Stephen Booth - Already Dead

Increasingly common were whiplash claims after car accidents, where the extent of injury was difficult for doctors to diagnose. Organised gangs operated ‘cash for crash’ schemes, staging collisions in which some unsuspecting motorist crashed into the rear of a vehicle that stopped suddenly with its brake lights disabled. Just like the cannabis gardeners, those at the bottom of the food chain in those schemes were often poor and ignorant immigrants, who were paid a few hundred pounds to put themselves physically in harm’s way. Any genuine injuries they sustained were collateral damage as far as the gang leaders were concerned.

‘Are we talking hard or soft?’ asked Baird.

‘I’m sorry?’

‘Basically, hard fraud is when someone deliberately invents a loss covered by their insurance policy. Criminal gangs get involved in hard fraud schemes, because they can obtain large amounts of money. Soft fraud is far more common. It’s more opportunistic. Policyholders exaggerate an otherwise legitimate claim. Almost anyone can be involved in that type of fraud. It’s so tempting just to overstate the amount of damage or the value of items lost. And of course, most small frauds go undetected, so it’s known as an easy crime to get away with.’

Fry shook her head. ‘Not soft fraud. There must be large amounts of money involved.’

He bit his lip. ‘I see.’

‘Those gangs who stage collisions to collect insurance money. The set-up sometimes involves insurance claims adjusters, doesn’t it? They create phoney police reports to process claims.’

‘It’s possible,’ said Baird slowly.

It was an evasive, noncommittal reply, if ever she’d heard one. Fry waited in silence for him to say more.

‘The sheer number of claims submitted each day makes it far too expensive for companies like ours to have employees checking each claim for signs of fraud,’ he said. ‘So we use computer systems and statistical analysis to identify suspicious claims for investigation. There are drawbacks.’

‘Such as?’

‘The system can only be used to detect types of fraud that have been identified before. Claims adjusters can be trained to identify “red flags” or symptoms that in the past have often been associated with fraudulent claims. Statistical detection doesn’t prove that claims are fraudulent. It merely identifies claims that need to be investigated further.

‘If a red flag is triggered on a claim, it’s passed on to a specialist loss adjuster to investigate. They’ll interview the policyholder, carry out background checks. Often the result of our fraud checks and an investigation is that the claim process becomes a bit long-drawn-out. Then some claimants simply withdraw their claim, and we never hear from them again. That’s a result too.’

‘An unscrupulous staff member could take advantage of that system,’ said Fry. ‘Meeting claimants and doing background checks — it puts someone in a position of power. Some individuals can’t resist abusing that sort of power.’

‘We participate in the Insurance Fraud Bureau scheme,’ said Baird. ‘Any legitimate insurance company would be mad not to. The IFB have recorded tens of thousands of staged collisions and false insurance claims across the UK. In one year, their use of data mining led to seventy-four arrests of individuals involved in insurance fraud networks.’

‘Data mining. Would that be in the job description of a fraud analyst?’

‘Like Ralph Edge?’

‘Yes, that’s who I’m thinking of.’

Baird looked suddenly alarmed. He stared out of the window as a defeated-looking Ralph Edge was led past his office by two men, each with a hand on an elbow. Fry jumped up and went to the door to watch them disappear down the corridor.

‘Who were they ?’ asked Baird.

‘Those,’ said Fry, ‘were two of my colleagues from the Major Crime Unit. They appear to have arrested Mr Edge.’

‘You’re not going arrest me too, are you?’ said Baird. ‘Please tell me you’re not. It was just a bit of fun.’

‘What was?’

‘The paintballing.’

‘It has nothing to do with that, sir.’

‘Thank goodness.’

Baird wiped his hands on a tissue from a box on his desk.

‘Ralph?’ he said. ‘I can’t believe it. Really?’

‘He didn’t take advantage of your open door to talk to you about it?’ asked Fry.

‘No.’

‘No doubt they’ll be taking away his files and computer,’ said Fry. ‘Of course, Mr Edge isn’t the type to do the dirty work himself.’

Baird waved his bony hand nervously That imaginary irritating fly in his office had become an entire swarm of wasps.

‘How am I going to explain this to my managing director?’ he said plaintively.

‘Perhaps you could send a boy with a message,’ said Fry.

Fry knew Ben Cooper had his phone switched on now, so she called him first to make sure he’d be in. She would have spent the rest of the day trying to track him down if necessary, but he answered straight away and agreed to see her.

She parked right outside number eight Welbeck Street this time, just behind Cooper’s Toyota. Inside his flat, he offered her a coffee, which she accepted reluctantly, feeling obliged to maintain a veneer of sociability when her instincts urged her to do quite the opposite.

Fry sat on his settee with her mug, exchanged glares with the cat, which stalked out of the room, and decided not to beat about the bush any more.

‘Why didn’t you just tell me everything you’d worked out?’ she said. ‘You could have given me the whole damn case.’

‘Would you have appreciated it?’ asked Cooper.

Fry hesitated, realised there was no point now in telling anything but the truth.

‘No,’ she said.

‘Well, then.’

‘I never really understood this obsession of yours,’ said Fry.

‘Obsession?’

‘All those cuttings on your kitchen wall. I call that the sign of an obsession.’

‘How did you know about those?’ asked Cooper quietly.

‘I…’

‘You’ve been in here somehow? Oh, wait a minute — Mrs Shelley mentioned that friends of mine had called looking for me. That would have been you, I suppose? So you made sure I was out of the way, then you talked your way into my flat.’

‘It might sound that way.’

‘Yes, it does.’

‘Let me explain, Ben. We’re all-’

He turned away. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m finished listening to your explanations, Diane. Just leave me alone, why don’t you? Everyone else does.’

‘No, wait. That wasn’t what I came here for.’

‘What, then?’

‘I want you to explain it to me, Ben.’

He put down his coffee on a low table. ‘I suppose you haven’t been following the news stories the way I have over these last few months, Diane. Did you actually look at my cuttings?’

‘Of course I did.’

‘I mean, did you look properly? The way you would look if you were presented with them as evidence and you were trying to put the clues together, to make connections? Or did you just take one glance and jump to a conclusion?’

Fry didn’t answer. Well, she couldn’t respond to that without admitting a failure. So she said nothing. It didn’t matter. Cooper knew the answer to his own question anyway.

‘Some of them aren’t really what you’d call cuttings,’ he said. ‘They’re printouts from the internet. Specialist news sites, mostly. You’d be amazed what you can turn up just by creating a few Google alerts. That’s how I know about Prospectus Assurance. It was a buyout, you know.’

‘Oh, I had a feeling when I went there that it used to be called something different.’

Cooper nodded. ‘It used to be owned by a firm called Diamond Finance. They were also the parent company for Diamond Hybrid Securities, based in London. But the insurance division has different owners now. They became Prospectus a few months ago. I read all about the takeover and the rebranding. The details are right there on my wall.’