by Ian Campbell
"What secrets and treasures?"
"Those of the Merovingians and Visigoths, the Carolingians, Cathars and the Knights Templar."
"And the village with the strange church?"
"Rennes le Château, you probably read the book about 'The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail', or saw the television programs."
"So that's why it seemed familiar. So you're serious about the artists' holidays and buying an old farm."
"Deadly serious. It would be an ideal way to invest some of the money and it would give us an interest, running the place for that purpose a few months of the year; the rest of the time we could travel and see the world."
"Any other reasons?"
"One very good practical one. It concerns opening a bank account here in France."
"Go on."
"Well we can both open an account here tomorrow, if we wish, but it would be 'une compte étrangère', a foreigner's account with severe restrictions."
"How would we get an ordinary account."
"Ah, for that, you need to own property. If you can produce the deeds to your property, you're entitled to an ordinary account, so I thought if we had to buy, then why not here, where we can make the best use of it."
"I see. You've given it quite some thought. What am I supposed to do?"
"Join the enterprise."
"But all my training has been in computers, what would I know about running a holiday camp?"
"Do you want to be in computers the rest of your life? You certainly won't be content teaching, with all that money burning a hole in your pocket."
"You know, I've never actually thought about what I would do if we pulled it off. I never dared imagine we would. I just shut the thought of failing out of my mind."
"That's understandable, but think about it now. Here, we'll be safe from anyone looking for us, if they ever do. It's beautiful country, full of legend; a great center for artists with all the beauty around us and a great climate. Even in October, the temperature's still in the seventies."
"It is a little out of the way."
"Sure, but not as remote as you think. We're only about a two hour drive from Toulouse and a two hour flight from Toulouse to London, so we can be back home in less than half a day. Will you think about it?"
"Of course. What does the sign over there, say?" asked Sam, changing the subject and pointing towards the nearby river bank.
"It marks the grotto of the Madelaine."
"What's that exactly?"
"A cave, the other side of the little stream which runs in the gorge over there," said Pascoe, pointing through the trees. "It marks the source of two springs - one contains iron, the other sulphur. They both feed the spa which is where we will spend the night."
"Did you say a spa, like a health spa?"
"Yes, just down the road at Rennes-les-Bains, founded by the Romans. You'll enjoy taking the waters... I believe they're most refreshing. I'll even scrub your back if you want." Pascoe chuckled to himself as he started the car in the direction of the village.
Although he had no way of knowing how events were progressing in England, Pascoe had planned for the eventual discovery of his fraudulent cheques and continued to act accordingly. In addition to the general sightseeing that morning he knew he would also have to give the banks their final instructions. So, when he and Sam checked out of the Spa Hotel the next morning, although Sam's interest was captivated solely by the beauty of the locale, he kept an eye open for a post office where he would be able to make the necessary calls. The problem was that international calls from tiny remote villages were sure to be remembered. With this in mind, he turned the deux chevaux in the direction of Perpignan on the Mediterranean coast, where the main post office would meet his needs.
The Bureau de Poste was open for business by the time they had lunched and Pascoe headed straight for it, hoping that he would be able to remember the routine for making calls.
"Le téléphone s'il vous plaît, Madame?" He asked the woman at the counter.
"A vôtre gauche, monsieur." She replied, indicating a position to the left of where he was standing. He had to queue again.
"Oui monsieur, voila!" said the clerk when it finally came to his turn to ask for the phone. The clerk spoke with a high pitched voice, more Spanish sounding than French and he threw a wooden plaque on the counter. Pascoe examined the piece of wood on which the figure '3' had been incised. The number indicated the booth to use, but as they carried no numbers themselves, he didn't know whether to count from the right or the left. It was a straight, fifty-fifty choice and he plumped for the third booth from the left. He had almost made himself comfortable in the booth when he remembered that he hadn't given the telephone number to the clerk, and not wishing to risk informing the clerk over the phone, wrote the first number on a page torn from his note book and took it to the clerk. Two minutes later and Pascoe was through to the London bank.
"Hello Mr. Bristow... Guyton here... did you receive my telex the other day?"
"Of course Mr. Guyton. That's all dealt with," replied the manager.
"There are one or two things I should like you to do for me if possible."
"Go ahead."
"I take it my staff have been paying into the account."
"Yes, as regular as clockwork."
"Then perhaps you'd be kind enough to give me the balance of the account."
"Certainly Mr. Guyton, will you hold?"
"Yes, I'll wait." It seemed ages before Bristow came back on the line, but was, in all probability only a few minutes.
"You realize Mr. Guyton, that I'm not supposed to divulge this information without some kind of identification from you."
"Quite so Mr. Bristow... The pen is still mightier than the sword."
"That'll do nicely Mr. Guyton. As at the close of business last night, your account is in credit for the amount of £81,520.40. Do you have any instructions for me?"
"Yes, I wish to close the account as of today. Please deduct your final charges and transfer the balance to the Belgae Bank in Brussels as you did before. When can I expect the transfer to be made?"
"It's too late to effect the transfer today, because we have to set a specific time to exchange credits by telex. Shall we say tomorrow at noon?"
"That'll be fine."
"I will need confirmation in writing."
"Will another telex do?"
"Of course, just so that I have something on file in my records."
"I'll see to it right away. Thank you Mr. Bristow. Perhaps we'll do business again sometime."
"Perhaps we will. Goodbye Mr. Guyton."
Pascoe replaced the receiver, looked up the next number and repeated the charade. The only changes were in the timing. With the Belgae Bank in Brussels he arranged to have the account cleared as soon as the funds arrived from London and their immediate transfer to Geneva. For that purpose, he had only to give the number of the account which made things a little easier. He placed the next call to the Engleburger Bank, instructing the manager to notify the Swiss lawyer Herr Diffring when the monies from Brussels had been received. The last piece of the jigsaw was a call to the Swiss lawyer, informing him to expect a call from the bank and then to oversee the exchanging of the funds for bearer bonds in Swiss francs. Pascoe told him that he would contact him with further instructions the following Thursday morning.
In all, the series of telephone calls took more than an hour to effect and the clerk was as pleased to have his phone bill paid as Pascoe was to finish his business in the post office. He offered the clerk a 50 franc tip and waited until he was about to take it, before withdrawing his hand slightly. The clerk looked disappointed, but Pascoe indicated that the money would be his in return for some information about local telex facilities. When the clerk had told him what he wanted to know Pascoe added another 50 franc note to the first and thanked the clerk for his help. The money was greedily snatched from his hand, before he could change his mind.
Sending the two te
lexes and waiting for the respective confirmations took another hour, so it was nearly 17.00 when he rejoined Sam in the nearby café.
"What on earth took you so long? I was getting worried." Commented Sam.
"You should try using their 'phone system. Still everything’s done now. I've instructed the banks and Herr Diffring in Geneva. We should be home and dry by Thursday at the latest."
"Well, without wishing to appear greedy," said Sam, sliding her arm around Pascoe's waist and inserting a finger between his shirt buttons to caress his stomach, "but how much did we get?"
"A little over £80,000."
"Is that all?" she whined, disappointment written all over her face.
"Don't forget the £30,000 they already transferred to the Belgian bank on Friday. I don't think that's bad at all." Added Pascoe, his voice sounding a little hurt.
"It's all right darling, I was only teasing. Sometimes I just like to see you squirm a little, just for fun." The serious frown disappeared from his brow as he realized that Sam had been winding him up.
"You are a sadist."
"I don't think so, but I'll try anything once."
"You're impossible. What am I going to do with you?"
"I'll write a list."
Chapter 19
Follow the money
Detective Sergeant Heath called for his Inspector at eight a.m., a full six hours before they were due to go on duty. There had been a call from the American Express office, stating that another $2,000 worth of cheques had been paid, all with numbers matching Winters' cheques. They met the manager, a man called Wilson at his office just after nine o'clock.
"Good morning Mr. Wilson, I am Detective Inspector Roberts and this is Detective Sergeant Heath." Roberts and Heath both showed their open warrant cards to Wilson, who invited them into his office.
"How can we help you Mr. Wilson? I believe there have been some further developments since we spoke last night."
"Yes. I understand from our New York office that a further $ 2,000 worth of Mr. Winters' cheques have been paid and I don't see how that is possible if you have them with you?"
Heath produced the wallet of travelers’ cheques from his briefcase and Roberts started the routine questioning.
"Let's start from square one Mr. Wilson. Are these cheques the ones in question?" Heath spread the cheques out on the table.
"I'll have to check the numbers, but it shouldn't take long." Wilson extracted a foolscap piece of paper from a manila folder. He placed the paper listing the numbers of the cashed cheques on the table in front of him and put on his reading glasses before studying it. He spent a long time scanning the list and marking cheque numbers with a red biro, sometimes in groups, sometimes separately, before passing the annotated list to Roberts.
"I've marked off the cheques which have already been paid, that bear the same numbers as the ones we have here." Wilson said at last, indicating figures on the list.
Both detectives looked closely at it, searching for a pattern.
"Mr. Wilson, we seem to have several possibilities. Let's take them in order. Are you satisfied that these cheques that we recovered from the thief, are the same as the ones bought by Mr. Winters?"
"Yes, I'm quite sure." And you're sure these cheques are genuine?" Roberts continued.
"They certainly seem to be." Wilson took a box the size of a car battery charger, from a cupboard and placed it on the desk, plugging it into a nearby mains socket. When he switched it on, a bright cold light emanated from the hollow underside of the box. Heath and Roberts recognized it as an ultra-violet flouroscope. Wilson placed each of the suspect cheques under the light. Parts of the design on the face of the cheques fluoresced, a sign that they were genuine. Next, he studied them through a high power desk magnifier.
"There's no doubt about it, these cheques are the real thing."
"Could you show us what to look for Mr. Wilson? It may be helpful later on."
"Certainly. You saw that they fluoresced, so I won't bother to go into that. Now, with the magnifier, take a look at any background part of the cheque." Roberts had the first look.
"What do you see?"
"Some tiny colored spots," replied Roberts, standing back to let his partner study them first hand.
"Apart from the number sequences, those two things usually determine that the cheques are genuine."
"That means the other cheques must be false, the ones paid out by New York, unless your printers slipped up and issued an extra batch of cheques with the same numbers."
"It does seem like it." Replied Wilson.
"Has this sort of thing ever happened before?"
"Yes, once or twice. Nobody's infallible, but when we checked, we found out that the fault was internal, that we had paid out twice. This time it's different. We're actually sitting on one pile of cheques, some of which have already been paid out."
"Is there any way of knowing where the other cheques were cashed?" asked Roberts.
"That's what I asked myself. I telexed New York last night. They should have the answers by now." Wilson crossed his office to a telex machine and typed in his request at the keyboard:-
Attention: Dutyman Amex, New York, New York
Ref: My Com. Yesterday. Please send details of encashment Winters CHQS.Nos.182356 - 182455 inc. Signed Wilson London 7642. Acknowledge soonest.
"Now we will just have to wait and see if any of my colleagues are awake in the Big Apple."
Twenty minutes later, the telex started chattering its message:-
Attention 7642 Wilson Amex. London. Ref your query. Info follows. Signed Dutyman.
The machine stopped briefly after the acknowledgement, only to burst back into life a few minutes later, spewing out a seemingly endless length of paper. When the machine had quite stopped, Wilson tore the paper off and placed it on the desk so that they could all see the message.
"I think you'd better go through this with us Mr. Wilson," said Roberts, gesturing towards the figures. Wilson obliged.
"What we have here, are the details of the cheques bearing the same numbers as those issued to Mr. Winters, which have been cashed and subsequently paid by our New York office. The dates are separate so you can see that if we take the first lot of cheques for the first date, they were cashed by two of the main clearing banks here in London. There were three batches cashed on the second date, two from the same clearing banks as before and the third from Thomas Cook. The other two dates fall in much the same pattern."
"So these cheques were actually cashed at these places in the city?"
"I didn't say that. Let me explain. If you went into your local High Street bank anywhere in the country to cash your travelers' cheques, that branch would send the cheque through to its foreign business division which would repatriate it to its parent company in its country of origin."
"Clear as mud!"
"Excuse me, Sir," said Heath, "I think I understand how the system works. It’s like the cheque clearing system, where instead of every branch of every bank having to write and dispatch cheques to all the other banks up and down the country, each bank uses a central clearing bank. Cheques from all over the place just make their way there, where they are sorted before being sent through to their destinations. Am I right so far?"
"Yes, Sergeant, except that in this case, each bank and people like Thomas Cook have their own international clearing branch, which sorts the travelers' cheques before sending them back to their places of origin."
"O.K. I'm with it so far," said Roberts, "But who pays?"
"The issuing company pays. In this case American Express pays the banks, which have already paid the client."
"How does that payment take place?"
"Electronically."
"Can you be a little more explicit?" asked Roberts.
"Each clearing house sorts its T'C's into differing types. Once it has collated all the cheques of a particular type it feeds them into a computerized reading machine. Have you ever seen a stack-read
er work on a main frame computer?"
"You mean the one where you place a whole stack of cards on a rack and the machine swallows them whole," asked the Inspector.
"Something like that. Only it reads the code on each card as it does so. The only difference is that in that system the reader scans the holes in the cards, whereas with ours, it scans the magnetic numbers on the bottom of each cheque. That set of numbers is similar in structure, to the set of numbers on your own personal cheques. On your personal cheques, it encodes your account number, branch and bank, whereas on the travelers’ cheques, it encodes the name of the issuing bank, the value and number of the individual cheque. Each cheque has a definite value, whereas your own cheques can be of any value. That's where the main difference lies.”
“In a bank a machine can read all the information from your cheques, automatically, except for the details written on it in ink. Those have to be keyed in separately by a clerk. Not so with travelers’ cheques. As they're already paid for by the time the customer gets his hands on them, we just pay whoever gives them back to us."
"So what happens to this information?" asked Roberts.
"The reading machine translates what it sees on the cheques into an electrical signal on tape. This is transmitted by telephone and satellite to a receiver in the office of the issuing bank, where it is decoded back into recognized figures and if those figures check in the computer's reference, a payment is paid electronically to the bank concerned."
"So the T'C's themselves remain where they are?"
"Basically yes. Except once every week or two, those cancelled cheques, which have already been paid, are boxed up and sent back to their place and country of origin.
"So in the case we are concerned with here, the actual cheques are still in this country?"
"Almost certainly. They're probably with the clearing banks on this list."
"All of which were closed for the weekend until Tuesday."
"That's right."
"Just what we needed, eh Sergeant?"
"What do you reckon then Inspector?" asked Wilson.
"I'll be straight with you Mr. Wilson. My only concern is whether a crime has been committed here under British Law. If there has been, then we are involved. However, at the moment, everything is circumstantial and until we can get to see some of the cheques held by the clearing banks, to see if there are any forgeries about, we won't know. I don't see that we can do anything more until we hear from the clearing banks."