by Pete Trewin
Ed looked at him. He had a smile on his face that said “I don’t believe a word”. Chris suddenly felt tired and dizzy. This was more than just the effects of alcohol. Had his drink been spiked? What a stupid recruit trick to fall for. He couldn’t remember what he’d said. He only hoped that he’d not said too much. He tried to remember something, anything, about date-rape drugs. Sodium Pentothal? No, that was a truth drug. Rohypnol? It wasn’t his area of expertise. And he was obviously not going to get anything out of this character. He slapped the table and stood up.
‘So there it is,’ he said. ‘I’ll have to be off now.’
‘Not so fast, pal.’
Ed’s tone stopped Chris. And he had stretched out a leg and leaned over so that he was physically blocking Chris’s escape.
‘You’re pissed mate,’ Ed said. ‘And I’ve got the keys to your van. You need to sober up a bit. My house is on the way back to your van.’
FIVE
Ed’s house was on top of the hill. You had to get to it via a road that wound round the back. As they reached the house and pulled into the drive Ed stopped the car for a moment.
‘Whaddaya think of that?’ he said.
The house was suddenly lit up by lights; it was big, detached and in the Victorian Gothic style. The turrets and the fancy entrance porch were all vaguely familiar. Maybe it was in the Cheshire book of listed buildings. Chris would have to look it up. Whatever Ed was up to there was obviously money in it.
As Chris got out of the car, he almost fell over. How long did date-rape style drugs last for? An hour? A couple of hours? He tried to remember. Nothing. He walked to the edge of the drive and sat on a low wall. Merseyside was spread out before him under a deep blue sky full of stars; lines of yellow streetlights stretching from horizon to horizon. On the motorway, three ribbons of slowly moving white car headlights curved one way, partnered by three ribbons of red taillights going the other way.
Despite his tiredness, Chris managed to take in the view. Flashes of flame from the chemical works reflected from low clouds and the surface of the River Mersey as it curved out towards the Irish Sea. He could even make out St Georges Hall, the Post Office Tower and the two Liverpool cathedrals outlined by their floodlights. Models in a toy city.
‘Quite a view isn’t it!’ Ed shouted back as he unlocked the front door. He opened it and switched on the light, his huge body blocking it for a moment.
Chris was now able to take in the park-like grounds and the enormous, mature trees. Beeches? A glimpse of tennis courts terraced into the hillside. A conservatory like the sort of thing you found in Victorian parks. There was enough space on the forecourt for half a dozen cars – as well as Ed’s monster off-roader.
A pair of white trainers, ludicrously too small for Ed’s enormous feet, stood by the door. A little umbrella was propped in the hat stand. As they entered, Chris noticed Ed’s heels clicking on the mosaic-tiled floor, and his own shoes slipping a little as he walked. Must be kept well polished.
The living room was maybe fifty feet long and twenty wide – the size of the entire ground floor of a normal house. At one end a huge TV screen covered most of an area of wall near the window. Ed led him to a black leather sofa in front of it.
‘Take a pew, matey.’
Ed sat down on a chair, and pressed a remote control. He filled a big glass from a bottle of Glenmorangie; Chris shook his head when Ed offered the bottle and a glass to him.
The video started with a huge caption:
BEN THE DIRTY OLD GIT
‘A pseudonym,’ Ed said, chuckling.
As the video ran, Chris experienced a most strange combination of feelings. At first he had a hot feeling in his groin but, as the content of the video unfolded, he developed a cold, clammy feeling in the back of his neck.
The video was shot from the point of view of a hand-held camera, the subject’s faces alarmingly close and clear. At one point the camera view shifted right round and up to the big, grinning face of the cameraman himself. Ed.
‘They all want to be stars,’ Ed chuckled when the video had finished. ‘They’ll do anything. This goes down a bomb on the Internet. Real money-spinner.’
He hiccupped and fought hard to control his mirth. He took a large swig of whisky.
‘Wait till you see my new website project,’ he chortled. ‘I’m going for the American market. I’m going to call it Humiliate Your Dream Slut. What I’ll do is hire some of those fantastically attractive women you get in America – you know; blonde, curvy, long legs, big tits – and get squads of Mexicans, Negroes, geeks, midgets or whatever to gang bang them. You can buy anything and anyone in America with enough money.’
He contemplated Chris’s blank face.
‘You seem to know a lot about computers, matey,’ Ed continued. ‘Why not come in with me? As a partner. We both put in five kay to start off with, just to see how it goes. Fifty-fifty. You could look after all the e-mail scamming and the pop-up malarkey. You’ll get to screw the bimbos too, of course.’ He grinned at Chris. ‘Or maybe you could show me where that forty grand is hidden. With that amount of cash we could really go for it. We could be millionaires, Chris.’ He stared at Chris.
‘Why haven’t you been back to get it yourself?’ Chris said. ‘And forty thousand’s not that much these days.’
‘I have been back. But it’s all been redeveloped. I couldn’t even find the wood. And I’ve got cash flow problems. Forty grand would sort things out.’
‘I need a piss,’ Chris said.
‘On the right, just before the stairs.’
Chris went to the bathroom and swilled his face with cold water. He cupped water in his hands from the tap and drank deeply. He combed his hair and examined his face in the mirror. The oblique light picked out the circular scar on his left cheek. After twenty years it had a faded a little, but not much. The doctor had said that he would take it with him to his grave.
He felt a little better. Maybe the effects of the spiked drink were wearing off.
The bathroom, with its big cast iron, ornate Victorian bath, was larger than any room in his own place. He checked the cabinet over the wash-basin. Make-up, toiletries, a small pair of spectacles. All women’s things. But a woman wouldn’t leave stuff like that unless she was in a hurry.
When Chris came back the video had finished and Ed was snoring. It took a couple of minutes to find Ed’s computer room. It was still switched on. What a dope. He checked the protection. Alarm system but not state of the art. No sign of CCTV cameras. Suppose whoever had googled his name had also googled Ed’s? He checked the browsing history. Porn. On-line gambling.
He leaned back in the chair. He didn’t feel as drunk or as tired now. He got up and went into the entrance hall. He noticed Ed’s coat hanging over the newel. He found his van keys in the pocket. A pile of letters on a shelf by the door confirmed Ed’s new surname: Sefton. As he crept past the entrance to the living room, Ed came out.
‘What are you doing?’ he said.
‘Nothing. I’m off.’
‘How are you going to get to your van? It’s at the bottom of the hill.’
‘I’ll be OK.’
Ed moved quickly. He staggered and almost lost his balance, but managed to block Chris’s path to the front door.
‘Come on, Chris, you’re pissed. You can sleep in one of the spare bedrooms.’ He laughed. ‘There are plenty of them at the moment.’
Chris grunted with anger and stamped a foot.
‘You dirty bastard!’ he shouted. ‘Showing me stuff like that!’
‘Come on, Chris,’ Ed said. ‘It’s only a bit of fun. I paid those bimbos in the film. They wanted to do it. No one got hurt.’
‘For fuck’s sake, Ed. You could be locked up. I bet some of those girls weren't legal....’
‘Nah, they were all over eighteen.’
Chris stood for a moment.
‘This is what it’s all about, isn’t it?’ Chris blurted out. ‘You want that money to s
et up a porn channel. You recognized me and followed me…’
‘Come on, Chris. I was out of my mind that night. I didn’t mean to kill anyone. Let’s just go back and get that money. We’ll be rich. You can stay the night. You shouldn’t drive in your condition. We’ve plenty of room.’
Chris made a quick move to Ed’s left then, like a rugby winger, side-stepped Ed’s lunge and shuffled to the right. Ed’s feet slipped on the floor and he sat down with the full weight of what must have been eighteen stone.
He sagged to one side in the doorway and lay groaning.
‘My back! My back!’
Chris stopped on the drive. He turned and said:
‘Actually, I don’t know you.’
‘You what?’ Ed laughed, still sitting on his arse in the doorway.
‘We’ve never met. And if you say that we have I’ll deny all knowledge.’
‘OK. If that’s the way you want it. I can see why. OK.’
Ed held out his hand from where he sat. Chris ignored it and strode off into the night.
‘It’s a pity, Chris!’ Ed shouted after him. ‘We could have been friends again!’
There were no streetlights on the narrow lane and Chris had to walk carefully. Once he stumbled on a tree branch and almost fell over. When he got to the van he put the lights on in the back and searched through the boxes in the built-in shelving units where he kept his equipment and gizmos. Eventually he found the box he was looking for. The unit was still in its plastic packaging, new and gleaming.
SIX
‘What is our product – our USP?’
Simon Chester contemplated the half dozen new recruits who were receiving the “Simon Show” as it was known. He cut an impressive figure at the podium for a fifty-two year old man. Six foot two with a decathlete’s frame and musculature, perfectly set off by a tailored, grey silk suit and a black, polo-necked sweater. Gleaming Gucci shoes. Glossy black hair tied back in a bun. Small goatee beard. Discrete silver jewellery. No wonder he had been profiled on television and in the newspapers. Chris would have wanted to shag him himself if he was that way inclined.
The nondescript meeting room was only just about large enough for twenty people. Grey carpet tiles, off-white ceiling tiles, magnolia-painted walls. Simon brightened it up.
Simon flicked the button on his state of the art laptop and a message flashed up on the screen:
Unique
Selling
Point
The logo in the bottom right-hand corner read: Safe n’ Secure. Chris breathed out. PowerPoint presentations were notorious for going wrong, and Simon was the type of boss who would throw a tantrum over nothing. Jeanette exchanged a glance with Chris, flicked her mid length blonde hair then crossed her shapely legs. She was wearing an expensively tailored dark blue suit with high heels. She turned to look at the screen with an attentive look on her face, her profile impressive.
A headache thumped at the inside of Chris’s skull. He could be sick or his bowels loosen at any moment. When he had woken up that morning, he had felt awful and couldn’t remember a thing about the night before. He’d just about managed to drive in to work without being sick.
He took another swallow of water and gritted his teeth.
‘Security?’ ventured a recruit, his voice catching slightly on the “c”.
Simon shook his head.
‘Surveillance?’ tried another. More confident this one.
No.
‘Forensic audit?’
‘No,’ Simon said with great emphasis. ‘Our USP is…’ He pressed the button on his laptop and a huge cartoon smiley face appeared on the screen next to the text box with the message in it. The first verse of a pop song burst out of the speakers:
‘What a Wonderful Day…ay…ay!’
When the music stopped, the clanging guitars reverberated around the room for a few seconds.
‘Our USP,’ Simon said, ‘is peace of mind, serenity, absence of stress and worry: the feel good factor.’
Pleasant laughter rippled through the room.
‘Imagine you are one of our customers,’ Simon continued. ‘Everyone is trying to rip you off, rob you, take you to court. And that’s before you get to worrying about the competition. So who is our customer?’
‘Business?’
‘Yes,’ Simon said as he went over to a flip chart. He wrote CUSTOMERS in big letters with a felt-tip and, the first bullet point, BUSINESS, underneath. ‘But what are the biggest enterprises by turnover in this area, apart from business?’ He wrote up the suggestions as they came: LOCAL COUNCIL, UNIVERSITIES, HOSPITALS, SCHOOLS. ‘Multimillion pound enterprises with all the possibilities for fraud that you have in business.’
He went back to the podium and pushed a button on the laptop.
‘Let’s look at a few examples pulled at random from some of our recent cases. And please don’t speculate on the identities of the people involved. No names, no pack drill.’
A photo of an elderly woman sitting behind a desk came up on the screen – a rather sad looking Eleanor Rigby type. The figure of £8,000 was written across the image.
‘School secretary embezzles dinner money,’ said Simon. ‘Eight thousand pounds. Typical scam of this size. Lots of small cash transactions, one person responsible. The old dear doesn’t get found out until she falls ill. Turns out to be cancer. Just been divorced, house to be repossessed. In debt. In her late fifties. A sad case? True. But she was in a position of trust in a school. Is there anything more important than our children’s education? This school was actually in the red to the tune of twenty thousand pounds. Schools are businesses now. And this was a little primary school. A big secondary school turns over a million pounds a year, easy.’
The next photo showed a youngish – maybe thirty-five-years-old at the most – woman in a smart, pin-stripe trouser suit holding a glass of wine at what looked like a social occasion. She was blonde, and had an attractive smile. She had £250,000 written across her.
‘Pensions scam,’ Simon said. ‘Two hundred and fifty grand. Much bigger fraud than the last one. Senior council manager responsible for pensions. A golden oldie this one. She created ghost pensioners and had their pensions paid into an account she’d set up.’
Simon stepped forward from the podium. He took his jacket off, and threw it over a chair.
‘This woman was a magistrate, a chair of school governors, a pillar of society. It turns out that she had a broken marriage. Yet the only difference between what she did and what, say, Robert Maxwell did, is in scale. It’ll take years for the council’s pension fund to make up the losses. And ordinary people – cleaners, porters, drivers – will suffer. And, unlike the school secretary, who I have to admit I felt sorry for, she had no money problems. She was well paid and she had no children.’
He paused.
‘No, she did it because she was passed over for promotion. So she saw the money from the fraud as her due. Didn’t feel guilty at all. Saw it as a form of equitable redistribution. This was one cold, tough cookie with the gift of the gab. And she’ll be out of jail in a couple of years with good behaviour. Back making big money as the chief executive of some ex-offenders charity.’
The screen went blank and Chris smiled to himself in the darkness. He knew what was coming next: Alison Kirkpatrick. The image was of an attractive woman in her late thirties, mixed race and long black hair. The tight skirt, blouse and high heels made the most of her figure and left nothing to the imagination. £500,000 was written across her.
‘But when it comes to local government scams this is the best of the lot. Unbelievable. Absolutely unbelievable. Not so much the money she defrauded from this council in Greater Manchester but the fact that she got away with it for so long. This lady had a fictitious CV. Ran a big department in the council yet at the same time managed a slot machine habit and a cocaine addiction. And to pay for all this she worked as a call-girl at night. What she didn’t spend we got back before she went to jail.’ He closed h
is eyes and paused. ‘I must admit that I’ve got a soft spot for Alison,’ he said at last.
Someone giggled then everyone laughed
The next image showed a grinning, red-faced, middle-aged man in an expensive looking, dark suit with a large red carnation in the button hole. £25 million was written across him.
‘And finally we have this property developer and his mate, a banker. Made twenty five million from soft loans which shouldn’t have been given. The point here is: who was hurt? The bank shareholders? This pair didn’t rob kids or pensioners. Both are charming men. Lovely manners. But they are just as much crooks as the others. Much more, actually. Stolen money doesn’t fall off trees. Whether it’s eight grand, two hundred and fifty grand, five hundred grand or twenty five million, we pay. You, me, everyone.’
Simon paused.
‘The key thing is motivation – we need to know how the fraudster’s mind works. But this last one was the most difficult to prove. To many people this is not even fraud. It’s not like being caught with your hand in the till. Often it’s not even money. It can be statistics. Fake the outputs to keep your job. Which is where Billy Whizz our computer geek here comes in.’
He nodded at Chris who half stood up but, as he moved, felt so sick that he had to give a brief bow and sit down.
‘So what,’ Simon said to his audience, ‘are the tell-tale signs that someone is up to no good?’
‘People who don’t take holidays?’ A suggestion from the back.
‘A classic. Especially in firms handling lots of small transactions, and, most especially, cash. If someone’s got a fraud going then that one person looks after everything. And they keep their files locked away. Often they’re only found out when they fall ill. Any other tell-tale signs?’
‘Conspicuous consumption beyond what you’d expect from someone’s salary?’
‘A good one.’
‘Fictitious employees – like the pensioners?’
‘Amazingly, still common. Surprisingly though, it’s more subtle things that Billy Whizz here works on. Things you wouldn’t think of at first glance. Things such as: autocratic line management, high staff turnover, low staff morale, falling profits against a trend. You can measure stuff like that. The Whizz can run telephone calls through his system, cross-referencing certain numbers – like public call-boxes and prisons. At the end you can get a lovely pattern. Take heed, nothing escapes the Whizz.’