Dick Francis's Gamble (16 page)

“Right,” I said with determination. “It's time to show a defiant face to the world. I'm going to get up and go in to work, and bugger what anyone thinks. I'm innocent and I'm going to act like it.”

“That's my boy,” said Claudia with a huge grin. “Bugger the lot of them.”

She lay down on the bed and snuggled up to me, slipping her hand down under the sheets in search of me.

“But do you have to go immediately? Or . . .” She grinned again. “Can you wait a while longer?”

Now I was really confused.

Had I been reading the signals incorrectly?

“Hmm, let me think,” I said, laughing with joy as well as expectation. “Work or sex? Sex or work? Such difficult decisions.”

Not really.

Sex won—easily.

 

 

I
didn't go into the office until after lunch, but that was not solely due to having fun and games in bed with Claudia. It was because I went to Hendon on the way to check on Sherri and to collect my laptop computer that I'd left on Herb's desk.

“What happened to you?” she said, opening the door. “I thought you were coming back yesterday afternoon.”

“I was,” I said. “But I was detained elsewhere.” I decided not to elaborate. “What have you been up to?”

“I've started going through Herb's things in his bedroom,” she said. “I got fed up doing nothing, and it somehow seems to help.”

“Did you find anything of interest?” I asked as I followed her down the corridor to the bedroom.

“Only this,” she replied, picking up something from the bed. “It was at the back of his wardrobe, hanging on a hook behind his coats.”

She handed me a small blue plastic box with a clip-on lid. Inside the box, all neatly held together by a rubber band, were twenty-two credit cards. I rolled off the band and shuffled through them. As far as I could tell, they matched the statements, right down to the variations in Herb's name.

“Why would anyone have so many credit cards?” Sherri asked. “And why would they all be in a box hidden in his wardrobe? They all look brand-new to me.”

And to me, I thought. Herb hadn't even bothered signing them on the back. These cards had been obtained solely for use on the Internet. But I knew that. I'd seen the statements.

Underneath the cards were four pieces of folded-up paper similar to the ones that Chief Inspector Tomlinson had shown me the previous morning. I looked at the lists of numbers and letters. The first columns on each side were definitely dates but they were written in the American way, with the month first and then the day, so “2/10” was the tenth of February. All the dates on these pieces started 1, 2 or 12, so were from January, February or December.

Sherri was sitting on the floor busily looking through a chest of drawers, lifting out neat piles of T-shirts and stacking them on the bed. I left her and went out of the bedroom, along the corridor and into the living room.

The handwritten lists I had photocopied yesterday were still on the desk next to my computer along with the photocopied bank and credit card statements. The dates on those lists all started with a “3,” for March.

I took them back to the bedroom.

On all of the lists, the second and third columns definitely looked like amounts of money. And the fourth column was a list of capital letters, possibly initials. I counted them. There were ninety-seven different sets of letters.

“What are you looking at?” Sherri said.

“I don't know, exactly,” I replied. “Lists of numbers and letters. Have a look.” I handed her the sheets. “I think the first column on each side are dates and the next two are probably amounts of money.”

“In dollars or pounds?” she asked.

“I don't know,” I said slowly. Was that why, I wondered, the amounts on the credit card statements didn't match the amounts on the sheets. Were one lot in dollars and the other in pounds?

I left Sherri studying the lists while I went back to the desk for the statements and Herb's calculator.

“What's the exchange rate for the U.S. dollar to the pound?” I asked, coming back into the bedroom.

“About one-point-six dollars to the pound,” Sherri said. “At least it was last week, but it changes all the time.”

I multiplied some of the amounts on the credit card statements by 1.6 and tried to match the new figure against any on the handwritten lists. It was a hopeless task. I didn't know the exact exchange rate, and there were over five hundred different entries on the twenty-two statements. Some of the amounts were close, but none were exactly the same. The best I could say was that they might have been related.

“Do you recognize any of the initials on the lists?” I asked Sherri.

“Is that what they are?” she said.

“I don't know but they look like it.”

She shook her head.

“Did you know that Herb liked to gamble?” I asked.

She looked up at me. “Of course,” she said. “Don't all men? Herb had always been one for an occasional flutter on the horses. Just like his father had been. It must be in the genes.”

“Did you know how much he gambled?” I asked.

“Never very much,” she said. “He may have liked the odd bet, but I know he believed that gambling had ruined our childhood. He would never have staked more than he could afford to lose. I'm absolutely sure of that.”

“And how much could he afford to lose?” I asked.

“What are you getting at?” Sherri said.

“Herb gambled a lot on the Internet,” I said. “A huge amount.”

She was shocked. “Are you sure?”

I nodded. “He must have spent hours every day gambling on Internet betting sites and playing at the virtual poker tables in the online casinos. And he lost. He lost big-time.”

“I don't believe it,” Sherri said. “How do you know?”

I held out the photocopies of the credit card statements to her. “Herb lost more than ninety thousand pounds last month alone. And the same the month before.”

“He can't have done,” she said with a nervous laugh. “Herb didn't have that sort of money.”

“Look for yourself,” I said, handing her the statements.

She looked at them for a moment, but I could see she was crying again.

“Do you think that's why he was killed?” she asked.

“I don't know,” I said. But I thought it quite likely.

She cried some more.

“I wish he'd never come to England,” Sherri said sadly. “Herb wouldn't have been able to gamble like that at home. Internet gambling is illegal in most of the United States.”

So it was.

I remembered reading about the head of an Internet gambling website who'd been arrested when he'd arrived at a U.S. airport and charged with racketeering simply for allowing Americans to gamble on his website even though it was based in England. It had all been about accepting credit card accounts with a United States address.

I looked again at the handwritten lists of dates, amounts of money and initials. And I pulled from my pocket the MoneyHome payment slips I had found in Herb's office cubicle.

Only last week, according to the torn-up payment slips I'd found in his wastebasket, Herb had received three large amounts of cash, two equivalent to five thousand dollars and one for eight thousand.

Suddenly, all of it made complete sense to me.

It hadn't been Herb who had lost ninety thousand pounds last month, it had been the people whose initials were to be found on Herb's lists, the ninety-seven people who were responsible for the five hundred and twelve different entries on the credit card accounts. And I'd like to bet they were all Americans.

If I was right, Herb had been running a system to provide ninety-seven Americans with a UK-based credit card account in order for them to gamble and play on Internet betting and casino sites.

But why would that have got him murdered?

T
o say my arrival at the offices of Lyall & Black about an hour after lunch caused a bit of a stir would be an understatement.

“Get out of these offices,” Gregory shouted at me almost as soon as I walked through the door on the fourth floor into the reception area, and he wasn't finished then. “You are a disgrace to your profession and to this firm. I will not have you here contaminating the other staff.”

I had made the mistake of not sneaking in while he was at lunch.

Mrs. McDowd looked positively frightened by the outburst. I probably did as well.

“Gregory,” I tried to say, but he advanced towards me, bunching his fists. Surely, I thought, he's not going to hit me. He didn't, but he grabbed me by the sleeve of my suit and dragged me towards the door.

He was surprisingly strong and fit for someone whose only workout was the walk to and from the restaurant on the corner.

“Leave me alone,” I shouted at him. But he took no notice.

“Gregory. Stop it!” Patrick's deep voice reverberated around the reception area.

Gregory stopped pulling and let go of my sleeve.

“I will not have this man in these offices,” Gregory said. “He has brought the firm of Lyall and Black into disrepute.”

Patrick looked at the reception desk, and at Mrs. McDowd and Mrs. Johnson, who were sitting behind it.

“Let us discuss this in your office,” Patrick said calmly. “Nicholas, will you please wait here.”

“Outside the door,” Gregory said, pointing towards the lifts and not moving an inch towards his office.

I stood there, looking back and forth between them. Everyone in the firm knew of Gregory's temper, it was legendary, but I had rarely seen it laid bare and so raw, and at such close quarters.

“I will go out for a coffee,” I said. “I'll be back in twenty minutes.”

“Best to go home,” Patrick said. “I'll call you later.”

Gregory turned towards Patrick. “I told you that we should never have taken him on in the first place.”

“In your office, please, Gregory!” Patrick said, almost shouting. He had a pretty good temper in him too, although it was usually slow to rise.

I waited while Gregory reluctantly moved off down the corridor with Patrick. I would have adored being a fly on the wall during their discussion.

“You had better go,” said Mrs. McDowd firmly. “I don't want you upsetting Mr. Gregory anymore. His heart can't take it.”

I looked at her. Mrs. McDowd, who saw it as her business to know everything about everyone in the firm. She probably knew Gregory's blood pressure, and his heart surgeon.

“Tell me, Mrs. McDowd, do you think Herb gambled much?”

“You mean on the stock market?” she asked.

“On the horses.”

“Oh no,” she said. “Mr. Herb didn't like betting on the horses. Too risky, he said. So much better to bet on a certainty, that's what he always told me.”

Death was a certainty.

Benjamin Franklin had said so—death, and taxes.

 

 

I
did go home, but not immediately.

Before I left Hendon I had looked up the locations of MoneyHome agents near to Lombard Street. I was amazed at how many there were, at least thirty within a one-mile radius of my office, the nearest being just around the corner in King William Street.

“This didn't come from here,” said the lady sitting behind the glass partition. “It hasn't got our stamp on it.”

I had somehow expected the MoneyHome agency to be like a bank, or a money exchange, but this one was right at the back of a convenience store.

“Can you tell me where it did come from?” I asked the lady.

“Don't you know?” she asked.

“No,” I said with declining patience. “I wouldn't have asked if I knew.”

She looked at me through the glass, then down at the payment slip. I had brought with me one of those I had found in Herb's desk rather than the torn-up squares, which were still at Herb's flat anyway.

“Sorry,” she said. “I don't recognize the stamp. But I know it's not ours.”

“Can you tell who sent the money?” I asked.

“No,” she said.

“What do you need to produce in the way of identification to collect money from a MoneyHome transfer?”

“The recipient's name and the MTCN.”

“What's that?”

“There,” she said, pointing at the payment slip. “It's the Money Transfer Control Number.”

“And that's all you need to collect the money,” I said. “No passport or driver's license?”

“Not unless it's been specially requested by the sender,” she said. “Sometimes there's a question I have to ask, and then you'd have to give the right answer. It's a bit like spies and such.” She smiled.

“So in fact,” I said, “you have no way of knowing who has sent the money or who has collected it?”

“The recipient's name is on the slip.”

The recipient's name on the slip I had shown her was Butch Cassidy. The names on the others I had were Billy Kid, Wyatt Earp, Jessie James and Bill Cody.

“That isn't his real name,” I said.

“No,” she said, looking. “I suppose not. But it's their money. As long as they've paid us our fee, it's not our business who they really are.”

“Does the amount make any difference?” I asked.

“MoneyHome's head office doesn't allow us to accept transfers of more than the equivalent of ten thousand U.S. dollars, as that breaks the money-laundering rules. Other than that, the amount doesn't matter, although we here have a payout limit of four thousand pounds without prior notice. You know, so we can get in the cash.”