Last Reminder

by Stuart Pawson

  ‘Yes. Are you familiar with her?’

  ‘Only from the painting.’ I did a thesis on it at college. Turner, the painter, was the true father of impressionism, but he doesn’t get the credit.

  ‘She was second in the line at Trafalgar. Avenged Nelson’s death. It’s said that…’

  ‘Is there a Mrs Eastwood, sir?’ Sparky interrupted.

  ‘Oh, er, no. Well, yes there is, but not here. We were divorced not long ago.’

  ‘Pardon me for asking,’ Sparky told him, ‘but women are often more observant about these things than we mere males.’

  ‘Yes. Yes, I can understand that, but I’m afraid I live quite alone.’

  I said, ‘Have you ever heard anything about any particular dealings he made that might have brought about his downfall? Anything at all? And if it was other people’s money he was losing, why has he been declared bankrupt?’

  He shook his head. ‘I really don’t know, Inspector, but he had his fingers into all sorts of schemes. I don’t envy you, having to unravel the mess he’s in. It’s true about the bankruptcy, though. It was in the papers, and he had a brief mention on the consumer programme on Radio Four.’

  I’d been hoping that Eastwood might have pointed us in the right direction, or any direction. Now we’d have to rely on the Fraud Squad, and they could take months. Unless, of course, one of the names in the filing cabinets could help us.

  I thanked Mr Eastwood for his cooperation and said we’d no doubt have to consult him again. He seemed quite pleased at the prospect. Funny how the right choice of words can create a favourable impression. If I’d suggested that we’d like him to help us with our enquiries he’d have been scared witless.

  The photographers had finished and the SOCOs had moved to other parts of the house, so we had the run of the kitchen. The pathologist was informed and the police surgeon came to confirm that life was extinct.

  We have a new lady pathologist. When she arrived we shook hands and I told her my name. ‘DI Charlie Priest,’ I said.

  ‘Professor Simms,’ she replied.

  Sometimes, I prefer working with the opposite sex, although my reasons aren’t anything to do with their competence, efficiency, or anything else revolving around ability. That’s evenly shared between the genders. It’s because usually they have softer voices. This is a grubby job, and a gentle voice, at the right time, might be all that makes it bearable.

  She had a quick look at the overall attitude of the body, then knelt on the floor to see up at his face.

  ‘Handsome enough, for his age,’ she said, pulling at an eyelid with her thumb.

  ‘The sort of face you’d trust?’ I wondered aloud.

  ‘Mmm. Why do you ask?’

  ‘Apparently he was some sort of financial adviser.’

  She took his temperature with a thermometer in his mouth and used another for the room temperature. When they had him on the slab they’d stick one up his bottom. The doc examined all his limbs, loosened his shirt to look at his torso, smelt where his breath would have been, if he’d had any.

  I needed confirmation of cause of death, and a rough estimate of its time, quick as possible. The prof looked puzzled, and kept returning to the wound on Goodrich’s head. I knew she wouldn’t be hurried, so I left her to it.

  Maggie was still out talking to neighbours, while Sparky and Jeff Caton, who’d just arrived, were looking at files in the office. I studied the place, taking in the machinery and devices of modern-day commerce. However did we manage without them all? This office had everything. Until it all went wrong. He’d filed for bankruptcy six months ago, and that was the last filing he’d attempted. Since then all the paperwork that came into the office had been piled on the desks and in the brightly coloured trays. The reason was obvious.

  ‘He had a secretary,’ I announced.

  The two of them turned to me.

  ‘He had a secretary until he went bankrupt, then she had to go. Find her, then maybe she can help us with this lot. Failing that, we’ll have to bring Luke in to crack his computer.’ Luke was a civilian nerd who talks to computers like some people talk to their hairdressers. ‘We need a complete list of his clients. That should give us something to start on.’

  ‘Just sorting a few out to be going on with, boss,’ Sparky told me.

  ‘Good. Find a couple of local ones for me to visit. Jeff, you have a look at his diary, and see if you can find an address book. We need his secretary, pronto. Not to mention next of kin.’

  ‘Inspector?’

  I turned round to find the professor looking round the door. She said, ‘Time of death, late yesterday. Say between four and midnight. Can’t be more precise than that, I’m afraid.’

  ‘And the cause?’ I asked.

  She gave me a weak smile. ‘Contradictory indications. For the time being let’s say it was the blow on the head. There are no other marks on the body. Sorry, but we’ll know better when we open him up. I’ve finished with him here, so you can arrange for his removal.’

  ‘Right, Professor. Thank you.’

  ‘There is one thing I’d like to show you. It might be interesting, but on the other hand it might be nothing.’

  I followed her through into the kitchen. Goodrich was still more or less as I’d seen him earlier, slumped forward with one hand on the chair arm, the other in his lap, fist clenched.

  ‘Look here,’ the professor said, taking his fist. She pointed with the tip of her pen into the circle made by his thumb and first finger. ‘He’s holding something.’

  I could see the end of a piece of clear plastic, or maybe Cellophane.

  ‘Do you want to retrieve it now?’ she asked.

  I nodded. ‘Yes, please. Might as well.’

  I held the rigid arm while she prised his fingers open. Slowly a piece of plastic, a couple of inches long by half-an-inch wide was revealed. It fell into my gloved hand and I peered at it.

  ‘How about that?’ I said after a few seconds, holding it towards the doctor.

  ‘Wowee!’ she gasped, under her breath. ‘Is it real?’

  ‘I wouldn’t know,’ I confessed. I’d only ever bought one, and that ended in disaster.

  It was a little transparent package, thermo-sealed to avoid tampering. At one end was what looked like a frame of microfilm, and at the other a piece of paper with some numbers and letters on it.

  In the middle was the biggest diamond I’d ever seen.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Colonel Bartlett was a wiry little man with a wiry moustache and a grizzled wire-haired terrier following him around, as if attached to his ankle by a very short lead. Sparky had found the colonel’s file in Goodrich’s cabinets and, as he lived less than a mile away, I’d come round to see what he could tell me. His wife, who I felt an overwhelming urge to call Lady Bartlett, although I suppose she was a mere Mrs, placed a delicate tea-cup and saucer on the table alongside me, with a matching plate holding a couple of pieces of that cake that looks like a chequered flag with marzipan round the edge. If he was wiry, you could have cut cheese with her.

  ‘Thank you. That’s most welcome,’ I said.

  ‘Dead, did you say?’ the colonel asked. The dog had left his ankle and come to sniff at mine. We were sitting in flowery easy chairs in their pleasant front room. A large regimental photograph hung above the fireplace, and on the sideboard was one of Bartlett himself, looking remarkably Errol Flynnish. Mrs Bartlett, the niceties of hospitality accomplished, perched on his chair arm.

  ‘Yes, sir. I’m afraid so. You weren’t close to him in any way, were you?’

  ‘No. Not at all. Business only. And bad bladdy business at that, if you ask me.’

  ‘That’s exactly what I do want to ask you about. First of all, though, can I ask you to treat this conversation as confidential, as we haven’t found any next of kin yet?’

  ‘Of course, Inspector. Mum’s the word.’

  Mrs Bartlett nodded her agreement. The dog was definitely interested in my l
eft ankle. I noticed that it had grown an erection, so I pulled my feet against the chair. It’s difficult to conduct a serious interview with a terrier shagging your leg.

  ‘At the moment,’ I began, ‘we’re treating his death as suspicious.’

  ‘You mean…murder?’

  ‘Possibly, although not necessarily.’

  ‘Oh my God!’ Mrs Bartlett wailed. I’d have thought army wives were made of sterner stuff.

  ‘Can’t say I’m surprised,’ Bartlett declared. ‘Might have done it myself, a few years ago.’

  She was ahead of him. ‘Does this mean,’ she asked, ‘that we are…suspects?’

  ‘Please,’ I said, holding my hands up in a gesture of appeasement. ‘We have no suspects, so, in a way, everybody is a suspect. At the moment I am only interested in investigating Goodrich’s affairs. All I know about him is that he was some sort of financial adviser. I plucked your name from the files because you are nearby, and I hoped you might be able to fill me in with some details about his business dealings.’

  ‘Oh, we can do that,’ Bartlett declared, unable to hide the bitterness that my visit had resurrected. ‘We can certainly do that.’

  They had £70,000 invested with Goodrich – most of their life savings. Someone at the golf club had introduced him, and at first things had gone fairly well.

  ‘To be fair to him, it was a bad time,’ Bartlett said. ‘The recession, you know.’

  I nodded sympathetically, although I’ve never understood how the whole world could be in recession at the same time. Unless recession is a virus, like Asian flu.

  He continued. ‘He put our money in various bonds, PEPs, stuff like that. All High Street names, and we had steady returns, although they were quite small. Then, one evening, he came round on his regular visit and suggested it was time we made our portfolio work for us. He was a dynamic bugger, I’ll say that for him. Would’ve made a bladdy good colour sergeant.’

  ‘So what did he suggest?’ I asked.

  ‘Diamonds,’ he growled.

  ‘Diamonds?’ This was what I was looking for.

  ‘Investment diamonds, to be precise,’ Mrs Bartlett informed us.

  ‘So you transferred your savings into these diamonds, on his suggestion?’

  ‘Yes, but not all of it, thank God,’ the colonel replied. He anticipated the next question. ‘We bought three, at just over one carat each. Cost us thirty thousand altogether.’

  ‘So what went wrong? Didn’t they exist?’

  ‘Oh, they existed all right. They did quite nicely to start with – looked as if they’d double their value in about five or six years. Then one day, completely out of the blue, a letter came from a firm of lawyers acting on behalf of the official receiver. It said that the company who supplied the diamonds, called IGI – International Gem Investments – were bankrupt, and we qualified as creditors. Eighteen months later all we’ve found out is that our diamonds are worth approximately one tenth of what we paid for them.’

  I took a sip of tea and, trying not to attract the dog’s attention, stretched out my legs. I had cramp in them. ‘So what went wrong?’ I asked. ‘Were they selling the stones to more than one person?’ That’s a well-tried scam, used with everything from armaments to…Zimmer frames. You prove you possess something, maybe a boatload of Italian wine that is going cheap because your brother-in-law works in the excise office, show the punters round it, supply them with samples and all the paperwork, but do the same thing with ten other people.

  Bartlett rose to his feet. ‘I’ll fetch the bumf, let you see for yourself.’

  When he’d gone I asked Mrs Bartlett if the rest of their money was safe.

  ‘Yes, thank God,’ she told me, ‘but we’re not receiving any income from it. Low interest rates sound a good idea, until you’re depending on your savings. Poor Gerald’s taken it badly. Blames himself. Always thought he was a good judge of a man’s character. Now he works three days a week as a groundsman at the golf club. We should have been…’ She produced a tissue from within the folds of her dress and blew her nose. I’m sorry, forgive me.’

  ‘It’s all right,’ I murmured, awkwardly.

  Bartlett returned and handed me a sheaf of documents, some glossy, some photocopied.

  ‘Here we are,’ he said. ‘Have a look at that lot. Some from Goodrich, saying what a fine deal they were, some copied from various financial magazines, whose advice was bordering on the criminal, and some nice glossy brochures from IGI.’

  I pulled out a glossy and started reading. In times of recession, it said, people the world over looked for more traditional investments to safeguard their wealth. Like gold, or, it suggested, diamonds. In a typical year enough diamonds were mined to fill an average-size skip. Ninety per cent of these would be industrial grade, used for making machine tools. Eight per cent would be gemstones, used in the jewellery trade, and the remaining few, the very best, would be snapped up by investors.

  My left leg felt warm. I lowered the papers and looked down. The dog had jumped it while I wasn’t looking. Rover didn’t know what danger he was in – I used to take penalties with my left foot. I snatched it back, placed it hard against the front of my chair and pressed my feet together for mutual protection. The stones in this two per cent, the leaflet continued, would be measured for weight, colour, clarity and cut, and then each one sealed in a package with a piece of microfilm containing its exact description. That sounded like what Goodrich was clutching when he died. The price of diamonds, it assured the reader, had not gone down in sixty years.

  As I finished the brochure and put it to the back of the bundle I was holding, Bartlett said, ‘Except, it’s all bladdy balderdash.’

  ‘Can I borrow these?’ I asked.

  ‘Of course. Anything to help.’

  ‘Thanks. So what’s balderdash?’

  ‘All that about investment diamonds. There’s no such thing. It’s nonsense. IGI dreamt up the whole scheme. While they were selling plenty everything appeared pukka gen, but as soon as a few people tried to cash in, the whole damn plot fell through. We were investing in IGI, not in diamonds.’

  ‘But you’re happy that they exist?’ I queried.

  ‘Oh yes, but what we paid ten grand each for could have been bought for less than one in any bladdy souk in the world.’

  ‘Do you still hold them?’

  ‘No, we never held them. They’re all in a bank on the Isle of Man.’

  ‘So you’ve never even seen them?’

  ‘No, but the diamonds are there. The receiver is trying to allocate them to the various investors at the moment. Only problem is, their value is as what they call collectibles. You know, jewellery. Might make a decent pair of earrings for her and a tie pin for me. If I could get my hands on the scoundrels, I’d…I’d…’

  His face started to glow like my ceramic hob does when I forget to turn it off. Mrs Bartlett put her hand on his shoulder and he covered it with his own. ‘Don’t upset yourself, Gerald,’ she murmured to him.

  ‘No, try not to upset yourself. And for what it’s worth, it looks as if someone did get their hands on Goodrich. What about safeguards?’ I asked. ‘Didn’t you make sure he was a member of the appropriate governing bodies?’

  ‘Of course we did,’ Bartlett replied indignantly. ‘He was a member of everything. More bladdy initials after his name than Saddam Hussein. And all as bladdy worthless. Washed their hands of us. Said we should have read the small print.’

  I offered words of sympathy and stood up to leave, thanking them for their assistance and Mrs Bartlett for the tea. I hadn’t touched the cake. ‘One last thing,’ I said. ‘Could you let me have the name of the receiver who’s handling the bankruptcy? It might be useful to have a word with him. If I find anything, I’ll let you know.’

  While I waited for the colonel to fetch the information the dog leapt up into the chair I’d vacated, rolled on to one side and started licking its cock. They do it because they can.

  The
next couple Sparky had found for me were an even sadder story. He’d worked as a window cleaner all his life and was now an invalid, crippled with arthritis and emphysema. They’d had twelve thousand pounds invested with Goodrich, doing reasonably well in General Accident, but he’d persuaded them to buy a couple of small diamonds with it and they were now poorer and wiser. Thirty English winters of climbing ladders and squeezing a washleather, with nothing to show for it but ill health. There was no doubt about it, Goodrich had left a long wide trail of heartbreak and anger in his wake. The enquiry was four hours old, and we had enough genuine suspects to crew a quinquereme of Nineveh.

  I needed a break, so I fished the mobile out of the glove box and dialled my favourite number. After three rings a soft, warm voice confirmed that I’d got it right.

  ‘It’s Charlie,’ I said, ‘desperately in need of a friend. Any idea where I might find one?’

  ‘Sorry,’ she replied in a comic voice, ‘we’re not doing friends today. Today, friends is off,’

  Annabelle Wilberforce is built like a beanpole, with short fair hair and a smile that flakes granite. Once, she lived in Africa, where she witnessed the atrocities of the civil war in Biafra. From there she moved to Kenya and married a man who became a bishop. He died of cancer, and now she hangs about with me.

  ‘Oh, that’s a shame,’ I said, lamely. I wasn’t really in the mood to be half of a comedy double act.

  ‘We can do fish fingers,’ she declared, in the same silly voice. ‘Or even fish arms, fish legs, or a nice piece of rump fish. Fish is definitely on.’

  ‘Wait!’ I shouted into the phone. ‘What’s got into you? Can a man find a sensible conversation round here?’

  ‘Sorry, Charles,’ she said in her normal voice. ‘I thought you said you wanted cheering up.’

  ‘No, I said I needed a friend.’

  ‘Oh, well, I’m the one you want. My middle name is Abacus.’

  ‘Abacus?’

  ‘That’s right – you can count on me.’

  I put my hand over the mouthpiece so she couldn’t hear me chuckling. When I’d recovered I said, ‘Is it possible for us to have a normal man-to-man talk without all these silly comments and second-rate impersonations?’