Illegal Tender (Three Oaks Book 12)

by Gerald Hammond

  ‘Rather more than that. There was about two and a half thousand in the account before she made the deposit.’

  ‘Oh dear!’ Ralph said with remarkable mildness. ‘And the money has gone beyond recall?’

  ‘It looks that way. It seems to be part of an international series. Other instances are being investigated by the police, in London and elsewhere, without any real success. Ian Fellowes is going to have our case added to the others. If it turns out that ours is among the biggest losses, we may go to the front of the queue. But the chances of recovering anything would seem to be very slim, if that.’

  ‘And there’s nobody whom we can sue on grounds of negligence?’

  ‘She could sue herself.’

  Ralph considered the idea for a few moments. To a lawyer, the idea of unnecessary and hopeless litigation has a certain attraction. Reluctantly, he pushed the idea aside. ‘This is not an occasion for levity,’ he said stiffly. He always regarded heavy-handed humour as his own perquisite.

  ‘Nobody else is to blame except the criminal,’ I said. ‘And I suggest that you refrain from rubbing Elizabeth’s nose in her folly. She has been calling herself all the names under the sun since we discovered the loss and she needs her confidence bolstered rather than damaged further.’

  He nodded wisely. ‘I understand,’ he said. ‘And it would shortly have been her own money, to dissipate as she saw fit. I may look at her askance, whatever that means — I shall probably have to practise in front of a mirror — but not a word of rebuke shall pass my lips. And what are we doing in the way of what I believe they call ‘damage limitation’?’

  ‘I was doing some arithmetic this morning,’ I told him. ‘The stock market’s still in one of its nosedives at the moment. Unless there’s a shift in the market, the least expensive option in the short term would be to borrow at the most favourable rate I can find. I’m looking at other disposable assets. There are, for instance, a number of unwanted antiques stored about the place. Mostly bonfire material, I expect, but you never know.’

  When deep in thought, Ralph was given to pursing his lips in a way that reminded me of a beginner learning to whistle. I watched, intrigued as usual, while he puckered up. ‘You might,’ he said at last, ‘be able to negotiate a delayed settlement for the Agrotechnics shares if that agent — Cowieson, is it? — were to cough up. Let him be the one to pay interest. Or am I wrong?’

  ‘You’re right,’ I said, ‘but —’

  Ralph was in no mood for buts. He waved them aside with an airy gesture. ‘I’m told that he’s on the way here and that he sounded quite cheerful. Perhaps he’s raised the money. If not, perhaps the time has come for you to lean on him a little harder?’ Ralph glanced at his watch. ‘I must say that he’s taking his time.’

  ‘You’d better hear my other news,’ I said. ‘Where’s Elizabeth?’

  ‘Our ward and her husband went through to the study to try to make sense of their immediate cash flow. Wages have to be paid and bills settled. And the bank will have to be warned of any outstanding cheques, direct debits and mandates. Overdraft facilities will have to be arranged.’ Ralph sighed deeply. ‘There is going to be a great deal of extra work entailed,’ he added as gloomily as though he was going to have to do some of it himself.

  ‘So far,’ I said firmly, ‘we may only have scratched the surface. There is an added complication. I have been trying to tell you that Mr Cowieson will not be joining us. I found his crashed car an hour ago, with him inside it. I think we can safely assume that he’s dead.’

  This time, Ralph combined his pursing of the lips with a sharp intake of breath so that he produced a piercing whistle which surprised even himself. He blinked and decided to pretend that the sound had never happened. ‘In law,’ he said, ‘the company remains unchanged and business continues as before. It would not be seemly, however, to foreclose instantly on his heir or heirs. Who would that be?’

  ‘Probably his son, Miles.’

  ‘One would suppose so. Speaking as one who acted on behalf of Mr Cowieson in more than one paternity case, I am not aware that he made a will; but he lived in his own little world, heedless of the consequences of his actions, and it would not be surprising if he had made bequests totalling far more than the value of his unencumbered estate. My first guess would be that the Cowieson debt will take some weeks to resolve. Oh my God!’

  ‘What?’ I said.

  ‘It has occurred to me that he may have made a will for himself on a form from the post office.’

  ‘Is that so bad?’ I asked.

  ‘I have no objection in principle,’ he said. ‘It almost invariably leads to complications providing profitable work for my profession for months or even years. No, the fear in my mind was that he might, quite without my permission, have named me as his executor. Imagine the possible conflicts of interest!’

  ‘You could refuse to act.’

  ‘I suppose so. Ah well, it may never happen.’ He blinked benignly at me. ‘The debt is, of course, your concern as a director of Agrotechnics and reflects only indirectly on our problem with the Ilwands. Or is there any chance of Agrotechnics delaying its payments to the building contractor and giving us a little more time?’

  ‘Not one single hope in hell,’ I said. ‘Read the Standard Form of Building Contract some time. That would be more expensive than borrowing from a usurer. I’ll get us a better deal than that. How long do we want the money for?’

  We spent the next hour going through the figures. To our relief, we found that Peter Hay’s estate was inconspicuously larded with disposable investments — shares in little known but profitable companies purchased as a gamble or as a favour to a friend, minor real estate, sporting rights to land long since sold. There were also the antiques which Elizabeth had told me were stored in the attic and outbuildings. The figures and timing were, for the moment, little more than inspired guesswork; but expressed as a discounted cash flow of the foreseeable income to the estate, even if it proved possible to dispose of only half those assets at realistic values, against the inescapable outgoings, the light at the end of the tunnel was not so very far distant. ‘Right,’ I said at last. ‘We want to borrow half the shortfall for three months and the rest until July of next year. I’ll get on to it tomorrow.’

  ‘That’s settled then. Now perhaps we should apprise our ward of what we have agreed.’

  Before we moved through to the study, I phoned for Hamish. He did not answer personally — presumably he was doing his belated rounds or else still wrestling with his sworn enemy the game dealer — but I left a message on his answering machine. He must have come through his door while I was speaking, because he called me back before we had got to our feet. I reported on the one pheasant and the state of his feed-hoppers and traps and told him that Spin was awaiting him at the house. He would hear about the death of Maurice Cowieson soon enough.

  In the study Elizabeth and Duncan were sitting before the computer screen, although neither seemed to have the spirit to look at it. There was an atmosphere in the room, as if the occupants were sick of talking, sick of each other, sick of life itself.

  ‘Mr Cowieson still hasn’t come,’ Elizabeth said dully. ‘He doesn’t give a damn about keeping people waiting.’ She shot a barbed glance at Ralph Enterkin. He was a frequent offender in that respect. ‘Just for that,’ she added, ‘I’m going to knock a week off the time we were going to allow him for settlement.’

  I realized guiltily that she would have been awaiting the agent for several hours, quite unaware that he would never arrive. I wondered how to break the news and decided to be blunt. ‘Don’t blame him too much,’ I said at last. ‘He made it almost to your gates, but there I’m afraid he ran out of road. He went over the drop above the Den Burn near where the Number One peg was placed yesterday. I think he’s dead.’

  Her new responsibilities seemed to have induced a softening in Elizabeth. She put aside her own troubles for a moment. ‘Poor man!’ she said. ‘And how awful
for his son! I must phone him.’

  ‘I don’t suppose that the son knows yet,’ I said. ‘He was going to go away for a few days but, even if he’s back or he hasn’t left yet, he may not have heard and you wouldn’t want to be the one to break the news. Leave it until he’s been informed.’ My own feeling was that Cowieson Junior might not be altogether desolated and I might not altogether blame him, but there was no immediate need to say so.

  ‘All right. What are we going to do about it?’

  ‘Nothing, until it’s confirmed,’ I said. ‘Then we’ll need an Agrotechnics board meeting. He may not be dead. If he’s in a coma, we may have an even bigger problem. But that isn’t what we want to talk to you about. That’s Agrotechnics business and your problems are our more immediate concern. We’ve been discussing how to bridge the financial gap. I have some tentative figures here . . .’

  We went over the figures in some detail with Elizabeth and a reluctant Duncan. I was relieved to discover that the miniatures hanging in the sitting room had no sentimental value but had been a bequest to Elizabeth from an uncle who had bought them out of a house clearance. With minor amendments, the figures were agreed and we drew up a list of assets. After some argument we also agreed who would make the opening moves towards the sale of each.

  Elizabeth was still worried. She tapped my page of figures with a short but manicured fingernail. ‘But what do we do about paying for the Agrotechnics shares until we can turn all this into cash? There’s still a big shortfall. Will the bank give us that much of an overdraft?’

  ‘They’d probably be delighted to,’ I said, ‘but the rate of interest would be crippling. Leave it with me. There’s always money somewhere, put by for a deal that won’t come off for a few months by somebody who’ll be delighted if it earns a fraction over the bank rate.’

  I would have been happy to expound for a little longer, now that we had moved into what had once been my field of expertise, but we heard the distant sound of the doorbell. Elizabeth got to her feet. ‘I’d better go,’ she said. ‘Mary’s on a day off and Joanna will be trying to cope with dinner on her own.’

  She left the room but returned in less than a minute, looking flustered. ‘It’s Ian Fellowes,’ she told me. ‘Detective Inspector Fellowes, I should say — he’s obviously on duty and there’s another officer with him. They want to see you in private. Whatever have you been up to?’

  I nearly laughed but it was not a subject for mirth. ‘I found Maurice Cowieson’s car down in the gully with him in it.’

  She looked at me with her eyes wide. ‘Oh. I didn’t know that you’d been the one who found him. You never said. How horrid for you!’ She gave a gentle shudder. ‘I don’t know what I’d have done if I’d suddenly come across a body, especially if it had been somebody I knew. I’ve put them in the sitting room.’ She looked at her watch. ‘I suppose they’re on duty, but help yourself to a drink if you feel like it.’

  Ralph struggled to his feet from the low couch. ‘I’ll take my leave,’ he said to me, ‘if you don’t want me to hold your hand and protect you from the bully-boys of the Establishment.’ (Elizabeth flinched. She had once used that expression in the hearing of Ralph Enterkin and he had no intention of allowing her to forget it.) ‘And I shall make enquiries about the sale of the properties in Church Street.’ He managed to imply that he was undertaking the lion’s share of the work before us.

  I thanked Elizabeth hastily for the offer of the drink, excused myself and crossed the wide hall to the sitting room. Ian Fellowes was standing by the window. Instead of his usual tweeds he was wearing corduroys and a poloneck and I guessed that he had been fetched away from his gardening. The very young man with him was more formally dressed but also in plain clothes. Ian introduced him as DC Brand.

  ‘I can guess what this is about,’ I said as we took seats. ‘Maurice Cowieson.’

  Ian gave me an affirmative nod and another to his companion, who produced a notebook and pencil. ‘Suppose you tell us about it,’ Ian said.

  I gave DC Brand my name and home address for the record. ‘Mr Cowieson was expected here,’ I said. ‘There was a message on the answering machine to say that he was coming. In fact, he asked to see me, but it was virtually certain that what he wanted to talk about was Agrotechnics business and Mrs Ilwand has an equal interest in the matter. She’s as much a director as I am. As you know, her self-confidence got a bit of a jolt yesterday, so I left it to her to see him. I thought that conducting an interview while in a dominant position might reassure her.’

  ‘Can we hear this message?’

  ‘She erased it,’ I said. ‘I saw her. I’m sorry.’ The atmosphere went from cosy to frosty. From his face, Ian was displeased. ‘In future,’ I said, ‘you can tell us which messages are going to be vital information and we’ll preserve them. Otherwise, they’ll just have to take their chances.’

  ‘All right,’ Ian snapped. ‘All right. No need to be sarcastic. I know that there was no attempt to hide evidence — it’s just frustrating when such messages get wiped off. Did he sound drunk?’

  I thought back. ‘Difficult to tell from a recorded message over the phone,’ I said. ‘The phone does distort voices and he had that sort of harsh voice that doesn’t express very much. On the whole, I think not. Or not very. You can ask Mrs Ilwand.’

  ‘I will. Why was he coming? What was this dominant position?’

  That question called for more thought. Financial affairs treble and more in importance from being bruited abroad. ‘This is in confidence unless you really have to spill the beans,’ I said. Both officers nodded solemnly. ‘Mrs Ilwand and I are both directors of Agrotechnics. Mr Cowieson’s business was retailing agricultural equipment and most of his business was in Agrotechnics products. He had built up a serious debt to Agrotechnics and had been given a deadline for reducing it. He claimed to be looking for financial backing elsewhere. He may have been bringing good news or he may have intended to ask for an extension of time. We don’t know. Probably one or the other — and you may be better able to infer which as details of his business emerge.’

  ‘If it’s irrelevant we won’t shout it from the rooftops,’ Ian said, ‘but I’ll be amazed if it doesn’t come out. Did his voice sound depressed?’

  ‘Not that I noticed. Certainly not suicidal.’

  Ian looked at me for a few seconds and then moved on. ‘So you decided to leave him to Mrs Ilwand and then went and found his body. Not the first body that you’ve stumbled on around these parts.’

  ‘The second — Sir Peter Hay’s was the first,’ I said. ‘And neither of them from choice. He is dead, then? I couldn’t be sure.’

  ‘Yes,’ Ian said. ‘He’s dead.’

  ‘I thought as much. My arrival was quite by chance. You can ask Hamish.’ I explained how I came to be in the right place at the right time.

  Ian could hardly have married into his wife’s family without learning a great deal about shooting. He was now a keen member of the Calder family syndicate. I could see that he accepted my explanation. ‘Tell me what you saw and did,’ he said.

  ‘It was the dog that led me to the car,’ I said. ‘He came out of the cover and I could see that he was puzzled and anxious so I followed him. The car was standing on its nose against the bank. The driver’s door was still shut but his window was down. The driver seemed to be dead. He was lying forward against the still partly inflated air bag. His head was badly damaged but I recognized Maurice Cowieson. I could feel warmth radiated from the car’s engine, so it had happened not long before.’

  ‘Did you touch him? Or the car?’

  ‘Only to put two fingers on his wrist.’ I paused. There was something else . . . ‘Oh, and I turned off the ignition, in case of a fire. I couldn’t feel any pulse. His injuries looked severe enough to be fatal, but you can’t always be sure. If there was still any life, I knew that anything I could do on the spot might make matters worse. I used my mobile phone, called the emergency services and then found
a place where I could climb the bank so that I could flag them down and point out where it had happened.’

  Ian asked a few more routine questions but I could see that he was not expecting to get any useful details out of them. Then, suddenly, he said, ‘You don’t seem surprised to see me here.’

  ‘I’m not,’ I said.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I didn’t like the look of it any more than you do,’ I told him. ‘I didn’t say anything to your friends from Traffic. It wasn’t for me to stir up suspicions. I could have been quite wrong and wasted a great deal of police time. Privately, I had my doubts. For one thing, there were no skid marks up at the road. For another, his air bag had worked; but even if it hadn’t it would have been difficult to see how he had come by those particular injuries — he could only have hit his head against the pillar between the door and the windscreen, and that would have caught him higher up and at quite a different angle. Then again, there was almost no blood on his face. With that injury, he must surely have bled, if only a little.’

  ‘So how would you explain the lack of blood?’ Ian asked me.

  ‘That’s for you to explain,’ I said. ‘My own thought, for what it’s worth, was that the pattern of bleeding had been wrong. He might only have bled for a second or two, but it could be that during that time he might have been lying in such a position that blood had run in a direction incompatible with a car smash, so somebody took a damp cloth to him.’

  Ian looked at me unseeingly while he thought about it and then he nodded. ‘Up at the road,’ he said, ‘did you see any tracks? It was some little time before the boys from Traffic realized that the picture didn’t look quite right and, by the time I arrived there, the ambulance and two Traffic cars had driven to and fro over the ground and there was a recovery vehicle parked in exactly the wrong place.’

  ‘The tracks were very faint,’ I said. ‘The ground’s very hard, as you know. But I think they went straight ahead across the broad verge with no sign of braking and no attempt to turn.’ A stray thought reached me belatedly. ‘I forgot to look and see whether the car was still in gear.’