by Iain Adams
What really surprised McRae was just how well John and Suzanne had hit it off; they had become inseparable. McRae sometimes suspected that their unlikely friendship might develop into something more.
Idly, McRae clicked onto the BBC website and, after absorbing the headlines in a half-hearted way, he glanced at the sports news before deciding that he had better get on with his email. As usual, the inbox was cluttered with spam, but he was pleased to see amongst the dross a couple of new case notifications, a cheeky little note from Karen chasing up some invoices and a welcome new message from Grim, containing his regular update on internal Fairclough developments.
Reading Grim’s mail quickly, McRae found himself suppressing a shiver of irritation as he read that the inevitable had happened. Terry Donoghue, his old friend and rival, was in the running to head up a new office for Fairclough. Obviously he’s done a decent job in Brum, he thought, though it was without any real bitterness. Reading quickly on, he stopped abruptly as it dawned on him that Fairclough’s intended new office would be in London.
He was a little surprised that his resident spy, Karen, hadn’t picked up on this news; after all, she worked in Terry’s office and had the most acutely sensitive antennae he had ever come across. Clearly, the new London office plan was board level only.
Anyway, he concluded, Fairclough won’t make much headway in the Lloyd’s market, so they aren’t likely to impact on me. Despite all, it would be good to see Terry again – the stuffy bastard!
He rattled off a sharp reply to Grim, thanking him for the information and suggesting that Terry’s promotion (if indeed it came off) might result in another opportunity for Grim, before deciding to nip out for a coffee.
Pausing to chat briefly with Suzanne, McRae descended the six flights of stairs, emerging into the warmth and bustle of the narrow street, and made his way towards Leadenhall Market. He was heading for Marco’s Café for a decent Americano and found himself whistling, which was something he never did, as he went. Life was improving by the day.
Finishing his leisurely coffee and stubbing out his Camel, McRae strolled back to the office. As he started to climb the first flight of stairs, he was met by Suzanne, clattering in the opposite direction.
She was excited. ‘I was just coming to get you. Guess what? We’ve just got a new pub case from Matt. It looks pretty decent, and Matt was asking whether we could get onto it today?’
‘What’s it about?’
‘Theft, I think, but quite a decent loss. It’s estimated at £35,000 apparently – some gastro-pub in the East End.’
Thinking it sounded pretty trivial to him, McRae managed to simulate a degree of enthusiasm; he didn’t want to dampen Suzanne’s obvious pleasure. Anyway, the fact was that every case was important these days and it was probably a useful job to give Suzanne a bit more general experience.
‘Fancy coming with me on it?’ he asked.
‘Yes please, I haven’t handled many thefts. It would be good,’ she responded with alacrity.
‘Okay, why don’t you fix the appointment and we’ll get over there this afternoon?’
She smiled in acknowledgement, turned and skipped up the stairs, leaving him to make his own more stately progression.
* * *
The Squatter’s Rights proved to be a rather typical Victorian corner pub that faced onto the Whitechapel Road. It was a big place with a beer cellar in the basement, as well as a modern kitchen and function room on the first floor, with the manager’s accommodation on the top floor.
Someone had spent a fortune on Farrow and Ball paint. The place had been tastefully, although unimaginatively, converted from a working-class East End boozer into a formulaic hipster gastropub, decorated in muted shades of grey. Grim would despise the place, thought McRae as soon as they walked through the bar door.
Carefully distressed old wooden settles had been lined up along one wall in ranks to form cosy cubicles and the floor had been relaid in old oak planks. Still, it was undoubtedly an improvement on whatever kind of rundown dump had preceded it. They even had fresh flowers in used jam jars on the bar tables, which would have been a nice touch if several tables hadn’t been hurled onto their sides by the intruders.
The landlord introduced himself. He was a quiet, studious-looking young man with the somehow inappropriate name of Dwayne Montague. He had a goatee beard and long hair in a ponytail. McRae liked him immediately.
It transpired that the thieves, who had forced an entry by way of the unprotected ground-floor ladies’ toilet window, had subsequently used two of the bar tables in order to gain access to the glazed transom window above the door leading to the stairs. Unfortunately, while the door itself had been well-protected and even alarmed, the glass above it had been unprotected due to somebody’s failure of imagination.
Basically, the thieves had been looking for cash or cigarettes. However, the till had been emptied, there were no gaming machines and the newly gentrified pub no longer sold cigarettes. The thieves clearly weren’t wine drinkers, so the net result was that they had got away with only a few cases of spirits.
The Great Train Robbery, it was not, but petty thieves can be pretty vindictive when thwarted.
By turning on the taps in the kitchen and toilets and unscrewing the newly installed plastic wastepipes, the idiots had managed to cause a fair amount of water damage before the landlord, asleep on the top floor, had heard the running water. Although the lounge bar had escaped, the rest of the ground floor had received a pretty good soaking. The water had responded to Newton’s immutable law by ending up in the beer cellar. It was, in short, a bit of a mess.
Despite the best efforts of all concerned, the basement, which was reached by a set of ancient stone steps, was still dripping. So, like the gentleman he thought he was, McRae decided to spare Suzanne’s kitten-heeled shoes and inspect that part of the premises himself.
The basement included the men’s toilets, which were reached by a short corridor, off which there were three doors. The bulk of the floor comprised the beer storage cellar. Fortunately, the alloy beer and lager casks were pretty impervious to damage, but pressure pumps, a couple of elderly chest freezers and miscellaneous cellar equipment had been sufficiently contaminated as to be beyond repair.
‘What’s behind that?’ asked McRae, pointing at the one remaining door.
‘Nothing, we don’t use it. In fact, I’m not really sure it’s legally our space,’ replied the manager. He unlocked the door, using the key that was already housed in the lock. He pushed it open, groped around to his left and eventually clicked on an old Bakelite light switch. In view of the amount of water that had been running down the walls, the landlord had been distinctly foolhardy, thought McRae. But, surprisingly, when the single neon tube eventually flickered into life, it was clear that this part of the basement must have been a little higher than the rest. The floor was basically dry. The room was largely empty apart from a few timber packing cases. At the opposite end was a short flight of steps that appeared to match the ones he had descended from the bar.
He wandered over to the foot of the steps and, looking up, saw light seeping beneath an old timber-framed and ledged door at the head of the stairs. The words “Fire Exit” appeared faintly in black against a white oblong above it. The door was protected by a panic bar, which, unusually, allowed it to be opened from the inside. The panic bar, however, was secured by a chain and padlock – the key to which was clearly visible within a small break-glass case on the wall. It was the weirdest arrangement Drew had ever seen. He started up the steps to test the door.
‘I’d rather you didn’t open that, mate,’ warned Dwayne. ‘We’re technically underneath the factory next door here, so this isn’t really our space at all. God knows why it says “Fire Exit” because no one in their right mind would get out that way. I think it’s some hangover from the war, but who knows? The factory is more recent than the pub and I think it was built partially over the old cellars. It doesn’t matter
to us anyway; we keep the door from the corridor locked with the key on our side anyway, and, as you can, see its steel plated’
Thinking again that it was a distinctly curious arrangement, but not detrimental to the overall security of the pub, McRae made his way back up to the bar.
Having obtained a reasonable overview of the damage, McRae left Suzanne to take the remaining particulars from the landlord while he took a look around with a view to seeing how the pub could improve its security.
Standing in the kitchen on the first floor, he gazed down into the pub’s rear yard. It had been converted into a kind of urban beer garden with a couple of heavy-duty trestle tables, a gas heater and a few umbrellas. The smoker’s last stand, he thought, noting the overflowing ashtrays on the tables.
To the right of the yard was an ancient, visibly crumbling brick wall, almost the height of a double-decker bus, which separated the yard from a similar yard serving the adjacent premises. The wall, which incorporated a narrow wooden gate, was listing alarmingly towards the pub. The property next door appeared to be a small factory of some kind. As he stared down into the factory yard, he noticed a number of used pallets stacked on their edges. Stapled to the edges of the pallets were a number of labels which looked somehow distantly familiar. He pulled his camera from his pocket and, gazing through the viewfinder, adjusted the zoom setting until he had a close-up.
The labels were yellow but it was impossible to make out the words. He took the picture anyway.
Deciding he had better take a quick look at the beer garden before he left, McRae sought out the landlord and got him to open the rear door. The yard was as desolate as it had appeared from above; there were just a few, admittedly new, trestle tables and a dying Wisteria that clambered listlessly, hopelessly, up the leaning wall. It would never reach the top by the looks of it; there was more chance of the wall coming down to the plant’s level.
‘Yeah, I know, that bloody wall is dodgy, but there’s plans to rebuild it, honest,’ offered Dwayne, reading the adjuster’s thoughts. ‘The only problem is that it legally belongs to the brewery – we’re only tenants. The brewery doesn’t want to spend the money; mind you if they won’t, we’ll have to or we’ll lose our smoking area.’
‘Well, I’m not exactly doing a Public Liability survey at the moment, but I will be obliged to mention it in passing – so better if you fix it sooner rather than later, eh?’ said McRae.
The landlord nodded.
Completing his recording of the protections, McRae rejoined Suzanne and together they wrapped up the meeting. He agreed to revisit the pub in a fortnight, by which point, with any luck, they might be in a position to finalise settlement.
Walking back to the car, McRae was pleased to concede he would permit Suzanne to draft the report, which he would then check before it went out. He knew she had the ability to string two words together, which on grumpier days he tended to think was diminishing amongst the “yoof” of today. Maybe, one day, young John might also acquire such an ability, but he tended to doubt it.
The only blot on the landscape of Suzanne’s talents, in McRae’s eyes (or should it be ears?), however, was her excruciating taste in music.
As they had made the unwise decision to eschew the underground in favour of Suzanne’s VW, McRae had been obliged to listen to Tinie Tempah, Dizzy Rascal and other, to his ears indistinguishable, rappers or “hip-hop ‘artists” during the crawl up the Finsbury Road. How could someone so bright listen to such stuff? he had wondered, before politely asking for a little peace when he could endure no more.
Now, on the return trip, he once again requested radio silence on the grounds that he needed to “think about something”. What he was actually debating was which of his Ry Cooder albums he would inflict upon her when Suzanne was next in his car. At times, his immaturity appalled him. Nonetheless, revenge would be sweet.
26
London, June 2011
The only issue for McRae, now that he had the luxury of staff, was what to do with his spare time. No matter how many calls he made or how many potential clients he saw, there were always periods at the end of the day when he had a straight choice to go to a pub or wine bar, or dwell on the past in his office. There were only so many ways to re-organise a half-empty filing cabinet.
In idle moments, his mind inevitably drifted back to the Hellenic case. This was an idle moment.
Suzanne was drafting the Squatters report and, while he waited for it to be passed to him, he indulged in his favourite pastime: searching the internet for similar cases to the Hellenic fire. He had become convinced, probably obsessed, over time, that Kanelos and his pals were professional fraudsters and that the Walsall incident could not have been their only effort.
As a result of hours spent idly googling terms like “Fashion fire”, “Clothing factory blaze” and “Arson attack”, he had finally shortlisted seven incidents in different UK locations that he thought were worthy of further exploration. Of course, the gang could well have diversified from fashion into another trade, but he thought this was unlikely in view of Kanelos’s highly convenient Greek sources. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
The incidents he had developed suspicions about had occurred between 2005 and 2009, and were located as far apart as Southampton and Newcastle. Of the seven cases, he had eventually reluctantly concluded that five were either legitimate or, at least, totally unconnected with Mr Kanelos. This left two fires: one in the name of Top Girl in Swansea, which had occurred in April 2006, and another called Malinka in Liverpool, which had occurred in October 2008. Although no financial details had been available in either case, both fires appeared, on the basis of the scant facts available, to have been worth a couple of million each.
After accessing all the online information he could trace for both fires, McRae had struggled to find anything that helped him identify a link to Kanelos, Angelous or any of the other Hellenic directors.
The difficulty was that the local newspaper reports on the fires, which were basically the only real online sources of information, had contained no reference to the names of any individuals whatsoever. Indeed, following the early editions that had tended to report the more pathetically sensational aspects – such as “Local woman’s shock as gas canister explodes in blaze!” – the stories had usually evaporated. Not for the first time, McRae wondered why the press so rarely followed through with their stories.
What he had been able to establish, however, was that the full legal names of the businesses he was interested in were TG Designs Ltd and Malinka (UK) Ltd. He had accessed the Companies House records of both companies, which listed the directors, but none of the names were obviously related to the Hellenic gang. This was depressing and almost certainly suggested that McRae had been barking up the wrong tree. One fact continued to intrigue him, though. Both companies had, at least on paper, ceased trading following the fires.
Normally, no matter how devastating or calamitous a fire might be, it was usual for companies to resume trading eventually, even if it was a year later. After all, that was why insurance existed. In these two cases, however, the companies had both been wound up. So, of course, had Hellenic. A decidedly flimsy link, but better than nothing.
The British Insurance Industry operates a small unit named the Insurance Fraud Bureau. The IFB is funded by various member companies, and, as its name suggests, is tasked with fighting fraud. There were only two problems with this august body, so far as McRae was concerned. Firstly, it was obsessed with motor fraud – incidents such as staged accidents, which were aimed at screwing personal injury payments from insurers – while few, if any, resources were devoted to corporate fraud. Secondly, there was the difficulty of access.
The only way to obtain information from the bureau was through one of its member companies, and the same was true of the other industry body, CUE (the Claims and Underwriting Exchange). It was potentially critical information, and was available to any official who asked. The problem for McR
ae was that he had no client. He was an outsider, a maverick. He could hardly refer the matter to the IFB or the CUE via Consolidated – he certainly wouldn’t be getting any help from Derek Smythson.
The IFB did, in fact, operate a kind of “snitch” line where suspicions of fraud could be anonymously reported over the telephone, though McRae wasn’t about to declare his suspicions to anyone, at least not until he had acquired cast-iron evidence. When he had what he needed it would be the police he went to, not the IFB. He knew it was wrong, but after what he had been through, he didn’t trust anyone else to wrap things up.
This was his dilemma: CUE could almost certainly provide data that he badly needed, but he had no access. And he could desperately do with more information on both the Top Girl and Malinka fires. Basic material was all he needed: the recorded cause, how the companies had been trading prior to the fires and, most significantly, whether there was any link, no matter how tenuous, with Alex Kanelos and his companions.
What complicated the issue was that McRae was pretty sure the gang had a well-developed strategy. Although it would be simple enough to buy ‘off-the-shelf’ companies and simply start trading for a few months before burning the places down, this would not have been smart. New companies meant new insurance. Large claims under brand-new policies for start-up businesses meant uncomfortable levels of scrutiny. No, what the gang were doing, if he was right, was acquiring existing rundown businesses that were clean and preferably had existing cover. This system had the inestimable benefit of apparent continuity; they simply had to buy their way in and take control.
He weighed up his options. He could try and track down the loss adjusters who had handled the two cases, but that would let the cat out of the bag and he was desperate to keep things to himself. The only person he could really trust was Grim and while his friend could certainly make some informal enquiries as regards the Swansea case, which was relatively local to him, he knew that Grim had put Hellenic behind him. From odd chats with him over the phone, he also knew that Grim strongly believed he should do likewise. Nonetheless, he decided to ask him to make a few low-key enquiries. He wouldn’t like it, but he knew he would do it.