Aren’t some of you ready to start treating yourselves? Won’t you be wanting to spend that money soon?Emma was putting it politely, but it would not have been unreasonable for the Chambers to have rung up their till for the last time several years ago, and the Faulkners were senior to the Billingses. If they had all invested around the same time that I had, and it seemed fair to think that they had, whose retirement should we be thinking of?
Who are you anyway? You don’t seem to know much about the village, Mrs. Faulkner asked.
Emma ignored the question and went back to her earlier theme.
You see entrepreneurs like Sir Alan Sugar and Deborah Meaden here, there, and everywhere, they’re more than just business tycoons, they’re celebrities. Why not James Dixon?she asked.He’s an inspiration to us all, shouldn’t he be flaunted?
They remained stumped, but I wasn’t. The reason James lived out in the sticks and kept a low profile was because his business was a Ponzi scheme.
Chapter Seventeen
I’d found out about six years before, when I’d asked for my money back and received the usual platitudes about the value being low and leaving it to grow.
“But you said it would grow in months,” I told him.
“I said it could do,” he said. “But we’ve had adverse economic conditions, so it’s taking longer.”
Usually when he started talking about economics and market factors and accounting equations and so on, I admitted defeat. For years, I’d had no doubt James was right and I was too embarrassed to say I’d signed up for it without properly understanding it. When he sold the investment to me, I’d assured him I’d grasped everything he said and I was happy with the T’s & C’s.
But now, I had accepted that there would be no children, and the limits James had put on my life were becoming intolerable. This time, I couldn’t just nod along with what he said. I admitted to myself thatI had made a mistake in investing, and I wanted to know how I could have misunderstood it so badly.
I started by googling his website, clicking on every tab to try to find something to give me a clue.
When James had first pitched the cryptocurrency to me, he’d opened up his laptop and showed me his website. The cryptocurrency was called Ingot, and its logo was a gold nugget. The website featured a picture of a big, shiny office block on the home page and a video of him, walking through the corridors, talking about the wonder of cryptocurrency.
He showed me a tab called “How it works,” which mostly featured graphs, with their lines going up and up and up, sometimes literally off the scale. Then he showed me another page explaining the graphs—the writing was small and the paragraphs were long, and I gave up at the word “derivatives” in the first section.
“I’d be really sad for your mum if you missed this opportunity, and the inheritance she left for your future went to waste,” James said, making me feel guilty. Then he said, “It’s only ignorance that stops people from investing.” Which made me feel stupid.
Now, years later, nothing had changed on the website, the graphs all looked exactly the same, only the years along the bottom were different, to make it look as if it was current. After everything James had said to me about adverse market conditions and a difficult economy, shouldn’t that graph go down sometimes?
I made a note of the address and headed out to Bristol to visit the office. I’d asked to visit it before, and James had always said, yes, of course, but there was always a reason why it wasn’t a good time. Now I wasn’t going to wait to be invited; I was going to go along and see what he was doing all day.
The building I found wasn’t as bright and shiny as the one on the website. In fact, it looked a bit run down, but it was a commercial building, with a list of the businesses it housed by the door. I looked for Ingot, but I couldn’t see it.
I went inside, where a receptionist asked if she could help me.
“I’m looking for Ingot,” I said, and she looked at me blankly. “The cryptocurrency business. This is its address.”
She typed something into her computer and shook her head. “Has it changed its name? All the firms here are on the list by the front door.”
“I don’t think so,” I said.
“Do you have a person’s name? I can see if we have an email address for them.”
I gave her James’s name and she typed in James Dixon, but nothing came up. Then she tried Dickson, in case it had been misspelled, and she tried Dickinson and Dickenson and Dicks and even Dix, but James wasn’t there.
An older man came out from the back room. “You looking for the cryptocurrency bloke?” he asked and I nodded, a bit of hope springing in my heart. “He moved out, more than a year ago, took all his staff and all his stuff and went. Don’t think he could afford the place anymore. He was never here anyway, always at the gym or the golf course or something. I don’t know where they moved to, didn’t leave a forwarding address. He’s got five grand of my money so let me know if you find him.”
I hadn’t known James played golf. I left with a sense of an unhappy epiphany dawning.
I continued to poke around on the website, hoping to find something I’d overlooked that would give me answers. In the end, I found them while poking around in the TV guide.
I came across a drama about a man called Bernie Madoff who ran something called a Ponzi scheme and conned people out of around $20 billion. I was watching it with half an eye at first, but I jumped to attention when I saw Mr. Madoff dazzling an elderly couple with tales of unimaginable wealth. He was telling them they could double, triple, quadruple their money in a matter of weeks, when really they couldn’t.
I told James about it that night. “It sounds like your cryptocurrency,” I said.
James smiled. “It’s nothing like my cryptocurrency. It was before the days of cryptocurrency. That man was just a common thief. Everybody knows that.”
