Dick Francis's Gamble

by Felix Francis

  He handed them over, and I skimmed through the first three or four statements. There was no doubt that the outstanding balance on each was very large and, in some cases, close to the maximum limit, but that did not show the full picture, not by a long way. I looked through the rest. They were all the same.

  “Didn’t you notice something unusual about these?” I asked.

  “Notice what?” said the chief inspector.

  “There are no interest payments from previous months. All these charges, on all of these statements, they’re all new.”

  I turned a statement over to look at the detailed breakdown and to see what Herb had spent a hundred thousand pounds on in a month and was shocked again. There were no purchases, as such, just payments to and from a plethora of Internet gambling and online casino sites. Masses of them. I looked through all the statements and they were the same. Many of the payments were quite modest but one or two ran into the thousands. Quite a few of the betting sites had actually paid money back to the accounts, but most showed a deficit. Overall, Herb had been a loser not a winner, nearly a hundred-thousand-pound-a-month loser.

  All the statements showed clearly that the previous month’s balances had been settled in full by the due date. I mentally added them up. As well as still owing almost a hundred thousand, Herb had paid nearly the same amount in gambling debts to the cards during March alone. Where had he obtained that sort of money? And how on earth had he had the time to gamble on so many different sites with so many different credit cards while working full-time at Lyall & Black? It sure as hell didn’t make any sense.

  As Claudia had said, you never really knew what even your closest friends were up to. Could this compulsive online gambling somehow be the reason that Herb was killed? The totals may have been large but the individual entries on the statements were modest, and certainly not big enough to initiate murder.

  “There are some other things I would like you to have a look at,” said the chief inspector. “You may be able to help me understand them.”

  He turned and walked down the hallway, turning left through a door. I followed him.

  Herb’s living room was in true bachelor-pad fashion, with half of it taken up by a single deep armchair placed in front of a large wall-mounted flat-screen television. On the far side of the room was a large desk, with a laptop computer, a printer and three piles of papers in metal baskets.

  It was some of the papers that the chief inspector wanted me to look at.

  “We need your permission as Mr. Kovak’s executor to remove certain items that we believe may help with our inquiries. These, for example. But we would like your opinion on them first.”

  He handed me two sheets of paper covered entirely on both sides by handwritten lists with columns of what appeared to be dates with amounts of money alongside, together with a further column of capital letters. “Could they have something to do with Mr. Kovak’s work?”

  I studied the lists briefly.

  “I doubt it,” I said. “They are handwritten and we do everything on computer. I think these could be amounts of money.” I pointed at the center two columns. “And these look like dates.”

  “Yes,” he said. “I worked that much out. But do you know what they are?”

  “Do they correspond to the amounts on the credit card statements?” I asked.

  “No. I looked at that. None of the figures are the same.”

  “How about last month’s statements?” I said. “Most of these dates are last month.”

  “We have been unable to locate any statements other than those you have seen. But some of the dates on this list would have been for the statements we have, and none of the amounts match.”

  “Then I’m afraid I can’t help you,” I said. “I don’t recognize any of the amounts and, individually, most are far too small to be anything to do with Mr. Kovak’s work. We always work in thousands, if not tens of thousands. Most of these are hundreds.” I looked once more at the lists. “Could that third column be people’s initials?”

  The chief inspector looked. “It might be. Do you recognize any of them? For example, do they match any of your work colleagues?”

  I scanned through the list. “Not that I can see.”

  “Right,” he said suddenly, as if making a decision. “With your permission we will take these papers away, together with the credit card statements, Mr. Kovak’s laptop computer and these other things.”

  The chief inspector waved a hand towards a box on a side table near the door. I went over and looked in. The box contained various bits and pieces, including Herb’s American passport, an address book, a desk diary and a folderful of bank statements. It was all rather sad.

  “It’s fine by me,” I said. “But you do know that his computer won’t give you access to Mr. Kovak’s work files?”

  “So I believe.”

  “He would have been able to access the office files and e-mails through his laptop, but no records of them would have been stored on it. The laptop would have merely been acting as a keyboard and a screen for the firm’s mainframe computer in Lombard Street.”

  “Nevertheless,” said the chief inspector, “it is our policy to search through such a device for any correspondence that might have a bearing on his death. I trust you are happy with that.”

  “Absolutely,” I agreed.

  “Good,” he said, folding the computer flat and placing it in the box with the other things.

  “But can I make copies of that credit card stuff before you take it away? I do know that one of the first tasks for executors is to close the bank accounts and pay the debts of the deceased but goodness’ knows where I will get a hundred thousand to do that. How much did he have in the bank?”

  “Not that much,” said the chief inspector.

  “Do you mind if I look?” I asked.

  “Not at all,” he said. “I understand from Mr. Kovak’s lawyer that it will be yours anyway.”

  I pulled the folder of bank statements out of the box and looked at the most recent ones. The balance was quite healthy, but, as DCI Tomlinson had said, it didn’t run to anything like a hundred thousand. More like a tenth of that. I unclipped the last statement from the folder and made a photocopy using the printer/copier on the desk. I then photocopied all the credit card statements, and both sides of the two sheets of handwritten figures, before handing them all back to the policeman.

  “Thank you,” he said. “I just need your signature on this form to give us permission to remove these items, and I have a receipt for them to give you.”

  He handed me the form, which I signed, and the receipt, which I put in my pocket.

  “Bloody paperwork,” he said, taking back the form. “These days we have to be so damn careful to do everything exactly according to the book or some clever-dick defense lawyer will claim that any evidence we find is not admissible in court. I can tell you, it’s a bloody nightmare.”

  Although better on the whole, I thought, than the police marching in anywhere they liked, in their size-twelve boots, taking away any stuff they wanted without permission and for no good reason.

  He packed his paperwork into the box along with the other things. “Now, Mr. Foxton,” he said, “could you just wander round the flat to satisfy yourself that we have left the place in reasonable order and also to check that nothing appears out of place or is missing.”

  “I’m happy to have a look,” I said, “but I’ve never been in here before so I don’t know what it looked like before you arrived.”

  “Please, anyway,” he said, putting his hand out towards the door.

  He followed me as I went around the flat, looking briefly in each of the two bedrooms, the bathroom and the well-fitted kitchen. Nothing to my eye appeared out of place, but of course it wouldn’t.

  “Have you searched everywhere?” I asked.

  “Not a proper forensic search,” he said. “We haven’t taken the floorboards up or knocked holes in the walls, that sort of thing. But
we had a reasonable look round to see if there was anything that could assist us in determining why he was killed. Mr. Kovak was a victim of the crime, not the perpetrator.”

  “How did you get in?” I asked as we went back along the hallway. “The front door doesn’t seem to have been forced.”

  “The key was in Mr. Kovak’s trouser pocket.”

  I thought again about Herb lying silent and cold in some morgue refrigerator.

  “How about his funeral?” I asked.

  “What about it?” he said.

  “I suppose it’s my job to organize it.”

  “Not before the Coroner has released the body,” he said.

  “And when will that be?” I asked.

  “Not just yet,” he replied. “He hasn’t been formally identified.”

  “But I told you who he was.”

  “Yes, sir,” he said with irony, “I know that. And we are pretty certain we know who he is because you told us, but you are not his next of kin and, to be fair, you have only known him for five years. He could have told you that he was Herbert Kovak while not actually being so.”

  “You’re showing that suspicious mind of yours again, Chief Inspector.”

  He smiled. “We are still trying to trace his next of kin, but so far without success.”

  “I know he lived in New York just before he came to England,” I said. “But he was brought up in Kentucky. In Louisville. At least that is what he said.”

  Did I now doubt it?

  “Yes,” said the chief inspector. “We have been in touch with our counterparts in New York and Louisville, but so far they have been unable to contact any members of his family. It would appear that his parents are deceased.”

  “Can you give me any idea of when a funeral can be held?”

  “Not at present,” he said. “I imagine it won’t be for a few weeks at least. Maybe his remains will need to be sent back to the United States.”

  “Don’t I decide that, as the executor of his will?” I asked.

  “Maybe,” he said. “Depends on the formal identification. But I’ll leave that up to the Coroner. In the meantime, if you think of anything else that might help us with our inquiries please call me.” He dug in his inside pocket for a card. “Use the mobile number. It’s usually on all the time, and you can leave a message if it’s not.”

  I put the card in my wallet and Chief Inspector Tomlinson collected the box of possible evidence.

  “Can I offer you a lift home?” he asked.

  “No thank you. I think I’ll have a look round here first. I can catch the bus.”

  “Don’t overdo it with that toe,” he said. “That’s what I did with mine, and it took weeks to get right.”

  “I’ll be careful,” I said with an inward smile. I would, in fact, be going in to the office and not home when I left here. “Now, how do I lock up?”

  “Ah yes,” he replied, digging into his coat pocket. “I had another key cut. We would like to hang on to one for the time being just in case we need to pop back to look through his things further.”

  “Right,” I said, taking the offered key. “Are you based down here, then? I thought you were Merseyside Police.”

  “I am,” he replied. “But I’m working on this case out of Paddington Green all this week. I will be going home on Friday.”

  “And you’ll let me know when I can start making funeral arrangements?”

  “The Liverpool Coroner will be in contact with you in due course,” he said rather unhelpfully, and then he departed, carrying his box of potential treasures under his arm.

  I sat for a while at Herb’s desk, looking again at the credit card statements.

  There were between twenty and thirty Internet gambling or online casino websites on each statement. Half of them I didn’t recognize, but their names showed what they were. One was called www.oddsandevens.net and another www.gamblehere.com. It didn’t take a genius to work it out.

  Not every statement had all the same sites, but some were on all of them, and all appeared at least half a dozen times. I started adding up. In total there were twenty-two different credit cards and five hundred and twelve different entries on the statements. The total owed was ninety-four thousand six hundred and twenty-six pounds and fifty-two pence.

  Some of the entries on all of the statements were credits, but overall the average loss per entry was a fraction under one hundred and eighty-five pounds. I checked the actual amounts against those on the handwritten lists but, as the chief inspector had said, not one of them matched.

  It wasn’t so much the amount of money that amazed me, even though it did, it was the number of different entries. Again I wondered how Herb had had the time to play or gamble online with five hundred and twelve different log-ins. I did some more mental arithmetic. Without work, eating or sleeping and spending every moment of the day for a whole month at the computer would have given him just an hour and a half on each account. It was impossible.

  I stood up and went into the kitchen.

  My mother always maintained that one could learn most about a person by looking in their fridge. Not with Herb. His fridge was starkly empty, with just a plastic carton of skim milk and a halffull tub of low-fat spread. His cupboards were almost equally bare, with a couple of boxes of breakfast cereal and half a loaf bread gone stale. On the worktop were ajar of instant coffee and two round tins with TEA and SUGAR printed on the outside and with some tea bags and granulated sugar on the inside.

  I filled the electric kettle and made myself a cup of coffee. I took it back to the desk in the living room and went on studying the credit card statements.

  I spotted that there was something else slightly odd about them.

  They didn’t all have the same name or the same address at the top.

  Some of them had this flat’s address and others the Lyall & Black office’s address in Lombard Street. Nothing too unusual about that. But the names on them also varied. Not very much, but enough for me to notice.

  I looked through them again, carefully making two piles on the desk, one for each address.

  There were eleven statements in each pile and eleven slight variations in Herb’s name: Herb Kovak, Mr. Herb E. Kovak, Herbert Kovak Esq., Mr. H. Kovak, Herbert E. Kovak, Mr. H. E. Kovak, H. E. Kovak Jr., H. Edward Kovak, Bert Kovak Jr., Herbert Edward Kovak and Mr. Bert E. Kovak.

  No two statements had the same name and address.

  Now, why did I think that was suspicious?

  I heard the key turn in the door and thought that DCI Tomlinson must have forgotten something. I was wrong.

  I went out into the hallway to find an attractive blond-haired young woman struggling through the front door with an enormous suitcase. She saw me and stopped.

  “Who the hell are you?” she demanded in a Southern American accent.

  I’d been about to ask her the same thing.

  “Nicholas Foxton,” I said. “And you?”

  “Sherri Kovak,” she said. “And where’s my damn brother?”

  There was no easy way to tell Sherri that her brother was dead, but it was the nature of his death she found most distressing.

  She sat in the big armchair and wept profusely while I made her a cup of hot sweet tea.

  In between her bouts of near hysteria, I discovered that she had arrived early that morning on an overnight flight from Chicago. She had been surprised, and rather annoyed, that Herb had not been at the airport to meet her as he had promised, but she had eventually made her own way to Hendon by train and taxi.

  “But how did you have a key to get in?” I asked her.

  “Herb gave me one when I was here last year.”

  Herb hadn’t mentioned to me last year that his sister was visiting or even that he had a sister in the first place. But why would he have? We had been work colleagues rather than close friends. He also hadn’t mentioned to me that he was a compulsive online gambler.

  I wondered if I ought to inform DCI Tomlinson that Herb K
ovak’s next of kin had turned up. Probably, but then he’d be back around here with a list of awkward questions when it was clear to me that, after a night of sitting upright on an airplane, what she needed most was a good sleep. I’d call the chief inspector later.

  I found some fresh bed linen in an airing cupboard and made up the bed in the smaller of the two bedrooms. I then guided the overtired and still-crying Miss Kovak from the living room to the bed and made her take off her shoes and lie down.

  “You sleep for a bit,” I said, covering her with a blanket. “I’ll still be here when you wake.”

  “But who are you, exactly?” she asked between sobs.

  “A friend of your brother’s,” I said. “We worked together.” I decided not to mention to her just yet that her brother had left his entire estate to me and not to her. And I wondered why that was.

  Sherri Kovak was almost asleep before her head reached the pillow. I left her there and went back to Herb’s desk and the credit card statements.

  It was gone nine o’clock, and I called the office number on my mobile. Mrs. McDowd answered.

  “It’s the man with the ingrown toenail calling in sick,” I said.

  “Shirker,” she announced with a laugh.

  “No, really,” I said. “I won’t be in the office until later. Please tell Mr. Patrick that I’m sorry but something has come up.”

  “Trouble?” she asked.

  “No,” I said. “No trouble, but something that I need to deal with.”

  I could almost feel her wanting to ask what it was. Mrs. McDowd liked to know everything about the goings-on of her staff, as she called us. She was always asking after Claudia, and she seemed to know more about my mother than I did.

  “Tell me, Mrs. McDowd,” I said in a friendly tone, “did you know that Herb Kovak had a sister?”

  “Yes, of course,” she said. “Sherri. She lives in Chicago. She and Mr. Herb were twins. She visited him last summer.”

  “Did you proffer this information to the policeman when he interviewed us all on Monday?”

  “No,” she said firmly, “I did not.”