Dick Francis's Gamble

6

I walked back to Herb’s flat hardly feeling my feet on the pavement.

What a bloody mess.

I could imagine that Billy Searle wasn’t too happy about it either. I thought the last thing he’d want would be the racing authorities asking him questions about why he needed a hundred thousand pounds so urgently.

I let myself in through Herb’s front door and went to check again on Sherri. She hadn’t moved and was still sound asleep. I left her alone and went back to the living room, where I sat at Herb’s desk wishing I’d brought my laptop with me. It was lying on the kitchen table in Finchley and I was tempted to go home to fetch it. Instead I called Claudia.

“Hi, it’s me,” I said when she answered.

“Hi, you,” she replied.

“Could you bring my computer over to Herb’s flat?” I said. “His sister has turned up, and she didn’t know he was dead. She’s sleeping now, but I don’t feel I can leave her for long. I’ll stay and work here, but I do need my laptop.” I decided against mentioning as yet the unwelcome coverage in the Racing Post.

There was a slight pause.

“OK,” Claudia said in a slightly irritated tone.

“It’s not very far,” I said encouragingly. “Use the car. You won’t need to park or anything, just drop it off.”

“OK,” she said again, lacking enthusiasm. “But I was just going out.”

Bloody hell, I thought. It wasn’t very much to ask.

“Where are you going?” I asked.

“Oh, nowhere,” she said. “Just to have coffee with a friend.”

“Who?”

“No one you know,” she said evasively.

Probably one of her artist friends. I didn’t know them and I didn’t really want to. Some of them were as weird as her paintings.

“Please, Claudia,” I said firmly, “I need it here so I can do my job.” And to bring in the money so you can live rent free, I thought, but didn’t say.

“OK,” she said once more, resigned. “Where is the flat?”

I gave her the address, and she promised she would bring the computer right over.

While I waited I went through the piles of papers on Herb’s desk, those remaining after the chief inspector had taken his box away.

There were the usual clutter of utility bills and debit card receipts interleaved with financial services’ magazines, insurance documents and some personal letters. I glanced through them all but nothing gave any clue to who would want Herb dead or how he came to gamble away a hundred thousand pounds a month on the Internet.

I didn’t expect them to. I assumed that the police would have removed anything of interest.

Next I went through the desk drawers. There were three on each side, and the ones on the left contained such exciting items as a stapler with spare staples, various-sized brown envelopes, paper and ink cartridges for the printer, a pack of permanent markers in bright colors, a plastic tub of large paper clips and a calculator.

Those on the right were only partially more interesting, with a large pile of paid bills, various income tax papers, a copy of Herb’s U.S. tax return, a rubber-band-bound stack of received Christmas cards and a plastic folder containing monthly pay slips from Lyall & Black.

I was curious to see that Herb had been paid somewhat more than I was, no doubt due to his three years’ prior experience at J.P. Morgan Asset Management in New York before moving to London. Now that I was Patrick’s most senior assistant, I would have to have a discussion with him about a raise.

I flicked through the bills but there was nothing that appeared to shine out like a lighthouse to guide me to his killer, although I did notice that Herb had been what my mother always described as a “free-spending spirit.” It was a term she used for those she considered to squander their money on lavish, unnecessary purchases instead of prudently saving it for a rainy day as she had always done.

Two separate invoices from a local travel agent showed that Herb’s free spending had run to at least two British Airways first-class roundtrip tickets across the Atlantic at eight thousand pounds each, one of them dated only the previous month for a planned but not yet taken trip in May. He may have been earning more than me, but there was no way he could have financed those out of his income from Lyall & Black even without the online gambling debts he had run up on the credit cards.

I wondered if he had inherited a large sum from his dead parents. I thought it unlikely as he had always claimed that his father had gambled away most of his family’s money. But perhaps Herb had been busy spending and gambling away the rest.

But where had he kept it?

I looked again at the photocopy I had made of his last bank statement. I had only made it to have a record of Herb’s account number and sort code. I would need them when I contacted the bank to inform them of his death. The latest balance was a little under ten thousand pounds, but there were no entries on the statements that appeared to be payments for the credit card accounts, and certainly no eight thousand pounds to the travel agent the previous month.

Herb had to have had another bank account, but there was no sign of it anywhere in his desk.

I looked at my watch. I had called Claudia nearly half an hour ago, and the journey should have taken her only ten minutes from Lichfield Grove, Finchley, to Seymour Way, Hendon. I went to the door to see if she was outside somewhere, but there was no sign of her or the Mercedes.

I waited in the doorway for five further minutes with slightly increasing irritation. I didn’t really want to call her again, but she was beginning to try my patience.

Once I would have been so excited by the prospect of seeing her, I wouldn’t have minded if she had been half a day late arriving. On one occasion I had been at Heathrow Airport at least two hours before her flight was due to land just to be sure not to miss her passing through customs.

But now, and not for the first time, I wondered if our relationship had run its course.

She finally arrived some thirty-five minutes after I had called. She stopped in the middle of the road and put down the passenger window. I leaned through it and picked up my computer from the seat.

“Thanks,” I said. “See you later.”

“OK,” she said, and drove off quickly.

I stood in the road waving but even if she could see me she didn’t wave back. There had been a time when we never parted without us waving vigorously until we were completely out of sight of each other.

I sighed. I had invested so much of my emotional capital in my relationship with Claudia, and the thought of being single again, having to start out once more, did not fill me with any joy. And I wasn’t at all sure I wanted it to end.

Claudia still excited me, and the sex was good, albeit somewhat rarer than it once had been. In fact, sex had been nonexistent over the last couple of weeks with Claudia always making some excuse. So what had gone wrong? Why was she suddenly not so loving towards me?

I wondered if she was seeing someone else. But who? Surely not one of her artistic layabout friends from her time at art college. The thought of her being intimate with one of them was enough to make me feel ill and not a little bit angry.

Miserably, I went back into Herb’s flat and sat down again at his desk, but even with my computer I couldn’t concentrate on any work due to thinking about the article in the paper and also about Claudia. After about half an hour, I called her mobile, but it went straight to voice mail. I didn’t leave a message because I didn’t know what to say.

Instead, I logged on to the Internet through Herb’s router and checked my office e-mails, many of which were junk from various finance firms offering rates of return that were well above the norm for the market.

Nestled amongst the trash were three work e-mails from this morning, one from Diana confirming the sales of all Billy Searle’s assets and the impending transfer from the firm’s client account to his bank, one from Patrick asking me to research a new personal pension plan being offered by one of the leading providers in the light of new pension legislation and the third from Jessica Winter advising me to wear a bulletproof vest if I was planning on coming into the office.

I thought it a particularly insensitive comment considering what had happened to Herb only five days previously.

I looked again at all the junk mail.

If a promised return appeared to be too good to be true, then it invariably was just that-too good to be true.

I thought back to my conversation with Jolyon Roberts at Cheltenham the previous day. Had the promised return on the Bulgarian property development project been too good to be true? Not as far as I could remember. It had not been the level of return that had been the concern, rather the distance away and the potential difficulty in acquiring accurate and up-to-date information on the progress of the project. In fact, just the problem that Mr. Roberts believed to be the issue.

I started to type “Roberts” into the company client index but thought better of it. The office mainframe computer kept a visible record of all files accessed, so any of us could see who had been looking at each file. It wasn’t particularly designed to spy on us or to prevent us accessing files, indeed it made it easy to keep a record of files visited. I could expect my files to be accessed by Patrick on a fairly random but regular basis, and the company files as a whole were regularly scrutinized by Jessica Winter, our Compliance Officer.

Whenever any of us opened a file it clearly showed in the top right-hand corner of the computer screen a list of the five people in the firm who had accessed the file most recently, together with the date and time of their access.

As one of the IFAs, I had authority to look at any of the company files, but I might have had difficulty explaining to Gregory why I had accessed those of one of his clients without his knowledge, especially a client as important as the Roberts Family Trust, and especially now.

I told myself that I should go straight to Gregory and Patrick, and probably to Jessica as well, and tell them about my conversation with Jolyon Roberts and get the matter looked at by them. But did I really want to go and accuse Gregory of misleading one of his clients, and on today of all days?

Then I would truly need that bulletproof vest.

Unlike in the United States where the Securities and Exchange Commission, the SEC, employs a prescriptive rule-based regime, the United Kingdom authorities had moved to a principles-based regulatory system. The onus was now on me to act in a manner that upheld the highest principles of honesty, openness and integrity, and to prove it.

It was difficult to decide which system was the better. Experience had shown that neither was fraud-proof. Indeed, the SEC had investigated Bernie Madoff several times without unearthing the biggest individual fraud in American history. Talk about the asylum being run by the lunatics, Madoff served three times as chairman of the NASDAQ stock market. And that was many years after he had started his fraud, and even after the first failed SEC investigation into his company’s activities.

And he’d just had to be called Madoff, hadn’t he? He’d “made off” with sixty-five billion dollars-yes, billion. And all because he’d been able fraudulently to circumvent the fixed U.S. regulatory rules. Whereas in the UK, it was not just the letter of the law I had to follow but also its spirit.

But was I, in fact, following the spirit of principles-based regulation not to mention immediately to my superiors, and to the Compliance Officer, that a client of the firm was questioning the judgment of one of the senior partners?

Probably not.

And I would mention it to them, I thought, just as soon as Gregory had calmed down a bit. In the meantime, I would do a bit of discreet investigating just as Jolyon Roberts had asked.

First I tried “Bulgarian development projects” in the Google search engine, but this turned up some fifty-five million hits, the first two pages of which appeared to have nothing to do with the development project I was looking for. Next I tried “Balscott Bulgarian development project,” and this turned up just two hits, but neither of them had any connection whatsoever with a low-energy lightbulb factory on either side of the Danube.

Next I tried “Europa,” the official European Union website, but that was more difficult to navigate through than the continent itself.

It was all a bit of a dead end without accessing the firm’s Roberts Family Trust computer file to see with whom and where the contact had been made in Bulgaria or with the EU. And I daren’t do that.

I decided instead that I’d try to have a quiet look through the paper records we kept at the office. Shares and bonds may have increasingly been bought and sold online but the digital deals were still all backed up with physical paperwork, and we were required to keep the papers for a minimum of five years. The office was consequently stacked high with boxes of transaction reports and somewhere amongst them would be the Roberts Family Trust paperwork for their five-million-pound investment in the Balscott Lighting Factory.

I sat back in the chair and thought about Claudia. I tried her mobile again, but, as before, it went straight to voice mail without ringing. I wished now that I had told her about the article in the Racing Post when she had brought over my computer. I tried her number once more, and this time I did leave a message.

“Darling,” I said. “Could you please give me a call when you get this? Love you. Byeee.” I hung up.

I looked at the clock on Herb’s desk. It was only a quarter to eleven. I had been here for nearly three hours, but it seemed like much longer.

I wondered what Claudia could be doing at a quarter to eleven in the morning, and with whom, that required her to have her phone switched off.

I sighed. Perhaps I didn’t want to know.

In my role as Herb’s executor, I used the account number and sort code on his statement to send an e-mail to his bank informing them that Mr. Kovak was deceased, and would they please send me details of all his accounts, and especially the balances.

Somewhat surprisingly I received a reply almost immediately thanking me for the sad news and advising me that they would need various pieces of original documentation before they could release the information I had asked for, including the death certificate, a copy of the will and an order of probate.

And how long would it take to get that lot?

I heard Sherri go along the corridor to the bathroom.

At least my troubles with Billy Searle were minor compared to hers.

I took the front cover sheet off the Racing Post and folded it up, as if not being able to see the damning words would in some way limit their damage to my reputation and career. I put the offending piece in my pocket and went to throw the rest of it into the wastebasket under Herb’s desk.

The basket had some things in it already, and, I thought, as I’ve looked everywhere else, why not there?

I poured the contents of the basket out onto the desk.

Amongst the opened envelopes, the empty Starbucks coffee cups and the screwed-up tissues were lots of little pieces of paper about an inch square. I put the cups, envelopes and tissues back in the basket, leaving a pile of the paper squares on the desk. It was fairly obvious that they were the torn-up remains of a larger piece, so I set about trying to put them back together. It was a bit like doing a jigsaw puzzle, but without the picture on the box to guide me.

I fairly quickly established that the pieces had not been from one larger piece but three. I slowly built up the originals in front of me. They were each about six inches by four, printed forms with words written on them in pen, similar forms but each with different writing. I stuck the bits together with Scotch tape.

“What are you doing?” Sherri asked from the doorway.

She made me jump.

“Nothing much,” I said, swiveling the desk chair around to face her. “How are you feeling?”

“Dreadful,” she said, coming into the room and flopping down into the deep armchair. “I can’t believe it.”

I thought she was about to cry again. I wasn’t sure whether the dark shadows beneath her eyes were due to tiredness or her tearsmudged mascara.

“I’ll get you some more tea,” I said, standing up.

“Lovely,” she said with a forced smile. “Thank you.”

I went through to the kitchen and boiled the kettle. I also made myself another coffee and took both cups back to the living room.

Sherri was sitting at the desk, looking at the pieces of paper. I sat down on the arm of the big armchair.

“Do you know what they are?” I asked.

“Of course,” she said. “They’re MoneyHome payment slips.” She sipped her tea. “One for eight thousand, and two for five.”

“Pounds?” I asked.

She looked at them.

“Dollars. Converted into pounds.”

“How do you know?” I asked.

She looked at me.

“I use MoneyHome all the time,” she said. “It’s a bit like Western Union, only cheaper. They have agents all over the world. Herb sent me the money for my airfare via MoneyHome.”

“Are any of these slips from that?”

“No,” she said with certainty. “These are the slips you get when you collect money, not when you send it.”

“So Herb collected eighteen thousand dollars’ worth of pounds from MoneyHome?”

“Yes,” she said.

“When?” I asked.

She looked at the reconstructed slips carefully. “Last week, but not all on the same day. Eight thousand on Monday and five each on Tuesday and Friday.”

“Who from?” I asked.

“These only tell you which MoneyHome office it was collected from, they don’t say who sent the money.” She drank more of her tea. “What’s all this about anyway?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I just found those torn-up sheets in the wastebasket.”

She sat drinking her tea, looking at me over the rim of the cup.

“Why are you here?” she asked.

“I was a friend of Herb’s and a work colleague,” I said, giving her one of the business cards from my wallet. “He made me the executor of his will.” I decided again not to mention that he had also made me the sole beneficiary.

“I didn’t know he even had a will,” Sherri said, reading from my card, “Mr. Nicholas Foxton, BSc, MEcon, DipPFS.”

“He made it five years ago when he first arrived at Lyall and Black,” I said, ignoring her reference to my qualifications. “Everyone in the firm has to have a will. The senior partners are always saying that we can hardly advise our clients to plan ahead if we aren’t prepared to do the same. But I have absolutely no idea why Herb chose to put me in his. Maybe it was just because we sat at desks next to each other. He’d only just landed in the country and perhaps he didn’t know anyone else. And none of us really expect to die when we’re in our twenties anyway. But he should still have named you as his executor, even if you were in the United States.”

“Herb and I weren’t exactly talking to each other five years ago. In fact, I’d told him by then that I never wanted to see or hear from him again.”

“Wasn’t that a bit extreme?” I said.

“We had a flaming row over our parents.” She sighed. “It was always over our parents.”

“What about them?” I asked.

She looked at me as if deciding whether to tell me.

“Our Mom and Dad were, shall we say, an unusual couple. Dad had made a living, if you can call it that, acting as an unlicensed bookie round the back side of Churchill Downs. He was meant to be a groom but he didn’t do much looking after the horses. He spent his time taking bets from the other grooms, and some of the trainers and owners too. Sometimes he won, but mostly he lost. Mom, meanwhile, had worked as a cocktail waitress in one of the swanky tourist hotels in downtown Louisville. At least that’s what she told people.”

She paused, and I waited in silence. She’d say it if she wanted to.

“She’d been a prostitute.” Sherri was crying again.

“You don’t have to tell me,” I said.

She looked at me with tear-filled eyes. “I’ve got to tell someone.” She gulped. “I’ve bottled it all up for far too long.”

Between bouts of tears she told me the sorry saga of her and Herb’s upbringing. It amazed me that I had sat next to him for all those years without realizing the hurdles he’d had to overcome to be a financial adviser.

Herb and Sherri’s father had been an abusive drinker who had seemingly treated his children as unpaid slave labor. Both of them had excelled in school but their father insisted that they drop out, aged sixteen, to go work, Herb as a groom in the Churchill Downs stables and Sherri as a chambermaid in one of the tourist hotels where her mother had plied her trade.

Herb had rebelled and run away to Lexington, where he had secretly applied for and won a free place at a private high school. But he’d had no accommodations, so he’d slept on the streets. One of the trustees of the school had found him there and offered him a bed. The trustee had been in financial services, and hence Herb’s career had been decided.

He’d stayed in Lexington after high school to attend the University of Kentucky on a scholarship, then, as the top graduate, had been offered a job at J.P. Morgan in New York.

I wondered how such a highflier had come to move from one of the global assets management giants to a firm such as Lyall & Black, a relative tiddler in the financial pond. Had he somehow done something to thwart his career prospects in New York?

Sherri, meanwhile, had been good at her job and bright about it, and she had been spotted by the management of the hotel for further training. That was ultimately how she came to be in Chicago, where she was currently assistant housekeeper in a big hotel in the same chain.

I didn’t see how all this information was going to be of any use to me, but I sat quietly and listened as she unburdened her emotions.

“How come you and Herb fell out?” I asked in one of the frequent pauses.

“He refused to come home from New York for the funeral when Dad died. I said he should be there to support Mom, but he refused, and he said he wouldn’t come to her funeral either if she dropped down dead tomorrow. Those were his exact words. And Mom heard him say them because she and I were in my car and the call was on speakerphone.” She paused, and more tears ran down her cheeks. “I still think it’s the reason why she did it.”

“Did what?” I asked.

“Swallowed a whole bottle of Tylenol Extra. A hundred tablets.”

“Dead?” I asked.

She nodded. “That night. I found her in the morning.” She sat up straight and breathed in deeply through her nose. “I accused Herb of killing her, and that’s when I told him I never wanted to see or hear from him again.”

“How long has it been since your parents died?”

“About six years, maybe seven.” She thought for a moment. “It’ll be seven years in June.”

“When did you change your mind?”

“What? About contacting Herb?”

I nodded.

“I didn’t. It was he who contacted me, about two years ago.” She sighed. “Five years was a long time not to speak to your twin brother. I had wanted to be in touch with him much sooner, but I was too proud.” She paused. “Too stupid, more like. He wrote to me at the hotel company, and we arranged to meet in New York. Then last summer he invited me to come to England and stay with him for a holiday. It was great.” She smiled. “Just like old times.” The smile faded and the tears began again. “I just can’t believe he’s dead.”

Neither could I.

I finally arrived at the office at twenty past one, a time when I reckoned Gregory should be just sitting down to his substantial lunch at the far end of Lombard Street. However, I approached number 64 from the opposite direction to the one he took to his usual restaurant in order to minimize the chances of running into him if he was late.

I ignored the lift, sneaked up the emergency stairway to the fourth floor and put my head around the glass entrance door. “Has Mr. Gregory gone to lunch?” I whispered to Mrs. McDowd, who was sitting at the reception desk.

“Ten minutes ago,” she whispered back.

“And Mr. Patrick?” I asked.

“Went with him,” she replied. “Both gone for an hour at least, probably two.”

I relaxed and smiled at her. “Maybe I’ll just stay for an hour.”

“Very wise,” she said with a grin from ear to ear. “Now, tell me, is it true what it says in the paper?”

“No, of course not,” I said.

She gave me one of her “I don’t believe you” looks. “You must have done something or it wouldn’t be on the front page.”

“Mrs. McDowd, it’s nothing. I promise you.”

She curled down her mouth as if she was a spoilt child who had failed to be given an ice cream. I ignored her, walking past the reception desk and down the corridor beyond. As I passed by, I glanced through the ever-open door of the Compliance Office, but Jessica Winter was not at her desk. Jessica was one of those who always went out for her lunch hour, as Herb had done, though in his case it was not to eat but to work out at a local gym.

I went on and into my office, not that I had it completely to myself. There were five cubicles crammed into the small room, one of which was mine. Herb had been next to me, both of us close to the window, while Diana and Rory, Patrick’s other assistants, occupied the two cubicles nearer the door. The fifth cubicle was no one’s specific personal domain but was used by any visiting staff, usually an accountant for two days a week, and Andrew Mellor, the lawyer, if he needed a desk. Today it was empty.

Diana was out to lunch, as usual, while Rory was sitting at his desk, typing with one hand on his computer keyboard while holding a half-eaten sandwich in the other.

“My God,” said Rory with his mouth full. “The invisible man returns. Gregory’s been looking for you all morning. You’re in real trouble.” He sounded as if he was rather pleased about it, and I could see a folded copy of the Racing Post lying on his desk. It had probably been him who had shown it to Gregory.

“You haven’t seen me, all right!” I said.

“Don’t involve me in your sordid little affairs,” he said rather haughtily. “I’m not putting my career at risk for you.”

Rory could be a real pain sometimes.

“Rory,” I said. “When, and if, you ever qualify to be an IFA, you can then start talking about your career. Until then, shut up!”

Rory knew that I knew that he had failed his qualifying exams twice and he was now in the Last Chance Saloon. He sensibly kept quiet.

I took off my suit jacket and hung it on the back of my chair. Then I sat down at Herb’s desk and pulled open the top drawer.

“What are you doing?” Rory asked somewhat arrogantly.

“I’m going through Herb’s desk,” I said. “I’m his executor and I’m trying to find the address of his sister.” He wasn’t to know that Herb’s sister was in Hendon. Rory ignored me and went back to his one-handed typing.

There was no sign of Sherri’s address but there were two more MoneyHome payment slips lurking in a drawer and this time not torn up into squares. There was also another of the sheets with handwritten lists on both sides, just like the one Chief Inspector Tomlinson had shown me in Herb’s flat. I carefully folded them all up and put them in my pocket.

Apart from that, the desk was almost too clean. No screwed-up papers or chocolate bar wrappers.

I wasn’t surprised. In fact, I was amazed there had been anything at all. I would have expected the police would have stripped it completely bare on the Monday after his death.

I looked around the cubicle. Some of the staff personalized their bulletin boards with family pictures or souvenir postcards sent by friends on holiday, but there had never been any such personal items pinned to Herb’s, not even a picture of Sherri. There was only the usual mandatory company telephone directory, and a small key pinned to the board with a thumbtack. I looked at it closely but left it where it was. A key without a lock wasn’t much use.

And there was nothing of interest in his wastebasket either, as it was completely empty. It would be. Even if the police hadn’t emptied it, the office cleaners had been there since Herb had last sat at this desk on the previous Friday afternoon.

I walked along the corridor and put my head right into the lion’s den.

Now, Gregory, as a senior partner, did qualify for an office of his own, but, fortunately for me, this particular lion was still out to lunch. I sat down in his chair and looked at his computer screen. As I had hoped, he hadn’t bothered to log out from his session when he went to lunch. Most of us didn’t. The office system was great when it was working, but it took so long to boot up that we all tended to leave it on all day.

I typed “Roberts Family Trust” into Gregory’s computer, and it instantly produced the details of the file on his screen with the date of the original investment prominently displayed at the top. The access list in the right-hand corner showed me that Gregory himself had looked at the file only that morning, at ten twenty-two a.m. precisely, no doubt in a lull from searching the offices for me. I just hoped he wouldn’t notice that his computer had accessed it again at one forty-six p.m.

However, it was one of the other names on the recent-inquiry list I found most interesting. It showed that Herb Kovak had accessed the file just ten days previously. Now, why had Herb looked at one of Gregory’s client files? It would have been most improper, just as it was for me to be looking at it now. Perhaps Herb had also had some suspicions about the Bulgarian investment. I wondered what they had been. It was too late to ask.

I would have loved to print out the whole file, but unfortunately the office server used a central printing system that recorded who had asked for what to be printed. How could I explain away an apparent request from Gregory when he was out to lunch? More to the point, how would I explain sitting at Gregory’s desk and using his computer if he returned unexpectedly early?

I instinctively looked at my watch. It was ten to two. I reckoned I should be safe for at least another twenty minutes, but I had no intention of being even half that long.

I flipped through the pages of the file trying to find the names of the Bulgarian agents involved in the project, but it was a nightmare, with PDF scans of the relevant documents all in the local Cyrillic script. It might as well have been in Chinese. I couldn’t read any of the words, but I could read what I thought was a telephone number written in regular digits. I copied it down on the back of one of Herb’s MoneyHome payment slips. It began “+359,” which I knew from looking at the Internet earlier was the international code for Bulgaria.

I looked again at my watch. Two o’clock.

I opened Gregory’s e-mail in-box and did a search for “Bulgaria.” There were six e-mails, all from September two years ago. I glanced through them but nothing seemed amiss. They were about European Union money, and they were all from the same source. I copied down the e-mail address of the sender, uri_joram@ec.europa.eu, and also that of the recipient, dimitar.petrov@bsnet.co.bg. Gregory had been copied into the correspondence but there was no sign of any replies. I took a chance and forwarded the e-mails to my private e-mail address, then I deleted the forwarded record from Gregory’s “Sent” folder. I wished I could have e-mailed myself the whole Roberts file, but our security system wouldn’t allow it.

I reluctantly closed Gregory’s in-box and the Roberts Family Trust file and checked that the screen appeared the same as when I had first arrived.

I slipped out into the corridor, and no one shouted a challenge or questioned what I had been doing in Gregory’s office.

As everywhere in the offices, the corridor outside was lined with cardboard document boxes holding the paper transaction reports. I searched for the box containing those for the date at the top of the computer file.

Mrs. McDowd may not have liked policemen very much, and she was definitely too nosy about the staff’s lives and families, but she was very methodical in her filing. All the boxes were in chronological order with dates clearly written in marker pen on the ends.

I lifted up the box with the correct date and dug through its papers until I found the correct transaction report and associated paperwork. I pulled them out, folded them and stuffed them into my trouser pocket alongside Herb’s MoneyHome payment slips, before putting the box carefully back in the same place I’d found it.

I glanced at my watch once more: twenty past two. Where had those twenty minutes gone? Time I was away. But why did I suddenly feel like a thief in the night? I’d done nothing wrong. Or had I? Maybe I should just go and see Jessica straightaway when she returned from lunch. But the client, Jolyon Roberts, had specifically asked me to have a discreet look rather than initiate a possible fraud investigation that would, as he put it, drag the good name of the Roberts family through the courts.

Nevertheless, whatever else I might do, I didn’t want to be in the offices when Gregory returned from his restaurant.

I went back into my office to collect my jacket.

“Leaving already?” said Rory sarcastically. “What shall I tell Gregory?”

I ignored him.

As I walked down the corridor towards the reception area I realized with a heavy heart that I’d left it too late. I could hear Gregory and Patrick talking. I would just have to face the music.

“Ah, there you are Foxton,” Gregory announced at high volume. “I’ve been looking for you all morning.”

I was so mesmerized by Gregory that I hardly took any notice of a man standing to the side of him and next to Patrick, but the man suddenly stepped forward right in front of me.

“Nicholas Foxton,” the man said. “I arrest you on suspicion of the attempted murder of William Peter Searle.”