Quintin Jardine - Alarm Call

The specialist fraud investigator was a tall man in his early forties, with a pencil moustache and wearing a brown suit that looked way too heavy for the weather: I hoped he wouldn’t start to sweat. I showed him through to our huge and, happily, air-conditioned office, where Prim was waiting. Susie and Audrey were working together. They looked up when I introduced him to everybody, then carried on with what they were doing.

He listened, gravely, as Prim told her story. He examined the documents she gave him, with a suitably earnest frown as he went from page to page, deepening as he reached the statements at the end.

‘Did you give Mr Wallinger any specific instructions at any time regarding the sale of your investments?’ he asked her, when he had read his way through the lot.

‘No, I didn’t. I never gave him any instructions at all, other than to make damn sure he took good care of my money.’

‘And you don’t recall ever telling him to transfer funds elsewhere?’

‘Never.’

‘How often did you discuss your financial affairs with him?’

‘Every few months, I suppose. We were very comfortable financially, and at that time I assumed that he was earning too. I was so focused on my child that I just let him get on with everything. I never asked him for regular reports, like I had from my old fund managers.’

‘So you were never told of any crisis, or of any movement of capital?’

‘No.’

McLaren arranged the papers in a neat pile on my desk. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘What do you want the police to do?’

Prim stared at him. ‘I want you to find him, I want you to arrest him, and I want you to get me my money back.’

‘We can only do the first two of those things, Ms Phillips. The third will be up to the court. A judge in a criminal trial could order him to make full restitution, but there’s no certainty of that. You’d be well advised to raise an action in the civil courts to recover your assets.’

‘That’s under way already,’ I told him.

‘I’m glad to hear it,’ he replied. ‘However. .’ There followed a portentous pause.

‘What?’ Prim demanded.

‘. . in the circumstances,’ he continued, ‘since you willingly gave Mr Wallinger access to your funds, there’s something that will have to happen before anyone gets arrested. We’ll have to establish that your money has been deliberately placed beyond your reach.’

‘But I don’t know where it is!’

‘Maybe not, but legally he’s your agent, and he does. He’s only committed a crime if he’s diverted your property to his own use. How long did you say he’d been gone?’

‘A bit over two months.’

‘Mmm. Not long in a lifetime, is it? Suppose, I’m being devil’s advocate here, mind, but suppose he had a legitimate reason for leaving? What if he was in some sort of personal danger, and wanted to shield you from it?’

‘By taking my son?’ Prim protested.

‘Maybe he had other reasons for doing that,’ McLaren said quietly.

‘Such as?’

‘Maybe best not to speculate.’

‘Come on!’

She was getting over-excited, rarely a good idea with a policeman; I took her arm as she started to rise from her seat and forced her to stay there. ‘I think Mr McLaren may be implying,’ I said, switching to my best Larry Hagman voice, ‘that Paul might have thought you were a tramp and an unfit mother, Sue Ellen, or at least that he might use that as a reason for taking Tom. Not that he’s implying that himself, you understand.’

‘He’d better bloody not!’ She snorted.

‘Be all that as it may,’ McLaren continued, clearly grateful for my help and glad to be putting the point behind him, ‘what I’m saying is that before I can apply for a warrant for Mr Wallinger’s arrest, I have to be able to satisfy the sheriff that I have just cause. For me to do that, in his continuing absence, I’ll have to trace your money. That may not be easy, given that it’s been a while since it was moved.’

‘Is there anything in those documents to tell you where it’s gone?’ I asked.

‘No, nothing at all.’ He looked at me. ‘There’s no indication that it’s been converted to another currency. That wouldn’t have been such a daft thing to do, by the way, given the strength of the pound in early April. He could even have argued that it was in Ms Phillips’s interests.’

‘He can argue till he’s multi-coloured in the face,’ Prim snapped, ‘but it won’t change the fact that he stole my money.’

‘Look, I accept that, and I will pursue this. All I’m telling you is that it’s not going to be easy and it will take time.’ His posture seemed to change, to relax and become less formal. Suddenly, he looked at me. ‘I recognise you, you know,’ he said, ‘and I don’t mean from the movies. I remember seeing you one day. . oh, it’ll be five years ago now. . when you came into the office to pick up Mike Dylan.’

I saw Susie stiffen; it was a name that wasn’t raised in our house very often, and never by strangers.

‘I just want to say that, well, I know you were friendly with Mike and, well. .’ He shifted awkwardly. ‘. . so was I. I know he went to the bad and all that, but even so, I liked him. So what I’m saying is that I’m not just going through the motions on this. I’m sure that Ms Phillips has been told by her lawyers that she has to make a criminal complaint, if only to back up a civil action. Well, even if that’s so, and it looks like a lost cause, I want you to know that you’ve come to the right man.’

‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘We appreciate that.’ I gave him one of my special business cards, with my mobile number on it and the e-mail address that I keep for people close to me. ‘You can raise me anytime, anywhere with those.’ Another idea occurred as I spoke. I found the list of numbers Kravitz had given me, copied the details of HHH Asset on to a sheet of paper and handed it to him. ‘That’s the company Wallinger’s mother worked for: they’re fund managers. It’s probably too obvious a place for him to dump the money, but. .’

‘It’s worth checking. Quite right; thanks.’ He stood, picking up the papers and shoving them into his briefcase. ‘I’ll get back to you as soon as I have anything new,’ he promised.

I walked him back through the house and to his car, which was pulled up at the front door. ‘Did you know my wife was once engaged to Mike?’ I asked him.

He nodded. ‘Mr Ross told me. He also told me that you were in Amsterdam when he got taken down.’

‘Not my fondest memory,’ I admitted. There were others but, good friend or not, I couldn’t let him in on them.

‘Nonetheless, take some advice, and look out for yourself and Ms Phillips over this business. When people start playing for the sort of money that’s involved here, things can get very serious.’

I pulled a grave face and made the right noises at the time, but in truth, I thought that McLaren’s warning was over-dramatic, and I didn’t take it very seriously. I had done research into Paul Wallinger that he hadn’t, and I did not have him marked down as a heavy hitter.

It was good to have him on-side; I had known that Prim’s money would be hard to catch up with, maybe impossible for us on our own. The banks would be unlikely to talk to individuals. . frankly I’d be very pissed off if mine did. . but with a police officer asking the questions they might be more inclined to co-operate.

When I went back inside, Audrey was waiting for me; she’d found a flight to Minneapolis next day, from Glasgow via Amsterdam, and she wanted me to okay it. I shivered when she told me that; I hadn’t been to Schiphol since the day Mike Dylan was shot. Nonetheless I said it was fine, and left her to go firm on the booking. I was taking a hell of a chance: I didn’t know for sure that Mother Wallinger was still in either of the twin cities of Minneapolis-St Paul, or that she was anywhere else on Earth for that matter, but we had to begin somewhere.