Felix Francis - Dick Francis's Gamble

“Fine,” I said. “She loves her little cottage, and she’s been busy with the local village historical society.”

“Perhaps we can go down and see her together,” Claudia said. “After.”

After the operation, she meant.

“I’d better call Jan Setter in the morning and tell her we won’t be able to make the opening night on Wednesday.”

“You go on your own,” Claudia said. “You’ll enjoy it.”

Sitting next to Jan in a theater all evening, with her hands wandering all over me in the darkness? No thanks.

“No,” I said. “I’ll tell her that neither of us will be there.”

Claudia smiled at me. I knew it was what she really wanted.

“It saved me buying a new dress anyway.”

We laughed.

That was the closest we came all evening to discussing her surgery, and presently I paid the bill and took my girl home to bed.

She had to go into the hospital the following evening, ready for the procedure on the Tuesday morning. Hence our lovemaking was passionate and full-on, as if we both realized that this might be our last time together with Claudia as a fertile woman.

At nine a.m. sharp on Monday morning I called Patrick in the office.

“Am I forgiven yet?” I asked him.

“Gregory’s not here today,” he replied. “He’s been away for the weekend and isn’t back until tomorrow afternoon or Wednesday. I think it best if you stay away a while longer.”

I wasn’t going to argue. Not having to be in the office over the next couple of days suited me very well.

“Can I now use the remote-access facility?” I asked. “Just to check that I’m not missing something that should be done today.”

The system allowed us to attach reminder notices to client files-for example, to alert us to a maturing bond or a rights issue so that we didn’t miss an opportunity to invest the client’s money most favorably.

“Of course,” Patrick replied.

Things had clearly mellowed over the weekend.

“So shall I plan on being in again on Wednesday?” I asked.

“Thursday might be better,” Patrick said, seemingly a little undecided. “I’ll speak to Gregory over lunch on Wednesday.”

“Thursday it is, then,” I said. “Unless I hear from you sooner.”

“Right.” Patrick seemed rather distracted. “There is a bit of a backlog with both you and Herb not being here. Diana and Rory will just have to cover everything until Thursday. I’ll ask them to stay late.”

I smiled. I bet Rory wouldn’t like that. There was no extra money for doing overtime in our job.

Detective Chief Inspector Tomlinson had called on Sunday evening to say he was traveling down from Liverpool and to ask if could I meet him at Herb Kovak’s flat at eleven the following morning. Yes, I’d said, I could.

In the end, both Claudia and I went over to Hendon together in the Mercedes because she didn’t want to be left alone, and I was delighted to have her with me.

The policeman was there ahead of us, and he had been interviewing poor Sherri Kovak, who clearly was distressed by the experience. Her eyes were red from crying, and she looked pale and drawn. Claudia went immediately over and put her arm around Sherri’s shoulders, even before they were introduced, taking her off into the kitchen.

“Thank you for coming,” the chief inspector said to me, shaking my hand. “I’m sorry but I seem to have rather upset Miss Kovak.”

“How?” I asked.

“I told her that I needed her to come back with me to Liverpool to carry out a formal identification of the body.”

I nodded. “I feared you might. You would think it wouldn’t be necessary to put people through such emotional trauma.” Especially, I thought, as one of the bullets that had killed him had entered through his face.

“I’m afraid the law takes little notice of people’s feelings.”

“And you should know,” I said.

“Yes,” he said, looking me in the eye. “I certainly do.”

Claudia came back out into the hallway, and I introduced her properly to Detective Chief Inspector Tomlinson.

“So are you the man who arrested my Nick?” she asked accusingly.

“No, darling,” I said, springing quickly to the policeman’s defense. “This isn’t the man who arrested me, this is the one who provided me with an alibi.”

“Oh,” she said. “All right, then. You may live.”

The chief inspector smiled at her little joke, but he was there strictly on business.

“Now,” he said to me, getting down to it, “where are these MoneyHome receipts?”

Claudia went back to Sherri in the kitchen while the chief inspector and I went through into the living room. I spread out the stuck-together little squares on Herb’s desk. The chief inspector’s eyebrows rose a notch.

“I found them torn up like this in the wastebasket,” I said. “I stuck them together. There are three different payment slips here, one for eight thousand dollars and two for five thousand each.”

“And you say that Mr. Kovak collected this money from a MoneyHome agent during the week before he was killed.”

“Yes,” I said. “That’s according to the stamps on them.”

“And do you know who sent him the money?”

“No,” I replied. “MoneyHome apparently only requires the recipient’s name and something called the Money Transfer Control Number in order to pay out. The agent doesn’t seem to know the sender’s name.”

“These bloody money transfer companies,” he said. “They seem to be absolutely determined to allow people to transfer money round the world completely anonymously. Cash in, cash out, no questions asked. They make it so easy for the villains, especially the drug dealers.”

“Can’t you make them tell you who sent the money?” I asked.

“They probably don’t know themselves,” he said. “And if they do get a name it’s probably false.”

“Butch Cassidy,” I said.

“Eh?”

“The recipient names on the payment slips,” I said. I added the two from my pocket to the three on the desk. “Butch Cassidy, Billy Kid, Wyatt Earp, Jessie James and Bill Cody. It’s not very difficult to spot they’re false.”

“Were they the aliases used by Mr. Kovak when he collected the money?” he asked, studying the slips.

“Yes,” I said.

I could see from his expression that the chief inspector immediately cast Herb as one of his villains.

“He wasn’t a drug dealer,” I said. The chief inspector looked up at me. “And he wasn’t a crook. He was just allowing his fellow Americans to do what we in England can do quite legitimately every day.”

“Gambling is a mug’s game,” he said.

“Maybe,” I agreed. “But it’s legal, taxed and, without it, there probably wouldn’t be any horse racing. Certainly not the industry we have today.”

The policeman pursed his lips as if to say he didn’t think it would be a great loss. I wondered if all policemen were born puritanical or did it develop after several years in the job.

“Mr. Kovak was still breaking the law.”

“Was he?” I asked. “Whose law?”

“He was aiding and abetting others,” the chief inspector said with certainty.

I wasn’t going to argue with him. I was pretty certain myself that if the reports of the arrest of the CEO of the Internet gambling site was anything to go by, Herb would have faced racketeering charges in the United States if they had known what he was up to.

I also showed the chief inspector the stack of unsigned credit cards, but he seemed far more interested in the MoneyHome payment slips.

“So where do we go from here?” I asked.

“I will take these slips and try and get MoneyHome to at least divulge which of their offices the money was sent from. The transfer number should be enough to do that. Then we will have to painstakingly try to find out whose initials are on the sheets of paper.”