Dick Francis's Gamble

by Felix Francis

  “Why not?” I asked her.

  “He didn’t ask me.”

  Mrs. McDowd clearly didn’t like the police very much.

  “Please tell Mr. Patrick that I’ll see him later today,” I said.

  “Right, I will,” she said. “It’s a good job you’re not here now anyway. Mr. Gregory is angry, fit to burst.”

  “What about?” I asked.

  “You,” she said. “He’s absolutely livid. Claims you’ve brought the whole firm into disrepute. He wants your head on a stick.”

  “But why?” I asked, rather worried. “What have I done?”

  “Don’t you know?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Read the front page of the Racing Post.”

  I went along the hall to check on Sherri Kovak. Her long blond hair was obscuring her face so I waited in the doorway for a few seconds listening to her breathing. She was sound asleep. Best thing for her, I thought. Sadly, the horrors of real life would still be waiting for her when she woke.

  As quietly as I could, I slipped out the front door and walked down towards Hendon Central in search of a newsagent’s.

  I could see the problem even before I picked up the paper. The inch-high bold headline read:

  FOXY FOXTON AND BILLY SEARLE IN £100,000 GAMBLE?

  I bought the paper with shaking hands and stood reading it in the shop.

  In addition to the headline there were photographs of Billy and me, mine taken during my racing days, wearing racing colors and cap.

  The article beneath was as equally damning as the headline:

  Leading National Hunt jockey Billy Searle was observed in a heated argument at Cheltenham Races yesterday with former fellow jockey Nick (Foxy) Foxton. The topic of their acrimonious exchange? Money.

  According to the Racing Post correspondent at the track, the amount under discussion was in excess of a hundred thousand pounds, with Searle demanding instant payment of this amount, which he claimed he was owed by Foxton. At one point Searle was heard to ask why he, Foxton, wanted to murder Searle. Could this all be connected with Foxy’s new job at City financial firm Lyall & Black, where he gambles daily with other people’s money on the stock markets?

  Well-known trainer, Martin Gifford, stated that Foxton had informed him on Tuesday that Herbert Kovak, the man whose murder last Saturday led to the postponement of the Grand National, was Foxton’s best friend and a fellow stock market speculator who had also worked for Lyall & Black. Gifford implied that Foxton may have known more about the killing than he was telling.

  Not surprisingly, people yesterday were asking if Foxton’s argument with Searle could have had some sinister connection to the Aintree murder. The Rules of Racing clearly ban gambling by professional jockeys, but no such restriction applies to former jockeys. The Racing Post will endeavor to keep its readers up to date with this story.

  The article cleverly didn’t actually accuse Billy Searle or me of any wrongdoing, it merely asked leading questions. But there was little doubt that the tone of the piece was designed to imply there was a criminal conspiracy between us, which also had something to do with the death of Herb Kovak.

  No wonder Gregory Black was steaming around the office fit to burst.

  I was surprised my phone wasn’t ringing off the hook.

  Bugger, I thought. What should I do now?

  I called Patrick on his mobile. I didn’t fancy using the office number just in case Gregory himself answered, as we all sometimes did if the receptionists were busy on other calls.

  “Hello, Nicholas,” said Patrick. “I thought I told you to be discreet. I hear that Gregory’s after your blood. I’d keep your head down if I were you.”

  “I will,” I said. “But it’s all a pack of lies.”

  “You know that, and I know that. But, unfortunately, John Doe on the street will believe what he reads in the paper.”

  “But they have completely distorted the truth. It’s so unfair.”

  “Tell that to the politicians.” He laughed. “I have already told Gregory not to believe what he reads, but he says, quite rightly, that you shouldn’t have been having a public argument with a client in the first place. He’s pretty mad.”

  “It wasn’t an argument,” I claimed in my defense. “Billy Searle just started shouting and swearing at me for no reason.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Patrick said. “It’ll all blow over in a couple of days.”

  I wish he’d been right.

  6

  I walked back to Herb’s flat hardly feeling my feet on the pavement.

  What a bloody mess.

  I could imagine that Billy Searle wasn’t too happy about it either. I thought the last thing he’d want would be the racing authorities asking him questions about why he needed a hundred thousand pounds so urgently.

  I let myself in through Herb’s front door and went to check again on Sherri. She hadn’t moved and was still sound asleep. I left her alone and went back to the living room, where I sat at Herb’s desk wishing I’d brought my laptop with me. It was lying on the kitchen table in Finchley and I was tempted to go home to fetch it. Instead I called Claudia.

  “Hi, it’s me,” I said when she answered.

  “Hi, you,” she replied.

  “Could you bring my computer over to Herb’s flat?” I said. “His sister has turned up, and she didn’t know he was dead. She’s sleeping now, but I don’t feel I can leave her for long. I’ll stay and work here, but I do need my laptop.” I decided against mentioning as yet the unwelcome coverage in the Racing Post.

  There was a slight pause.

  “OK,” Claudia said in a slightly irritated tone.

  “It’s not very far,” I said encouragingly. “Use the car. You won’t need to park or anything, just drop it off.”

  “OK,” she said again, lacking enthusiasm. “But I was just going out.”

  Bloody hell, I thought. It wasn’t very much to ask.

  “Where are you going?” I asked.

  “Oh, nowhere,” she said. “Just to have coffee with a friend.”

  “Who?”

  “No one you know,” she said evasively.

  Probably one of her artist friends. I didn’t know them and I didn’t really want to. Some of them were as weird as her paintings.

  “Please, Claudia,” I said firmly, “I need it here so I can do my job.” And to bring in the money so you can live rent free, I thought, but didn’t say.

  “OK,” she said once more, resigned. “Where is the flat?”

  I gave her the address, and she promised she would bring the computer right over.

  While I waited I went through the piles of papers on Herb’s desk, those remaining after the chief inspector had taken his box away.

  There were the usual clutter of utility bills and debit card receipts interleaved with financial services’ magazines, insurance documents and some personal letters. I glanced through them all but nothing gave any clue to who would want Herb dead or how he came to gamble away a hundred thousand pounds a month on the Internet.

  I didn’t expect them to. I assumed that the police would have removed anything of interest.

  Next I went through the desk drawers. There were three on each side, and the ones on the left contained such exciting items as a stapler with spare staples, various-sized brown envelopes, paper and ink cartridges for the printer, a pack of permanent markers in bright colors, a plastic tub of large paper clips and a calculator.

  Those on the right were only partially more interesting, with a large pile of paid bills, various income tax papers, a copy of Herb’s U.S. tax return, a rubber-band-bound stack of received Christmas cards and a plastic folder containing monthly pay slips from Lyall & Black.

  I was curious to see that Herb had been paid somewhat more than I was, no doubt due to his three years’ prior experience at J.P. Morgan Asset Management in New York before moving to London. Now that I was Patrick’s most senior assistant, I would have to have
a discussion with him about a raise.

  I flicked through the bills but there was nothing that appeared to shine out like a lighthouse to guide me to his killer, although I did notice that Herb had been what my mother always described as a “free-spending spirit.” It was a term she used for those she considered to squander their money on lavish, unnecessary purchases instead of prudently saving it for a rainy day as she had always done.

  Two separate invoices from a local travel agent showed that Herb’s free spending had run to at least two British Airways first-class roundtrip tickets across the Atlantic at eight thousand pounds each, one of them dated only the previous month for a planned but not yet taken trip in May. He may have been earning more than me, but there was no way he could have financed those out of his income from Lyall & Black even without the online gambling debts he had run up on the credit cards.

  I wondered if he had inherited a large sum from his dead parents. I thought it unlikely as he had always claimed that his father had gambled away most of his family’s money. But perhaps Herb had been busy spending and gambling away the rest.

  But where had he kept it?

  I looked again at the photocopy I had made of his last bank statement. I had only made it to have a record of Herb’s account number and sort code. I would need them when I contacted the bank to inform them of his death. The latest balance was a little under ten thousand pounds, but there were no entries on the statements that appeared to be payments for the credit card accounts, and certainly no eight thousand pounds to the travel agent the previous month.

  Herb had to have had another bank account, but there was no sign of it anywhere in his desk.

  I looked at my watch. I had called Claudia nearly half an hour ago, and the journey should have taken her only ten minutes from Lichfield Grove, Finchley, to Seymour Way, Hendon. I went to the door to see if she was outside somewhere, but there was no sign of her or the Mercedes.

  I waited in the doorway for five further minutes with slightly increasing irritation. I didn’t really want to call her again, but she was beginning to try my patience.

  Once I would have been so excited by the prospect of seeing her, I wouldn’t have minded if she had been half a day late arriving. On one occasion I had been at Heathrow Airport at least two hours before her flight was due to land just to be sure not to miss her passing through customs.

  But now, and not for the first time, I wondered if our relationship had run its course.

  She finally arrived some thirty-five minutes after I had called. She stopped in the middle of the road and put down the passenger window. I leaned through it and picked up my computer from the seat.

  “Thanks,” I said. “See you later.”

  “OK,” she said, and drove off quickly.

  I stood in the road waving but even if she could see me she didn’t wave back. There had been a time when we never parted without us waving vigorously until we were completely out of sight of each other.

  I sighed. I had invested so much of my emotional capital in my relationship with Claudia, and the thought of being single again, having to start out once more, did not fill me with any joy. And I wasn’t at all sure I wanted it to end.

  Claudia still excited me, and the sex was good, albeit somewhat rarer than it once had been. In fact, sex had been nonexistent over the last couple of weeks with Claudia always making some excuse. So what had gone wrong? Why was she suddenly not so loving towards me?

  I wondered if she was seeing someone else. But who? Surely not one of her artistic layabout friends from her time at art college. The thought of her being intimate with one of them was enough to make me feel ill and not a little bit angry.

  Miserably, I went back into Herb’s flat and sat down again at his desk, but even with my computer I couldn’t concentrate on any work due to thinking about the article in the paper and also about Claudia. After about half an hour, I called her mobile, but it went straight to voice mail. I didn’t leave a message because I didn’t know what to say.

  Instead, I logged on to the Internet through Herb’s router and checked my office e-mails, many of which were junk from various finance firms offering rates of return that were well above the norm for the market.

  Nestled amongst the trash were three work e-mails from this morning, one from Diana confirming the sales of all Billy Searle’s assets and the impending transfer from the firm’s client account to his bank, one from Patrick asking me to research a new personal pension plan being offered by one of the leading providers in the light of new pension legislation and the third from Jessica Winter advising me to wear a bulletproof vest if I was planning on coming into the office.

  I thought it a particularly insensitive comment considering what had happened to Herb only five days previously.

  I looked again at all the junk mail.

  If a promised return appeared to be too good to be true, then it invariably was just that—too good to be true.

  I thought back to my conversation with Jolyon Roberts at Cheltenham the previous day. Had the promised return on the Bulgarian property development project been too good to be true? Not as far as I could remember. It had not been the level of return that had been the concern, rather the distance away and the potential difficulty in acquiring accurate and up-to-date information on the progress of the project. In fact, just the problem that Mr. Roberts believed to be the issue.

  I started to type “Roberts” into the company client index but thought better of it. The office mainframe computer kept a visible record of all files accessed, so any of us could see who had been looking at each file. It wasn’t particularly designed to spy on us or to prevent us accessing files, indeed it made it easy to keep a record of files visited. I could expect my files to be accessed by Patrick on a fairly random but regular basis, and the company files as a whole were regularly scrutinized by Jessica Winter, our Compliance Officer.

  Whenever any of us opened a file it clearly showed in the top right-hand corner of the computer screen a list of the five people in the firm who had accessed the file most recently, together with the date and time of their access.

  As one of the IFAs, I had authority to look at any of the company files, but I might have had difficulty explaining to Gregory why I had accessed those of one of his clients without his knowledge, especially a client as important as the Roberts Family Trust, and especially now.

  I told myself that I should go straight to Gregory and Patrick, and probably to Jessica as well, and tell them about my conversation with Jolyon Roberts and get the matter looked at by them. But did I really want to go and accuse Gregory of misleading one of his clients, and on today of all days?

  Then I would truly need that bulletproof vest.

  Unlike in the United States where the Securities and Exchange Commission, the SEC, employs a prescriptive rule-based regime, the United Kingdom authorities had moved to a principles-based regulatory system. The onus was now on me to act in a manner that upheld the highest principles of honesty, openness and integrity, and to prove it.

  It was difficult to decide which system was the better. Experience had shown that neither was fraud-proof. Indeed, the SEC had investigated Bernie Madoff several times without unearthing the biggest individual fraud in American history. Talk about the asylum being run by the lunatics, Madoff served three times as chairman of the NASDAQ stock market. And that was many years after he had started his fraud, and even after the first failed SEC investigation into his company’s activities.

  And he’d just had to be called Madoff, hadn’t he? He’d “made off” with sixty-five billion dollars—yes, billion. And all because he’d been able fraudulently to circumvent the fixed U.S. regulatory rules. Whereas in the UK, it was not just the letter of the law I had to follow but also its spirit.

  But was I, in fact, following the spirit of principles-based regulation not to mention immediately to my superiors, and to the Compliance Officer, that a client of the firm was questioning the judgment of one of t
he senior partners?

  Probably not.

  And I would mention it to them, I thought, just as soon as Gregory had calmed down a bit. In the meantime, I would do a bit of discreet investigating just as Jolyon Roberts had asked.

  First I tried “Bulgarian development projects” in the Google search engine, but this turned up some fifty-five million hits, the first two pages of which appeared to have nothing to do with the development project I was looking for. Next I tried “Balscott Bulgarian development project,” and this turned up just two hits, but neither of them had any connection whatsoever with a low-energy lightbulb factory on either side of the Danube.

  Next I tried “Europa,” the official European Union website, but that was more difficult to navigate through than the continent itself.

  It was all a bit of a dead end without accessing the firm’s Roberts Family Trust computer file to see with whom and where the contact had been made in Bulgaria or with the EU. And I daren’t do that.

  I decided instead that I’d try to have a quiet look through the paper records we kept at the office. Shares and bonds may have increasingly been bought and sold online but the digital deals were still all backed up with physical paperwork, and we were required to keep the papers for a minimum of five years. The office was consequently stacked high with boxes of transaction reports and somewhere amongst them would be the Roberts Family Trust paperwork for their five-million-pound investment in the Balscott Lighting Factory.

  I sat back in the chair and thought about Claudia. I tried her mobile again, but, as before, it went straight to voice mail without ringing. I wished now that I had told her about the article in the Racing Post when she had brought over my computer. I tried her number once more, and this time I did leave a message.

  “Darling,” I said. “Could you please give me a call when you get this? Love you. Byeee.” I hung up.

  I looked at the clock on Herb’s desk. It was only a quarter to eleven. I had been here for nearly three hours, but it seemed like much longer.