The Fix

Chapter 16 The Switcheroo

The knock on Hayes's door came at 7 a.m. on a Tuesday morning two weeks before Christmas 2012. Hayes padded down the bespoke pine staircase of his newly renovated home to let in more than a dozen police officers and Serious Fraud Office investigators. He had been expecting them.¹

Hayes stood numbly at his wife's side as the officers swept through the property, gathering computers and documents into boxes and loading them into vehicles parked at the end of the gravel driveway. The couple had only moved in a fortnight before. Their infant son was upstairs in bed. Outside, commuters made their way in the dark to the railway station at the bottom of the village.

“You do not have to say anything, but it may harm your defense if you do not mention when questioned something which you later rely on in court,” a uniformed officer told Hayes. “Anything you do say may be given in evidence.”

Traffic was heavy by the time the former trader was led to the back of a waiting car. The 20-mile crawl from Surrey to the City of London passed in silence.

Bishopsgate police station is a gray, concrete building on one of the financial district's busiest thoroughfares. Set among the packed eateries and shops surrounding Liverpool Street railway station, it's easy to miss. Two doors away, on a wall above a tobacconist, a small mosaic depicting Sir Robert Peel, the founder of the British police force, looks down on passersby.

It was a fitting location for Hayes's first brush ...