level, and there's no way that I, as a corporate manager, can access
any of it directly."
"I'm beginning to guess the consequences of the fire," said Steele.
"I'm sure you are. The damage upstairs was total. The entire IT
system of Tubau Gordon Oriental has been destroyed, and with it all of
our computer records for its current financial year, which has been
running since January the first."
"Don't you back up?"
"We back up on to a separate mainframe, outside the network, but that
was also located on the sixth floor. It's gone too."
"Paper records?"
"Yes, and all reduced to muddy ashes. The only paper that survived the
fire was in rolls in the staff toilets."
"So what have you lost?"
"As I said, we've lost everything; the current investment position of
every one of the clients of Tubau Gordon Oriental. We'd have to go
back as best we can and rebuild every transaction to the beginning of
the calendar year. That would take God knows how long and even then
we'd only have an approximation. We will have to ask every company in
which we're invested to issue duplicate share certificates, but with
the settlement system we'll never know what was in the pipeline, since
we do our own trading. It's impossible; in practice, all that we can
do is credit everyone with everything they had at the time of the last
audit and take it from there. It's a disaster of unthinkable
proportions."
"What about previous years? Has all that gone too?" r
Dolan looked up to the ceiling. "No, thank God. Once our audits are
all completed we archive the records of each year in a secure data
warehouse. On top of that we archive our computer records on a
six-monthly basis. Had it not been for the fire, that would have
happened on Tuesday."
Steele felt a flutter in the pit of his stomach, but kept it to
himself. "How many Far East trusts were there?" he asked.
"Three public; Japanese, Chinese, and new markets."
"Three public, you said?"
"Yes. There was also one private trust located upstairs, and managed
under our corporate umbrella. It's a family trust; not a unique
situation. This one belongs to the Candela family."
"As in ...?"
"Yes, it's David's. It used to be managed within Candela and Finch,
but he switched it here a few years back, because he liked our security
systems and our in-house trading facility. Ironic, is it not?"
"It sure is," Steele conceded, impassively. "When you began," he
continued, 'you said that investment trusts were more or less all you
did. What else is there?"
"We have a currency section," said the chief executive, 'speculating on
the global money markets. That was on the sixth floor; it's gone too.
Never rains, eh."
"That's what we find." The policeman waited until he felt that he had
all of Dolan's attention once more. "So why were you about to pick up
the phone?" The silence continued, for several seconds.
"Because," came the reply at last, "I have just finished a
reconciliation of our total assets; investments and cash in the bank
and in transit. It's difficult, given the missing Oriental portfolios,
but by my calculation, we're thirty million out... on the downside."
"Bloody hell," Steele exclaimed.
"That's an understatement."
"Will it finish you?"
"No, it won't, but it will send our share price floor-wards and make us
a snip for any predators that are out there." Dolan stood up and
walked to the window of his office; he gazed along the Western Approach
Road, at nothing in particular.
"So, inspector," he asked, 'are you going to call in the cavalry?"
"I'm going to call in the fire brigade, first off."
"I have done already. And I've called in independent experts. I did
that on Sunday. They both agree that the fire started in a computer
terminal that was left on over the weekend to receive incoming faxes
... a normal procedure, and that there is no evidence of it being
deliberate. Someone seems to have been dead lucky, Mr. Steele."
"So far," the policeman retorted. "I'm going to need a list of every
person employed on the sixth floor with the skill to make thirty
million disappear without being caught. Obviously, that will include
the manager of the Candela family trust."
"I wouldn't bother with that, inspector. David manages it personally.
It's another of his many skills."
Sixty.
"How'd you like to stay in Buffalo and be my chief of detectives?"
asked Bradford Dekker.
"No offence, sheriff," Skinner replied, 'but if I stayed here, I'd be
after your job. Elected people trying to manage policemen are the bane
of my life back home; if I lived here the only way I could handle it
would be to become one myself."
"If the voters of Erie County knew all that's happened over the last
couple of days you could run as the Taleban candidate and still get
elected."
Bob pulled over a kitchen stool and sat on it, glancing out of the
window. With the phone to his ear, he could see Jazz playing in the
garden, with Trish watching over him. "So it's over, is it?" he
asked.
"Yes. Poor old Candy Brew is downstairs right now in conference with
his attorney, that's if the woman can get him to stop sobbing for long
enough to listen to what she's got to tell him. When Madigan and I
walked into his office he looked at us and burst into tears, and he's
been like that most of the time since."
Dekker sounded elated, understandably. "The hair and skin samples
matched his," he continued, 'like you said they would, but we didn't
need to throw that at him. We didn't need to throw anything at him, in
fact. He told us the whole story as soon as we sat him down in the
interview room. Hero worship can be a deadly thing, Bob, when it goes
to extremes. Mr. Brew had more than a crush on Ron Neidholm; he was
downright in love with him. His house is like a shrine, an absolute
shrine. He's from Chicago, originally, but he volunteered to us that
he took a job in Buffalo because it was Ron's home town. His obsession
was no secret either. It was a standing joke among the staff in
Waterside Library, and among some of the borrowers as well. We've
re-interviewed the Bierhoff woman;
she admitted that she didn't just happen to mention Sarah and Ron to
him, she did it to wind him up."
"Bitch," Skinner snarled.
"And how. She drove Brew right off the rails; he admitted to us that
he went to Neidholm's house to ask him if it was true and if it meant
that he wouldn't play football any more. The victim invited him in and
took him through to the kitchen, because he said he was about to start
fixing a salad. He said that he was expecting company. Candy's story
is that when he confronted him, asked him straight out, Ron was evasive
at first, suggested very politely that it was none of his damn
business. But he persisted, and finally the big guy lost his cool. He
told him that he had had a lifetime
of guys like him, who thought that
football was the only thing in the world, and that finally he had had
enough. He wanted a normal life, among real people with a wife and
kids, and no more freaks like Brew' Dekker was excited, now, in full
flow; at last he paused for breath.
"While he was yelling this, according to Candy, he reached out and
grabbed him by the hair with his left hand. That ties in with the
samples that were found on the sticking plaster. The guy thought he
was going to slug him with the other one, and he got terrified. The
knife was lying on the counter beside him. He says he doesn't remember
picking it up ..."
"None of them ever remember," said Skinner, quietly.
"I'll bow to your experience on that. Anyway, he says there was this
blank moment, and next thing he knew, Ron was on the floor at his feet
with the knife in his chest. He just ran for it then, out of the
house, got in his car and drove home. He sat there for two days, doing
nothing, waiting for us to come for him, only we didn't. After a while
he plucked up the courage to switch on television, and he saw a report.
It said that we had a prime suspect, a woman, and that charges were
expected imminently. He knew they must have meant Sarah and he began
to relax."
"He was going to let her take the blame?"
"Without a second thought; he believed, in fact he still does, that she
deserved it. In his mind, if it hadn't been for her throwing herself
at Neidholm, as he put it, life would just have gone on as it was.
That's why he approached him in the restaurant. He'd never had the
nerve to do that before, or to write to him, or anything else; he only
worshipped him from as close as he could get. Neidholm never had a
public relationship, you see. Half of America thought he was gay; as
for Candy, he just assumed it. So when he saw him there with Sarah, he
experienced a flash of pure terror. He could tell how easy they were
with each other, and he had this sense that everything was going to
change, that all his fantasies were going to be taken from him, by this
woman, whoever she was.
"He fretted about it from that point on, until Alice Bierhoff told him
her story, and the poor guy just went nuts."
"Will he go for an insanity plea?"
"I don't know yet. The DA's offered him a plea deal to second degree
homicide; that's what his attorney's trying to talk to him about. If
he takes it, then Sarah won't have to testify. If he doesn't, I'm not
so sure."
"You might try telling him from me that if he puts my wife on the
witness stand and makes her admit to an affair in public he really will
be fucking crazy."
"He's never met you," Dekker chuckled, 'so he wouldn't understand, but
I'll do what I can to keep that from happening."
"So what's our position now?" asked Skinner.
"Sarah has her passport back. She can leave Buffalo any time she
likes."
"When's this going to hit the fan?"
"Brew's attorney won't go public while we're still negotiating, but I
can't hold it beyond tomorrow midday. If he hasn't accepted the DA's
deal by then he'll be arraigned on a charge of first degree murder."
"Punishable by?"
"In theory, death, but we won't go for that."
"If you did, Bierhoff should be on a table alongside him."
"I agree, but there's nothing she can be charged with. I've already
made sure that she'll live from now on with the knowledge that her
tongue got a man killed. If this does go to trial the whole of America
will know it."
He heard Dekker draw a breath. "Bob, I want to thank you again for
this."
"Don't, please. In a way, I'm to blame for it all; if I hadn't gone
charging back to Scotland it would never have happened. Neidholm and
Sarah, I mean; sure, Brew might have gone off the rails eventually, but
probably not."
"Can you say that for certain?"
Skinner blinked at Dekker's quiet question, then thought about it. "Can
I say that my wife wouldn't have had a fling with the guy even if I had
been here?" he murmured into the phone. "Maybe I don't want to know
the answer to that, Brad."
"No. Maybe you don't." He paused. "So what are you going to do
now?"
"I'm going to shuffle out of fucking Buffalo, that's what I'm going to
do. If I can I'll get us on a plane to New York tonight, then back
home tomorrow. I'll call Clyde Oakdale and ask his office to put
everything in place."
"Good luck to you then, sir. Should Sarah be required to testify, I'll
contact you directly."
"You may not have to. See you, Brad. Gook luck in the elections ...
not that you'll need it now."
He hung up, then called Oakdale at his law firm, and gave him brief,
terse instructions. When he was finished, he walked upstairs. Sarah
was in the nursery, playing with Seonaid. She looked at him over her
shoulder as he came into the room. She tried to read his expression,
but failed. "Well?" she asked. "Who was that?"
"The county sheriff," he told her. "You're in the clear."
She turned and handed their daughter to him, then gave a huge sigh of
unfettered relief. "Thank you," she whispered, her eyes moistening.
"Thank you so much."
"Maybe you should thank her," he said, kissing Seonaid on the forehead,
'and the boys."
"No. I'll thank you; no one else could have done it."
"Eddie Brady should have done it," he replied.
Sarah rubbed a tear from her cheek. "So that little man actually
killed Ron."
"Stone fucking dead, honey. You know what they say; the harder they
come, the bigger they fall, or something like that." He looked her in
the eye. "But it's not over. Now you have something else to face. I'm
taking the kids back to Scotland; we're leaving as soon as Clyde can
get us on a flight. I won't have them here to be filmed and
photographed when this thing breaks in the media."
"And what about me?" she asked, quietly.
"That's your choice, love. I've told Oakdale to book a seat for you
too; it's up to you whether you're in it when the plane takes off."
"What do you want?"
He laid the wriggling Seonaid on the floor and let her crawl towards a
toy. "If I was going to kick you out I'd hardly have got you that
seat, would I? Listen, Sarah; when I went back home to defend my job,
I rejected you, and not for the first time, either. When you coupled
with Neidholm, you were rejecting me. All I have to say to you is that
I regret what I did now. I didn't consider what effect it might have
had on you, and I apologise for that. As for what you did, I'm not
going to ask whether you regret that, and I'm not going to make it a
precondition of coming home. It's your life, and your decision, but
when you make it, be in no doubt that I want you to come." He reached
out a hand and touched her face, for the first time since his return.
"I've taken you for granted; I'm sorry for it." He smiled, faintly. "I
can't promise that it won't happen again, but
if it does, I'll be sorry
then too."
Sarah took hold of his fingers, and held them to her cheek for a second
or two, then twined her own with them. "Whether you believe this is up
to you, but when I went to see Ron at his place, when I found him, I
went there to tell him that I was turning him down and going back to
Thursday Legends Page 38
