Illegal Tender (Three Oaks Book 12)

by Gerald Hammond

  Ian Fellowes was a typical lowland Scot, stocky and sandy-haired. He listened in silence to the story of the disaster as related by a shamefaced Elizabeth and read through the copies of the two e-mails which she had run off for him.

  When she had run out of both facts and regrets, he said, ‘You can stop reproaching yourself. Older and wiser heads than yours have been taken in. I could name a few names which would surprise you but I won’t — people are sensitive about their mistakes. The fact remains that anyone, caught by an apparently routine matter in a moment of distraction, can be fooled. Fraud would be impossible otherwise. You weren’t expecting trickery so you fell for it. You’ll be more careful next time.’

  ‘That’s for sure,’ Elizabeth said gloomily. ‘I was in the middle of form-filling for the tax man and my first reaction was another damn form to fill in. But that doesn’t obscure the fact that I’ve virtually given away the price of a good farm. What are the chances of our ever seeing the money again?’

  Ian looked sad. He was one of the many officers who hated above anything else the duty of breaking bad news. ‘Not very good, I’m afraid,’ he said. ‘In fact, I wouldn’t put them higher than negligible. I’ve just come back from a course on electronic fraud. E-mail fraud came high on the agenda and this series in particular took up an hour. Yours seems to be part of the same series — the wording within the message looks identical and is the same as the one that Mr Kitts brought from Edinburgh. It’s been going on for two years now and it seems to be the work of a sophisticated person or syndicate.’

  ‘Sophisticated, but not wholly familiar with the English language,’ I suggested.

  ‘That tends to be less noticeable in the Americas,’ Ian pointed out. ‘They operate almost entirely over the phone lines. The British end of the investigation is in the hands of the Serious Fraud Office and they’re in touch with police forces throughout the civilized world, but it all takes time during which tracks can be covered. Look at it this way. In Britain at least, anyone can open a bank account over the phone. You give a name, get a password and a code number and that’s about it. You deposit a sum of money in it and arrange for the Internet accounts to be paid by direct debit. You never touch that account again.’

  He stirred the two pages with his finger. ‘You send out these e-mails from anywhere and pick up the replies ditto. There’s no law against adopting ‘CompuServe at Something-or-other’ as your e-mail address. There should be, but there isn’t. And you’d think that somebody at the Internet would insert a program to screen out such obvious attempts at fraud in the name of one or other of the service providers, but they haven’t yet although I understand that it’s in hand. Right, then. You set up a dozen other bank accounts — many more than a dozen in the States, where large transactions have to be reported — and use the BACS to transfer money from the account of anyone rash enough to respond.’

  ‘What’s the BACS?’ Elizabeth asked him, frowning. ‘Something to do with the Internet?’

  Ian looked stumped for the moment. Evidently his course had not been as thorough as he was making out. I decided to help him. ‘Nothing to do with the Internet,’ I said. ‘It’s your telephone banking. The initials stand for Bank Automated Clearing System, if that’s of any interest. In Britain there’s an office block full of computers — in Reading, I think.’

  Ian tried to look as though he had known all along. ‘Thank you,’ he said.

  ‘These people have to come out of the shadows and make contact with the money at some point,’ I pointed out.

  Ian nodded. ‘Using the same system, they’ll move the money around — probably to somewhere like the Cayman Islands, which is where a lot of the drugs money gets laundered. Then, at the British end, it probably comes back to the Channel Islands and gets translated into something portable — bearer bonds or certificates of ownership of gold. It could be drugs or gemstones. It takes time to follow up such transactions that far. It can be done but it always turns out to be a waste of time. The Serious Fraud Office is constantly tracking these movements in the hope that they’ll make a mistake at that point and leave a trail that continues onward, but it hasn’t happened yet. Maybe it never will. The portable assets get brought ashore in a suitcase and re-deposited.’

  ‘And if they ever do make a mistake?’ I said. ‘Will anything helpful follow on?’

  Ian shrugged. ‘If they do, we may see some arrests but we’re very unlikely to find our way to more than a fraction of the missing money. And how do you prove that any, let alone all, of that was ever yours?’

  ‘The lawyers would have a bonanza,’ I said. Ralph Enterkin would think that Christmas was lasting all the year round.

  We lapsed into a gloomy silence. Elizabeth, I could see, was building up a head of steam. It had been in the nature of her upbringing to believe that society was ordered, that the police were there to protect her and that the law would right any wrong that was done to her. It was a view bound to provoke rebellion in the young. In the past, when she had been at odds with her grandfather, I had heard her cry out against the ordering of society and advocate the disbanding of the police — making all the arguments that come so readily to rebellious youth. But now that she had been dragged into the Establishment, it seemed that the ordering of society should be protecting her but had let her down.

  ‘Take it easy, my dear,’ I told her. ‘It isn’t the end of the world and you’ll still be a wealthy young woman.’

  ‘Just much less wealthy than before,’ she said bitterly.

  ‘I’m afraid that’s true. But we must do what we can to minimize your loss.’

  I had inadvertently offered myself as a target. ‘Oh, do try to talk sense!’ she snapped. ‘How can you minimize a fixed sum?’

  It hardly seemed to be an occasion for a detailed explanation of all the possible consequences. ‘Imagine this,’ I said. ‘You’re in a room. This room, if you like. Somebody throws a stone through the window. The glass has gone for ever, but do you let the stone bounce around among these expensive machines or do you try to catch it before it does any more damage?’

  Elizabeth sat still while colour washed through her face. Then she nodded slowly and I saw her muscles relax. ‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered. Apology had never come easily to her.

  ‘I can’t help you with your damage limitation, I’m afraid,’ Ian said. ‘I’ll take this copy along. There won’t be anything I can do today. The automated parts of the system will be at work but people will be in short supply. I’ll fax these to the Serious Fraud Office, first thing in the morning, and I’ll let you know what if anything comes out of it. But don’t expect to hear anything very soon. It’s a slow business, tracing these transactions through places where there’s a tradition of banking confidentiality, and there may be dozens of cases ahead of yours in the queue.’

  ‘In fact,’ Duncan said, speaking for the first time, ‘the news won’t be good and it won’t be soon.’

  Ian got to his feet. ‘That’s about it,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry to have to be the one to tell you this, but you might be wise to act on the assumption that there won’t be any, ever.’

  *

  Ian could see that we had more than enough to be going on with. He made a quick escape. Elizabeth went with him to the door.

  ‘Don’t be too hard on her,’ I told Duncan while we were alone. ‘Go on being supportive. Anybody could have been fooled.’

  He looked surprised that I should even say such a thing. ‘It’s entirely her money,’ he said. ‘She can give it to the Sally Anns if she likes. I’d miss my comforts but we would survive, so I’m not going to criticize. She can do that to herself, more and better, if we don’t stop her.’

  I had to agree. ‘That’s the other danger, permanent loss of confidence.’

  ‘You can help there,’ he said. ‘Keep her occupied with other estate business. Let her see that she can make decisions.’

  Elizabeth’s financial well-being might still be my concern but I was da
mned if I was going to be solely responsible for her therapy. ‘In case you’d forgotten,’ I said stiffly, ‘you’re her husband. You should be able to nurse her through the bad times. That’s what husbands are for.’

  ‘I’ll be nice to her,’ he promised. His voice, as usual, was very calm, his manner laid-back. ‘But the rest is very little to do with me. I have my own business — thanks, I admit, to a loan from the estate. My finances are quite separate and I prefer to have it that way. It’s my job to support her.’ He met my eye squarely. ‘It’s not a job I have a chance to shine at for the moment, for reasons beyond my control. If the worst ever came to the worst I’d do it, happily. But while Elizabeth still has money I don’t want to take any responsibility for it. It would make me feel like a parasite. If I have to be one, I don’t want to feel like it.’

  Put like that he made it sound quite noble, but I had more than a suspicion that he was opting out of a process which was going to be both exhausting and emotionally draining. The devil of it was that I couldn’t think of any valid counter-arguments.

  ‘Until Ian reports back,’ Duncan said, when Elizabeth returned and settled in the chair behind the big desk, ‘there won’t be anything useful to do except the damage limitation exercise. I’ll scram out of the way and let you and Henry get on with it. I’d better go to the shop. I have a computer in with a faulty disk drive and the customer wants it back tomorrow morning without fail.’

  Elizabeth nodded vaguely. ‘All right, dear,’ she said.

  Duncan jumped to his feet and got out of the room before she could change her mind. He threw me a guilty look over his shoulder before the door closed.

  ‘Uncle Henry,’ Elizabeth said dismally, ‘what are we going to do?’

  I needed time to think. During Ian’s visit I had heard Beatrice Payne’s little car zoom up to the door and to my relief she chose that moment to bring in a tray with coffee. Noticing three cups, I was afraid that she intended to join us and I prepared to hint that matters confidential were to be discussed. But she only asked whether Duncan was coming back, which Elizabeth answered with a quick shake of the head. Miss Payne removed the extra cup and left the room with a lack of curiosity which, taken with her unusual reluctance to intrude, surprised me. She must surely, I thought, have detected that something big was in the air. Either that or she had made a guess, accurate or not. Or perhaps she had distractions of her own. I thought that she had looked less discontented, even hopeful. Perhaps she had begun to look forward to motherhood. It seemed more likely that the mysterious boyfriend had reappeared and supplied a dose of the loving which had been missing from her life.

  Elizabeth managed to pour coffee. I accepted my cup from her before the nervous tremor in her hand caused her to spill more than a drop or two. ‘First,’ I said, ‘an overview, so that we can be sure that we have the same understanding of our situation.

  ‘Your grandfather had two priorities. Firstly, to preserve the estate and, secondly, to relieve the danger of unemployment in the area. As I understand it, you approve of both those aims?’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ she said impatiently.

  ‘No compromises?’

  ‘Definitely not.’

  ‘Right. The two may sometimes be in conflict, but we’ve been doing our best. With those aims in mind, we’ve been consolidating the estate. Talisman Farm was irrelevant and fifty miles away so we sold it. There was a better use for the capital.

  ‘I suggest that there’s no question of selling any more land.’

  ‘Definitely not,’ she said. ‘We have a tidy boundary at last and it’s all sort of interdependent.’

  ‘Even if you were prepared to dispose of parts of the estate, this would be a terrible time to sell. We only got a good price for Talisman Farm because some of the land was needed for an extension to the industrial estate. In addition to the farms and forestry, there are several buildings in Newton Lauder. Most of those Sir Peter acquired as a result of trying to prop up businesses which were in danger. One or two could now be sold without endangering those businesses. That might make some small contribution to the equation. I’ll have the factor look into it.

  ‘Sir Peter also had investments in a number of local firms. We’ll have to see if any of those investments can be sold without doing any damage.’

  Elizabeth muttered something about drops and buckets but I let it go by.

  ‘Now we come to Agrotechnics. Sir Peter founded the firm with the intention of relieving unemployment in the area and it has been largely successful. The designers have farming experience and the engineers are practical men. The firm had grown to the point where a substantial expansion was due, which is why the new share issue was floated.’

  Elizabeth straightened up suddenly. ‘Not the only reason,’ she said. ‘The employment situation in the Borders is getting worse.’ She smacked her hand down on the desk. ‘Employers are being forced out of business by foreign competition and by government policies which take no account of anything outside the towns and cities. As long as there are jobless who want jobs . . .’

  As a business philosophy, what she was saying might have been a road to ruin, but I was happy. I had not realized how closely she was following in Sir Peter’s footsteps nor that she had even taken the trouble to think about the effect on local conditions. And she was recovering her confidence and poise.

  I refrained from giving her a round of applause. ‘Quite so,’ I said.

  She met my eye. ‘Are you saying that I can’t make the investment after all? Mary’s cousin is out of a job and several others I know of.’

  ‘I’m not saying that at all,’ I told her. ‘You have already made the investment, all but paying over the money. You’re committed. You wanted to keep a controlling interest, so you underwrote a large part of the share issue. That has to be paid for in about three weeks’ time. That’s where most of the money from Talisman Farm was to go. Don’t panic,’ I added quickly as I saw her tense up again. ‘You won’t be led away in chains or declared bankrupt or anything. At a pinch, we could sell the shares again before settling day.’

  ‘I don’t want to do that if we don’t have to,’ she said quickly.

  ‘No more do I, though our reasons are probably different. I want to keep the bulk of the shares in your hands to prevent a takeover by some rival who only wants to steal the technology and reduce the competition by asset-stripping the company. But, almost as important, you wouldn’t get full value at the moment. I think that word has got around about Cowieson’s difficulties. I noticed in this morning’s paper that the price of Agrotechnics shares has fallen. We don’t want to fix your loss.’

  ‘And if Mr Cowieson pays up? Does that help?’

  ‘It would be useful to Agrotechnics,’ I said. ‘The expansion could go quicker and easier. It’s their money, not yours. But it might make it possible to negotiate a delay in settlement.’

  She sighed and pulled a face. ‘When I make a mess, I make a big one.’

  ‘Always look forward, not back,’ I told her. ‘Learn from the past but think to the future. Regret never pays dividends.’

  She stared at me for a second, puzzled and, perhaps justifiably, annoyed. I am inclined to pontificate at times. ‘Surely,’ she said at last, ‘regret is always there?’

  ‘Then give way to it for five minutes and then put it out of your mind and get on with your life,’ I said.

  ‘You’re right, damn you, Uncle Henry!’ She straightened her back. ‘Well? What do you advise? What do I do?’

  ‘Nothing about this for the moment. The ball’s in my court, as they say. I had better notify my fellow trustee and speak to a few other people. You could clear your desk of the estate business that you wanted to see me about. Then you’ll be available when you’re needed.’

  We filled in the hour before lunch taking decisions about a dozen matters of tenancy and finance. It would take her a day at least to gather the information and get the letters out. By then I could hope to have thought
of some more tasks for her.

  When we had finished, she came back to the problem of the moment. ‘My grandfather had a heap of stuff from the other house stored in the outbuildings and the attics,’ she said. ‘Stuff which had come down from the ancestors. Junk, most of it, but somebody knowledgeable should go through it. A Rembrandt or two could come in useful.’

  ‘Well done,’ I said. ‘That’s the kind of thinking we need. There’s a painting of foxhounds by John Emms in the dining room. It should make five thousand easily. Or does it have sentimental value?’

  ‘None at all. I don’t hunt and it was left to me by a cousin I didn’t like very much.’ Her rare smile had become rarer since the calamity, but she produced one suddenly. ‘If it was Labradors instead of foxhounds, I wouldn’t have given it up so easily.’

  ‘Very understandable,’ I said. ‘I’ll make an arrangement for getting things valued. Anything else?’

  Her face fell again. ‘Please God let something turn up! I had plans for the balance of the money. Roadside reflectors, for one thing.’

  She had lost me. ‘Catseyes, you mean?’

  ‘Sort of. We’ve been getting too many deer killed and injured on the roads. Badgers, too. There’s a type of reflector designed to reflect the lights of oncoming vehicles into nearby cover, to deter wildlife from coming out until the vehicle’s gone by. The council have agreed to make a contribution.’

  This was obviously something dear to her heart and, at a humanitarian level, I could see a great deal of merit in the idea. It would have been cruel to tell her to forget it. ‘Put the idea on hold for the moment,’ I said, ‘until we see how it all shakes out.’

  ‘It seems a bit hard that wildlife has to suffer because I was a bloody fool. And then, in the longer term . . .’