7

I spent the afternoon waiting in an eight-foot-by-six holding cell at the Paddington Green Police Station not quite knowing what to think.

The man in the office had identified himself as another detective chief inspector, this one from the Metropolitan Police.

I’d missed his name. I hadn’t really been listening.

I did, however, remember him advising me that I didn’t have to say anything, with the proviso that it might harm my defense if I didn’t mention something when questioned that I later relied on in court. I’d been too shocked to say anything anyway. I had just stood there with my mouth open in surprise as a uniformed policeman had applied handcuffs to my wrists and then led me down in the lift to a waiting police car.

William Peter Searle, the chief inspector had said when I was arrested.

That had to be Billy Searle.

So Billy had been right about one thing.

Thursday had been too late.

I suppose I couldn’t really blame the police for arresting me. Hundreds of witnesses had heard Billy shouting the previous afternoon at Cheltenham. “Why are you trying to murder me?” had been his exact words, even if the Racing Post had distorted them somewhat.

I hadn’t been trying to murder him, but I hadn’t taken him seriously either.

But to whom could Billy have owed so much money? Clearly, someone who was prepared to try to kill him for nonpayment by the Wednesday-night deadline.

I sat on one end of the cell’s fixed concrete bed and went on waiting. But I wasn’t particularly worried. I knew I had nothing to do with Billy’s or anyone else’s attempted murder and surely it would be only a matter of time before the police discovered that.

First Herb Kovak and now Billy Searle. Could the two be connected?


Thursday afternoon dragged on into early evening, and I was left alone in the cell, still waiting.

For the umpteenth time I looked at my wrist to check the time and, for the umpteenth time, saw no watch.

It had been removed when I was “checked in” to the custody suite by the custody sergeant, along with my tie, my belt, my shoelaces and the contents of my pockets, including Herb’s MoneyHome payment slips and the transaction report from the box outside Gregory’s office.

The cell door opened, and a white-shirted policeman brought in a tray that held a covered plate and a plastic bottle of water.

“What time is it?” I asked.

“Seven o’clock,” he said without looking at his watch.

“How much longer am I going to be kept here?” I asked.

“The DCI will see you when he’s ready,” replied the policeman, who then placed the tray down next to me on the concrete bed and went out. The door clanged shut behind him.

I looked under the cover. Fish and chips. And quite good too.

I ate the lot and drank the water. It took about five minutes.

And then I waited some more, counting the bricks in the walls in an attempt to alleviate the boredom. It failed.


The detective chief inspector finally opened the cell door long after the barred and frosted-glass window had turned from daylight to night black.

“Mr. Foxton,” he said, coming into the cell. “You are free to go.”

“What?” I said, not quite taking it all in.

“You are free to go,” the detective said again, standing to one side of the door. “We will not be charging you with any offense.” He paused as if not being quite able to say the next bit. “And I’m sorry for any inconvenience that may have been caused.”

“Sorry!” I said. “Sorry! I should bloody well think you are sorry. I’ve been treated like a common criminal.”

“Mr. Foxton,” the chief inspector replied, somewhat affronted. “You have been treated exactly in accordance with the laid-down regulations.”

“So why was I arrested?” I demanded.

“We had reason to believe you were responsible for the attempted murder of the jockey, William Searle.”

“So what’s happened that now makes you so sure I’m not responsible for it?” I was purposefully making myself appear angry. It might be the only chance I would have of asking the detective for some answers, and I wanted to take advantage of his defensive position.

“I am persuaded that you could not have been present when Mr. Searle was attacked. You have an alibi.”

“How do you know?” I said. “You haven’t asked me any questions.”

“Nevertheless,” he replied, “I am satisfied that it was not possible for you to have committed the attack. So you are free to go.”

I didn’t move.

“How are you satisfied that I couldn’t have done it?” I asked with persistence.

“Because it is physically impossible for you to have been in two places at the same time. That’s what having an alibi means. ‘Alibi’ is a Latin word meaning ‘somewhere else,’ and you were somewhere else when the attempt was made on Mr. Searle’s life.”

“So where was this attack?” I asked. “And when?”

The chief inspector looked uncomfortable, as if he didn’t particularly like answering questions. No doubt he was more relaxed asking them.

“Mr. Searle was deliberately knocked off his bicycle on the road outside his home in the village of Baydon in Wiltshire, at exactly five minutes past seven this morning. He is currently in a critical condition at the Great Western Hospital in Swindon.”

“And how are you so sure I was somewhere else at exactly five minutes past seven this morning?” I asked.

“Because you were at 45 Seymour Way in Hendon exactly fifty-five minutes later,” he said. “You were interviewed at that address at precisely eight o’clock by Detective Chief Inspector Tomlinson of the Merseyside Police. There is no way you could have traveled the seventy-two miles from Baydon to Hendon in fifty-five minutes, and especially not at that time of the morning during the rush hour.”

“And why didn’t you work this out before I was arrested?” I was beginning to sound rather self-righteous even to my ears.

“We were simply acting on a request from the Wiltshire force,” he replied, neatly passing the blame elsewhere.

“Well, then they should have checked,” I said, trying to maintain a look of rightful indignation. “Maybe I’ll sue you for wrongful arrest.”

“I think, sir,” he said very formally, “that you will find that attempted murder is an arrestable offense, and that we had reasonable grounds for an arrest. Just because it turned out that you couldn’t have been the perpetrator doesn’t give you grounds for claiming false arrest.”

“Hmm,” I said. “So I am now free to go, just like that?”

“Yes,” he said.

“No questions? No police bail?”

“No, sir,” he replied. “Alibi is a complete defense. It doesn’t mitigate a crime, it proves innocence. So there would be no point in charging or bailing you. However, I am sure that the Wiltshire force will want to ask some questions about your argument with Mr. Searle at Cheltenham Races yesterday. No doubt they will be making an appointment in due course. You are free to go home now,” he said. He waved a hand towards the doorway as if trying to encourage me on my way.

I’d had enough of this cell and I didn’t need his encouragement to leave it.

The custody sergeant sneered at me as he returned my watch and mobile phone, my tie, belt and shoelaces, and the previous contents of my pockets. He clearly enjoyed booking prisoners in far more than letting them go.

“Sign here,” said the sergeant without any warmth, pointing at a form on the desk.

I signed.

“Thanks for the supper,” I said cheerily.

The sergeant didn’t reply.

“Which way out?” I asked, looking around at various doors, none of them with a convenient EXIT sign above it. Perhaps it was designed that way to confuse any escapees.

“That way,” said the sergeant, pointing at one of the doors. He pushed a button on his desk, and the lock on the heavy steel door buzzed. I pulled it open and walked out into the police station reception area as the door closed automatically behind me with a loud clunk.

Claudia was waiting there, sitting on an upright tubular steel chair that was bolted to the floor. She jumped up when she saw me and rushed over, throwing her arms around my neck and hugging me tight. She was crying.

“Oh, Nick,” she sobbed into my neck, “I’ve been so frightened.”

“Come on,” I said, hugging her back. “Let’s go home.”

We walked out into the night, hand in hand, and hailed a passing black cab.

“I didn’t think you’d be here,” I said to Claudia as we sat down.

“Why ever not?” she said. “I’ve been here ever since I found out where they’d taken you. It’s been bloody hours.”

“But how did you know I’d been arrested?” The police had allowed me only one call, and I’d made that to the company’s lawyer, Andrew Mellor.

“Rosemary called me,” Claudia said. “She was in floods of tears.”

“Rosemary?” I asked.

“You know,” she said. “Rosemary McDowd. She’s such a dear.”

I had worked at Lyall & Black for five years and for all that time I’d had no idea that Mrs. McDowd’s name was Rosemary. The receptionists were always referred to as Mrs. McDowd and Mrs. Johnson because that’s what they called each other. Only the other staff had first names, Mr. Patrick, Mr. Gregory, Miss Jessica, Mr. Nicholas and so on, and we were only addressed in that way because, again, that was how the Mesdames McDowd and Johnson did it.

“How did Mrs. McDowd have your number?” I asked.

“Oh, we speak quite often.”

“What about?”

Claudia didn’t reply.

“What about?” I repeated.

“You,” she said.

“What about me?” I asked.

“Oh, nothing,” she said evasively.

“No. Come on,” I said. “Tell me. What about me?”

Claudia sighed. “I sometimes call her to find out what sort of mood you’re in when you leave the office.”

More likely, I thought suspiciously, to check that I was actually in the office or when I’d left it.

“So what did Mrs. McDowd tell you today?” I asked, purposely changing the conversation’s direction.

“Between sobs, she told me that you had been arrested by the police for attempted murder. I thought it must be to do with Herb Kovak, but she said it was about someone else.”

I nodded. “Billy Searle was attacked this morning. He was a top jump jockey, and also a client of mine.”

“What the hell’s going on?” Claudia said.

That’s what I wanted to know.


I t had been nearly eleven o’clock by the time I’d been released, and I’d asked the taxi driver to go to the newspaper kiosk on the Edgware Road where I knew they received the early editions of the daily newspapers the night before.

Claudia stayed in the cab as I went to buy copies of all they had, including the Racing Post, which arrived in a van as I was paying for the rest.

If its previous day’s front-page headline had been vague and set as a question, this one pulled none of its punches:


BILLY SEARLE ATTACKED.

FOXTON ARRESTED FOR

ATTEMPTED MURDER


And the article beneath gave no comfort to me either.

Further to our exclusive report in yesterday’s Racing Post concerning a heated argument at Cheltenham Races on Wednesday between top jump jockey Billy Searle and ex-jock turned financial wizard Nicholas (Foxy) Foxton, we can exclusively reveal that Foxton was yesterday arrested for Searle’s attempted murder.

Billy Searle was taken to the Great Western Hospital in Swindon from the scene of a horrific incident in Baydon, near Lambourn, early yesterday morning when it appears he was deliberately knocked from his bicycle. Doctors at the hospital state that Searle’s condition is critical, with a broken leg and serious head injuries.

Foxton was arrested yesterday at 2:25 p.m. on suspicion of attempted murder at the Lombard Street offices of City financial services firm Lyall & Black, and he is currently being held for questioning at the Paddington Green Police Station.

Remarkably accurate, I thought, except for the bit about currently being held at the Paddington Green Police Station, and that had been right until about twenty minutes ago. Beside the article was another picture of Billy Searle, this time all smiles and wearing a business suit, and a photograph of the cordoned-off village of Baydon. Overlying the top right-hand corner of this photo was a smaller head-and-shoulders shot of me, positioned, to my eye, as if implying that I had been present in Baydon High Street.

Gregory was going to have a field day in the morning. It wouldn’t just be my head he would have on a stick, it would be my career as well. Who would trust a financial adviser who was on the front page of a national newspaper having been arrested for attempted murder?

Not me, for one.

I climbed back into the cab with the papers and showed the Racing Post to Claudia.

“It so bloody unfair,” she said, reading the headline. “How can they mention your name when you haven’t even been charged? You should sue.”

“Over what?” I asked. “They haven’t said anything that wasn’t true.”

“But why do the police give out names before they charge someone?”

I suspected that the information had not come from the police but from a source much closer to home. The time and place of the arrest were too precise and too accurate. The police would have only said something like “A twenty-nine-year-old man has been arrested and is helping with our inquiries.”

My money would be on Rory to be the office mole, although what he hoped to gain by it was anyone’s idea. He couldn’t have my job without passing his IFA exams first, and even I didn’t believe he would have murdered Herb for the cubicle close to the window. It would have been Diana’s anyway.


I looked at the newspapers before I went to bed and all of them had front- or back-page reports about the attack on Billy Searle. None of them had the full facts, but each still managed to mention me by name and imply my guilt.

Oh God, I thought, my mother would see them in the morning.

I switched on the television and watched the latest news on one of the twenty-four-hour news channels. They had a report live from Baydon.

“It appears,” said the reporter, “that the jockey Billy Searle was leaving his home to ride his bicycle to Lambourn, as he did every morning. He was due to ride horses at morning exercise. He was being waved away by his girlfriend when a car, which had seemingly been waiting in the street, suddenly accelerated into the bicycle, knocking Searle violently to the ground, before being driven away at speed. Billy Searle was taken to the hospital in Swindon, where he is in a critical but stable condition with head and leg injuries. Police are asking anyone who may have any information concerning the incident to come forward. A man who we believe to be the ex-jockey Nicholas Foxton was arrested in connection with the attack, but he has since been released without charge.”

“Well, at least they said you’d been released,” said Claudia.

“I’d rather they hadn’t mentioned my name at all,” I said. “You watch. Most people will think I’m guilty. They will already all have me tried and convicted in their minds. Being released will make no difference, not until after the police have caught the real attacker and he’s confessed.”

“It’s so unfair,” Claudia said again.

Indeed it was, but complaining about it wasn’t going to help. I just hoped that they arrested the real attacker soon.

Claudia and I went upstairs to bed, but I couldn’t sleep. I lay awake in the darkness, going over and over everything in my head.

Last Saturday morning my life had been so settled and predictable and my career path mapped out to success and riches, even if it was a little boring. But the last five days had seen so much change. I had witnessed one murder at close range and been arrested for attempting another; I’d begun to doubt my relationship with Claudia, even suspecting that she might be having an affair with someone else; and I’d gone behind the back of my superior at work to access his personal e-mails to try to determine if he was complicit in a multimillion-pound fraud.

Not to mention becoming the executor and beneficiary of someone that I hardly knew who then turned out to have a twin sister. And then, to top it all, I’d been propositioned for sex by a woman nearly twenty years older than me, and I’d also discovered the real heartbreaking reason for my parents’ unhappy marriage.

It was enough to keep even the most tired of men from sleeping. I lay awake in the dark wondering what I should do next and also whether I would still have a job to go to in the morning.


I woke late after a restless night, the space in the bed next to me already empty and cold.

I rolled over and looked at the bedside clock. It was gone eight o’clock, and I was usually on the Tube by now.

The phone rang. I decided I didn’t want to talk to anyone so I didn’t pick it up. However, it stopped ringing when Claudia answered it downstairs.

I turned on the television for the news. Billy Searle’s attempted murder had been downgraded from the top story by a government U-turn on schools’ policy, but it still warranted a report from Baydon village, and they still managed to mention me by name and show my picture in spite of my release.

At this rate the whole bloody world would believe me guilty.

Claudia came into the room. “It’s your mother,” she said.

I picked up the phone. “Hello, Mum,” I said.

“Darling,” she said. “What the hell’s going on? You’re in all the papers and on the TV.” She sounded very upset, as if she was in tears.

“It’s all right, Mum,” I said. “Calm down. I didn’t do anything, and the police know it. Otherwise they wouldn’t have released me. I promise you, all is fine.”

It took me about five minutes to calm my mother down completely. I knew when I’d succeeded because she told me to get up and have a good breakfast. Eventually I put the phone down and laid my head back on the pillow.

“Aren’t you going to the office today?” Claudia asked, coming back into the bedroom carrying two cups of steaming coffee.

It was an innocent enough question, so why did I straightaway wonder if she was checking on my movements in order to plan her own?

“I don’t know,” I said, taking one of the cups from her. “What do you think?”

“Things could be worse,” she said. “You could still be in that police station, or in court. Let’s look on the bright side.”

“What plans do you have?” I asked.

“Nothing much,” she said. “I might go shopping later.”

“For food?”

“No,” she said. “I need a new dress for the show next week.”

“Oh,” I said. “I’d forgotten about that.”

The thought of attending the opening night of a new West End musical with all the associated press coverage did not now fill me with great joy. Claudia and I had accepted an invitation from Jan Setter to join her at the star-studded event, and at the after-show party. I wondered if, after my clumsy brush-off at Cheltenham, Jan would now be so keen for me to be there, to say nothing of my subsequent arrest.

Look on the bright side, Claudia had said, things could indeed have been worse. I could have still been stuck in that unwelcome cell or I might have been lying in a Liverpool mortuary refrigerator like Herb or in a Swindon hospital intensive care bed like Billy. Things could have been a lot worse.

“Right,” I said with determination. “It’s time to show a defiant face to the world. I’m going to get up and go in to work, and bugger what anyone thinks. I’m innocent and I’m going to act like it.”

“That’s my boy,” said Claudia with a huge grin. “Bugger the lot of them.”

She lay down on the bed and snuggled up to me, slipping her hand down under the sheets in search of me.

“But do you have to go immediately? Or…” She grinned again. “Can you wait a while longer?”

Now I was really confused.

Had I been reading the signals incorrectly?

“Hmm, let me think,” I said, laughing with joy as well as expectation. “Work or sex? Sex or work? Such difficult decisions.”

Not really.

Sex won-easily.


I didn’t go into the office until after lunch, but that was not solely due to having fun and games in bed with Claudia. It was because I went to Hendon on the way to check on Sherri and to collect my laptop computer that I’d left on Herb’s desk.

“What happened to you?” she said, opening the door. “I thought you were coming back yesterday afternoon.”

“I was,” I said. “But I was detained elsewhere.” I decided not to elaborate. “What have you been up to?”

“I’ve started going through Herb’s things in his bedroom,” she said. “I got fed up doing nothing, and it somehow seems to help.”

“Did you find anything of interest?” I asked as I followed her down the corridor to the bedroom.

“Only this,” she replied, picking up something from the bed. “It was at the back of his wardrobe, hanging on a hook behind his coats.”

She handed me a small blue plastic box with a clip-on lid. Inside the box, all neatly held together by a rubber band, were twenty-two credit cards. I rolled off the band and shuffled through them. As far as I could tell, they matched the statements, right down to the variations in Herb’s name.

“Why would anyone have so many credit cards?” Sherri asked. “And why would they all be in a box hidden in his wardrobe? They all look brand-new to me.”

And to me, I thought. Herb hadn’t even bothered signing them on the back. These cards had been obtained solely for use on the Internet. But I knew that. I’d seen the statements.

Underneath the cards were four pieces of folded-up paper similar to the ones that Chief Inspector Tomlinson had shown me the previous morning. I looked at the lists of numbers and letters. The first columns on each side were definitely dates but they were written in the American way, with the month first and then the day, so “2/10” was the tenth of February. All the dates on these pieces started 1, 2 or 12, so were from January, February or December.

Sherri was sitting on the floor busily looking through a chest of drawers, lifting out neat piles of T-shirts and stacking them on the bed. I left her and went out of the bedroom, along the corridor and into the living room.

The handwritten lists I had photocopied yesterday were still on the desk next to my computer along with the photocopied bank and credit card statements. The dates on those lists all started with a “3,” for March.

I took them back to the bedroom.

On all of the lists, the second and third columns definitely looked like amounts of money. And the fourth column was a list of capital letters, possibly initials. I counted them. There were ninety-seven different sets of letters.

“What are you looking at?” Sherri said.

“I don’t know, exactly,” I replied. “Lists of numbers and letters. Have a look.” I handed her the sheets. “I think the first column on each side are dates and the next two are probably amounts of money.”

“In dollars or pounds?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” I said slowly. Was that why, I wondered, the amounts on the credit card statements didn’t match the amounts on the sheets. Were one lot in dollars and the other in pounds?

I left Sherri studying the lists while I went back to the desk for the statements and Herb’s calculator.

“What’s the exchange rate for the U.S. dollar to the pound?” I asked, coming back into the bedroom.

“About one-point-six dollars to the pound,” Sherri said. “At least it was last week, but it changes all the time.”

I multiplied some of the amounts on the credit card statements by 1.6 and tried to match the new figure against any on the handwritten lists. It was a hopeless task. I didn’t know the exact exchange rate, and there were over five hundred different entries on the twenty-two statements. Some of the amounts were close, but none were exactly the same. The best I could say was that they might have been related.

“Do you recognize any of the initials on the lists?” I asked Sherri.

“Is that what they are?” she said.

“I don’t know but they look like it.”

She shook her head.

“Did you know that Herb liked to gamble?” I asked.

She looked up at me. “Of course,” she said. “Don’t all men? Herb had always been one for an occasional flutter on the horses. Just like his father had been. It must be in the genes.”

“Did you know how much he gambled?” I asked.

“Never very much,” she said. “He may have liked the odd bet, but I know he believed that gambling had ruined our childhood. He would never have staked more than he could afford to lose. I’m absolutely sure of that.”

“And how much could he afford to lose?” I asked.

“What are you getting at?” Sherri said.

“Herb gambled a lot on the Internet,” I said. “A huge amount.”

She was shocked. “Are you sure?”

I nodded. “He must have spent hours every day gambling on Internet betting sites and playing at the virtual poker tables in the online casinos. And he lost. He lost big-time.”

“I don’t believe it,” Sherri said. “How do you know?”

I held out the photocopies of the credit card statements to her. “Herb lost more than ninety thousand pounds last month alone. And the same the month before.”

“He can’t have done,” she said with a nervous laugh. “Herb didn’t have that sort of money.”

“Look for yourself,” I said, handing her the statements.

She looked at them for a moment, but I could see she was crying again.

“Do you think that’s why he was killed?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. But I thought it quite likely.

She cried some more.

“I wish he’d never come to England,” Sherri said sadly. “Herb wouldn’t have been able to gamble like that at home. Internet gambling is illegal in most of the United States.”

So it was.

I remembered reading about the head of an Internet gambling website who’d been arrested when he’d arrived at a U.S. airport and charged with racketeering simply for allowing Americans to gamble on his website even though it was based in England. It had all been about accepting credit card accounts with a United States address.

I looked again at the handwritten lists of dates, amounts of money and initials. And I pulled from my pocket the MoneyHome payment slips I had found in Herb’s office cubicle.

Only last week, according to the torn-up payment slips I’d found in his wastebasket, Herb had received three large amounts of cash, two equivalent to five thousand dollars and one for eight thousand.

Suddenly, all of it made complete sense to me.

It hadn’t been Herb who had lost ninety thousand pounds last month, it had been the people whose initials were to be found on Herb’s lists, the ninety-seven people who were responsible for the five hundred and twelve different entries on the credit card accounts. And I’d like to bet they were all Americans.

If I was right, Herb had been running a system to provide ninety-seven Americans with a UK-based credit card account in order for them to gamble and play on Internet betting and casino sites.

But why would that have got him murdered?

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