by Dick Francis
Alex and Julie really weren’t very discreet. Making sure the flash was switched off, I took twenty or more photos through the window of them kissing, him sliding his hands inside her coat and pulling up her nightdress. Even though Julie’s back was mostly towards the window, there was little doubt where Alex was placing his fingers and my eighteen-times optical zoom Leica lens captured everything.
Presently, Julie cut the plastic ties round Alex’s ankles and they went hand-in-hand out of the kitchen, and, I presumed, up the stairs to bed. Short of shinning up a drainpipe, I would see nothing more and, in spite of being called Tom, my artificial leg didn’t lend itself readily to climbing up to peep through bedroom windows.
Even then I didn’t return to Ian’s car and go home. Instead, I went back down the side of the house and out into Bush Close, to where Julie had parked the white BMW. It was some way down the road, well beyond the glow from the street light outside number 12. I tried the doors but she had locked them, so I sat down on the pavement, leaned up against the passenger door, and waited.
I was getting quite used to waiting, and thinking.
Alex Reece clearly received more than an average bonus after being away for five days in Gibraltar, and I was just beginning to think that Julie was staying for the whole night when, about an hour after I left, I saw her coming towards me through the pool of light produced by the solitary street lamp.
I pulled myself to my feet using the car door handle but I remained crouched down below the window level so Julie couldn’t see me as she walked along the road. When she was about ten yards away, she pushed the remote unlock button on her key and the indicator lights flashed once in response. As she opened the driver’s door to get in, I opened the passenger one to do likewise so we ended up sitting side by side with both doors slamming shut in unison.
Startled, she immediately tried to open the door again but I grabbed her arm on the steering wheel.
‘Don’t,’ I said in my voice-of-command. ‘Just drive.’
‘Where to?’ she said.
‘Anywhere,’ I said with authority. ‘Now. Drive out of this road.’
Julie started the car and reversed it into one of the driveways to turn round. In truth, it was not the best-performed driving-test manoeuvre, and there would probably be BMW tyre marks on the front lawn of number 8 in the morning, but at least she didn’t hit anything, and I wasn’t an examiner.
She pulled out into Water Lane and turned right towards Newbury, towards home. We went a few hundred yards in silence.
‘OK,’ I said. ‘Pull over here.’
She stopped the car at the side of the road.
‘What do you want?’ she said rather forlornly.
‘Just a little more help,’ I said.
‘Can’t you just leave us alone?’
‘But why should I?’ I exclaimed. ‘My mother has paid you more than sixty thousand pounds over the past seven months and I think that entitles me to demand something from you.’
‘But Alex told you,’ she said. ‘You can’t have it back. We’ve spent it.’
‘On what?’ I asked.
She looked across at me. ‘What do you mean, on what?’
‘What have you spent my mother’s money on?’
‘You mean you don’t know?’
‘No. How could I?’
She laughed. ‘Coke, of course. Lots of lovely coke.’
I didn’t think she meant Coca-Cola.
‘And bottles of bubbly. Only the best, you know. Cases and cases of lovely Dom.’ She laughed again.
I realized that she must have been sampling one or the other during the past hour with Alex. It was not only fear that had caused her to drive on the grass. I couldn’t smell alcohol on her breath, so it had to have been the coke.
‘Does Ewen know you take cocaine?’ I asked.
‘Don’t be fucking stupid,’ she said. ‘Ewen wouldn’t know a line of coke if it ran up his nose. If it hasn’t got four legs and a mane, Ewen couldn’t care less. I think he’d much rather screw the bloody horses than me.’
‘So what is Jackson Warren and Peter Garraway’s little tax fiddle?’
‘Eh?’
‘What is Jackson and Peter’s tax fiddle?’ I asked again.
‘You mean their VAT fiddle?’ she asked.
‘Yes,’ I said excitedly. I waited in silence.
She paused for a bit but eventually began to explain. ‘Did you know that racehorse owners can recover the VAT on training fees?’
‘My mother said something about it,’ I said.
‘And on their other costs as well, those they attribute to their racing “business”, like transport and telephone charges and vet’s fees. They can even recover the VAT they have to pay when they buy the horses in the first place.’
The VAT rate was at nearly twenty per cent. That was a lot of tax to recover on expensive horseflesh.
‘So what’s the fiddle?’ I asked.
‘What makes you think I’d ever tell you?’ she said, turning in the car towards me.
‘So you do know, then?’ I asked.
‘I might,’ she said arrogantly.
‘I’ll delete the pictures if you tell me.’
Even in her cocaine-induced state, she knew that the pictures were the key.
‘How can I trust you?’
‘I’m an officer in the British Army,’ I said rather pompously. ‘My word is my bond.’
‘Do you promise?’ she said.
‘I promise,’ I said formally, holding up my right hand. Yet another of those promises I might keep.
She paused a while longer before starting again.
‘Garraway lives in Gibraltar and he’s not registered for VAT in the UK. He actually could be but he’s obsessive about not having anything to do with the tax people here because he’s a tax exile. He only lives in Gibraltar to avoid paying tax. Hates the place really.’ She paused.
‘So?’ I said, prompting her to continue.
‘So all Peter Garraway’s horses are officially owned by Jackson Warren. Jackson pays the training fees and all the other bills and then he claims back the VAT. He even buys the horses for Garraway in the first place and gets the VAT back on that too. He uses a company called Budsam Ltd.’
‘So why is that a fiddle?’ I asked. ‘If Jackson buys them and pays the fees then he is the owner, not Garraway.’
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘but Peter Garraway pays Jackson back for all the costs.’
‘Doesn’t that show up in Jackson’s accounts or those of the company?’
‘No.’ She smiled. ‘That’s the clever bit. Peter pays Jackson into an offshore account in Gibraltar that Jackson doesn’t declare to the Revenue. Alex says it’s very clever because Jackson gets his money offshore without ever having to transfer anything from a UK bank, which would be required by law to tell the tax people about it.’
‘How many horses does Peter Garraway own in this way?’ I asked.
‘Masses. He has ten or twelve with us and loads more with other trainers.’
‘But don’t they pay for themselves with the prize money?’
‘No, of course not,’ she said. ‘Most horses don’t make in prize money anything like what they cost to keep, especially not jumpers. Far from it. Not unless you count the betting winnings, and Garraway gets to keep those himself.’
‘So why doesn’t Peter Garraway register himself as an owner in the UK for the VAT scheme?’
‘I told you,’ she said. ‘He’s paranoid about the British tax people. They’ve been trying for ever to get him for tax evasion. He’s obsessive about the number of days he stays here, and he and his wife even travel on separate planes so they won’t both be killed in a crash and his family get done here for inheritance tax. There’s no way he’ll register. Alex thinks it’s stupid. He told them it would solve the problem of the VAT without any risk, but Garraway won’t listen.’
I listened all right.
Wasn’t it Archimedes who cla
imed that, if you gave him a lever long enough, he could lift the world?
I listened to Julie with mounting glee. Perhaps now I had a lever long enough to prise my mother’s money back from under the Rock of Gibraltar.
All I had to do was to work out on whom to apply it, and when.
17
I spent much of the night downloading Alex’s files and e-mails onto my laptop using the internet connection in my mother’s office.
I had let myself into the kitchen silently using Ian’s key. The dogs had been unperturbed by their nocturnal visitor, sniffing my hand as I’d passed them and then going back to sleep, happy that I was friend, not foe.
I worked solely by the light of the computer screen and left everything exactly as I found it. I didn’t know why I still thought it was necessary for my presence to be a secret from my mother, but I wasn’t yet ready to try to explain to her what had been going on.
It might also have been safer for me if she didn’t know where I was.
After I had left Julie to drive herself home in the white BMW, I’d taken Ian’s car slowly up the driveway of Greystone Stables. My two tell-tale sticks on their stones were broken. Someone had been up to the stable yard; someone who would now know I wasn’t dead; someone who might try to kill me again. But they would have to find me first.
I slept fitfully on Ian’s sofa and he left me there snoozing when he went out to morning stables at half past six on Monday morning.
By the time he returned around noon, I had read through all of Alex’s downloaded information on my laptop. Most of it was boring but, amongst the dross, there were some real gems, and three stand-out sparkling diamonds.
Maybe I wouldn’t need to use my lever after all.
One of the diamonds was that Alex, it transpired, was not only the accountant for Rock Bank (Gibraltar) Ltd, but also one of the signatories of the company’s bank account and, best of all, I had downloaded all the passwords and usernames that he needed to access the account online.
I would try to log in to the account tonight, I thought, when I had access to the internet from my mother’s office.
The other diamonds were the e-mails sent by Jackson Warren to Alex Reece concerning me, the first a message sent on the night of Isabella’s kitchen supper, and the second after the races at Newbury on the day Scientific had won. The first had been sent in a fit of anger, and the second as a warning, but nevertheless, it amazed me how lax people could be with e-mail security.
In the army, all messages were encrypted before sending so that they were not readable by the enemy. Even mobile phones were not permitted to be used in Afghanistan in case the Taliban were listening to the transmissions and gaining information that could be useful either in a tactical way, or simply to undermine the morale of the troops.
No parents, having been called by their soldier offspring one evening from a mobile telephone in Helmand province, would welcome then receiving a second call, this time from an English-speaking member of the Taliban, who would inform them that their son was going to be targeted in the morning, and that he would be returning home to them in a wooden box.
It had happened.
Yet here was a supposedly sensible person, Jackson Warren, sending clear-text messages by e-mail for all to read. Well, for me to read, anyway.
What the bloody hell do you think you were doing talking so openly in front of Thomas Forsyth? Jackson had written soon after storming out of the supper. His mother was one of those who invested heavily in our little scheme. KEEP YOUR BLOODY LIPS SEALED – DO YOU HEAR?
Capital letters in an e-mail were equivalent to shouting and I could vividly recall the way Jackson had stormed out of the room that night. He would certainly have been shouting.
The second e-mail was calmer, but no less direct, and had been sent by Jackson to Alex at five o’clock on the afternoon of the races. He must have written it as soon as he arrived home from Newbury.
Thomas Forsyth told me this afternoon that he wants to contact you. I am making arrangements to ensure that he cannot. However, if he manages to be in contact with you before my arrangements are in position, you are hereby warned NOT to speak with him or communicate with him in any way. This is extremely important, especially in the light of the company business this coming week.
I knew only too well what arrangements Jackson had subsequently taken to stop me speaking with Alex – my shoulders still ached from them. But what, I wondered, had been the company business? Perhaps all would be revealed by access to the company bank account later.
‘So how are the horses?’ I asked Ian as he slumped down onto the brown sofa and switched on the television.
‘They’re all right,’ he said with a mighty sigh.
‘What’s wrong, then?’ I asked. ‘Would you like me to leave?’
‘As you like,’ he said, seemingly uninterested in the conversation as he flicked through the channels with the remote control.
‘Bad day at the office?’ I asked.
‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘You could say that.’
I said nothing. He’d tell me if he wanted to.
He did.
‘When I took this job I thought it would be more as an assistant trainer rather than just as “head lad”. That’s what Mrs Kauri implied. She told me she doesn’t have an assistant, as such, so I thought the role of head lad would be more important to her than to other trainers.’
He paused, perhaps remembering that I was Mrs Kauri’s son.
‘And?’ I prompted.
‘And nothing,’ he said. He turned off the TV and swivelled round on the sofa to face me. ‘I was wrong, that’s all. It turns out she doesn’t have an assistant because she can’t delegate anything to anybody. She even treats me the same as one of the young boys straight out from school. She tells the staff to do things that I should be telling them to do, and often it is directly opposite to what I’ve already said. I feel worthless and undermined.’
Story of my life, I thought.
At least, it had been the story of my life until I’d left home to join the army. It seemed to me that Ian was already on the road to somewhere else. It was a shame. I’d seen him working with the horses and even I could see that he was good, calming the younger ones and standing no nonsense from the old hands. He also had a passion for them, and he longed for them to win. Losing Ian Norland would be a sad day for Kauri House Stables.
‘Have you been looking?’ I asked.
‘There’s a possibility of a new stable opening that’s quite exciting,’ he said, suddenly more alive. ‘It’s some way off yet but I’m going to keep my options open. But don’t you go telling your mother. She’d be furious.’
He was right, she would be furious. She demanded absolute loyalty from everyone around her but, sadly, she repaid it in short measure, and she wasn’t about to change now.
‘Which stables?’ I asked.
‘Rumour has it that one of the trainers in the village is going to open up a second yard and he’ll be needing a new assistant to run it. I thought I might apply.’
‘Which trainer?’ I asked.
‘Ewen Yorke,’ he said. ‘Apparently he’s buying Greystone Stables.’
He’d have to fix the broken pane in the tack-room window.
The statements of the bank account of Rock Bank (Gibraltar) Ltd were most revealing.
I had spent the afternoon re-reading all the e-mails that I had downloaded from Alex Reece’s computer as well as the files from the Rock Accounts folder. Quite a few of the e-mails were communications back and forth with someone called Sigurd Bellido, the senior cashier at the real Gibraltar bank that held the Rock Bank Ltd account, discussing the transfer of funds in and out. Unfortunately there were no references to account names and numbers from which, and to which, the transfers were made, although strangely they all discussed the ongoing health of Mr Bellido’s mother-in-law.
When, at two in the morning, I logged on to the online banking system in my mother’s office,
I could see that the recent transfers discussed with Mr Bellido were reflected in the various changes to the account balance.
As Alex had said, money periodically came into the account, presumably from the ‘investors’ in the UK, and then left again about a week later. If Alex was right, it disappeared eventually into some secret Swiss account belonging to Garraway or Warren.
I looked particularly at the transactions for the past week to see if they showed any evidence of the ‘company business’ that Jackson had referred to in his e-mail.
There had been two large deposits. Both were in American dollars, one for one million and the other for two million. A couple more mugs, I thought, duped into investing in a non-existent hedge fund.
One of the deposits had no obvious reference but the other, the two million dollars, had a name attached to it – Toleron. I knew I’d heard that name before, but I couldn’t place where, so I typed ‘Toleron’ into the Google search bar on my computer, and it instantly gave me the answer.
TOLERON PLASTICS appeared across my screen in large red letters, with THE LARGEST DRAINPIPE MANUFACTURER IN EUROPE running underneath in slightly smaller ones. Mrs Martin Toleron had been the rather boring lady I’d sat next to at Isabella’s kitchen supper who would, it appeared, very soon be finding out that her ‘wonderful’ husband wasn’t quite as good at business as she had claimed. I almost felt sorry for her.
Had that really been only eleven days ago? So much had happened in the interim.
I searched further for Mr Martin Toleron. Nearly every reference was connected with the sale of his company the previous November to a Russian conglomerate, reputedly adding more than a hundred million dollars to his personal fortune.
Suddenly I didn’t feel quite so sorry for his wife over the loss of a mere two million.
As Alex would have said, they could afford it.
Early on Tuesday morning, while my mother was away on the gallops watching her horses exercise, I borrowed Ian Norland’s car once more and went to see Mr Martin Toleron.