working against him.
He had built the methodology around legal gaps.
His defence would be built around them too.
She opened her notebook to a clean page and wrote his name at the top and beneath it wrote everything she knew about him that was documented and verifiable. The amendment filing. The holding company. The private members club. The internal investigation at his former firm fourteen years ago that had been settled privately. The connection to Crewe's sixth engagement and through it to the Osei case and the sixteenth case Seline had identified.
It was a beginning.
It was not enough.
She called Seline at seven-fifteen.
Seline had been working since six and answered with the alert efficiency of someone who had already found things and was ready to discuss them.
"The internal investigation at his former firm," Zara said. "Fourteen years ago. Settled privately. Is there any record of what it covered."
"I have been looking at that since yesterday evening," Seline said. "The settlement is sealed. The terms are not publicly available." She paused. "But the firm had a compliance officer at the time. A woman who left the firm six months after the settlement and set up an independent compliance consultancy. She has been running it for thirteen years."
"She knows what the investigation covered," Zara said.
"She was the compliance officer," Seline said. "She would have been central to it."
Zara wrote the name Seline gave her beneath Ashworth's on the clean page.
Caroline Adeyinka. No relation to the Adeyemi family. A compliance specialist who had left a senior position at one of the country's largest corporate law firms six months after a private settlement that had buried something significant and had been running her own practice ever since.
She thought about Victor Cole sitting across from her in his office. The immunity agreement. The hour and twenty minutes of thorough account. The specific relief of a man setting something down that had been heavy for a long time.
"Can you find a contact number for Caroline Adeyinka," she said.
"Sending it now," Seline said.
The number arrived on her phone within two minutes.
She looked at it.
A compliance officer who had left a senior position six months after a settlement that covered something significant enough to be sealed. Thirteen years of independent practice. Thirteen years of distance from whatever she had seen inside that firm.
She dialled.
Caroline Adeyinka answered on the fourth ring with the cautious professional manner of someone receiving a call from an unfamiliar number and deciding in the first seconds whether to engage or deflect.
Zara introduced herself and the Restoration Project and said simply and directly that she was calling about Leonard Ashworth and the internal investigation at his former firm fourteen years ago and that she believed Caroline had information that was relevant to a current investigation involving a significant number of families who had been seriously harmed.
The silence on the line was long.
Longer than Zara had expected.
When Caroline spoke her voice was careful and measured in the way of someone who had been waiting for a version of this call for a long time and was now deciding whether the version that had arrived was the one they were going to respond to.
"How did you find me," she said.
"The same way we find everything," Zara said. "Carefully and without stopping."
Another silence.
"I signed a confidentiality agreement as part of the settlement," Caroline said. "The terms are binding."
"I understand that," Zara said. "I am not asking you to breach a confidentiality agreement. I am asking if you are willing to meet with me and tell me what you are able to tell me within the constraints of what you have signed." She paused. "Sometimes what a person is able to say within constraints is enough to point in the right direction. And sometimes the right direction is all we need."
A long silence.
"How many families," Caroline said.
"Fourteen confirmed," Zara said. "Possibly more."
Another silence. The specific silence of someone making a decision that they had been moving toward for a long time and had not yet found the right reason to make.
"Tomorrow morning," Caroline said. "My office. Eight o'clock."
"I will be there," Zara said.
She ended the call and looked at the notebook.
Caroline Adeyinka's name with a time and a date written beside it.
Kofi appeared at her office door with his flask and the expression of someone who had heard enough of the call to understand its significance.
"She said yes," he said.
"She said tomorrow," Zara said. "Which is not quite the same thing but is close enough to matter."
She looked at the notebook.
At Ashworth's name at the top of the clean page and everything beneath it that was building toward something complete.
"We need one more thing," she said quietly.
Kofi looked at her.
"We always need one more thing," he said.
"Yes," she said. "And we always find it."