Illegal Tender (Three Oaks Book 12)

by Gerald Hammond

  Ian took a thoughtful pull at his whisky. ‘Somehow I’ve lost my motivation to solve this case,’ he said. ‘Anybody who cared to kill Maurice Cowieson can’t be all bad. And you didn’t hear me say that.’

  ‘Of course not,’ said his wife. ‘I know when you’re only joking — you were only joking, weren’t you? I’ll tell you something else. At the shoot dinner, while Henry was talking to Mrs Ombleby, somebody said that Miles’s father wouldn’t be pleased as he was setting his cap at her. It may just have been malicious gossip —’

  ‘I’d heard that in the town,’ said Molly, ‘so there may be something in it. She owns half of Edinburgh, so that may have been the attraction. She could easily have bailed him out of his money troubles. She’s not very attractive in any other way.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said her husband reflectively. ‘She’s amusing company, which can’t always be said about rich widows, and I suspect that she may be one of those apparently passionless women who suddenly catch fire. I’ve been told about them,’ he added quickly. ‘What’s more difficult to understand is what the women ever saw in him.’

  ‘That’s not so difficult,’ Molly said. ‘He had a good line in chat. He could make little jokes that had double meanings hidden in them, but never going over the line and beyond the point that would be sort of appropriate to the stage he’d reached with whoever he was talking to. The stage of intimacy — you know what I mean?’ she asked anxiously. We reassured her. ‘And he had old-fashioned good manners — courtly, sort of — and he was always very neat and clean. It could have worked, him and Mrs Ombleby. There are worse reasons for marriage than financial interest.’ She was still in the throes of a long-standing and happy marriage, so that she would have liked to see the rest of the world tidily coupled.

  Keith looked at her. Molly had a Mona Lisa smile. After a hesitation, Keith resumed. ‘The only other whisper was that when he went to the bank to make a deposit they had to prise his fingers apart before he could bear to let go.’

  ‘That I could well believe,’ I said.

  ‘Ah, yes.’ Ian leaned back in his chair and looked at me expectantly. ‘I was going to come to you about his business affairs.’

  ‘And I was going to come and tell you about them,’ I said. I looked around. ‘Still in confidence?’ I received a succession of nods which I knew would be honoured. ‘Cowieson’s upbringing, from what’s been said, was typical, guaranteed to produce exactly what it did — a well educated, highly trained nincompoop. He had his contract to retail Agrotechnics’s agricultural machinery long before I was appointed to the board or I would have fought tooth and nail to see it awarded to somebody else, anybody else, even at worse terms. What he’s managed to sell has sold because it’s good stuff and people have tracked him down and pushed money at him.

  ‘Until a few years ago, a farmer couldn’t lose money if he tried. Some of that easy money rubbed off on his suppliers. Then things got tough. Now, with cattle and sheep in serious decline, a great deal of pasture is being turned over to arable, making a considerable demand for new machinery. Agrotechnics is booming but Cowieson wasn’t attacking the new market. His methods were too old-fashioned to be believable. Word of mouth and handing out a few brochures. He grudged money spent on advertising. There was allowance in the costs for giving a handsome kickback to farmers but Maurice seems to have kept that for himself. God knows where it went. Any profit that the business made seems to have vanished.’

  ‘Spent on his women,’ Deborah said. ‘You know how word goes round in a small community. From what I hear, he never grudged gifts of jewellery or Thai silk undies, provided there was going to be a return in you-know-what.’

  ‘That could explain a great deal,’ I said. ‘As a result of plain bad management, aggravated by a comparatively minor fire, his sales fell short of the figure he was required by his contract to take from Agrotechnics — a figure which none of the other agencies had the least difficulty in meeting. Result — overstocking and a huge debt to the manufacturer, but he still refused to give up the agency. He seems to have had a remarkable talent for deluding himself. He could close his mind to anything he didn’t want to think about and believe what he wanted to believe.

  ‘The first thing I did when I became a director was to insist that he grant a floating charge, virtually putting up his stock and business as security for the debt. We interviewed him last Friday and he swore that he was expecting a fresh injection of finance and would settle the debt. Maybe he was pinning his hopes on a quick courtship of the wealthy widow. But it would only have taken a more intensive selling campaign to put things right within a couple of years and if we’d seen an improvement in his methods we’d have given him more time. He couldn’t see that. We were on the point of foreclosing on him and putting in a manager with a proven track record when . . . this happened.’

  ‘Which would raise the spectre of suicide but for the pathologist’s report,’ Keith said. ‘Men have driven off the road before now to escape from their worries. Perhaps she turned him down.’

  Ian was frowning. He made another note. ‘I’ll have to try the pathologist again. Between us, we may have missed something.’

  ‘His situation was worse even than I’ve told you so far,’ I said reluctantly. The fact that I had disliked the builder made me perversely more reluctant to put him forward as a suspect. ‘When somebody grants a floating charge, the company’s documents at Register House are endorsed accordingly. While I was at Cowieson’s this afternoon, Allardyce, the builder, turned up. He claimed to be under the impression that he too had been granted a floating charge. It was dated later than ours and ours had been properly arranged and registered by Agrotechnics’s solicitors. Allardyce admitted that he’d taken Cowieson’s word for it that the floating charge had been properly registered.’

  ‘Then how —?’ Ian began. He stopped. ‘Claimed to be? You think that Allardyce might have discovered earlier that he’d been sold a pup?’

  ‘I leave thinking to you,’ I said. ‘I worded myself carefully, that’s all. The way I read it is that Maurice Cowieson saw the floating charge as a splendid way of getting creditors off his back while he looked for alternative sources of finance.’

  ‘An act of deliberate fraud?’

  ‘That’s how I see it, assuming that Mr Allardyce was telling the truth. It certainly isn’t the kind of thing that can happen by mistake.’ I paused while I considered my words. ‘You’ll have to see him yourself, of course. If you’re looking for opinions, I think that the existence of a prior floating charge was news to Mr Allardyce, unless he’s a superlative actor.’

  ‘Which he isn’t,’ Deborah said. ‘He’s a member of the drama society but his acting was so wooden and unconvincing that we have him painting scenery and taking tickets and occasionally carrying a tray on stage. You’ve more need to look very hard at Miles Cowieson. If his father was playing silly beggars and throwing the business down the drain . . .’

  ‘Did you think I’d forgotten him?’ Ian enquired. ‘At the moment, it seems clear that when his father died he was already in the air, on a plane to Amsterdam. It would have been just possible, but very unlikely, for a lookalike to have gone in his place, but nothing else has come up so far to support the possibility. I’m afraid that we have to count him out.’ Ian gave a sigh which would have blown out the candles on a centenarian’s birthday cake. He pushed the stack of reports away from him, got to his feet and came to replenish my glass. ‘Without a lucky break, I’m not going to solve this one. There’s so little to go on that I can only start from motives; and that’s always a shaky start because crimes are often committed for motives that a sensible man would consider ridiculous. But murderers aren’t sensible men.’

  ‘What about your forensic boffins?’ Keith said. ‘What have they told you?’

  ‘Very little,’ Ian said. ‘We aren’t sure yet where he died.’

  ‘But the car . . .?’

  ‘Not much more. No unexpected fin
gerprints, just the smudges of gloved fingers. Plenty of hairs, mostly long and tinted, but if we trace all the women who’ve been in his car, what will that tell us?’

  ‘It may furnish useful DNA corroboration when you find your murderer,’ Keith pointed out.

  ‘If, not when,’ Ian said gloomily. ‘And any woman could come up with quite a convincing reason for having been in that car.’

  There was a gloomy silence. Molly was ready to contribute another ill-judged snippet of optimism. Before she could drive Ian the rest of the way up the wall, I jumped in. ‘And you’ve no more news about the missing money?’ I asked.

  He shook his head, but at least the chance to spoil my day seemed to brighten his own outlook. ‘Not a word,’ he said more cheerfully. ‘It’s been referred to the Serious Fraud Office and it remains their baby until they’ve dealt with it.’

  ‘And they will get round to that when?’

  ‘God knows,’ Ian said.

  Chapter Seven

  At my age, I had every right to be badly hung over after a vinous lunch and a sip of brandy followed by an evening during which, when I came to look back, rather a lot of whisky had been taken. But in the morning I had no more than a mild headache, a mere dull nagging in the brain, which was better than I deserved.

  Our visit to Ian’s and Deborah’s house had continued for some time after the lady of the house had begun to hint that bed was calling. (Hospitality runs in the Calder family and, once Ian had appreciated the amount of background information being heaped on him, he produced a second bottle.) I had weakly accepted rather more of Ian’s whisky than was wise. When Keith was almost ready to move, Deborah had driven me, in my own car, up the hill, followed by Molly in the other car to bring her back. Elizabeth and Duncan had already retired and the house was dark and silent. I crept to bed, careful not to stumble. I had no wish for an admonitory lecture. I suspected that Isobel had had a word in Elizabeth’s ear, suggesting that she might steer me away from the indulgences to which old men are vulnerable. Whatever the reason, there was sometimes a tendency for my role and Elizabeth’s to reverse.

  A late breakfast, served by Joanna and taken in solitary state, soon put me more or less right and I found that my mind was back in gear. Duncan had already left for work but I found Elizabeth in the study, dealing in a lacklustre manner with the morning’s mail.

  She greeted me a little more cheerfully than before and I gathered that she had come to terms with her loss and at least partially forgiven herself for her folly. It was inevitable that she would hear about my evening with the Calders so I invented a few lies about my friend’s early departure and gave her a foreshortened and edited version of my real evening.

  I finished by asking whether she had made any progress with tracing the e-mail fraud. She shrugged and went rapidly through all the signs of one who has abandoned hope. ‘I can’t seem to find a starting point which wouldn’t immediately come up against the need for a court order or whatever it is you need to make some bossy, petty-minded prat cough up some useful but relatively harmless information,’ she said. ‘And if the police and the Serious Fraud Office, with their access to bank and telephone records, haven’t got anywhere . . .’

  A kick-start was called for if she was to be boosted out of her lethargy and despond. My own understanding of the Internet was about as deep as my comprehension of the binomial theorem, but sometimes the ignorant eye will be caught by something which is too obvious for the expert to see. ‘Do you have those two printouts handy?’ I asked her.

  Elizabeth sighed. ‘While you’re about it, you may as well go for a stroll across the loch,’ she said tartly. But she handed me a folder from her desk. As I feared, apart from the addresses and the message the pages were taken up with gobbledegook. Try as I might, I could not recognize anything significant. If there was nothing helpful in the printing itself, perhaps there might be more value in the differences. I looked from the copy that Gordon had given me to the fraudulent one which had deceived Elizabeth, beginning, for lack of any reason to the contrary, with the topmost line. ‘As I understand it,’ I said, ‘addresses and file references have to be correct, right down to the spaces and punctuation. Right?’

  ‘Quite right,’ she said with excessive patience. ‘It would use up rather a lot of memory to program a computer to select the nearest approximation to the right address and, of course, it would hardly do for confidential mail to fetch up in the wrong hands.’

  I ignored her patronizing manner. ‘There’s probably a simple explanation,’ I said slowly, ‘which I’m not wise enough to see, but these are slightly different.’ I showed her the first message, which opened with FROM: INTERNET: CompuServe@Controller.net. The other began FROM:INTERNET:Com puserve@Controler.net. ‘Are those just mistakes?’ I asked her. ‘Or is there any significance?’

  She frowned, her interest gradually sharpening. ‘If those were typographical errors,’ she said, ‘the message would still have arrived here.’ I began to deflate. ‘But,’ she said, ‘the address of origin is put in automatically by the sender’s machine. And I clicked on REPLY at the bottom of the message. Any error there and he wouldn’t have got my reply and we’d have been saved this whole horrible hoo-ha. I suppose it’s possible that they built in a difference for sorting purposes, but I can’t see any reason for it with two identical messages. Why didn’t I notice the discrepancy?’

  ‘Who really reads the address at the top of a letter without a special reason?’ I asked rhetorically. ‘Same principle.’

  She gave a sigh of relief and favoured me with a smile, almost her first since we had discovered the loss. ‘God bless you, Uncle Henry! I was beginning to wonder if I’d totally lost my marbles, but that makes me feel a little saner. Do you see what it means?’

  I put my finger on the earlier copy. ‘I’m told that these have been turning up all over the world. My guess would be that somebody who received one decided to jump on the bandwagon. He — or she —’ I added for the sake of political correctness, ‘may even have fallen for it and wanted to recoup their loss.’

  ‘Some recouping!’ she said bitterly. ‘Yes, that’s exactly how I see it.’

  ‘As you say. They would then have to have a similar but slightly different address. There would be no point in the exercise if useful information simply went back to the original fraudster. How would they have got your e-mail address?’

  ‘Easily. Perhaps the easiest way of all would be to look at the correspondence in what they call the ‘forums’. I’ve been using them a lot — they make a simple and easy way to get free advice from experts. Where do we go from here?’

  I looked at her in surprise. My first thought was that she should be in a better position to answer that question. Then I realized that under the veneer of education she was still an unsophisticated girl and that I had far more experience in matters of financial chicanery. We were silent for several minutes while I thought it out. ‘You’d better call Duncan home if, as you said, he’s more familiar with the subtleties of programming,’ I said.

  ‘I will if you say so. But I don’t think he’d be able to get far without the powers that the police can call on.’

  ‘Maybe you’re right,’ I said. ‘I’ve probably been given quite a false impression that the whole system’s wide open by all the talk about ‘hacking in’. The police can get access to banking and telephone records. We’ll have to keep them informed anyway. We’d better get in touch with Ian Fellowes.’

  She turned the phone round on the desk and read me out the number of the local station. Detective Inspector Fellowes, I was told, was in a meeting but would call me back. I disconnected. Remembering my own dictum that nobody ever calls you back, I decided to phone again every half-hour or so until I got Ian on the phone.

  Within a few seconds, the phone rang. I made a mental apology to Ian, but the voice which came on the line was that of Mr Stoep. Could he come through this afternoon to inspect and value the available treasures? Rather than prol
ong the discussion and risk losing Ian’s return call (if it ever came), while thinking that Ronnie could do the honours if I was otherwise engaged, I said that he would be welcome.

  I was explaining Mr Stoep to Elizabeth when the phone rang again. This time it was Ian. ‘Thank you,’ I told him. ‘You’re very prompt.’ I went on to explain how a further examination of the e-mails suggested that more than one fraudster was at work, using almost identical formats.

  ‘That’s the first suggestion of the kind,’ Ian said. ‘I’ll pass it on to the Serious Fraud Office but it may not be enough to jump your case to the front of the queue.’ His voice went from speculative to decisive. ‘I’d better come up and see you. Would this evening suit?’

  I consulted Elizabeth briefly. ‘That would be perfect,’ I said. ‘But . . . are you sure you can get away?’

  ‘The hotshot from Edinburgh has arrived, ahead of my prognostication.’ There was a long pause. I guessed that Ian was making certain that he was not overheard. ‘As I feared, he’s being highly critical of all that’s gone before. I’m in the process of handing over what I’ve got so far and he’s not impressed. I think he’s looking forward to reporting on my failures when he’s brought the case to a triumphant conclusion. After I’ve given him the lot, I think he’ll want me out of his hair. About eight?’

  I agreed and we ended the call. ‘He’s coming at about eight,’ I told Elizabeth. ‘I leave it to you to decide whether to get Duncan home and go as far as you can before Ian gets here.’

  ‘I don’t think that there’s anything he could do,’ she said. ‘On top of which, I made up my mind never to remind Duncan that I’m the one with the money. He refused to accept a marriage settlement, you may remember.’