Illegal Tender (Three Oaks Book 12)

by Gerald Hammond

  I had telephoned to say that I would be late. Elizabeth and Duncan had already eaten dinner but Elizabeth came and sat with me and even accepted a glass of wine while I picked at a piece of Dover sole. I am as fond of fish as the next man but twice in a day is too much.

  Elizabeth was more cheerful than I had seen her since the evening of the shoot. The reason was soon clear. ‘Ian was on the phone. He’s coming tonight. He says that that Woman Detective Constable has made amazing progress today. He says that she’s a real ball of fire and he was very lucky to get her.’

  ‘He said much the same to me,’ I told her. ‘I just hope that she doesn’t burn out before she’s tracked your money down. She passed us, going towards Edinburgh like a bat out of hell. She was in uniform but all prettied up.’

  Elizabeth’s expression soured for a moment. ‘Going to make eyes at another lot of officers I suppose,’ she said.

  ‘And the best of luck to her,’ I retorted. If WDC McLure had found good reason to make herself smart and presentable before returning to Edinburgh, it could only be to further the case in hand; or so I hoped.

  I could see that Elizabeth was putting an altogether less charitable interpretation on my last words, but her manner implied that she had more important topics to discuss than the amours of a junior police officer. ‘Ian has to go to a briefing with the senior man from Edinburgh, so he can’t come to us until later in the evening. A nuisance for him — he can’t be seeing much of Deborah just now — but it fits quite well, because Mrs Ombleby rang up. She wants to see me this evening.’ Elizabeth looked at her watch. ‘She’ll be here soon. Do you want to meet her?’

  I did rather want to see Mrs Ombleby again. Her name had been linked to that of the late Maurice Cowieson and I thought that I might get that gentleman’s amorous adventures into better perspective if I could gently sound out one of his targets. And if Elizabeth was contemplating an investment in Mrs Ombleby’s project I would certainly want to sit in on their discussion.

  The lady arrived in the XJS drophead Jaguar which had belonged to her late husband — and which I definitely coveted, although Isobel would have suspected the most immoral motives if I had ever contemplated purchasing such a car. On the day of the shoot I had seen Mrs Ombleby in the roughest of tweed and, only an hour later, in navy silk and well chosen but undoubtedly valuable jewellery. Now she had taken the middle road, a severe working dress with little make-up and the only jewellery was on her marriage finger. Then, she had been one of the many background figures. Looking at her with fresh eyes, I saw that she was well rounded, verging on stout, but in the firm and bouncing way that makes the fatness neither a burden to its bearer nor an eyesore but rather a hint of jollity. She smelled, very faintly, expensive. Her hair, which had been tinted back to its original brown, had been styled by an expensive hand but was now worn loose. Her features were strong but slightly blurred, her eyes keen. She was, I noticed, light on her feet. The overall effect was of a woman of energy and intelligence, and one who still had much to offer to a man such as the late Mr Cowieson.

  Elizabeth brought her to the study where I was waiting and reminded each of us of the other’s identity. Mrs Ombleby shook hands like a man and favoured me with a smile. We settled in the deep, leather chairs. ‘We spoke on Saturday,’ she said. ‘You were the hero of the hour. And I believe that you’re one of Elizabeth’s trustees.’

  So time was not to be wasted in idle chatter. I approved of that in a busy woman. ‘Only for a few more months,’ I said.

  ‘But until then, you’re standing by to make sure that nobody puts anything over on her?’ The words were spoken without ulterior meaning. ‘Very wise. Elizabeth tells me that she’s let you in on my secret. What’s your first impression?’

  ‘It sounds like a brainwave,’ I said. ‘And the moment seems to be propitious, now that electronic shopping is coming in.’

  She looked at me closely, to see if I was only making polite noises. ‘As a man, you may not appreciate the drag on a busy woman of having to think up the menus, translate them into ingredients and quantities and make a long list. Internet shopping, as it’s being planned at the moment, will take it from there to the point where she has to follow the proper recipe for each bit of each meal.’

  ‘And that’s the point at which you find that you’ve run out of something,’ I said. ‘I know. My wife’s a busy vet and dog trainer and I have to help out for much of the time. Sadly, we live away out in the country, so it may be years before we can benefit from your service. But I love the idea of shopping by formula and receiving the right ingredients packaged along with the recipe. Working wives and harassed mums will love it too.’

  ‘But you don’t sound convinced.’

  I was surprised that she could detect any note of reserve in my voice. I was weighing the project up as an investment, but on the whole I was ready to be convinced. ‘I’m only wondering how much it will cost,’ I said.

  She nodded slowly and gravely. ‘Not as much as you’d think. Of course, we may be beyond the means of the single parent on Social Security or the student in a flat; but most people are better off than ever before and prepared to spend money to make life easier for themselves. The cost of delivery is partly offset by the saving in using warehouse space instead of expensive high street shopping space. With the help of a good computerized system, the extra cost of breaking down the purchases into dish ingredients and furnishing the recipe is almost negligible.’ From a folder, she produced some cost figures and I ran my eye over them. She had been thorough and she answered my few questions without hesitation.

  ‘And you’re looking for finance?’

  She met my eye frankly. ‘Mostly, I’m financing the first phase, in Edinburgh and Glasgow, myself. That’s how much faith I have in the idea. If it fails, I’m wiped out, but that’s my problem. If it works as I think it will and we go nationwide, then I’ll need more capital.’

  ‘I’ve been telling Mrs Ombleby that I may not be able to invest after all,’ Elizabeth said. She sounded almost guilty.

  ‘Things are looking healthier,’ I told her. ‘If you want to invest, subject only to results in the first phase looking good, I think you could give Mrs Ombleby an assurance. If by any chance we don’t raise enough capital, I’ll find some bridging money for you.’

  They both smiled at me. Mrs Ombleby began to gather her papers, but I had not yet satisfied my curiosity. ‘Have you come far?’ I asked.

  She snapped the lock on her briefcase and sat back, prepared to devote a few finite minutes to the courtesies. ‘Five or six miles. I live just outside the town, to the south.’

  So she had been almost a neighbour of Maurice Cowieson. ‘Did you come through the town or up the back road?’ I asked her.

  Her eyebrows went up. ‘I didn’t know that there was a back road or I’d have used it. They have Main Street up again, with cones and barriers and temporary traffic lights and not a sign of anybody actually doing anything.’

  ‘Then you’d certainly have saved time on the back road. You turn off beside the industrial estate. Behind where Maurice Cowieson lived,’ I said without emphasis.

  For a moment I saw an expression on her face which was hard to interpret. It was neither fear nor anger but, I thought, distaste. Then Mrs Ombleby looked at the carriage clock over the fireplace. ‘I must be going,’ she said. ‘If I turn right outside the archway, will that take me up to the back road?’

  We promised that it would.

  ‘Then I’ll go that way and I’ll know it next time. We’ll keep in touch.’ She shook hands with me again and Elizabeth went to the door with her.

  ‘You shouldn’t have mentioned Mr Cowieson,’ Elizabeth said, returning to the study when the Jaguar had oozed away. ‘It’s a sensitive subject.’

  ‘Did they . . . have something going?’ I asked, choosing the most contemporary metaphor that I could think of in order to keep the question light.

  She hid a smile. ‘I shouldn’t think so. S
he thought that he was a crook. She came here last week and asked me if I’d told anybody about her plans. I told her that I hadn’t and I insisted on her telling me why she thought I might have done. She said that somebody must have spilled the beans because Maurice Cowieson had approached her. He knew all about it.’

  ‘He could have stumbled on some of your e-mails in the Internet,’ I suggested.

  ‘Mr Cowieson couldn’t have found his way into the Internet if they’d left the door open,’ Elizabeth said contemptuously. ‘You heard Duncan say so, more or less. But he’d got hold of it somehow and he was threatening to sell the idea to one of the big food wholesalers.’

  ‘He wanted money?’

  ‘Not exactly,’ Elizabeth said. She paused, either to build up the drama or while she wondered whether I was fit to hear more secrets. But there was a happy glint in her eye. The scandal was too good to keep. ‘He wanted sex.’

  ‘Did he get it?’ I asked before I could check myself.

  ‘She said not.’

  It hardly bore wondering about. Any mental picture of Maurice Cowieson’s skinny frame in juxtaposition with Mrs Ombleby’s rich curves was faintly repugnant. I decided to change the subject quickly. ‘Wouldn’t she really know about the back road?’ I asked.

  Elizabeth lost interest. ‘I’d have thought so,’ she said.

  *

  We did not have to wait long for Ian. This time, he came alone. He looked tired. He was much less formal, now that murder was not on the agenda. It seemed that we were now on the same side. ‘I almost wish that I hadn’t borrowed that woman from Edinburgh,’ he said. ‘She seems to have the knack of doing fourteen things simultaneously, several of which consist of driving me towards the same sort of energy output. I only asked for her because she’d been on the same course on computer fraud and seemed to ask the right questions. It turns out that she knows almost everybody. She has degrees in both computing and physics and all the energy of an atomic pile. And like a pile, she irritates. I suppose that Edinburgh were glad to get a short respite from her. She’s totally exhausted me and I never even laid a finger on her.’

  ‘And that would have been all right, would it?’ Elizabeth demanded, her feminist hackles rising. ‘Being exhausted because you had laid a finger on her?’

  ‘I was joking,’ Ian explained patiently. ‘Deborah would have seen it. But never mind. When she wasn’t setting tasks for me, WDC McLure spent much of the day on the phone. She always seemed to know the right person to speak to and now she’s gone into Edinburgh to get hold of somebody senior who can lean on people in the telephone and banking industries to find and cough up some more information which is not usually disgorged.

  ‘Our target thinks that he or she — let’s stick to he for the sake of simplicity — has been very clever. In point of fact, he has been rather clever, he’d have beaten me hands down. But Miss McLure had it pinned down in minutes. It helped that his service provider — Demon — is now owned by Scottish Telecom. The service providers, of course, are only too anxious to see the frauds which are being carried out in their names stopped.’ He looked at Elizabeth. ‘So they helped us to trace the method by which their charges had been paid. After all, even when they thought that our man was innocent they weren’t going to let him use their facilities without getting paid for it. It turned out that he’d given them a direct debit authority on an account with an Edinburgh branch of the Royal Bank which had been opened over the phone the previous week in the name of Roger Breeks and giving an address which doesn’t exist. According to the bank, somebody came in and deposited two hundred pounds in used Clydesdale tenners and that was that. Nobody has the faintest recollection as to what he looked like and the security video only shows a slightly out-of-focus figure in a plain mackintosh and a hat with a downturned brim, heavy spectacles and a bushy moustache which is almost certainly false.

  ‘So Demon set about tracing the origin of the e-mail which reached you and the destination of the one which you sent back.’ He paused. ‘The originating computer was the mainframe at Agrotechnics.’ I jumped and I must have made a sound of surprise, because he laughed silently. ‘Don’t let that weigh too much with you. The e-mail reached the Agrotechnics computer from a mobile phone over a satellite link, hooked presumably to a laptop computer, and was sent on automatically.’

  ‘So that’s a dead end?’ Elizabeth suggested.

  ‘Only for the moment. We’ve got the number of the mobile, but that was bought over the phone, paid for and connected in the name of the same Mr Breeks. We’ve no way of knowing where that phone is now although we may be able to trace it if any more calls are made from it. More likely it’s been chucked on the back of somebody’s fire. But we know that when it sent the original e-mail and received your reply it was in this cell area. As a matter of interest, another reply has been sent to it, so presumably there was another, um . . .’ On the point of uttering some such word as mug or sucker, Ian caught himself. ‘Victim,’ he said carefully. ‘Whoever that may be either hasn’t noticed the loss yet or doesn’t want to appear . . . unwise, because it hasn’t been reported yet.’

  ‘And is that as far as we can get?’ I asked.

  ‘Our target may think so. It’s as far as we’ve got so far,’ Ian said. ‘As I told you, Miss McLure’s gone in to Edinburgh to get support from somebody closer to Chief Constable level. We want your bank to trace where the money was transferred to or, if they still won’t play ball, the Bank Automated Clearing System in Reading should be able to do it.’

  ‘In that case, we’ve got him?’ I suggested.

  Ian made a face. ‘It won’t be that easy. He’s been so evasive that he surely won’t have left a strong connection between himself and the money. He’ll have turned it into something as portable as a banker’s draft, maybe several, and carried it to another bank, maybe even another country, and made a fresh deposit.’

  ‘Even a banker’s draft could be traced in the end,’ I said.

  ‘Think about jewellery, drugs, antiques, rare postage stamps. Laundering has been brought to a fine art in recent years. But don’t lose heart. We’ll see what tomorrow brings.’

  ‘Suppose it brings the information we’re looking for,’ Elizabeth said. ‘Suppose word comes back that the culprit was Charlie Buggins in Newton Lauder. What then?’

  Ian sighed. ‘Then we start all over again. We may be able to prove that he committed the fraud. If he decides to hold his tongue, we have to find what he did with the money. We may have to point out to him that judges go very hard on villains who could make restitution but don’t. If he denies that the Rembrandt painting in his wife’s safe deposit box was acquired with your money, we may have to set out to prove it all over again. You may even have to sue him for the return of your million-plus.’

  ‘It goes on for ever, doesn’t it?’ Elizabeth said dully.

  ‘It can do,’ Ian said. ‘Justice is not a very fast-moving lady. But I never told you that it was going to be quick or easy, did I?’

  ‘Quite the reverse,’ I said. We seemed to have exhausted the subject of fraud for the moment so I decided to chance my luck. ‘Has Mr Dornoch being giving you more trouble?’ I asked.

  Ian bridled. I thought that he was going to turn back into the formal police officer addressing one who was a mere member of the public and therefore by definition (in the police dictionary) an ignorant and unreasonable nuisance. But his sense of grievance was too strong. ‘That man,’ he said, ‘is driving me mad. He’s more interested in catching me out than in running an investigation.’

  ‘Not the best way to solve a crime,’ I suggested.

  ‘He thinks that he has it solved,’ Ian said. ‘In absolute, total confidence, I think he intends to make an arrest in the morning. And, to our shame, he’ll be doing it on the basis, largely, of information furnished by you and relayed by me.’

  A quick mental review of the information which I had passed on to Ian assured me that he would not be talking so openly if
Duncan had been the target, and I had made no mention of Mrs Ombleby. The next most likely person to leap to mind was . . .

  ‘Mr Allardyce? The builder?’ I said.

  Clearly, Ian had had no intention of letting that particular cat out of the bag, but he nodded in spite of himself.

  ‘Allardyce,’ I said, ‘was flabbergasted when I told him that his floating charge was worth rather less than the paper it was written on. And I’m assured that he’s a rotten actor.’

  Ian nodded again. ‘But he’s also a rotten driver,’ he said. ‘And he wouldn’t be short of men to come and give him a lift home or down to Cowieson’s house to collect his own car. There was a call at about the right time from his mobile to the pub where some of his men were watching the live broadcast of the match on Sky TV instead of waiting for the repeat. The men all deny that the call had anything to do with transport but say it was to give some orders for the next morning’s jobs.’

  ‘And the Detective Chief Inspector doesn’t believe them?’

  Ian grunted. ‘The man’s a conspiracy theorist.’

  ‘That’s as may be,’ I said, ‘but he doesn’t have to rely on proving that the murderer had an accomplice. If his car was still at Cowieson’s house, the killer could easily have walked down the hill.’

  ‘My men couldn’t find anything significant along the Den Burn,’ Ian said, frowning. ‘And he’d have been taking an awful risk, with my father-in-law using ferrets nearby and God knows who else about the fields.’