Felix Francis - Dick Francis's Gamble

I flicked through the bills but there was nothing that appeared to shine out like a lighthouse to guide me to his killer, although I did notice that Herb had been what my mother always described as a “free-spending spirit.” It was a term she used for those she considered to squander their money on lavish, unnecessary purchases instead of prudently saving it for a rainy day as she had always done.

Two separate invoices from a local travel agent showed that Herb’s free spending had run to at least two British Airways first-class roundtrip tickets across the Atlantic at eight thousand pounds each, one of them dated only the previous month for a planned but not yet taken trip in May. He may have been earning more than me, but there was no way he could have financed those out of his income from Lyall & Black even without the online gambling debts he had run up on the credit cards.

I wondered if he had inherited a large sum from his dead parents. I thought it unlikely as he had always claimed that his father had gambled away most of his family’s money. But perhaps Herb had been busy spending and gambling away the rest.

But where had he kept it?

I looked again at the photocopy I had made of his last bank statement. I had only made it to have a record of Herb’s account number and sort code. I would need them when I contacted the bank to inform them of his death. The latest balance was a little under ten thousand pounds, but there were no entries on the statements that appeared to be payments for the credit card accounts, and certainly no eight thousand pounds to the travel agent the previous month.

Herb had to have had another bank account, but there was no sign of it anywhere in his desk.

I looked at my watch. I had called Claudia nearly half an hour ago, and the journey should have taken her only ten minutes from Lichfield Grove, Finchley, to Seymour Way, Hendon. I went to the door to see if she was outside somewhere, but there was no sign of her or the Mercedes.

I waited in the doorway for five further minutes with slightly increasing irritation. I didn’t really want to call her again, but she was beginning to try my patience.

Once I would have been so excited by the prospect of seeing her, I wouldn’t have minded if she had been half a day late arriving. On one occasion I had been at Heathrow Airport at least two hours before her flight was due to land just to be sure not to miss her passing through customs.

But now, and not for the first time, I wondered if our relationship had run its course.

She finally arrived some thirty-five minutes after I had called. She stopped in the middle of the road and put down the passenger window. I leaned through it and picked up my computer from the seat.

“Thanks,” I said. “See you later.”

“OK,” she said, and drove off quickly.

I stood in the road waving but even if she could see me she didn’t wave back. There had been a time when we never parted without us waving vigorously until we were completely out of sight of each other.

I sighed. I had invested so much of my emotional capital in my relationship with Claudia, and the thought of being single again, having to start out once more, did not fill me with any joy. And I wasn’t at all sure I wanted it to end.

Claudia still excited me, and the sex was good, albeit somewhat rarer than it once had been. In fact, sex had been nonexistent over the last couple of weeks with Claudia always making some excuse. So what had gone wrong? Why was she suddenly not so loving towards me?

I wondered if she was seeing someone else. But who? Surely not one of her artistic layabout friends from her time at art college. The thought of her being intimate with one of them was enough to make me feel ill and not a little bit angry.

Miserably, I went back into Herb’s flat and sat down again at his desk, but even with my computer I couldn’t concentrate on any work due to thinking about the article in the paper and also about Claudia. After about half an hour, I called her mobile, but it went straight to voice mail. I didn’t leave a message because I didn’t know what to say.

Instead, I logged on to the Internet through Herb’s router and checked my office e-mails, many of which were junk from various finance firms offering rates of return that were well above the norm for the market.

Nestled amongst the trash were three work e-mails from this morning, one from Diana confirming the sales of all Billy Searle’s assets and the impending transfer from the firm’s client account to his bank, one from Patrick asking me to research a new personal pension plan being offered by one of the leading providers in the light of new pension legislation and the third from Jessica Winter advising me to wear a bulletproof vest if I was planning on coming into the office.

I thought it a particularly insensitive comment considering what had happened to Herb only five days previously.

I looked again at all the junk mail.

If a promised return appeared to be too good to be true, then it invariably was just that-too good to be true.

I thought back to my conversation with Jolyon Roberts at Cheltenham the previous day. Had the promised return on the Bulgarian property development project been too good to be true? Not as far as I could remember. It had not been the level of return that had been the concern, rather the distance away and the potential difficulty in acquiring accurate and up-to-date information on the progress of the project. In fact, just the problem that Mr. Roberts believed to be the issue.

I started to type “Roberts” into the company client index but thought better of it. The office mainframe computer kept a visible record of all files accessed, so any of us could see who had been looking at each file. It wasn’t particularly designed to spy on us or to prevent us accessing files, indeed it made it easy to keep a record of files visited. I could expect my files to be accessed by Patrick on a fairly random but regular basis, and the company files as a whole were regularly scrutinized by Jessica Winter, our Compliance Officer.

Whenever any of us opened a file it clearly showed in the top right-hand corner of the computer screen a list of the five people in the firm who had accessed the file most recently, together with the date and time of their access.

As one of the IFAs, I had authority to look at any of the company files, but I might have had difficulty explaining to Gregory why I had accessed those of one of his clients without his knowledge, especially a client as important as the Roberts Family Trust, and especially now.

I told myself that I should go straight to Gregory and Patrick, and probably to Jessica as well, and tell them about my conversation with Jolyon Roberts and get the matter looked at by them. But did I really want to go and accuse Gregory of misleading one of his clients, and on today of all days?

Then I would truly need that bulletproof vest.

Unlike in the United States where the Securities and Exchange Commission, the SEC, employs a prescriptive rule-based regime, the United Kingdom authorities had moved to a principles-based regulatory system. The onus was now on me to act in a manner that upheld the highest principles of honesty, openness and integrity, and to prove it.

It was difficult to decide which system was the better. Experience had shown that neither was fraud-proof. Indeed, the SEC had investigated Bernie Madoff several times without unearthing the biggest individual fraud in American history. Talk about the asylum being run by the lunatics, Madoff served three times as chairman of the NASDAQ stock market. And that was many years after he had started his fraud, and even after the first failed SEC investigation into his company’s activities.

And he’d just had to be called Madoff, hadn’t he? He’d “made off” with sixty-five billion dollars-yes, billion. And all because he’d been able fraudulently to circumvent the fixed U.S. regulatory rules. Whereas in the UK, it was not just the letter of the law I had to follow but also its spirit.