Overall, it wasn’t very helpful. Herb had clearly set up a system that would be difficult, if not impossible, to unravel. From what I could tell from the lists and the MoneyHome payment slips, it was clear that he’d received large sums of cash from multiple sources, money he must have then used to pay the monthly balances on the twenty-two credit cards.
Herb had collected eighteen thousand dollars’ worth of pounds only the previous week, five thousand of it just the day before his death. Some of that cash must still be hidden somewhere.
My problem was that, while I had the statements showing the ninety-four thousand pounds outstanding, and, as his executor and beneficiary I was liable for the debt, I hadn’t yet found the stash of readies to pay it.
Claudia wasn’t at home when I arrived back at three-thirty. I tried her mobile, but it went straight to voice mail.
I wandered around the house, wondering what had gone wrong with our relationship.
I didn’t really understand it. The sex that morning had been as good as ever, but Claudia had been uncharacteristically quiet during and afterwards, as if her mind had been elsewhere.
I asked myself what I really wanted. Did I want to continue or was it time to draw a line and move on? Did I love her enough? How much would I miss her if she left?
Claudia and I had been together now for almost six years. I was twenty-nine, and she was three years my junior. Apart from my real concern about her weird paintings, I found the setup comfortable and fulfilling. And I was happy as things were.
Was that the problem? Did Claudia want something more from our relationship than I did? Did she perhaps now want that ring on her finger? Or maybe she had changed her view about children? But, then, surely she would have told me. I would have been delighted.
So, I concluded, it had to be me that was the problem. Claudia must have tired of me, and perhaps there was someone else already lined up to take my place. It was the only conclusion that made any sense.
I tried her mobile again, but, as before, it went straight to voice mail.
The house suddenly felt very empty, and I realized that I was lonely without Claudia here. I wandered around, looking at familiar things as if it were the first time I had seen them.
I went up to Claudia’s studio and looked at the painting she was working on, and also at two or three others leaned against the wall, waiting for the paint to dry and harden.
As always, they were dark and, to my eye, somewhat disturbed. One of them was full of bizarre flying monsters with birdlike bodies and human heads, each head with a huge open mouth full of fearsome-looking pointed teeth.
I shuddered and covered the image with another painting, this one of several identical and very beautiful women all dressed in blue ball gowns. A pretty enough sight, one might think, except these women had feet that were in fact eagle claws ripping apart the naked body of the man on whom they were standing.
Was the man meant to be me? And were the women all representations of Claudia herself? Was this how our relationship would end, with Claudia ripping me apart? I doubted it would happen quite so literally as in the picture, but emotionally she had me halfway to the funny farm already.
Once again I asked myself how such a sweet girl could paint such strange images. And I was sure they had become more bizarre and much more violent in recent months. Was there a whole side to Claudia’s character that I remained totally unaware of? But, on the whole, I believed that it was better for her to find an outlet for such strange thoughts than to keep them bottled up inside her head, with the pressure ever building towards explosive levels.
The house phone rang, and I went through to our bedroom to answer it, hoping it would be Claudia.
It wasn’t. It was Patrick.
“I’m sorry for Gregory’s outburst earlier,” he said. “He and I had a discussion, and he’s now calmed down a lot. He was just upset by what had been written in the papers.”
Not as upset as me, I thought.
“So can I come back into the office?” I asked.
“Not today,” he said rather too quickly. “Maybe on Monday, or later next week. Let the dust settle for a few days.”
“I’ll work from home, then,” I said, “using the remote-access facility.”
“Right,” Patrick said slowly. “But I agreed with Gregory that you would not be representing the firm for the immediate future.”
“And how long, exactly, is the immediate future?” I asked.
“Until he and I agree,” he said.
“Are you telling me I’m fired?”
“No, of course not,” he said. “Just that it might be better for you to take some paid holiday until the police sort out who really did try to murder Billy Searle.”
“What if they never do?” I asked.
“Let’s hope that is not the case,” he said. “I’ll call you next week. In the meantime I must ask you not to use the remote-access facility and not to contact anyone at the firm.”
Patrick disconnected without saying good-bye, no doubt pleased to have got through the conversation without me shouting at him.
I felt like shouting at someone. Everything that had been fine just a week ago was suddenly going down the tubes. I sat down on the edge of the bed, feeling more miserable than I had since the day I had been told I couldn’t ride again.
I decided that feeling sorry for myself wasn’t going to achieve anything, so I went downstairs and sat down at the kitchen table with my laptop computer.
I spent a fairly unproductive half hour looking at the six e-mails that I had forwarded to my in-box from Gregory’s, concerning the Bulgarian property development.
They were all from the same man, Uri Joram, and the first two were about the grants available to disadvantaged parts of the European Union for industrial developments that would assist in the regeneration of sites previously occupied by state-subsidized factories. Many such factories had quickly gone bust when the communist regime had collapsed and free-market competition had arrived in its place.
As far as I could make out from Mr. Joram’s rather poor grasp of written English, the EU money would only be forthcoming if there was some private investment in the project on the basis that two euros would be granted for each euro invested privately. Jolyon Roberts had told me that his family trust had invested five million pounds, so that alone could have attracted a further ten million from the European tax coffers.
But that was not all, not by a long way.
The four remaining e-mails were about funding for the homes to be constructed close to the factory to house the workers. This was to come from a different source, the EU Social Housing Fund, and required no similar two-for-one arrangement. It appeared that the new factory alone was sufficient to trigger the one hundred percent grant for the housing, which was in the region of eighty million euros.
If, as Jolyon Roberts’s nephew had implied, no houses and no factory had been built in Bulgaria, then someone somewhere had likely pocketed nearly a hundred million euros, most of it public money.
I looked closely at the e-mail addresses. The e-mails had been sent by [email protected] to [email protected], with Gregory Black being copied in. The ec.europa.eu domain indicated that Uri Joram worked in the offices of the European Commission, probably in Brussels, and I could deduce that Mr. Petrov must be in Bulgaria from the .bg extension.
It wasn’t a huge help.
I also looked at the telephone number I had copied from the Roberts Family Trust file on Gregory’s computer. I wondered if I should call it. But what good would it do? I couldn’t speak Bulgarian, and even if whoever answered could understand English, they were most unlikely to give me any information that would answer my questions.
What should I do?
It may very well have been a simple mistake made by Mr. Roberts’s nephew. He might have gone to the wrong place in Bulgaria, with the factory and the houses existing elsewhere. Surely there would have been checks made by the European Union
officials running the EU Social Housing Fund to confirm that their eighty million euros had been spent properly on bricks and mortar.
I decided that, having been asked by Jolyon Roberts to look into it, I couldn’t just do nothing, so I sent a short e-mail to Dimitar Petrov, asking him to send me the names and addresses of the directors of the Balscott Lighting Factory if he had them.
By the time I realized that sending the e-mail was possibly not such a good idea if Mr. Petrov himself was one of those involved in the potential hundred-million-euro fraud, it was well on its way and there was no bringing it back.
It couldn’t do any harm, could it?
I closed my computer and looked at the clock. It was a quarter to five, so I made myself a cup of tea.
I couldn’t help but notice that Claudia had left her latest mobile phone bill lying on the worktop right next to the kettle. And I also couldn’t resist the temptation to look at it.
I suppose I was looking for numbers I didn’t recognize that she had called regularly. There was one, with calls almost every day for the past two weeks, and often more than once a day.
Now what did I do? Did I call the number and demand to know who had been talking so often to my girl? No, of course I didn’t. But I copied the number into my mobile phone just in case I changed my mind.
Claudia arrived home at five-thirty, and I resisted the temptation to ask her where she had been and why her phone had been switched off.
“Why aren’t you at the office?” she asked.
“Patrick sent me home,” I said. “Gregory seems to think I’ve brought the company into disrepute. Patrick thinks it would be best for me to have some time off, to stay away from the office, just to let the dust settle.”
“But that’s ridiculous,” she said. “The police let you go. You have a cast-iron alibi.”
“I know that, and you know that,” I replied crossly. “But you know what most people are like, they believe what they read.”
“Those bloody newspapers,” she said with feeling. “They shouldn’t be allowed to give out people’s names before they’re charged.”
Or even convicted, I thought. But I also knew the police were secretly quite keen for the names of those accused to be released early so that potential witnesses would come forward.
“Patrick says it will all blow over in a few days,” I said. “He thinks people will forget.”
“I hope he’s right,” she said.
So did I.
“Did you get your dress?” I asked.
“What dress?” she said.
“Come on, darling,” I said, slightly irritated. “You know. The one you were going to buy for the opening night on Wednesday.”
“Oh, that,” she said, clearly distracted. “Perhaps I’ll go tomorrow. Something came up this afternoon.”
I didn’t like to think what, so I didn’t ask.
“How long did Patrick say you had to stay away from the office?” Claudia asked into the silence.
“Maybe a week,” I said, wondering if she was asking for reasons other than worries over my reputation and career. “Perhaps I’ll go to the races instead.”
“Great idea,” she said. “Give your mind a rest from all those figures.”
Perhaps it was time to start looking at figures of a different kind.
9
On Saturday afternoon I put on my thick skin and went to Sandown Park Races on the train from Waterloo.
“Bloody hell,” said Jan Setter. “I didn’t expect to see you here. I thought you’d been sent to the Tower.”
“Not quite,” I said.
I was standing on the grass close to the parade ring, near the statue of the horse Special Cargo.
“Did you do it?” Jan asked in all seriousness.
“No, of course I didn’t,” I said. “The police wouldn’t have let me go if they still thought I’d tried to kill Billy. I have an alibi.”
“Who did do it, then?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “But it wasn’t me.”
“Blimey,” she said. “Then there’s still a would-be murderer out there on the loose.”
“Lots of them,” I said. “Not just Billy’s but Herb Kovak’s too.”
“Who’s Herb Kovak?” she asked.
“Chap who was shot at Aintree last Saturday,” I said. “He was a colleague of mine at work.”
“Did you kill him then?”
“Jan,” I said forcefully, “I didn’t kill anyone, or try to. OK?”
“Then why were you arrested?”
I sighed. People, even good friends, really did believe what they read in the papers. “Someone told the police that Billy had shouted at me at Cheltenham, demanding to know why I was going to murder him. They put two and two together and made five. That’s all. They got it wrong.”
“So why did Billy shout at you?”
“It was to do with his investments,” I said.
Jan raised a questioning eyebrow.
“It’s confidential,” I said. “You wouldn’t want me telling everyone about your investments, now would you?”
“No,” she agreed. “But then I haven’t been deliberately knocked off my bike.”
“That’s a fair point, but confidentiality rules still apply,” I said. “Severely injured or not, he’s still my client.”
Mind you, I thought, there was a limit to confidentiality.
The Wiltshire Police had called me on Friday evening to make an appointment, and I had spent time with two of their number earlier, going over in minute detail all the events of Tuesday and Wednesday at Cheltenham Races, with particular reference to Billy Searle’s investments.
“Was it true that you owe Mr. Searle over a hundred thousand pounds?” one of them had asked me as his opening shot.
“No,” I’d replied calmly. “Not personally. I’m a financial adviser and Billy Searle is a client of mine, which means I manage the investment of his money. In total, he has about a hundred and fifty thousand invested through me, and he told me on Tuesday that he urgently wanted all his money out in cash. He became very distressed and angry when I told him it would take a few days to realize the cash through the sale of his stocks and shares.”
“Why do you think Mr. Searle needed such a large sum so quickly?” the other policeman had asked.
“He told me he owed some guy a hundred thousand and he needed to pay it back by Wednesday night at the very latest, or else.”
“Or else what?” they’d both asked in unison.
“Billy seemed frightened, and when I told him that his money wouldn’t be in his bank until Friday, he said he hoped he would still be alive by Friday.”
“Those were his exact words?”
“Pretty much,” I’d said.
“Did he give you any indication who this guy was?”
“None, but he was clearly terrified of him. Why don’t you ask Billy?”
“Mr. Searle is in a critical condition,” one of them had replied.
“He has severe head injuries, and it is far from certain yet whether he will ever recover consciousness.”
How dreadful, I thought. Billy had survived all those racing falls over all those years only to have head injuries due to someone knocking him off his bike. It didn’t seem fair.
“I wouldn’t have thought that knocking someone off their bicycle was a very sure way of killing them,” I’d said. “How would someone know he would be riding his bike at that time?”
“Mr. Searle rode his bicycle to Lambourn every day at the same time. Apparently, it was part of his fitness regime, and well known. And the car seems to have struck him with considerable force.”
“Yes, but, even so, it is not as certain as a shooting.” I had been thinking of Herb the previous Saturday. “Are you sure it was attempted murder?”
“We are treating the attack as attempted murder,” one of them had replied rather unhelpfully.
Yes, I’d thought, but that didn’t necessarily make it so.
“Positive,” I’d said. “All Billy told me was that he owed the money to some guy.”
But why would you try to kill someone because they owed you money? Then there would be no chance of getting it back. Maybe the attack had meant to be a warning, or a reminder to pay up, and had simply gone too far. Or had it been a message to others: Pay up or else—just as Billy had been afraid of.
“The Racing Post seems to have implied it was a bookmaker.”
“I think that was probably speculation on their part,” I’d said. “Billy never mentioned anything like that to me. In fact, he said that he couldn’t tell me why he owed the money.”
“So why did he claim that it was you who was murdering him?”
“I now realize that he must have believed he might be murdered because I couldn’t get his money together by Wednesday night and it would therefore be my fault if he was killed. But obviously I didn’t think that at the time.”
The two policemen had then effectively asked me the same questions over and over again in slightly different ways, and I had answered them each time identically, with patience and good grace.
Eventually, after more than an hour, they had been satisfied that I had nothing else to tell them and had gone away, but not before they’d had a close inspection of my car to see if there were any dents or scratches caused by Billy Searle’s bicycle. So much for my alibi.
As soon as they had gone, I had rushed away from home, just making it to Sandown in time for the first race. I’d had to endure a few stares on my way into the racetrack, together with a few indelicate and abusive comments, but, even so, it felt good to be in a familiar environment, as well as free in the fresh air.
It would have been better still if I’d been riding.
“Do you have any runners today?” I asked Jan. At least I could be certain that, this time, she hadn’t come to the races just to see me.
“One in the big chase,” she said. “Ed’s Charger. Not much chance but the owner insisted.” She rolled her eyes up into her head, and I laughed. “Still got your sense of humor, then?”
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