Felix Francis - Dick Francis's Gamble

“I’ll be careful,” I said with an inward smile. I would, in fact, be going in to the office and not home when I left here. “Now, how do I lock up?”

“Ah yes,” he replied, digging into his coat pocket. “I had another key cut. We would like to hang on to one for the time being just in case we need to pop back to look through his things further.”

“Right,” I said, taking the offered key. “Are you based down here, then? I thought you were Merseyside Police.”

“I am,” he replied. “But I’m working on this case out of Paddington Green all this week. I will be going home on Friday.”

“And you’ll let me know when I can start making funeral arrangements?”

“The Liverpool Coroner will be in contact with you in due course,” he said rather unhelpfully, and then he departed, carrying his box of potential treasures under his arm.

Isat for a while at Herb’s desk, looking again at the credit card statements.

There were between twenty and thirty Internet gambling or online casino websites on each statement. Half of them I didn’t recognize, but their names showed what they were. One was called www.oddsandevens.netand another www.gamblehere.com. It didn’t take a genius to work it out.

Not every statement had all the same sites, but some were on all of them, and all appeared at least half a dozen times. I started adding up. In total there were twenty-two different credit cards and five hundred and twelve different entries on the statements. The total owed was ninety-four thousand six hundred and twenty-six pounds and fifty-two pence.

Some of the entries on all of the statements were credits, but overall the average loss per entry was a fraction under one hundred and eighty-five pounds. I checked the actual amounts against those on the handwritten lists but, as the chief inspector had said, not one of them matched.

It wasn’t so much the amount of money that amazed me, even though it did, it was the number of different entries. Again I wondered how Herb had had the time to play or gamble online with five hundred and twelve different log-ins. I did some more mental arithmetic. Without work, eating or sleeping and spending every moment of the day for a whole month at the computer would have given him just an hour and a half on each account. It was impossible.

I stood up and went into the kitchen.

My mother always maintained that one could learn most about a person by looking in their fridge. Not with Herb. His fridge was starkly empty, with just a plastic carton of skim milk and a halffull tub of low-fat spread. His cupboards were almost equally bare, with a couple of boxes of breakfast cereal and half a loaf bread gone stale. On the worktop were ajar of instant coffee and two round tins with TEA and SUGAR printed on the outside and with some tea bags and granulated sugar on the inside.

I filled the electric kettle and made myself a cup of coffee. I took it back to the desk in the living room and went on studying the credit card statements.

I spotted that there was something else slightly odd about them.

They didn’t all have the same name or the same address at the top.

Some of them had this flat’s address and others the Lyall & Black office’s address in Lombard Street. Nothing too unusual about that. But the names on them also varied. Not very much, but enough for me to notice.

I looked through them again, carefully making two piles on the desk, one for each address.

There were eleven statements in each pile and eleven slight variations in Herb’s name: Herb Kovak, Mr. Herb E. Kovak, Herbert Kovak Esq., Mr. H. Kovak, Herbert E. Kovak, Mr. H. E. Kovak, H. E. Kovak Jr., H. Edward Kovak, Bert Kovak Jr., Herbert Edward Kovak and Mr. Bert E. Kovak.

No two statements had the same name and address.

Now, why did I think that was suspicious?

I heard the key turn in the door and thought that DCI Tomlinson must have forgotten something. I was wrong.

I went out into the hallway to find an attractive blond-haired young woman struggling through the front door with an enormous suitcase. She saw me and stopped.

“Who the hell are you?” she demanded in a Southern American accent.

I’d been about to ask her the same thing.

“Nicholas Foxton,” I said. “And you?”

“Sherri Kovak,” she said. “And where’s my damn brother?”

There was no easy way to tell Sherri that her brother was dead, but it was the nature of his death she found most distressing.

She sat in the big armchair and wept profusely while I made her a cup of hot sweet tea.

In between her bouts of near hysteria, I discovered that she had arrived early that morning on an overnight flight from Chicago. She had been surprised, and rather annoyed, that Herb had not been at the airport to meet her as he had promised, but she had eventually made her own way to Hendon by train and taxi.

“But how did you have a key to get in?” I asked her.

“Herb gave me one when I was here last year.”

Herb hadn’t mentioned to me last year that his sister was visiting or even that he had a sister in the first place. But why would he have? We had been work colleagues rather than close friends. He also hadn’t mentioned to me that he was a compulsive online gambler.

I wondered if I ought to inform DCI Tomlinson that Herb Kovak’s next of kin had turned up. Probably, but then he’d be back around here with a list of awkward questions when it was clear to me that, after a night of sitting upright on an airplane, what she needed most was a good sleep. I’d call the chief inspector later.

I found some fresh bed linen in an airing cupboard and made up the bed in the smaller of the two bedrooms. I then guided the overtired and still-crying Miss Kovak from the living room to the bed and made her take off her shoes and lie down.

“You sleep for a bit,” I said, covering her with a blanket. “I’ll still be here when you wake.”

“But who are you, exactly?” she asked between sobs.

“A friend of your brother’s,” I said. “We worked together.” I decided not to mention to her just yet that her brother had left his entire estate to me and not to her. And I wondered why that was.

Sherri Kovak was almost asleep before her head reached the pillow. I left her there and went back to Herb’s desk and the credit card statements.

It was gone nine o’clock, and I called the office number on my mobile. Mrs. McDowd answered.

“It’s the man with the ingrown toenail calling in sick,” I said.

“Shirker,” she announced with a laugh.

“No, really,” I said. “I won’t be in the office until later. Please tell Mr. Patrick that I’m sorry but something has come up.”

“Trouble?” she asked.

“No,” I said. “No trouble, but something that I need to deal with.”

I could almost feel her wanting to ask what it was. Mrs. McDowd liked to know everything about the goings-on of her staff, as she called us. She was always asking after Claudia, and she seemed to know more about my mother than I did.

“Tell me, Mrs. McDowd,” I said in a friendly tone, “did you know that Herb Kovak had a sister?”

“Yes, of course,” she said. “Sherri. She lives in Chicago. She and Mr. Herb were twins. She visited him last summer.”

“Did you proffer this information to the policeman when he interviewed us all on Monday?”

“No,” she said firmly, “I did not.”

“Why not?” I asked her.

“He didn’t ask me.”

Mrs. McDowd clearly didn’t like the police very much.

“Please tell Mr. Patrick that I’ll see him later today,” I said.

“Right, I will,” she said. “It’s a good job you’re not here now anyway. Mr. Gregory is angry, fit to burst.”