Sherri was sitting at the desk, looking at the pieces of paper. I sat down on the arm of the big armchair.
“Do you know what they are?” I asked.
“Of course,” she said. “They’re MoneyHome payment slips.” She sipped her tea. “One for eight thousand, and two for five.”
“Pounds?” I asked.
She looked at them.
“Dollars. Converted into pounds.”
“How do you know?” I asked.
She looked at me.
“I use MoneyHome all the time,” she said. “It’s a bit like Western Union, only cheaper. They have agents all over the world. Herb sent me the money for my airfare via MoneyHome.”
“Are any of these slips from that?”
“No,” she said with certainty. “These are the slips you get when you collect money, not when you send it.”
“So Herb collected eighteen thousand dollars’ worth of pounds from MoneyHome?”
“Yes,” she said.
“When?” I asked.
She looked at the reconstructed slips carefully. “Last week, but not all on the same day. Eight thousand on Monday and five each on Tuesday and Friday.”
“Who from?” I asked.
“These only tell you which MoneyHome office it was collected from, they don’t say who sent the money.” She drank more of her tea. “What’s all this about anyway?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I just found those torn-up sheets in the wastebasket.”
She sat drinking her tea, looking at me over the rim of the cup.
“Why are you here?” she asked.
“I was a friend of Herb’s and a work colleague,” I said, giving her one of the business cards from my wallet. “He made me the executor of his will.” I decided again not to mention that he had also made me the sole beneficiary.
“I didn’t know he even had a will,” Sherri said, reading from my card, “Mr. Nicholas Foxton, BSc, MEcon, DipPFS.”
“He made it five years ago when he first arrived at Lyall and Black,” I said, ignoring her reference to my qualifications. “Everyone in the firm has to have a will. The senior partners are always saying that we can hardly advise our clients to plan ahead if we aren’t prepared to do the same. But I have absolutely no idea why Herb chose to put me in his. Maybe it was just because we sat at desks next to each other. He’d only just landed in the country and perhaps he didn’t know anyone else. And none of us really expect to die when we’re in our twenties anyway. But he should still have named you as his executor, even if you were in the United States.”
“Herb and I weren’t exactly talking to each other five years ago. In fact, I’d told him by then that I never wanted to see or hear from him again.”
“Wasn’t that a bit extreme?” I said.
“We had a flaming row over our parents.” She sighed. “It was always over our parents.”
“What about them?” I asked.
She looked at me as if deciding whether to tell me.
“Our Mom and Dad were, shall we say, an unusual couple. Dad had made a living, if you can call it that, acting as an unlicensed bookie round the back side of Churchill Downs. He was meant to be a groom but he didn’t do much looking after the horses. He spent his time taking bets from the other grooms, and some of the trainers and owners too. Sometimes he won, but mostly he lost. Mom, meanwhile, had worked as a cocktail waitress in one of the swanky tourist hotels in downtown Louisville. At least that’s what she told people.”
She paused, and I waited in silence. She’d say it if she wanted to.
“She’d been a prostitute.” Sherri was crying again.
“You don’t have to tell me,” I said.
She looked at me with tear-filled eyes. “I’ve got to tell someone.” She gulped. “I’ve bottled it all up for far too long.”
Between bouts of tears she told me the sorry saga of her and Herb’s upbringing. It amazed me that I had sat next to him for all those years without realizing the hurdles he’d had to overcome to be a financial adviser.
Herb and Sherri’s father had been an abusive drinker who had seemingly treated his children as unpaid slave labor. Both of them had excelled in school but their father insisted that they drop out, aged sixteen, to go work, Herb as a groom in the Churchill Downs stables and Sherri as a chambermaid in one of the tourist hotels where her mother had plied her trade.
Herb had rebelled and run away to Lexington, where he had secretly applied for and won a free place at a private high school. But he’d had no accommodations, so he’d slept on the streets. One of the trustees of the school had found him there and offered him a bed. The trustee had been in financial services, and hence Herb’s career had been decided.
He’d stayed in Lexington after high school to attend the University of Kentucky on a scholarship, then, as the top graduate, had been offered a job at J.P. Morgan in New York.
I wondered how such a highflier had come to move from one of the global assets management giants to a firm such as Lyall & Black, a relative tiddler in the financial pond. Had he somehow done something to thwart his career prospects in New York?
Sherri, meanwhile, had been good at her job and bright about it, and she had been spotted by the management of the hotel for further training. That was ultimately how she came to be in Chicago, where she was currently assistant housekeeper in a big hotel in the same chain.
I didn’t see how all this information was going to be of any use to me, but I sat quietly and listened as she unburdened her emotions.
“How come you and Herb fell out?” I asked in one of the frequent pauses.
“He refused to come home from New York for the funeral when Dad died. I said he should be there to support Mom, but he refused, and he said he wouldn’t come to her funeral either if she dropped down dead tomorrow. Those were his exact words. And Mom heard him say them because she and I were in my car and the call was on speakerphone.” She paused, and more tears ran down her cheeks. “I still think it’s the reason why she did it.”
“Did what?” I asked.
“Swallowed a whole bottle of Tylenol Extra. A hundred tablets.”
“Dead?” I asked.
She nodded. “That night. I found her in the morning.” She sat up straight and breathed in deeply through her nose. “I accused Herb of killing her, and that’s when I told him I never wanted to see or hear from him again.”
“How long has it been since your parents died?”
“About six years, maybe seven.” She thought for a moment. “It’ll be seven years in June.”
“When did you change your mind?”
“What? About contacting Herb?”
I nodded.
“I didn’t. It was he who contacted me, about two years ago.” She sighed. “Five years was a long time not to speak to your twin brother. I had wanted to be in touch with him much sooner, but I was too proud.” She paused. “Too stupid, more like. He wrote to me at the hotel company, and we arranged to meet in New York. Then last summer he invited me to come to England and stay with him for a holiday. It was great.” She smiled. “Just like old times.” The smile faded and the tears began again. “I just can’t believe he’s dead.”
Neither could I.
I finally arrived at the office at twenty past one, a time when I reckoned Gregory should be just sitting down to his substantial lunch at the far end of Lombard Street. However, I approached number 64 from the opposite direction to the one he took to his usual restaurant in order to minimize the chances of running into him if he was late.
I ignored the lift, sneaked up the emergency stairway to the fourth floor and put my head around the glass
