Crossfire

16

I was worried that he was going to pass out. His eyes started to roll back in their sockets, and his breathing suddenly became shallower. I didn't want him to have a heart attack simply from fear. That might take some explaining.

"Alex," I shouted at him, bringing his eyes back into focus on my face. "You can prevent this, you know. All you have to do is cooperate and answer all my questions. But you have to be completely candid and tell me everything. Do you understand?"

He nodded eagerly.

"And do you agree to answer everything?"

He nodded again.

"Nothing held back?"

He shook his head from side to side, so I stepped forwards and tore off the tape from across his mouth.

"Now, for a start," I said, "who killed Roderick Ward?"

He still wouldn't answer.

"I won't give you another chance," I said seriously.

"How do I know you won't kill me anyway, after I've told you?"

"You don't," I said. "But do you have any choice? And if I gather enough incriminating information about you, so that you would also be in big trouble if you told the tax man about my mother, then we would both have a weapon of mass destruction, as it were. Either of us telling the authorities would result in the very thing we were trying so hard to prevent. We would both have the safety of mutually assured annihilation, a bit like nuclear deterrence. Neither of us would use the information for fear of the retaliation."

"But you could still kill me," he said.

"Yes," I agreed, "I suppose I could, but why would I? There would be no need, and even I don't kill people without a reason."

He didn't look terribly reassured, so I untaped his foot from the spindle and then pulled him across the floor so he was sitting up with his back against the wall by the kitchen door.

"Now," I said, sitting down once more on the upright chair. "If you didn't kill Roderick Ward, who did?"

I still wasn't sure he would tell me, so seemingly absentmindedly, I picked up the syringe and made another fine spray of fluid shoot from the needle.

"His sister," Alex said.

I looked at him. "Stella Beecher?"

He seemed surprised I knew her name, but I'd already shown him the note he had sent to her. He nodded.

"Now, why would she kill her own brother?"

"She didn't mean to," he said. "It was an accident."

"You mean the car crash?"

"No," he said. "He was already dead when he went into the river. He drowned in a bath."

"What on earth was Stella Beecher doing giving him a bath?"

"She wasn't exactly giving him a bath. They were trying to get him to tell them where the money had gone."

"What money?" I asked.

"Fred's father's money."

I was confused. "Fred?"

"Fred Sutton," he said.

Old Man Sutton's son. The man I had seen in the public gallery at Roderick Ward's inquest.

"So Fred Sutton and Stella Beecher know each other?" I asked.

"Know each other!" He laughed. "They live together. They're almost married."

In Andover, I thought, close to Old Man Sutton and his nursing home. So it had been no coincidence at all that Stella Beecher had moved to Andover.

It took more than an hour, but in the end, Alex told me how, and why, Roderick Ward was found dead in his car, submerged in the River Windrush.

Ward had been introduced to Old Man Sutton by Stella Beecher, who had been in a relationship with Detective Sergeant Fred for some time. Unbeknownst to either Fred or Stella, Roderick had somehow conned the old man into borrowing against his house and investing the cash in a nonexistent hedge fund in Gibraltar. Fred found out about it only after he'd seen the brick being thrown through his father's window. It was like a soap opera.

"How do you know all this?" I asked Alex. "What's your connection?"

"I worked with Roderick Ward."

"So you are implicated in this sham hedge-fund business?"

He didn't really want to admit it. He must have known that my mother had been conned in the same way. He looked away from my face, but he nodded.

"So who's the brains behind it?" I asked.

He turned his eyes back to mine. "Do you think I'm stupid or something?" he said. "If I told you who it was then you wouldn't need to kill me because they'd do it for you."

Actually, I did think him stupid. But not as stupid as Roderick Ward. Fancy stealing from the father of your sister's boyfriend, especially when the boyfriend just happened to be a police detective-now, that was really stupid!

"Let's go back to Roderick Ward," I said. "Why did you send a note to Stella Beecher saying you had the stuff? What stuff? And how did you know Stella anyway?"

"I didn't," he said. "But I knew her address, because Roderick had said it was the same address he used, the one in Oxford."

"So what was all this about having the stuff? And hoping it was in time?"

"Fred Sutton had been harassing Roderick and me at an office we'd rented in Wantage, threatening us and so on."

I didn't blame him, I thought.

"He told me that he'd get a warrant for my arrest, and he'd use his police contacts to fit me up good and proper. He said I'd get ten years unless I gave him some papers he wanted about where his dad's money had gone."

"So why the note?" I asked.

"I made the copies of the papers, but he didn't come to collect them on the Monday morning as he'd said he would. He told me he'd definitely be at the office by eight, and I was waiting. But he didn't come all day, and Roderick didn't show up, either. I thought the two of them must have done a deal, and I would end up carrying the can. I was shit scared, I can tell you. And I had no other way of contacting him, so I sent the note."

So I had been wrong about "the stuff " being something to do with my mother's tax papers, and also "in time" had not been about before Roderick Ward's "accident," but about before getting an arrest warrant issued.

Never assume anything, I reminded myself.

But I'd been right about one thing: Alex Reece was indeed stupid.

"So how do you know that Fred Sutton and Stella killed Roderick Ward?" I asked him.

"Fred pitches up first thing the next day and demands the papers, but I told him to get stuffed. If he thought I was going to take the blame for what Roderick had been doing, he had another think coming. But he says Roderick's dead and I'll go the same way if I didn't give him the papers."

He paused only to draw breath.

"So I says to him that I didn't believe him that Roderick was dead. I told him he was only saying it to frighten me. He tells me that I should be frightened because they murdered him in the bath, but then he thinks better of it and claims it was an accident, that they'd only meant to scare him into telling them where the money had gone. But Fred says that Stella pulled his feet and his head went under and he just… died. Killed her own brother, just like that, Fred said. One minute they were asking him questions, the next he was dead."

"So did you give Fred the papers he wanted?" I asked.

"Yeah," he said. "But they wouldn't have done him much good. It's been ages since his money went, and they change the numbers and stuff all the time."

"'They'?" I asked.

He clammed up tight, pursing his lips and shaking his head at me.

But I'd been doing a lot of thinking while I'd sat waiting in Greystone Stables and in the Newbury coffee shop, and the more I had thought about it, the more convinced I had become.

"You mean Jackson Warren and Peter Garraway," I said. It was a statement rather than a question.

He stared at me with his mouth hanging open. So I was right.

But it had to be them.

"And who is Mr. Cigar?" I asked him.

He laughed. "No one," he said. "That was Roderick's idea. They all thought it a great joke as they puffed on their own great big Havanas."

"And Rock Bank Ltd?" I said. "Is that a myth too?"

"Oh no, that exists, all right," he said. "But it's not really a bank. It's just a Gibraltar holding company. When money comes in, it sits there for a while, and then leaves again."

"How much money?" I asked.

"Depends on how much people invest."

"And where does it go when it leaves Rock Bank?"

"I arrange a transfer into another Gibraltar account, but it doesn't stay long there either," he said. "I don't know where it goes then. I'm pretty sure it ends up in a secret numbered Swiss account."

"How long does it stay in Rock Bank?"

"About a week," he said. "Just long enough to allow for clearance of the transfer and for any problems to get sorted."

So Rock Bank (Gibraltar) Ltd had no assets of its own. No wonder the London-based liquidation firm was attempting to pursue the individual directors.

"And where does it come from?" I asked him.

"The mugs," he said, with a laugh.

"You're the mug," I said. "Look at you. You don't look quite so clever at the moment. And I bet you don't get to keep much of the money."

"I get my cut," he boasted.

"And how long in prison will your cut be worth when this all falls apart, as it surely must? Or when will Warren and Garraway decide you are no longer worth your cut? Then you might end up drowned in a bath, just like Roderick."

"They need me," he boasted again. "I'm the CPA. They need me to square the audit. You're just jealous of a successful business."

"But it's not a business," I said. "You are simply stealing from people."

"They can afford it," he said, sneering.

I wasn't going to argue with him, because there was no point. He probably agreed with the philosophy of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge.

"So how do Jackson Warren and Peter Garraway know each other?"

"I don't know," he said. "But they've done so for years. Long before I met them."

"And how long have you known them?" I asked.

"Too long," he said, echoing what he'd said to me at Isabella's kitchen supper.

"And how long is that?" I persisted.

"About four years."

"Was that when the fake-hedge-fund scheme started?"

"Yeah, about then."

"Is that what you were referring to when you had that little spat with Jackson Warren, you know, that night when I first I met you?"

"No," he said. "That was over his and Peter's other little fiddle."

"And what's that?" I asked.

"No way," he said, shaking his head. "I've already said too much as it is."

At least he was right on that count.

"You think the Revenue will investigate their other little fiddle?" I asked him, thinking back to the supper exchange between him and Jackson. What was it he had said then? Something about that there was no telling what else the Revenue might dig up. "And you're worried about that investigation finding out about everything else?"

It was a guess but not a bad one.

"Bloody stupid, if you ask me," he said.

I was asking him.

"Why take the risk?" I said.

"Exactly."

"So their other little fiddle is about tax?"

"Look," he said, changing the subject and completely ignoring my question, "I had a few beers on the flight, and now I desperately need to take a piss."

I thought back to my time in the stable. Should I make him wet himself just as I had been forced to do?

"Come on," he shouted at me. "I'm bloody bursting."

Reluctantly, I took a pair of scissors from my rucksack, leaned down and cut the ties holding Alex's hands behind his back.

"I might run away," he said, sitting up and rubbing his wrists.

"Not like that you won't." I pointed to the plastic ties that still bound his ankles together.

"Come on," he said. "Cut them too."

"No," I said. "You can hop."

Grudgingly, he pulled himself upright and hopped into the bathroom beneath the stairs.

I thought it unlikely that there would be a phone in the bathroom, but nevertheless, I took the precaution of removing the house telephone from its cradle in the kitchen. You can't dial out on one extension if another is off the hook, and his cell was still lying, switched off, on the kitchen counter where I'd left it.

Alex was taking his time, and I was beginning to think he might be trying to escape out of the bathroom window, when I heard the flush. Presently, he reappeared, hobbling out into the hall.

"Cut these bloody things off," he demanded angrily. He had obviously been using the time to try to break the plastic ties around his ankles, but I knew from experience that they were tougher than they looked. Much tougher indeed than his skin, which was chafed and reddening.

"No," I said.

"What the bloody hell more do you want?" he asked angrily.

"My WMD," I said.

"Eh?"

"My weapon of mass destruction," I said. "My nuclear deterrent. I need some hard evidence."

"What sort of evidence?"

"Evidence of conspiracy to defraud my mother of one million U.S. dollars."

"Dream on," he said, smiling.

"Maybe I should just ring up Jackson Warren and ask him about my mother's money, telling him that it was you who suggested I did so."

"You wouldn't do that," he said, looking a little worried.

"Don't tempt me," I said.

"He'd bloody kill me just for talking to you."

Good, I thought. It was much to my advantage that Alex remained more frightened of Jackson Warren than he was of me. That alone would prevent him from telling Jackson anything about this nocturnal encounter. Maybe that in itself was my nuclear deterrence.

"Or perhaps I should call Jackson and ask for the number of the Swiss bank account into which he and Garraway put all the money they steal."

"You'd better bloody not," Alex said. "Or I'll be onto the tax man about your mother."

I strode into the kitchen, and he hobbled in behind me. I walked straight past his flight bag, and I glimpsed out of the corner of my eye as he pushed it farther out of sight beneath the table. I didn't mind one bit that Alex believed I hadn't accessed his computer.

"Sit down," I said sharply, pointing to one of the kitchen chairs.

I don't think he really knew how to react. He didn't move.

"Sit down," I said again, in my best voice-of-command.

He wavered, but after a few seconds, he pulled the chair out from under the table and sat down while I sat on the chair opposite him.

"So whose idea was it to get my mother's horses to lose?" I asked.

"Julie's," he said.

"So she could bet against them on the Internet?"

"No, nothing like that," he said. "She just wanted to give her old man's horses a better chance of winning. He gives her such a hard time when they lose. It was me who bets against the horses on the Internet. Not too much, like, not enough to attract attention. But it's been a nice little earner."

Amateurs, I thought. These people were amateurs.

The doorbell rang, making both of us jump. It was followed by a persistent gentle knocking at the door. I glanced at my watch. It was ten to one in the morning.

"Stay there," I ordered. "And keep quiet. Neither of us wants the police involved in this, do we?"

Alex shook his head, but I thought it most improbable that the police would knock so softly. They were far more likely to break the door down.

I walked through into the dark front room and looked out through the window. Julie Yorke was standing outside the door, rapping her knuckles gently against the glass. I went back into the hall and opened the door.

"What have you done to him?" Julie asked in a breathless voice.

"Nothing," I said.

"Where is he, then?" she demanded.

"In the kitchen," I said, standing aside to let her pass. I glanced out at the dark and silent road and closed the door.

When I went back into the kitchen Julie was standing behind Alex, stroking his fine ginger hair. In other circumstances, it might have been a touching scene.

I could see that she was still wearing a nightdress under her raincoat.

"Couldn't sleep?" I asked sarcastically.

"I had to wait for my bloody husband to drop off," she said. "I've taken a bloody big chance coming here, I can tell you. I tried to call, but it was permanently engaged and Alex's cell went straight to voice mail."

I looked across the kitchen at the house phone still lying off the hook on the countertop, and at the switched-off cell alongside it.

"I thought I told you not to contact Alex," I said sharply, pointing to her.

"You said not in the next thirty-six hours," she replied in a pained tone. "That ran out at ten forty-five this evening."

I hadn't been counting, but she obviously had.

"So what happens now?" Alex asked into the silence.

"Well," I said, "for a start, you return all the blackmail money to my mother. I reckon that's about sixty thousand pounds."

"I can't," he said. "We've spent it. And anyway, why would I?"

"Because you obtained it illegally," I pointed out.

"But your mother should have paid it to the tax man."

"And so she will when you give it back."

"Dream on," he said again, with a laugh.

"OK," I said. "If that's your attitude, I will have to go to Jackson Warren and Peter Garraway and ask them for it."

"You'll be lucky," he said, still laughing. "They're the most tightfisted pair of bastards I've ever met."

"I'll tell them you said that."

The laughter died in his throat.

"Now, don't you go telling them anything of the sort, or I'll be straight on the blower to the Revenue."

Mutually assured destruction-it was what nuclear deterrence was all about.

"And what about my pictures?" Julie demanded, gaining some confidence from Alex.

"They prove nothing,"Alex said. "All they show is that you were in the mailbox shop. That doesn't mean you were blackmailing anyone."

"Not those pictures," Julie said, irritated. "The other pictures he took of me yesterday."

"What other pictures?" Alex demanded, turning to me.

Oh dear, I thought. This could get really nasty. How might Alex react to my taking explicit images of his naked girlfriend? I sensed that Julie had also worked it out that if Alex hadn't already seen them, it might be much better for her if he didn't do so now.

"Er," she said, backtracking fast. "They're not that important."

"But pictures of what?" Alex persisted, still looking at me.

Should I tell him? Should I show him just the sort of girl she was? Or could the pictures still be useful to me as a lever to apply to Julie?

"Just some photos I took outside the Yorkes' house yesterday afternoon."

"Show me," he said belligerently.

I thought of my camera, still safely out of sight in my little rucksack.

"I can't," I said. "I don't have the camera with me."

"But why were you taking photos of Julie outside her house?" he demanded.

I thought quickly. "To record her reaction when I showed her the prints of her in the mailbox shop. That's when I told her not to contact you for thirty-six hours."

Julie seemed relieved, and Alex appeared satisfied by the answer, even if he was a tad confused.

"So what happens now?" he asked again.

It was a good question.

I thought about asking Julie if she knew anything of Warren and Garraway's other little fiddle, the tax one, but I decided I might get more from her without Alex being there, especially if I were to use my photo lever on her.

"Well, I don't know about you two," I said, standing up, "but I'm going home to bed." And, I thought, to read Alex's e-mails.

I collected my "insulin" bag from the stairs, slung my rucksack onto my back and left the two lovebirds in the kitchen as I left the house by the front door. But I didn't walk off down the road. I removed the camera from my rucksack and went quickly down the side of the house to the rear garden and the kitchen window.

I had purposely left a small space at the bottom when I'd closed the blind, and I now put my eyes up close to the glass and looked in.

Alex and Julie really weren't very discreet. Making sure the flash was switched off, I took twenty or more photos through the window of them kissing, him sliding his hands inside her coat and pulling up her nightdress. Even though Julie's back was mostly towards the window, there was little doubt where Alex was placing his fingers, and my eighteen-times optical zoom Leica lens captured everything.

Presently, Julie cut the plastic ties from around Alex's ankles and they went, hand-in-hand, out of the kitchen and, I presumed, up the stairs to bed. Short of shinning up a drainpipe, I would see nothing more, and in spite of being called Tom, my artificial leg didn't lend itself readily to climbing up to peep through bedroom windows.

Even then I didn't return to Ian's car and go home. Instead, I went back down the side of the house and out into Bush Close, to where Julie had parked the white BMW. It was some way down the road, well beyond the glow from the streetlight outside number twelve. I tried the doors, but she had locked them, so I sat down on the pavement, leaned up against the passenger door and waited.

I was getting quite used to waiting, and thinking.

Alex Reece clearly received more than an average bonus after being away for five days in Gibraltar, and I was just beginning to think that Julie was staying for the whole night when, about an hour after I left, I saw her coming towards me through the pool of light produced by the solitary streetlamp.

I pulled myself to my feet using the car's door handle but I remained crouched down below the window level so Julie couldn't see me as she walked along the road. When she was about ten yards away, she pushed the remote unlock button on her key and the indicator lights flashed once in response. As she opened the driver's door to get in, I opened the passenger one to do likewise, so we ended up sitting down side by side with both doors slamming shut in unison.

Startled, she immediately tried to open the door again, but I grabbed her arm on the steering wheel.

"Don't," I said in my voice-of-command. "Just drive."

"Where to?" she said.

"Anywhere," I said with authority. "Now. Drive out of this road."

Julie started the car and reversed it into one of the driveways to turn around. In truth, it was not the best-performed driving-test maneuver, and there would probably be BMW tire marks on the front lawn of number eight in the morning, but at least she didn't hit anything, and I wasn't an examiner.

She pulled out into Water Lane and turned right towards Newbury, towards home. We went a few hundred yards in silence.

"OK," I said. "Pull over here."

She stopped the car at the side of the road.

"What do you want?" she said, rather forlornly.

"Just a little more help," I said.

"Can't you just leave us alone?"

"But why should I?" I exclaimed. "My mother has paid you more than sixty thousand pounds over the past seven months, and I think that entitles me to demand something from you."

"But Alex told you," she said. "You can't have it back. We've spent it."

"On what?" I asked.

She looked across at me. "What do you mean 'on what'?"

"What have you spent my mother's money on?"

"You mean you don't know?"

"No. How could I?"

She laughed. "Coke, of course. Lots of lovely coke."

I didn't think she meant Coca-Cola.

"And bottles of bubbly. Only the best, you know. Cases and cases of lovely Dom." She laughed again.

I realized that she must have been sampling one or the other during the past hour with Alex. It was not only fear that had caused her to drive on the grass. I couldn't smell alcohol on her breath, so it had to have been the coke.

"Does Ewen know you take cocaine?" I asked.

"Don't be fucking stupid," she said. "Ewen wouldn't know a line of coke if it ran up his nose. If it hasn't got four legs and a mane, Ewen couldn't care less. I think he'd much rather screw the bloody horses than me."

"So what is Jackson Warren and Peter Garraway's little tax fiddle?"

"Eh?"

"What is Jackson and Peter's tax fiddle?" I asked again.

"You mean their VAT fiddle?" she asked.

"Yes," I said excitedly. I waited in silence.

She paused for a bit, but eventually she started. "Did you know that racehorse owners can recover the VAT on training fees?"

"My mother said something about it," I said.

"And on their other costs as well, those they attribute to their racing business, like transport and telephone charges and vet's fees. They can even recover the VAT they have to pay when they buy the horses in the first place."

The VAT rate was at nearly twenty percent. That was a lot of tax to recover on expensive horseflesh.

"So what's the fiddle?" I asked.

"What makes you think I'd ever tell you?" she said, turning in the car towards me.

"So you do know, then?" I asked.

"I might," she said arrogantly.

"I'll delete the pictures if you tell me."

Even in her cocaine-induced state, she knew that the pictures were the key.

"How can I trust you?"

"I'm an officer in the British Army," I said, rather pompously. "My word is my bond."

"Do you promise?" she said.

"I promise," I said formally, holding up my right hand. Yet another of those promises I might keep.

She paused a while longer before starting again.

"Garraway lives in Gibraltar, and he's not registered for VAT in the UK. He actually could be, but he's obsessive about not having anything to do with the tax people here because he's a tax exile. He only lives in Gibraltar to avoid paying tax. Hates the place, really." She paused.

"So?" I said, prompting her to continue.

"So all Peter Garraway's horses are officially owned by Jackson Warren. Jackson pays the training fees and all the other bills, and then he claims back the VAT. He even buys the horses for Garraway in the first place and gets the VAT back on that too. He uses a company called Budsam Ltd."

"So why is that a fiddle?" I asked. "If Jackson buys them and pays the fees, then he is the owner, not Garraway."

"Yes," she said, "but Peter Garraway pays Jackson back for all the costs."

"Doesn't that show up in Jackson's accounts or those of the company?"

"No." She smiled. "That's the clever bit. Peter pays Jackson into an offshore account in Gibraltar that Jackson doesn't declare to the Revenue. Alex says it's very clever because Jackson gets his money offshore without ever having to transfer anything from a UK bank, which would be required by law to tell the tax people about it."

"How many horses does Peter Garraway own in this way?" I asked.

"Masses. He has ten or twelve with us and loads more with other trainers."

"But don't they pay for themselves with the prize money?"

"No, of course not," she said. "Most horses don't make in prize money anything like what they cost to keep, especially not jumpers. Far from it. Not unless you count the betting winnings, and Garraway gets to keep those himself."

"So why doesn't Peter Garraway register himself as an owner in the UK for the VAT scheme?"

"I told you," she said. "He's paranoid about the British tax people. They've been trying forever to get him for tax evasion. He's obsessive about the number of days he stays here, and he and his wife even travel on separate planes so they won't both be killed in a crash and his family get done here for inheritance tax. There's no way he'll register. Alex thinks it's stupid. He told them it would solve the problem of the VAT without any risk, but Garraway won't listen."

I listened, all right.

Wasn't it Archimedes who claimed that if you gave him a lever long enough, he could lift the world?

I listened to Julie with mounting glee. Perhaps now I had a lever long enough to pry my mother's money back from under the Rock of Gibraltar.

All I had to do was work out on whom to apply it, and when.