Dick Francis's Gamble

8

To say my arrival at the offices of Lyall & Black about an hour after lunch caused a bit of a stir would be an understatement.

“Get out of these offices,” Gregory shouted at me almost as soon as I walked through the door on the fourth floor into the reception area, and he wasn’t finished then. “You are a disgrace to your profession and to this firm. I will not have you here contaminating the other staff.”

I had made the mistake of not sneaking in while he was at lunch.

Mrs. McDowd looked positively frightened by the outburst. I probably did as well.

“Gregory,” I tried to say, but he advanced towards me, bunching his fists. Surely, I thought, he’s not going to hit me. He didn’t, but he grabbed me by the sleeve of my suit and dragged me towards the door.

He was surprisingly strong and fit for someone whose only workout was the walk to and from the restaurant on the corner.

“Leave me alone,” I shouted at him. But he took no notice.

“Gregory. Stop it!” Patrick’s deep voice reverberated around the reception area.

Gregory stopped pulling and let go of my sleeve.

“I will not have this man in these offices,” Gregory said. “He has brought the firm of Lyall and Black into disrepute.”

Patrick looked at the reception desk, and at Mrs. McDowd and Mrs. Johnson, who were sitting behind it.

“Let us discuss this in your office,” Patrick said calmly. “Nicholas, will you please wait here.”

“Outside the door,” Gregory said, pointing towards the lifts and not moving an inch towards his office.

I stood there, looking back and forth between them. Everyone in the firm knew of Gregory’s temper, it was legendary, but I had rarely seen it laid bare and so raw, and at such close quarters.

“I will go out for a coffee,” I said. “I’ll be back in twenty minutes.”

“Best to go home,” Patrick said. “I’ll call you later.”

Gregory turned towards Patrick. “I told you that we should never have taken him on in the first place.”

“In your office, please, Gregory!” Patrick said, almost shouting. He had a pretty good temper in him too, although it was usually slow to rise.

I waited while Gregory reluctantly moved off down the corridor with Patrick. I would have adored being a fly on the wall during their discussion.

“You had better go,” said Mrs. McDowd firmly. “I don’t want you upsetting Mr. Gregory anymore. His heart can’t take it.”

I looked at her. Mrs. McDowd, who saw it as her business to know everything about everyone in the firm. She probably knew Gregory’s blood pressure, and his heart surgeon.

“Tell me, Mrs. McDowd, do you think Herb gambled much?”

“You mean on the stock market?” she asked.

“On the horses.”

“Oh no,” she said. “Mr. Herb didn’t like betting on the horses. Too risky, he said. So much better to bet on a certainty, that’s what he always told me.”

Death was a certainty.

Benjamin Franklin had said so-death, and taxes.

I did go home, but not immediately.

Before I left Hendon I had looked up the locations of MoneyHome agents near to Lombard Street. I was amazed at how many there were, at least thirty within a one-mile radius of my office, the nearest being just around the corner in King William Street.

“This didn’t come from here,” said the lady sitting behind the glass partition. “It hasn’t got our stamp on it.”

I had somehow expected the MoneyHome agency to be like a bank, or a money exchange, but this one was right at the back of a convenience store.

“Can you tell me where it did come from?” I asked the lady.

“Don’t you know?” she asked.

“No,” I said with declining patience. “I wouldn’t have asked if I knew.”

She looked at me through the glass, then down at the payment slip. I had brought with me one of those I had found in Herb’s desk rather than the torn-up squares, which were still at Herb’s flat anyway.

“Sorry,” she said. “I don’t recognize the stamp. But I know it’s not ours.”

“Can you tell who sent the money?” I asked.

“No,” she said.

“What do you need to produce in the way of identification to collect money from a MoneyHome transfer?”

“The recipient’s name and the MTCN.”

“What’s that?”

“There,” she said, pointing at the payment slip. “It’s the Money Transfer Control Number.”

“And that’s all you need to collect the money,” I said. “No passport or driver’s license?”

“Not unless it’s been specially requested by the sender,” she said. “Sometimes there’s a question I have to ask, and then you’d have to give the right answer. It’s a bit like spies and such.” She smiled.

“So in fact,” I said, “you have no way of knowing who has sent the money or who has collected it?”

“The recipient’s name is on the slip.”

The recipient’s name on the slip I had shown her was Butch Cassidy. The names on the others I had were Billy Kid, Wyatt Earp, Jessie James and Bill Cody.

“That isn’t his real name,” I said.

“No,” she said, looking. “I suppose not. But it’s their money. As long as they’ve paid us our fee, it’s not our business who they really are.”

“Does the amount make any difference?” I asked.

“MoneyHome’s head office doesn’t allow us to accept transfers of more than the equivalent of ten thousand U.S. dollars, as that breaks the money-laundering rules. Other than that, the amount doesn’t matter, although we here have a payout limit of four thousand pounds without prior notice. You know, so we can get in the cash.”

“Are your transfers always in cash?” I asked.

“Yeah, of course,” she said. “That’s what we do. Cash transfers. Lots of the immigrant workers round here send cash home to their wives. Poles mostly. And we do a special deal on transfers to Poland, up to a thousand pounds for just twenty quid.”

Overall, it wasn’t very helpful. Herb had clearly set up a system that would be difficult, if not impossible, to unravel. From what I could tell from the lists and the MoneyHome payment slips, it was clear that he’d received large sums of cash from multiple sources, money he must have then used to pay the monthly balances on the twenty-two credit cards.

Herb had collected eighteen thousand dollars’ worth of pounds only the previous week, five thousand of it just the day before his death. Some of that cash must still be hidden somewhere.

My problem was that, while I had the statements showing the ninety-four thousand pounds outstanding, and, as his executor and beneficiary I was liable for the debt, I hadn’t yet found the stash of readies to pay it.

Claudia wasn’t at home when I arrived back at three-thirty. I tried her mobile, but it went straight to voice mail.

I wandered around the house, wondering what had gone wrong with our relationship.

I didn’t really understand it. The sex that morning had been as good as ever, but Claudia had been uncharacteristically quiet during and afterwards, as if her mind had been elsewhere.

I asked myself what I really wanted. Did I want to continue or was it time to draw a line and move on? Did I love her enough? How much would I miss her if she left?

Claudia and I had been together now for almost six years. I was twenty-nine, and she was three years my junior. Apart from my real concern about her weird paintings, I found the setup comfortable and fulfilling. And I was happy as things were.

Was that the problem? Did Claudia want something more from our relationship than I did? Did she perhaps now want that ring on her finger? Or maybe she had changed her view about children? But, then, surely she would have told me. I would have been delighted.

So, I concluded, it had to be me that was the problem. Claudia must have tired of me, and perhaps there was someone else already lined up to take my place. It was the only conclusion that made any sense.

I tried her mobile again, but, as before, it went straight to voice mail.

The house suddenly felt very empty, and I realized that I was lonely without Claudia here. I wandered around, looking at familiar things as if it were the first time I had seen them.

I went up to Claudia’s studio and looked at the painting she was working on, and also at two or three others leaned against the wall, waiting for the paint to dry and harden.

As always, they were dark and, to my eye, somewhat disturbed. One of them was full of bizarre flying monsters with birdlike bodies and human heads, each head with a huge open mouth full of fearsome-looking pointed teeth.

I shuddered and covered the image with another painting, this one of several identical and very beautiful women all dressed in blue ball gowns. A pretty enough sight, one might think, except these women had feet that were in fact eagle claws ripping apart the naked body of the man on whom they were standing.

Was the man meant to be me? And were the women all representations of Claudia herself? Was this how our relationship would end, with Claudia ripping me apart? I doubted it would happen quite so literally as in the picture, but emotionally she had me halfway to the funny farm already.

Once again I asked myself how such a sweet girl could paint such strange images. And I was sure they had become more bizarre and much more violent in recent months. Was there a whole side to Claudia’s character that I remained totally unaware of? But, on the whole, I believed that it was better for her to find an outlet for such strange thoughts than to keep them bottled up inside her head, with the pressure ever building towards explosive levels.

The house phone rang, and I went through to our bedroom to answer it, hoping it would be Claudia.

It wasn’t. It was Patrick.

“I’m sorry for Gregory’s outburst earlier,” he said. “He and I had a discussion, and he’s now calmed down a lot. He was just upset by what had been written in the papers.”

Not as upset as me, I thought.

“So can I come back into the office?” I asked.

“Not today,” he said rather too quickly. “Maybe on Monday, or later next week. Let the dust settle for a few days.”

“I’ll work from home, then,” I said, “using the remote-access facility.”

“Right,” Patrick said slowly. “But I agreed with Gregory that you would not be representing the firm for the immediate future.”

“And how long, exactly, is the immediate future?” I asked.

“Until he and I agree,” he said.

“Are you telling me I’m fired?”

“No, of course not,” he said. “Just that it might be better for you to take some paid holiday until the police sort out who really did try to murder Billy Searle.”

“What if they never do?” I asked.

“Let’s hope that is not the case,” he said. “I’ll call you next week. In the meantime I must ask you not to use the remote-access facility and not to contact anyone at the firm.”

Patrick disconnected without saying good-bye, no doubt pleased to have got through the conversation without me shouting at him.

I felt like shouting at someone. Everything that had been fine just a week ago was suddenly going down the tubes. I sat down on the edge of the bed, feeling more miserable than I had since the day I had been told I couldn’t ride again.

I decided that feeling sorry for myself wasn’t going to achieve anything, so I went downstairs and sat down at the kitchen table with my laptop computer.

I spent a fairly unproductive half hour looking at the six e-mails that I had forwarded to my in-box from Gregory’s, concerning the Bulgarian property development.

They were all from the same man, Uri Joram, and the first two were about the grants available to disadvantaged parts of the European Union for industrial developments that would assist in the regeneration of sites previously occupied by state-subsidized factories. Many such factories had quickly gone bust when the communist regime had collapsed and free-market competition had arrived in its place.

As far as I could make out from Mr. Joram’s rather poor grasp of written English, the EU money would only be forthcoming if there was some private investment in the project on the basis that two euros would be granted for each euro invested privately. Jolyon Roberts had told me that his family trust had invested five million pounds, so that alone could have attracted a further ten million from the European tax coffers.

But that was not all, not by a long way.

The four remaining e-mails were about funding for the homes to be constructed close to the factory to house the workers. This was to come from a different source, the EU Social Housing Fund, and required no similar two-for-one arrangement. It appeared that the new factory alone was sufficient to trigger the one hundred percent grant for the housing, which was in the region of eighty million euros.

If, as Jolyon Roberts’s nephew had implied, no houses and no factory had been built in Bulgaria, then someone somewhere had likely pocketed nearly a hundred million euros, most of it public money.

I looked closely at the e-mail addresses. The e-mails had been sent by uri_joram@ec.europa.eu to dimitar.petrov@bsnet.co.bg, with Gregory Black being copied in. The ec.europa.eu domain indicated that Uri Joram worked in the offices of the European Commission, probably in Brussels, and I could deduce that Mr. Petrov must be in Bulgaria from the.bg extension.

It wasn’t a huge help.

I also looked at the telephone number I had copied from the Roberts Family Trust file on Gregory’s computer. I wondered if I should call it. But what good would it do? I couldn’t speak Bulgarian, and even if whoever answered could understand English, they were most unlikely to give me any information that would answer my questions.

What should I do?

It may very well have been a simple mistake made by Mr. Roberts’s nephew. He might have gone to the wrong place in Bulgaria, with the factory and the houses existing elsewhere. Surely there would have been checks made by the European Union officials running the EU Social Housing Fund to confirm that their eighty million euros had been spent properly on bricks and mortar.

I decided that, having been asked by Jolyon Roberts to look into it, I couldn’t just do nothing, so I sent a short e-mail to Dimitar Petrov, asking him to send me the names and addresses of the directors of the Balscott Lighting Factory if he had them.

By the time I realized that sending the e-mail was possibly not such a good idea if Mr. Petrov himself was one of those involved in the potential hundred-million-euro fraud, it was well on its way and there was no bringing it back.

It couldn’t do any harm, could it?

I closed my computer and looked at the clock. It was a quarter to five, so I made myself a cup of tea.

I couldn’t help but notice that Claudia had left her latest mobile phone bill lying on the worktop right next to the kettle. And I also couldn’t resist the temptation to look at it.

I suppose I was looking for numbers I didn’t recognize that she had called regularly. There was one, with calls almost every day for the past two weeks, and often more than once a day.

Now what did I do? Did I call the number and demand to know who had been talking so often to my girl? No, of course I didn’t. But I copied the number into my mobile phone just in case I changed my mind.

Claudia arrived home at five-thirty, and I resisted the temptation to ask her where she had been and why her phone had been switched off.

“Why aren’t you at the office?” she asked.

“Patrick sent me home,” I said. “Gregory seems to think I’ve brought the company into disrepute. Patrick thinks it would be best for me to have some time off, to stay away from the office, just to let the dust settle.”

“But that’s ridiculous,” she said. “The police let you go. You have a cast-iron alibi.”

“I know that, and you know that,” I replied crossly. “But you know what most people are like, they believe what they read.”

“Those bloody newspapers,” she said with feeling. “They shouldn’t be allowed to give out people’s names before they’re charged.”

Or even convicted, I thought. But I also knew the police were secretly quite keen for the names of those accused to be released early so that potential witnesses would come forward.

“Patrick says it will all blow over in a few days,” I said. “He thinks people will forget.”

“I hope he’s right,” she said.

So did I.

“Did you get your dress?” I asked.

“What dress?” she said.

“Come on, darling,” I said, slightly irritated. “You know. The one you were going to buy for the opening night on Wednesday.”

“Oh, that,” she said, clearly distracted. “Perhaps I’ll go tomorrow. Something came up this afternoon.”

I didn’t like to think what, so I didn’t ask.

“How long did Patrick say you had to stay away from the office?” Claudia asked into the silence.

“Maybe a week,” I said, wondering if she was asking for reasons other than worries over my reputation and career. “Perhaps I’ll go to the races instead.”

“Great idea,” she said. “Give your mind a rest from all those figures.”

Perhaps it was time to start looking at figures of a different kind.