Stuart Pawson - Last Reminder

‘He had a secretary,’ I announced.

The two of them turned to me.

‘He had a secretary until he went bankrupt, then she had to go. Find her, then maybe she can help us with this lot. Failing that, we’ll have to bring Luke in to crack his computer.’ Luke was a civilian nerd who talks to computers like some people talk to their hairdressers. ‘We need a complete list of his clients. That should give us something to start on.’

‘Just sorting a few out to be going on with, boss,’ Sparky told me.

‘Good. Find a couple of local ones for me to visit. Jeff, you have a look at his diary, and see if you can find an address book. We need his secretary, pronto. Not to mention next of kin.’

‘Inspector?’

I turned round to find the professor looking round the door. She said, ‘Time of death, late yesterday. Say between four and midnight. Can’t be more precise than that, I’m afraid.’

‘And the cause?’ I asked.

She gave me a weak smile. ‘Contradictory indications. For the time being let’s say it was the blow on the head. There are no other marks on the body. Sorry, but we’ll know better when we open him up. I’ve finished with him here, so you can arrange for his removal.’

‘Right, Professor. Thank you.’

‘There is one thing I’d like to show you. It might be interesting, but on the other hand it might be nothing.’

I followed her through into the kitchen. Goodrich was still more or less as I’d seen him earlier, slumped forward with one hand on the chair arm, the other in his lap, fist clenched.

‘Look here,’ the professor said, taking his fist. She pointed with the tip of her pen into the circle made by his thumb and first finger. ‘He’s holding something.’

I could see the end of a piece of clear plastic, or maybe Cellophane.

‘Do you want to retrieve it now?’ she asked.

I nodded. ‘Yes, please. Might as well.’

I held the rigid arm while she prised his fingers open. Slowly a piece of plastic, a couple of inches long by half-an-inch wide was revealed. It fell into my gloved hand and I peered at it.

‘How about that?’ I said after a few seconds, holding it towards the doctor.

‘Wowee!’ she gasped, under her breath. ‘Is it real?’

‘I wouldn’t know,’ I confessed. I’d only ever bought one, and that ended in disaster.

It was a little transparent package, thermo-sealed to avoid tampering. At one end was what looked like a frame of microfilm, and at the other a piece of paper with some numbers and letters on it.

In the middle was the biggest diamond I’d ever seen.

Colonel Bartlett was a wiry little man with a wiry moustache and a grizzled wire-haired terrier following him around, as if attached to his ankle by a very short lead. Sparky had found the colonel’s file in Goodrich’s cabinets and, as he lived less than a mile away, I’d come round to see what he could tell me. His wife, who I felt an overwhelming urge to call Lady Bartlett, although I suppose she was a mere Mrs, placed a delicate tea-cup and saucer on the table alongside me, with a matching plate holding a couple of pieces of that cake that looks like a chequered flag with marzipan round the edge. If he was wiry, you could have cut cheese with her.

‘Thank you. That’s most welcome,’ I said.

‘Dead, did you say?’ the colonel asked. The dog had left his ankle and come to sniff at mine. We were sitting in flowery easy chairs in their pleasant front room. A large regimental photograph hung above the fireplace, and on the sideboard was one of Bartlett himself, looking remarkably Errol Flynnish. Mrs Bartlett, the niceties of hospitality accomplished, perched on his chair arm.

‘Yes, sir. I’m afraid so. You weren’t close to him in any way, were you?’

‘No. Not at all. Business only. And bad bladdy business at that, if you ask me.’

‘That’s exactly what I do want to ask you about. First of all, though, can I ask you to treat this conversation as confidential, as we haven’t found any next of kin yet?’

‘Of course, Inspector. Mum’s the word.’

Mrs Bartlett nodded her agreement. The dog was definitely interested in my left ankle. I noticed that it had grown an erection, so I pulled my feet against the chair. It’s difficult to conduct a serious interview with a terrier shagging your leg.

‘At the moment,’ I began, ‘we’re treating his death as suspicious.’

‘You mean…murder?’

‘Possibly, although not necessarily.’

‘Oh my God!’ Mrs Bartlett wailed. I’d have thought army wives were made of sterner stuff.

‘Can’t say I’m surprised,’ Bartlett declared. ‘Might have done it myself, a few years ago.’

She was ahead of him. ‘Does this mean,’ she asked, ‘that we are…suspects?’

‘Please,’ I said, holding my hands up in a gesture of appeasement. ‘We have no suspects, so, in a way, everybody is a suspect. At the moment I am only interested in investigating Goodrich’s affairs. All I know about him is that he was some sort of financial adviser. I plucked your name from the files because you are nearby, and I hoped you might be able to fill me in with some details about his business dealings.’

‘Oh, we can do that,’ Bartlett declared, unable to hide the bitterness that my visit had resurrected. ‘We can certainly do that.’

They had?70,000 invested with Goodrich — most of their life savings. Someone at the golf club had introduced him, and at first things had gone fairly well.

‘To be fair to him, it was a bad time,’ Bartlett said. ‘The recession, you know.’

I nodded sympathetically, although I’ve never understood how the whole world could be in recession at the same time. Unless recession is a virus, like Asian flu.

He continued. ‘He put our money in various bonds, PEPs, stuff like that. All High Street names, and we had steady returns, although they were quite small. Then, one evening, he came round on his regular visit and suggested it was time we made our portfolio work for us. He was a dynamic bugger, I’ll say that for him. Would’ve made a bladdy good colour sergeant.’

‘So what did he suggest?’ I asked.

‘Diamonds,’ he growled.

‘Diamonds?’ This was what I was looking for.

‘Investment diamonds, to be precise,’ Mrs Bartlett informed us.

‘So you transferred your savings into these diamonds, on his suggestion?’

‘Yes, but not all of it, thank God,’ the colonel replied. He anticipated the next question. ‘We bought three, at just over one carat each. Cost us thirty thousand altogether.’

‘So what went wrong? Didn’t they exist?’

‘Oh, they existed all right. They did quite nicely to start with — looked as if they’d double their value in about five or six years. Then one day, completely out of the blue, a letter came from a firm of lawyers acting on behalf of the official receiver. It said that the company who supplied the diamonds, called IGI–International Gem Investments — were bankrupt, and we qualified as creditors. Eighteen months later all we’ve found out is that our diamonds are worth approximately one tenth of what we paid for them.’

I took a sip of tea and, trying not to attract the dog’s attention, stretched out my legs. I had cramp in them. ‘So what went wrong?’ I asked. ‘Were they selling the stones to more than one person?’ That’s a well-tried scam, used with everything from armaments to…Zimmer frames. You prove you possess something, maybe a boatload of Italian wine that is going cheap because your brother-in-law works in the excise office, show the punters round it, supply them with samples and all the paperwork, but do the same thing with ten other people.