The Carry Trade

About this book

At one in the morning on a City clearing floor, analyst Nadia Quist sees a small loss paid to a brass-plate firm in Limassol, in the same pattern of numbers she ties to her brother’s death three years ago. She follows it. A literary thriller from the world of British banking.

A small loss at the foot of a column. Forty-one thousand, two hundred and sixty pounds, structured to the penny, paid to a brass-plate counterparty in Limassol — and the man who cleared it has not noticed Nadia Quist is still on the night shift.

Three years ago, the inquest into her brother Theo’s death at Tilbury was returned as open. The verdict left her quietly certain it was anything but. Now, at one in the morning on a clearing floor in the City, the same arithmetic that killed him has surfaced again on her screen.

To understand what she has found, Nadia will follow it: through a Frankfurt settlement floor processing 1.4 million instructions a day, past a Treasury card with a three-prefix and a man on a bench who has known too long, into a Luxembourg hotel where a careful woman with proof on a single fold of A4 paper will not be there to hand it over.

The architect of the channel is untouchable by accusation. By the journalist’s piece, by the regulator’s notice, by the formal arrest. He has priced each of those into his calculations across thirty years.

The system he runs his money through has not.

A literary thriller for readers of John le Carré, Mick Herron’s Slow Horses, and Robert Harris. Set in the clean, exact world of British clearing and settlement banking, where the cost of a quiet number is sometimes a human life — and where one careful analyst, properly armed with a single trade that cannot be unwound, can make the system say it out loud.