Dick Francis's Gamble

by Felix Francis

  “It seems they are here to arrest Mr. Gregory,” said the unflappable Mrs. McDowd.

  “Arrest Gregory? But that’s ridiculous. What for?”

  “Conspiracy to defraud and conspiracy to murder,” DI Batten said.

  “Fraud? Murder? Who has he murdered?” Patrick demanded, turning towards the policeman.

  “No one,” said DI Batten. “Mr. Black has been arrested on suspicion of conspiracy to murder.”

  Patrick wasn’t to be deterred.

  “So who, then, is he suspected of conspiring to murder?”

  “Me,” I said, stepping forward.

  Patrick said nothing. He just stared at me.

  Later in the afternoon, life in the offices of Lyall & Black at 64 Lombard Street returned to some sort of normalcy, if having one of the senior partners arrested for conspiracy to defraud and murder could ever be considered normal.

  I went into my office for the first time in almost two weeks to find that Rory had moved himself into Herb’s desk by the window. Diana was still where she had always been.

  “By rights, that should have been Diana’s,” I said to Rory. “She’s the more senior.”

  “She had yours until half an hour ago,” Rory replied with a sneer. “Patrick said you weren’t coming back.” His tone implied that he was sorry I had.

  Diana, meanwhile, remained silently resentful as I opened the window to let in some of the warm spring day. Perhaps the weather had changed for the better as well.

  Maybe Diana wouldn’t have to wait too much longer to get back to my desk anyway. That is, if my desk remained at all. At the moment, I couldn’t see Lyall & Black surviving as a firm beyond next week. Once news of a fraud investigation got out, our clients would desert us quicker than rats from a sinking ship. Everything in financial services comes down to client confidence, and confidence in a firm involved in fraud would be close to absolute zero.

  The quickest way to create a run on a bank was to publicly warn that there might be one. Depositors would quickly lose confidence in the institution and would queue around the block to get their money back. But of course no bank leaves cash lying around in its vaults just in case of such an eventuality. The money will have been lent out to other customers as mortgages and business loans. Hence the bank can’t pay. As word spreads that the bank is in trouble, even more depositors come looking for their money, and the whole crisis self-perpetuates and then crashes down like a house of cards. The bank’s credibility, which might have taken several hundred years to establish, can be destroyed in as little as a day. As it had been with Northern Rock in the UK and Indy-Mac in the U.S., and so would be with us. But, in our case, there would be no government bailout.

  Yes, indeed, we had all better start looking for new positions by another firm’s window. But what chance would we have with a reference from Lyall & Black? Not much.

  There were nearly a hundred unanswered e-mails for me on the company server, plus twenty-eight messages on my office voice mail, including quite a few from irate clients with whom I had missed meetings. There were also two from the Slim Fit Gym, reminding me again that they wanted Herb’s locker back.

  “Where’s the key?” I asked Rory.

  “What key?” he said.

  “The key that was pinned to Herb’s bulletin board.”

  “Still on it, I expect,” Rory said. “I swapped the whole desk cubicle.”

  I went over to one of the empty cubicles and checked. The key was still pinned to the board. I took it off and put it in my pocket.

  I sat down again at my desk and started going through the mass of e-mails but without really taking in any of the information contained in them. My heart simply wasn’t in this job anymore.

  If and when Claudia beat this cancer, we would do something different, something together.

  Something more exciting. But maybe something a little less dangerous.

  “I’m going out,” I said to Rory and Diana, as if they cared.

  As I walked down the corridor I had to step over some big tied-up polyethylene bags stacked full of files and computers. The Fraud Squad was busily packing up the stuff from Gregory’s office. I was quite surprised they hadn’t thrown us all out of the building to pack up the whole firm. That would come later, no doubt, when they had discovered a little more.

  The receptionist at the Slim Fit Gym was really pleased to see me.

  “To be honest,” she said in a broad Welsh accent, “it’s beginning to smell a bit, especially today in this warm weather. It’s upsetting some of our other clients. There must be some dreadfully sweaty clothes in there.”

  The key from Herb’s desk fitted neatly into the hefty padlock on the locker, and I swung open the door.

  The receptionist and I leaned back. It smelled more than a just a bit.

  There was a dark blue bag in the locker with a pair of off-white training shoes placed on top, and I think it was the shoes, rather than the clothes inside the bag, that were the culprits as far as the smell was concerned. Perhaps Herb had suffered from some sort of foot-fungal problem that had spread to his shoes and then clearly festered badly there over the last three weeks. But whatever the cause, the smell was pretty rank.

  “Sorry about this,” I said. “I’ll get rid of it all.”

  I tucked the offending shoes into the bag on top of the clothes and left the receptionist tut-tutting about having to disinfect all the lockers.

  I walked back towards Lombard Street and dumped the whole thing, together with all the contents, into a City of London–crested street litter basket. I didn’t think Mrs. McDowd would be very happy if I took that smell back into the office.

  I had walked nearly a hundred yards farther on when I suddenly turned around and retraced my steps. I had searched everything else of Herb’s. Why not that blue bag?

  Neatly stacked, in a zipped-up compartment beneath the clothes, was over a hundred and eighty thousand pounds wrapped in clear plastic sandwich bags, three thousand in twenty-pound notes in each bag. There was also a list of ninety-seven names and addresses, all of them in America.

  Good old Herb. As meticulous as ever.

  Mr. Patrick would like to see you,” Mrs. McDowd said to me as I skipped through the door with the bag of loot over my shoulder. “In his office, right now.”

  Patrick was not alone. Jessica Winter was also there.

  “Ah, Nicholas,” said Patrick. “Come and sit down.” I sat in the spare chair next to the open window. “Jessica and I have been looking at how things stand. We need to implement a damage-control exercise. To maintain the confidence of our clients and to assure them that it’s ‘business as usual’ at Lyall and Black.”

  “And is it business as usual?” I asked.

  “Of course,” he said. “Why wouldn’t it be?”

  I thought that was pretty obvious. Members of the Fraud Squad were still in the room next door, bagging up evidence.

  “No,” Patrick went on, “we mustn’t let this little setback disrupt our work. I will write to all of Gregory’s clients, telling them that for the time being I will be looking after their portfolios. It will just mean we all have to work a little harder for a while.”

  But for how long, I wondered?

  The maximum sentence for conspiracy to murder was life imprisonment.

  “So how about the Bulgarian business?” I asked.

  “Jessica and I have just been looking at it,” Patrick said. “Or what is left to look at after those damn police have been in here taking stuff away.”

  “And?” I asked.

  “It’s rather inconclusive,” Jessica said.

  “What’s inconclusive?” I asked, somewhat surprised.

  “There seems to be no evidence to show if the original investment was obtained by fraudulent means, or whether there was any purposeful deception by anyone in this firm,” Jessica said.

  She’s covering her back, I thought.

  “But how about the European Union grants?” I said. />
  “They are not our business,” Patrick said sharply. “Neither Gregory individually nor Lyall and Black as a firm can be held responsible for the actions of people in Brussels, those who may have issued EU grants without due diligence. The only matter that affects this firm is the original Roberts Family Trust investment and then only if we were knowingly negligent in brokering it. As far as we can establish, the investment idea was put forward by the senior trustee of the trust.”

  I had to admit, it was a persuasive argument, especially as Viscount Shenington was unlikely to be in any state to refute it. Perhaps I had been a tad premature in writing off the future of Lyall & Black.

  But that didn’t explain what had happened to Herb Kovak, and it didn’t explain Shenington’s comment about me being difficult to kill and not turning up where I was expected. The only place I’d been expected had been the offices of Lyall & Black and the only people who had known where I’d been expected had been the firm’s staff. Gregory must have at least discussed the matter of my murder with Shenington. That alone would have been enough to convict him.

  “What about the photographs that Gregory showed to Colonel Roberts?” I said. “The ones that purported to prove that the factory and houses had already been built.”

  “Gregory told me this morning that he’d been sent those by the developer in Bulgaria and in good faith,” said Patrick. “He’d had no reason to doubt their authenticity.”

  “Not until Jolyon Roberts asked about them,” I said. “What did he do then?”

  “Gregory told me that Colonel Roberts didn’t exactly say that he questioned whether the photos were accurate or not. In fact, Gregory said that Roberts kept contradicting himself and changing his mind throughout their final telephone conversation and he kept apologizing all the time for wasting Gregory’s time. In the end, Gregory wasn’t quite sure what to think.”

  I could believe it. Jolyon Roberts had done exactly the same with me at Cheltenham. I thought it strange that a man who had clearly been so decisive on the battlefield could have been so befuddled and incoherent when it came to accusing a friend of lying and of stealing from him. I suppose it was all about family honor, and not losing face.

  “Thank you, Jessica,” Patrick said. “You can be getting back to your office now.”

  Jessica stood up and left. I remained where I was.

  “Now, Nicholas,” said Patrick when the door was shut, “I have decided to overlook your rather strange behavior over the past three weeks and to wipe the slate clean. Your job is still yours if you want it. To be honest, I don’t know how we would manage at the moment if you weren’t here.”

  So was that a vote of confidence in my ability, I wondered, or a decision born simply out of necessity?

  “Thank you,” I said. “I’ll think about it.”

  “Don’t take too long about it,” Patrick said. “It’s time to put other things out of your mind and get back to work.”

  “I’m still not happy about things,” I said. “Especially the fraud.”

  “Suspected fraud,” he corrected. “If you ask me, it is a shame you ever went to see Roberts’s nephew in Oxford.”

  “Maybe,” I said.

  “Well, go now and get on with your work, I have things to do.”

  It was a dismissal, so I stood up and went back to my desk.

  I was still greatly troubled by Patrick’s and Jessica’s seeming brush-off of such a serious situation.

  Herb had accessed the file and then he was killed.

  Shenington and his gunmen knew more about my movements than they could have done without someone in the firm passing on the information.

  Something wasn’t right. I could tell because the hairs on my neck refused to lie down. Something definitely wasn’t right. Not right at all.

  I took out a sheet of paper from a drawer and wrote out again a copy of the note I had found in Herb’s coat pocket.

  YOU SHOULD HAVE DONE WHAT YOU WERE

  TOLD. YOU MAY SAY YOU REGRET IT, BUT

  YOU WONT BE REGRETTING IT FOR LONG.

  I wrote it out in capital letters, using a black ballpoint pen, so that it looked identical to the original.

  I picked up my mobile phone and the note and went down the corridor. I walked into Patrick’s office, closing the door behind me.

  “Yes?” he asked, showing some surprise at my unannounced entrance.

  I stood in front of his desk, looking down at him as if it was the first time I had ever seen him properly.

  “What did you tell Herb to do?” I asked him quietly.

  “What do you mean?” he replied with a quizzical expression.

  “You told him that he should have done what he was told,” I said.

  I laid the note down on the table, facing him, so that he could read the words.

  “What was it you told Herb to do?”

  “Nicholas,” he said, looking up at me and betraying a slight nervousness in his voice, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Yes, you do,” I said with some menace. “It was you all along, not Gregory. You devised the fraud, you found Shenington to put up the five million from his family trust, and you saw to it that you weren’t found out.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said again, but his eyes showed me he did.

  “And you had Herb killed,” I said. “You even wrote this note to him as a sort of apology. Everyone liked Herb, including you. But he had to die, didn’t he? Because he had accessed the Roberts file and he’d worked out what was going on. What did you do? Offer him a piece of the action? Try and buy his silence? But Herb wasn’t having any of that, was he? Herb was going to go to the authorities, wasn’t he? So he had to die.”

  Patrick sat in his chair, looking up at me. He said nothing.

  “And it was you that tried to have me killed as well,” I said. “You sent the gunman to my house in Finchley and then, when that didn’t work, you sent him to my mother’s cottage to kill me there.”

  He remained in his chair, staring at me through his oversized glasses.

  “But that didn’t work either,” I said. “So you arranged for me to come here on Monday for a meeting with you and Gregory.” I laughed. “A meeting with my Maker, more like. But I didn’t come, although you tried hard to convince me to. Then I saw you on the train, and you said, ‘Come home with me now, and we’ll sort this out tonight.’ But I’d have been dead if I had, wouldn’t I?” I paused and stared back at him. He still said nothing. “So then Shenington changed his mind about talking to me and invited me to be his guest at the races in order to complete the job.”

  “Nicholas,” Patrick said, finally finding his voice, “what is all this nonsense?”

  “It’s not nonsense,” I said. “I never told you that I’d been to see Mr. Roberts’s nephew in Oxford. In fact, I’d purposely not told you because I didn’t want anyone knowing my movements. I just told you that I’d spoken to him. For all you knew, it could have been on the telephone. But Shenington told you that I went to Oxford to meet his son, didn’t he? And you repeated it to me just now.”

  “You have no proof,” he said, changing his tune.

  “Did you know that you can get fingerprints from paper?” I asked, picking up the note carefully by the corner.

  He wasn’t to know that the original had already been tested by the Merseyside Police forensic department and found to have only my and Herb’s prints on it.

  His shoulders sagged just a fraction, and he looked down at the desk.

  “What did Herb say he regretted?” I asked.

  “He said he regretted finding out,” Patrick said wistfully with a sigh. “I was careless. I stupidly left a document under the flap of the photocopier. Herb found it.”

  “So what did you tell him to do?” I asked for a third time.

  “To accept what he’d been offered,” he said, looking up at me. “But he wanted more. Much more. It was too much.”

  Herb ha
d clearly not been as much of a saint as I’d made out.

  “So you had him killed.”

  He nodded. “Herb was a fool,” he said. “He should have accepted my offer. It was very generous, and you can have the same—a million euros.”

  “You make me sick,” I said.

  “Two million,” he said quickly. “It would make you a rich man.”

  “Blood money,” I said. “Is that the going rate these days for covering up fraud, and murder?”

  “Look,” he said, “I’m sorry about Herb. I liked him, and I argued against having him killed, but the others insisted.”

  “Others?” I said. “You must mean Uri Joram and Dimitar Petrov.”

  He stared at me with his mouth open.

  “Oh yes,” I said. “The police know all about Joram and Petrov because I told them. I told them everything.”

  “You bastard,” he said with feeling. “I wish Petrov had killed you at the same time he shot Herb Kovak.”

  Throughout the encounter I’d been holding my mobile phone in my left hand. It was one of those fancy new do-anything smart phones, and one of its functions was the ability to act as a voice recorder.

  I’d recorded every word that had been said.

  I pushed the buttons and played back the last bit. Patrick sat very still in his executive leather chair, listening, and staring at me with a mixture of hatred and resignation in his eyes.

  “I wish Petrov had killed you at the same time he shot Herb Kovak.”

  It sounded rather metallic out of the telephone’s tiny speaker, but there was no doubt that it was Patrick Lyall’s voice.

  “You bastard,” he said again.

  I folded the note, turned away from him and walked back along the corridor to my desk to call Chief Inspector Tomlinson. But I’d only just picked up the telephone when there was a piercing scream from outside the building.

  I stuck my head out through the window.

  Patrick was lying faceup in the middle of the road, and there was already a small pool of blood spreading out around his head.

  He had taken the quick way down from our fourth-floor offices.