Dick Francis's Gamble

21

Detective Chief Inspector Flight was far from amused. He personally had spent more than an hour trudging across the dark, muddy track, looking for the horse, while wearing his best leather shoes, and, if that wasn’t bad enough, he was also soaked to the skin. As he explained to me at length and rather loudly, his coat was meant to have been waterproof but, on that count, it seemed to have failed rather badly.

“I’m tempted to put you in a cell and throw away the key,” he said.

We were in one of the interview rooms at the Cheltenham Police Station.

“How is Viscount Shenington?” I asked, ignoring his remark.

“Still alive,” he said. “But only just. They’re working on him at the hospital. The ambulance paramedics got him breathing again, but it seems his heart is now the problem.”

Just like his brother.

“And the doctor is also saying that even if he does survive, his brain is likely to have been permanently damaged due to being starved of oxygen for so long.”

Shame, I thought. Not!

“You say that you simply rugby-tackled him and you didn’t see that his nose and mouth were lying in the water?”

“That’s right,” I said. “I just thought he was winded by the fall. Only after I’d checked that Claudia was all right did I discover he was facedown in a puddle. Then, of course, I rolled him over onto his back.”

“Did you not then think of applying artificial respiration?” he asked.

I just looked at him.

“No,” he said. “I can see the problem.”

“Exactly,” I said. “The man had come there to kill me. Why would I try and save him? So that he could have another go?”

“Some people might argue that you were negligent.”

“Let them,” I said. “Whatever happened to Shenington was his own fault. You saw the gun. He wasn’t there making a social call.”

He looked up at the clock on the wall. It showed that it was well after midnight.

“We’ll have to continue this in the morning,” he said, yawning.

“I have to be at the Paddington Green Police Station by eleven,” I said.

“So do I,” Flight replied. “We can talk on the way.”

The meeting at Paddington Green lasted for more than two hours. In addition to me, there were four senior police officers present: Detective Chief Inspectors Tomlinson and Flight; a detective inspector from the City of London Police Economic Crime Department-the Fraud Squad; and Superintendent Yering, who chaired the meeting by virtue of his superior rank.

At his request, I started slowly from the beginning, outlining the events in chronological order, from the day Herb Kovak had been gunned down at Aintree right through to the previous evening at Cheltenham racetrack and at my mother’s cottage in Woodmancote. However, I decided not to include the finer details of how I had forced Shenington’s head down into the puddle on the gravel driveway.

“Viscount Shenington,” I said, “seems to have been desperate for money due to his gambling losses and clearly provided the five million pounds from the Roberts Family Trust in order to trigger the grants from the European Union. It appears that he even gave his brother the impression that he had needed to be convinced to make the investment.”

“Perhaps he did, to start with,” said DCI Flight, “until he discovered the availability of the grants.”

“Maybe,” I said. “But I think it’s far more likely that the idea for stealing the EU grants came first and Shenington was simply brought in as the necessary provider of the priming money.”

“So he wasn’t the only one involved?” Tomlinson said.

“Not at all,” I said. “I’ve seen e-mails between a Uri Joram in the office of the European Commission in Brussels and a Dimitar Petrov in Bulgaria-”

“How did you see them?” Tomlinson interrupted.

“On Gregory Black’s computer,” I said. “He was copied on their correspondence.”

“And who is Gregory Black?” asked the detective inspector from the Fraud Squad.

“He’s one of the senior partners at Lyall and Black, the firm of financial advisers where I work.” Or where I used to work.

“And what do you think he has to do with this?” he asked.

“I’m only guessing, but I believe that Gregory Black probably found Shenington for Joram and Petrov. They would have needed someone with five million pounds to invest to trigger the much larger sum from the EU. Shenington was a client of Gregory’s, and who could be better, a man who controlled a wealthy family trust but was himself broke and in dire need of lots of ready money to pay his gambling debts. And Gregory would have known that. Financial advisers are aware of all their clients’ most intimate financial secrets.”

“But what has all this to do with the death of Herbert Kovak?” asked DCI Tomlinson. That was his major concern.

“Herb Kovak had accessed the file with the e-mails between Joram and Petrov just a few days before he was killed. And Gregory Black would have known he had because Herb’s name appeared on the recently accessed list. I saw it there. Perhaps Herb had asked some difficult questions about the project, questions that got him killed.”

I could see that I was losing them.

“Remember,” I said, “we are talking about a huge amount of money here. A hundred million euros. Even split four ways, it’s a handsome sum, and worth a bit of protecting.”

I could see them doing the simple math in their heads.

“And,” I went on, “in the last week or so, every time Gregory Black knew where I was, someone tried to kill me there. I now think that Shenington only changed his mind about wanting to talk to me, then asked me to the races, because I hadn’t been turning up at my office. He as good as admitted it yesterday. He said I was a difficult man to kill because I usually didn’t turn up when I was expected. Well, I was expected at a meeting with Gregory Black on Monday morning and I’m now certain that I would have been killed if I’d gone to it. I probably wouldn’t have even reached the office front door. I’d have been shot down in the street. Murdered in a public place, just like Herb Kovak was at Aintree.”

“I think it’s time I spoke again to Mr. Gregory Black,” said DCI Tomlinson. “I remember him from my previous encounter.”

Yes, I thought, and I bet he remembers you.

There followed a brief discussion as to who had the proper jurisdiction to arrest and on suspicion of what charges. Finally, it was agreed that the honor would fall to DI Batten, the detective inspector from the Fraud Squad. After all, the City of London was his patch. However, we all wanted to be present, and a total of three police cars made the trip across London to 64 Lombard Street, where we were joined by a fourth from the uniformed branch.

It was quarter past two by the time we arrived at my office. Gregory should be just back from his usual substantial lunch at the restaurant on the corner. I hoped he’d made the most of it. There would be no more foie gras and filet mignon en croûte where he was going.

“Can I help you?” Mrs. McDowd asked as the policemen entered. Then she saw me with them. “Oh, Mr. Nicholas, are these men with you?”

DI Batten ignored her. “Can you tell me where I might find Mr. Gregory Black?” he said rather grandly.

“I’ll call him,” she said nervously, clearly slightly troubled by the mass of people crowding into her reception area.

“No,” said DI Batten, “just tell me where he is.”

At that point Gregory walked down the corridor.

“There he is,” said Mrs. McDowd, pointing.

The detective inspector wasted no time.

“Gregory Black,” he said, taking hold of Gregory by the arm, “I arrest you on suspicion of conspiracy to defraud and also on suspicion of conspiracy to murder. 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. Anything you do say may be given in evidence.”

Gregory was stunned. “But that’s ridiculous,” he said. “I’ve done nothing of the sort.”

Then he saw me.

“Is this your doing?” he demanded, thrusting his face belligerently towards mine. “Some kind of sick joke?”

“Murder is never a joke,” said DI Batten. “Take him away.”

Two uniformed officers moved forward and handcuffed Gregory, who was still loudly protesting his innocence. The policemen ignored his pleas and led him out of the glass door and onto the lift.

I knew all too well what that felt like.

“What the hell’s going on?” Patrick had appeared in the reception, obviously summoned by the noise. “What are these men doing here?”

“It seems they are here to arrest Mr. Gregory,” said the unflappable Mrs. McDowd.

“Arrest Gregory? But that’s ridiculous. What for?”

“Conspiracy to defraud and conspiracy to murder,” DI Batten said.

“Fraud? Murder? Who has he murdered?” Patrick demanded, turning towards the policeman.

“No one,” said DI Batten. “Mr. Black has been arrested on suspicion of conspiracy to murder.”

Patrick wasn’t to be deterred.

“So who, then, is he suspected of conspiring to murder?”

“Me,” I said, stepping forward.

Patrick said nothing. He just stared at me.

Later in the afternoon, life in the offices of Lyall & Black at 64 Lombard Street returned to some sort of normalcy, if having one of the senior partners arrested for conspiracy to defraud and murder could ever be considered normal.

I went into my office for the first time in almost two weeks to find that Rory had moved himself into Herb’s desk by the window. Diana was still where she had always been.

“By rights, that should have been Diana’s,” I said to Rory. “She’s the more senior.”

“She had yours until half an hour ago,” Rory replied with a sneer. “Patrick said you weren’t coming back.” His tone implied that he was sorry I had.

Diana, meanwhile, remained silently resentful as I opened the window to let in some of the warm spring day. Perhaps the weather had changed for the better as well.

Maybe Diana wouldn’t have to wait too much longer to get back to my desk anyway. That is, if my desk remained at all. At the moment, I couldn’t see Lyall & Black surviving as a firm beyond next week. Once news of a fraud investigation got out, our clients would desert us quicker than rats from a sinking ship. Everything in financial services comes down to client confidence, and confidence in a firm involved in fraud would be close to absolute zero.

The quickest way to create a run on a bank was to publicly warn that there might be one. Depositors would quickly lose confidence in the institution and would queue around the block to get their money back. But of course no bank leaves cash lying around in its vaults just in case of such an eventuality. The money will have been lent out to other customers as mortgages and business loans. Hence the bank can’t pay. As word spreads that the bank is in trouble, even more depositors come looking for their money, and the whole crisis self-perpetuates and then crashes down like a house of cards. The bank’s credibility, which might have taken several hundred years to establish, can be destroyed in as little as a day. As it had been with Northern Rock in the UK and Indy-Mac in the U.S., and so would be with us. But, in our case, there would be no government bailout.

Yes, indeed, we had all better start looking for new positions by another firm’s window. But what chance would we have with a reference from Lyall & Black? Not much.

There were nearly a hundred unanswered e-mails for me on the company server, plus twenty-eight messages on my office voice mail, including quite a few from irate clients with whom I had missed meetings. There were also two from the Slim Fit Gym, reminding me again that they wanted Herb’s locker back.

“Where’s the key?” I asked Rory.

“What key?” he said.

“The key that was pinned to Herb’s bulletin board.”

“Still on it, I expect,” Rory said. “I swapped the whole desk cubicle.”

I went over to one of the empty cubicles and checked. The key was still pinned to the board. I took it off and put it in my pocket.

I sat down again at my desk and started going through the mass of e-mails but without really taking in any of the information contained in them. My heart simply wasn’t in this job anymore.

If and when Claudia beat this cancer, we would do something different, something together.

Something more exciting. But maybe something a little less dangerous.

“I’m going out,” I said to Rory and Diana, as if they cared.

As I walked down the corridor I had to step over some big tied-up polyethylene bags stacked full of files and computers. The Fraud Squad was busily packing up the stuff from Gregory’s office. I was quite surprised they hadn’t thrown us all out of the building to pack up the whole firm. That would come later, no doubt, when they had discovered a little more.

The receptionist at the Slim Fit Gym was really pleased to see me.

“To be honest,” she said in a broad Welsh accent, “it’s beginning to smell a bit, especially today in this warm weather. It’s upsetting some of our other clients. There must be some dreadfully sweaty clothes in there.”

The key from Herb’s desk fitted neatly into the hefty padlock on the locker, and I swung open the door.

The receptionist and I leaned back. It smelled more than a just a bit.

There was a dark blue bag in the locker with a pair of off-white training shoes placed on top, and I think it was the shoes, rather than the clothes inside the bag, that were the culprits as far as the smell was concerned. Perhaps Herb had suffered from some sort of foot-fungal problem that had spread to his shoes and then clearly festered badly there over the last three weeks. But whatever the cause, the smell was pretty rank.

“Sorry about this,” I said. “I’ll get rid of it all.”

I tucked the offending shoes into the bag on top of the clothes and left the receptionist tut-tutting about having to disinfect all the lockers.

I walked back towards Lombard Street and dumped the whole thing, together with all the contents, into a City of London-crested street litter basket. I didn’t think Mrs. McDowd would be very happy if I took that smell back into the office.

I had walked nearly a hundred yards farther on when I suddenly turned around and retraced my steps. I had searched everything else of Herb’s. Why not that blue bag?

Neatly stacked, in a zipped-up compartment beneath the clothes, was over a hundred and eighty thousand pounds wrapped in clear plastic sandwich bags, three thousand in twenty-pound notes in each bag. There was also a list of ninety-seven names and addresses, all of them in America.

Good old Herb. As meticulous as ever.

Mr. Patrick would like to see you,” Mrs. McDowd said to me as I skipped through the door with the bag of loot over my shoulder. “In his office, right now.”

Patrick was not alone. Jessica Winter was also there.

“Ah, Nicholas,” said Patrick. “Come and sit down.” I sat in the spare chair next to the open window. “Jessica and I have been looking at how things stand. We need to implement a damage-control exercise. To maintain the confidence of our clients and to assure them that it’s ‘business as usual’ at Lyall and Black.”

“And is it business as usual?” I asked.

“Of course,” he said. “Why wouldn’t it be?”

I thought that was pretty obvious. Members of the Fraud Squad were still in the room next door, bagging up evidence.

“No,” Patrick went on, “we mustn’t let this little setback disrupt our work. I will write to all of Gregory’s clients, telling them that for the time being I will be looking after their portfolios. It will just mean we all have to work a little harder for a while.”

But for how long, I wondered?

The maximum sentence for conspiracy to murder was life imprisonment.

“So how about the Bulgarian business?” I asked.

“Jessica and I have just been looking at it,” Patrick said. “Or what is left to look at after those damn police have been in here taking stuff away.”

“And?” I asked.

“It’s rather inconclusive,” Jessica said.

“What’s inconclusive?” I asked, somewhat surprised.

“There seems to be no evidence to show if the original investment was obtained by fraudulent means, or whether there was any purposeful deception by anyone in this firm,” Jessica said.

She’s covering her back, I thought.

“But how about the European Union grants?” I said.

“They are not our business,” Patrick said sharply. “Neither Gregory individually nor Lyall and Black as a firm can be held responsible for the actions of people in Brussels, those who may have issued EU grants without due diligence. The only matter that affects this firm is the original Roberts Family Trust investment and then only if we were knowingly negligent in brokering it. As far as we can establish, the investment idea was put forward by the senior trustee of the trust.”

I had to admit, it was a persuasive argument, especially as Viscount Shenington was unlikely to be in any state to refute it. Perhaps I had been a tad premature in writing off the future of Lyall & Black.

But that didn’t explain what had happened to Herb Kovak, and it didn’t explain Shenington’s comment about me being difficult to kill and not turning up where I was expected. The only place I’d been expected had been the offices of Lyall & Black and the only people who had known where I’d been expected had been the firm’s staff. Gregory must have at least discussed the matter of my murder with Shenington. That alone would have been enough to convict him.

“What about the photographs that Gregory showed to Colonel Roberts?” I said. “The ones that purported to prove that the factory and houses had already been built.”

“Gregory told me this morning that he’d been sent those by the developer in Bulgaria and in good faith,” said Patrick. “He’d had no reason to doubt their authenticity.”

“Not until Jolyon Roberts asked about them,” I said. “What did he do then?”

“Gregory told me that Colonel Roberts didn’t exactly say that he questioned whether the photos were accurate or not. In fact, Gregory said that Roberts kept contradicting himself and changing his mind throughout their final telephone conversation and he kept apologizing all the time for wasting Gregory’s time. In the end, Gregory wasn’t quite sure what to think.”

I could believe it. Jolyon Roberts had done exactly the same with me at Cheltenham. I thought it strange that a man who had clearly been so decisive on the battlefield could have been so befuddled and incoherent when it came to accusing a friend of lying and of stealing from him. I suppose it was all about family honor, and not losing face.

“Thank you, Jessica,” Patrick said. “You can be getting back to your office now.”

Jessica stood up and left. I remained where I was.

“Now, Nicholas,” said Patrick when the door was shut, “I have decided to overlook your rather strange behavior over the past three weeks and to wipe the slate clean. Your job is still yours if you want it. To be honest, I don’t know how we would manage at the moment if you weren’t here.”

So was that a vote of confidence in my ability, I wondered, or a decision born simply out of necessity?

“Thank you,” I said. “I’ll think about it.”

“Don’t take too long about it,” Patrick said. “It’s time to put other things out of your mind and get back to work.”

“I’m still not happy about things,” I said. “Especially the fraud.”

“Suspected fraud,” he corrected. “If you ask me, it is a shame you ever went to see Roberts’s nephew in Oxford.”

“Maybe,” I said.

“Well, go now and get on with your work, I have things to do.”

It was a dismissal, so I stood up and went back to my desk.

I was still greatly troubled by Patrick’s and Jessica’s seeming brush-off of such a serious situation.

Herb had accessed the file and then he was killed.

Shenington and his gunmen knew more about my movements than they could have done without someone in the firm passing on the information.

Something wasn’t right. I could tell because the hairs on my neck refused to lie down. Something definitely wasn’t right. Not right at all.

I took out a sheet of paper from a drawer and wrote out again a copy of the note I had found in Herb’s coat pocket.

YOU SHOULD HAVE DONE WHAT YOU WERE

TOLD. YOU MAY SAY YOU REGRET IT, BUT

YOU WONT BE REGRETTING IT FOR LONG.

I wrote it out in capital letters, using a black ballpoint pen, so that it looked identical to the original.

I picked up my mobile phone and the note and went down the corridor. I walked into Patrick’s office, closing the door behind me.

“Yes?” he asked, showing some surprise at my unannounced entrance.

I stood in front of his desk, looking down at him as if it was the first time I had ever seen him properly.

“What did you tell Herb to do?” I asked him quietly.

“What do you mean?” he replied with a quizzical expression.

“You told him that he should have done what he was told,” I said.

I laid the note down on the table, facing him, so that he could read the words.

“What was it you told Herb to do?”

“Nicholas,” he said, looking up at me and betraying a slight nervousness in his voice, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Yes, you do,” I said with some menace. “It was you all along, not Gregory. You devised the fraud, you found Shenington to put up the five million from his family trust, and you saw to it that you weren’t found out.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said again, but his eyes showed me he did.

“And you had Herb killed,” I said. “You even wrote this note to him as a sort of apology. Everyone liked Herb, including you. But he had to die, didn’t he? Because he had accessed the Roberts file and he’d worked out what was going on. What did you do? Offer him a piece of the action? Try and buy his silence? But Herb wasn’t having any of that, was he? Herb was going to go to the authorities, wasn’t he? So he had to die.”

Patrick sat in his chair, looking up at me. He said nothing.

“And it was you that tried to have me killed as well,” I said. “You sent the gunman to my house in Finchley and then, when that didn’t work, you sent him to my mother’s cottage to kill me there.”

He remained in his chair, staring at me through his oversized glasses.

“But that didn’t work either,” I said. “So you arranged for me to come here on Monday for a meeting with you and Gregory.” I laughed. “A meeting with my Maker, more like. But I didn’t come, although you tried hard to convince me to. Then I saw you on the train, and you said, ‘Come home with me now, and we’ll sort this out tonight.’ But I’d have been dead if I had, wouldn’t I?” I paused and stared back at him. He still said nothing. “So then Shenington changed his mind about talking to me and invited me to be his guest at the races in order to complete the job.”

“Nicholas,” Patrick said, finally finding his voice, “what is all this nonsense?”

“It’s not nonsense,” I said. “I never told you that I’d been to see Mr. Roberts’s nephew in Oxford. In fact, I’d purposely not told you because I didn’t want anyone knowing my movements. I just told you that I’d spoken to him. For all you knew, it could have been on the telephone. But Shenington told you that I went to Oxford to meet his son, didn’t he? And you repeated it to me just now.”

“You have no proof,” he said, changing his tune.

“Did you know that you can get fingerprints from paper?” I asked, picking up the note carefully by the corner.

He wasn’t to know that the original had already been tested by the Merseyside Police forensic department and found to have only my and Herb’s prints on it.

His shoulders sagged just a fraction, and he looked down at the desk.

“What did Herb say he regretted?” I asked.

“He said he regretted finding out,” Patrick said wistfully with a sigh. “I was careless. I stupidly left a document under the flap of the photocopier. Herb found it.”

“So what did you tell him to do?” I asked for a third time.

“To accept what he’d been offered,” he said, looking up at me. “But he wanted more. Much more. It was too much.”

Herb had clearly not been as much of a saint as I’d made out.

“So you had him killed.”

He nodded. “Herb was a fool,” he said. “He should have accepted my offer. It was very generous, and you can have the same-a million euros.”

“You make me sick,” I said.

“Two million,” he said quickly. “It would make you a rich man.”

“Blood money,” I said. “Is that the going rate these days for covering up fraud, and murder?”

“Look,” he said, “I’m sorry about Herb. I liked him, and I argued against having him killed, but the others insisted.”

“Others?” I said. “You must mean Uri Joram and Dimitar Petrov.”

He stared at me with his mouth open.

“Oh yes,” I said. “The police know all about Joram and Petrov because I told them. I told them everything.”

“You bastard,” he said with feeling. “I wish Petrov had killed you at the same time he shot Herb Kovak.”

Throughout the encounter I’d been holding my mobile phone in my left hand. It was one of those fancy new do-anything smart phones, and one of its functions was the ability to act as a voice recorder.

I’d recorded every word that had been said.

I pushed the buttons and played back the last bit. Patrick sat very still in his executive leather chair, listening, and staring at me with a mixture of hatred and resignation in his eyes.

“I wish Petrov had killed you at the same time he shot Herb Kovak.”

It sounded rather metallic out of the telephone’s tiny speaker, but there was no doubt that it was Patrick Lyall’s voice.

“You bastard,” he said again.

I folded the note, turned away from him and walked back along the corridor to my desk to call Chief Inspector Tomlinson. But I’d only just picked up the telephone when there was a piercing scream from outside the building.

I stuck my head out through the window.

Patrick was lying faceup in the middle of the road, and there was already a small pool of blood spreading out around his head.

He had taken the quick way down from our fourth-floor offices.

Straight down.

And it had been the death of him.