The Black Lotus by Peter J. McKenna

Author:Peter J. McKenna [McKenna, Peter J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2020-05-02T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter 40

Monday, the 2nd of January, 6:02 p.m.

The rest of Matthieu’s Monday continued in much the same way that it had begun. Unfortunately, every wine glass at the château had been recently hand washed and polished. The only fingerprints that Simone St. Clair could find on any of them belonged to the person who had cleaned them, François Fouquet himself, ironically enough. Matthieu knew that this would have been a long shot, and probably wouldn’t have proven anything anyways, but he still felt disappointed, nonetheless.

When Matthieu finally got a hold of Boutrel’s financial records later that evening, he began combing through them.

The first thing that he came across was the hefty life insurance policy that Beatrice had taken out on her husband just a week prior to his death. The premium that she would have been paying for a leech like Monsieur Boutrel hardly seemed worth it. Then again, maybe the premium was worth it if she only had to make one payment for such a staggering payout of nearly €100 million. Was the Boutrel name alone worth that much? Although he had become less suspicious of the “grieving” widow, she climbed his suspect list once again.

Matthieu began to delve deeper into Boutrel’s finances and found that Boutrel had an account in nearly every French bank.

So, Matthieu decided to start by reviewing all of Boutrel’s most recent transactions to see if he could make any sense of the numbers.

The numbers in his French accounts were confusing, to say the least. The balances remained relatively stable and Matthieu could see that it was mostly as Beatrice had said.

Every Friday, Boutrel received a combined transfer of €200,000 spread out amongst his numerous French accounts, Beatrice’s allowance. There were also a number of other deposits into these French accounts, none with any details associated with them other than the amounts. The money that was deposited into these accounts was always a discreet cash transaction. There were never any names or identities linking any of them to anything. Matthieu now understood why Boutrel always preferred working in cash. If the police had ever come across these accounts, there was virtually no paper trail. The cash deposits could have been, theoretically, collected from anywhere. They were all seemingly innocuous, but Matthieu could tell that something unsavory was afoot.

However, strangely enough, all of the French accounts had been drained and closed on the 3rd of December. On the 17th of December, the accounts were opened again. From that day forward, his allowance was doubled. The pattern continued like this until his death.

When the funds had been drained, they had all been funneled into a mysterious account that didn’t have any name associated with it, just an account number. The details of this mystery account were unavailable to Matthieu. He tried to look into the bank that the account was listed under, Financial Union, apparently located in a small Caribbean island called St. Kitts. This was, undoubtedly, part of the offshore accounts that Beatrice had spoken of. However, the further Matthieu dug, the less he came up with.

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