Felix Francis - Dick Francis's Gamble

He sat and looked at me for a moment.

“Because I trust you,” he said.

“But you hardly know me.”

“I know you much better than you might realize.” He smiled. “I’ve been watching your career every step of the way since you first rode that winner for my cousin. And I normally pride myself on being able to spot the good’uns from the bad’uns. That is why I am so concerned about this project. After all, it was me who persuaded my brother, Viscount Shenington, that the family trust should invest in something that appeared so worthwhile. I just need to know what is going on.”

“Sir,” I said. “I am under an obligation to report it if I find that there is a fraud or even if there is misrepresentation in advertising an investment.”

“Mmm, I see,” he said, stroking his chin. “My brother and I are most concerned that the good name of the Roberts family should not be dragged through the courts. He is in favor of simply writing off the investment and saying nothing. However…” He stopped.

“You feel responsible?” I asked.

“Exactly,” he said. “But I would prefer it if you could be very discreet. If this is a scam, well, to be honest, I would rather not have everybody know that I’ve been a fool.”

“Especially your brother.”

He looked me in the eye and smiled. “Trustworthy, and wise.”

“But I will have to talk to Gregory about it,” I said.

“Can you not have a little look at things first without telling anybody? I am sure that someone with your keen nose for a good investment will be able to spot a rotten egg pretty quickly if there’s one to find.”

I laughed. “I think you have the wrong person. My nose isn’t that keen.”

“Oh, I think it is,” Jolyon Roberts replied. “I have a friend who’s forever telling me about all the money you’ve made for her in films and theater.”

“I’ve just been lucky,” I said.

“Yes,” he said, smiling. “You and Arnold Palmer.”

I looked at him quizzically.

“You’re too young,” he said, laughing. “Arnold Palmer the golfer.”

“What about him?” I asked.

“When a reporter once asked him why he was so lucky in golf, he famously replied, ‘It’s a funny thing, the harder I practice, the luckier I get.’”

But my luck was about to run out.

True to his word, Detective Chief Inspector Tomlinson sent a car to collect me from home on Thursday morning and he was waiting at Herb Kovak’s flat when I arrived and he was waiting at Herb Kovak’s flat when I arrived at eight a.m. sharp.

“Ah, good morning, Mr. Foxton,” he said, opening the front door and offering his hand. “And how is your toe today?”

“It’s fine,” I said honestly. “It doesn’t hurt at all.”

And I’d forgotten to limp.

“Nasty things, ingrown toenails,” he said. “Had one myself years ago. Hurt like hell.”

“Luckily, I’m a quick healer,” I said. “Now, how can I help?”

He stepped to the side, and I walked past him and into the hallway of Herb’s flat. I still thought of it as Herb’s flat although, I supposed, it was now technically mine, or it would be in due course.

“Are you certain Mr. Kovak was not in personal financial difficulties?” the chief inspector asked while closing the front door.

“No, I’m not certain, but I have no reason to think he was. Why do you ask?”

He waved a stack of papers towards me.

“What are they?” I asked.

“Credit card statements,” said the chief inspector.

“So?”

“Mr. Kovak appears to have had more than twenty separate credit cards, and, according to these statements, at his death, he owed nearly a hundred thousand pounds on these cards alone.”

I could hardly believe it. Not only because Herb was in so much debt but also because his debt was on credit cards. If anyone knew how expensive it was to borrow on plastic, then a financial adviser would. Even with interest rates historically low, the annualpercentage rate on credit cards was typically between sixteen and twenty percent, with some even as high as thirty. Borrowing money on credit cards was a mug’s game. The interest charges alone on a debt as big as that would be around fifteen hundred a month. That was about half what Herb was taking home in salary, after the usual deductions for tax and National Insurance.

If Herb had owed nearly a hundred thousand on credit cards, then his flat must surely be mortgaged to the hilt. It certainly wouldn’t end up being mine, more likely the bank’s.

And yet he’d always had plenty of money in his pocket. He was extravagant even in his spending, always wearing new clothes and dining out being the norm. It didn’t make sense.

“Can I have a closer look at those?” I asked the chief inspector, reaching out for the papers.

He handed them over, and I skimmed through the first three or four statements. There was no doubt that the outstanding balance on each was very large and, in some cases, close to the maximum limit, but that did not show the full picture, not by a long way. I looked through the rest. They were all the same.

“Didn’t you notice something unusual about these?” I asked.

“Notice what?” said the chief inspector.

“There are no interest payments from previous months. All these charges, on all of these statements, they’re all new.”

I turned a statement over to look at the detailed breakdown and to see what Herb had spent a hundred thousand pounds on in a month and was shocked again. There were no purchases, as such, just payments to and from a plethora of Internet gambling and online casino sites. Masses of them. I looked through all the statements and they were the same. Many of the payments were quite modest but one or two ran into the thousands. Quite a few of the betting sites had actually paid money back to the accounts, but most showed a deficit. Overall, Herb had been a loser not a winner, nearly a hundred-thousand-pound-a-month loser.

All the statements showed clearly that the previous month’s balances had been settled in full by the due date. I mentally added them up. As well as still owing almost a hundred thousand, Herb had paid nearly the same amount in gambling debts to the cards during March alone. Where had he obtained that sort of money? And how on earth had he had the time to gamble on so many different sites with so many different credit cards while working full-time at Lyall & Black? It sure as hell didn’t make any sense.

As Claudia had said, you never really knew what even your closest friends were up to. Could this compulsive online gambling somehow be the reason that Herb was killed? The totals may have been large but the individual entries on the statements were modest, and certainly not big enough to initiate murder.

“There are some other things I would like you to have a look at,” said the chief inspector. “You may be able to help me understand them.”

He turned and walked down the hallway, turning left through a door. I followed him.

Herb’s living room was in true bachelor-pad fashion, with half of it taken up by a single deep armchair placed in front of a large wall-mounted flat-screen television. On the far side of the room was a large desk, with a laptop computer, a printer and three piles of papers in metal baskets.

It was some of the papers that the chief inspector wanted me to look at.

“We need your permission as Mr. Kovak’s executor to remove certain items that we believe may help with our inquiries. These, for example. But we would like your opinion on them first.”

He handed me two sheets of paper covered entirely on both sides by handwritten lists with columns of what appeared to be dates with amounts of money alongside, together with a further column of capital letters. “Could they have something to do with Mr. Kovak’s work?”