Dick Francis's Gamble (21 page)

“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.

A
t 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.

 

 

D
etective 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.”

“You really think this must have something to do with Herb's murder?” I asked.

“Don't you?” he said. “We've no other leads to go on. You never know, perhaps Mr. Kovak was blackmailing one of his ‘clients,' threatening to tell the U.S. authorities about their illegal gambling. So they killed him.”

“There goes that suspicious mind of yours again, Chief Inspector.”

“Suspicion is all we have at the moment,” he said seriously. “And there's precious little of that in this case.”

There was a heavy knock at the front door.

“That will be my sergeant,” the chief inspector said. “He's come to drive Miss Kovak and me to Liverpool.”

 

 

C
laudia and I watched them go.

“That poor girl,” Claudia said, holding my hand. “Her family are all dead. She's alone in the world.”

At least she's healthy, I thought. How typical of my gorgeous Claudia to think of others when she had enough of her own troubles to worry about.

“Do you fancy going out to lunch?” I asked.

“Lovely,” she said.

“Luigi's again?”

“It's a bit unimaginative,” she said. “But, why not? I like it there.”

I drove us home and we again walked around the corner to our favorite restaurant. On this occasion the proprietor, Luigi Pucinelli, was present.

“Ah, Signor Foxton and the lovely Signorina Claudia.
Buongiorno
. . . welcome,” he said, being his usual effusive self. “Table for two?
Bene.
Follow me.”

He showed us to our favorite table in the window.

“We don't often see you for lunch,” Luigi said in his Italian accent, adding an
eh
to every word that ended in a consonant.

“No,” I said. “It's a special treat.”

“Eccellente,”
he said with a flourish, giving us the menus.

“Grazie,”
I said to him, playing the game.

Luigi was no more Italian than I was. I had met his mother one night in the restaurant and she had told me with a laugh that Luigi Pucinelli had been born Jim Metcalf in a hospital just up the Tottenham High Road, not five miles away.

But good luck to him, I thought. The food and service at Luigi's were superb, and his restaurant thrived, authentic Italian or not.

Claudia chose the
antipasto
for us to share as a starter, with
saltimbocca alla pollo
to follow, while I decided on the
risotto al funghi
.

We ate the
antipasto
in silence.

“Speak to me,” Claudia said. “This is not the last meal of the condemned, you know.”

I smiled at her. “No, of course not.”

But we were both nervous.

Nervous of what tomorrow morning would bring.

 

 

I
ordered a taxi to take us to the hospital that evening at seven o'clock.

“Why do you need to go in the night before?” I asked Claudia as we made our way down the Finchley Road.

“Something about wanting to monitor me overnight before the operation so they have something to compare the readings with afterwards.”

“What time is the op in the morning?” I asked.

“The surgeon said it would be first thing, just as soon as he's finished his early-morning rounds.”

That meant it could be anytime, I thought.

In my experience, and I had plenty of it from my racing days, doctors and surgeons were about as good at time keeping as a London bus in the rush hour.

“At least we won't have to wait all day,” I said, smiling at her.

She gave me a look that said she would be quite happy to wait all year.

“It's better to get it done, and then at least we will know what we're up against.”

“I know,” she said. “But I'm frightened.”

So was I. But now was not the time to show it.

“Everything will be OK,” I said, trying to sound reassuring. “You said they've found it early, and I've researched everything on the Internet. You're going to be just fine. You'll see.”

“Oh, Nick,” she said, grasping my hand very tight. There were tears in her eyes.

I pulled her close to me, and we sat in silence as the taxi maneuvered through Regent's Park and out onto the Euston Road.

 

 

I
t was a difficult evening, and night, for both of us.

Claudia was checked into the hospital by the admissions staff, for whom it was a regular routine to be completed with brisk efficiency. They didn't mean to be uncaring, but quite a few times they made us feel uncomfortable and even foolish.

I kept having to wait in the corridor outside her room as nurses and technicians came to perform some procedure or other. Swabs were taken from up Claudia's nose and inside her mouth, and then others were then taken from more intimate areas. Blood was drawn for this, and urine was tested for that.

After a couple of hours they finally said that she was ready for the morning and left us in peace. I turned off the bright overhead lights and dimmed the reading light to a much more subdued level. Suddenly, everything did not look quite so stark and antiseptic. Much better.

I sat on a chair by her bed and held her hand.

“You ought to go home,” Claudia said. “I'll be fine.”

“Unless they physically throw me out,” I said, “I'm not going anywhere.”

Claudia laid her head back on the pillow and smiled. “Good,” she said.

I still couldn't believe how badly I had read the situation between us. What a fool I had been, and what a greater fool I might have become. Just thinking about it caused me to break out in a cold sweat.

“You get some sleep now, my love,” I said to her. “You'll need all the strength you can get for tomorrow.”

“This bloody bed is so hard, it makes my back ache.”

I spent a few minutes using the electric bed control, lifting the head or feet, trying to make her more comfortable. It didn't really work.

“Why can't they have bloody beds that are comfortable to lie on?” Claudia complained. “You'd think that would be the first priority.”

I recognized what was happening. She was getting irritated by the slightest little thing. It was a sign of the nervous condition she was in. I would just have to smile gently and agree with her.