“I told her we were engaged,” I said. “We are, aren’t we?”
“Yes,” she said, smiling. “Of course we are. But what else did you tell her? You know, about the cancer?”
“Nothing,” I said. “I’ll leave that for you to decide.”
“I think not,” she said. “Not yet.”
“Fine,” I replied.
We went into the open-plan kitchen/dining room/living room, and Claudia sat down gingerly on a chair.
“What’s the matter, my dear?” my mother asked with concern. “You look like you’re in pain.”
“I am, Dorothy,” Claudia said. “I’ve just had an operation. A hernia. But I’ll be fine soon.”
“My dear,” said my mother, “come at once and put your feet up on the sofa.”
She fussed around her future daughter-in-law like a brooding mother hen and soon had Claudia propped up on the sofa with multiple pillows.
“There,” my mother said, standing back. “How about a nice cup of tea?”
“That would be lovely,” Claudia said, and she winked at me.
I left them to their bonding session while I took our things upstairs to the guest bedroom, negotiating the narrow, twisting staircase with our bags.
I sat on the bed and called the office using my mother’s cordless phone. Gregory should have returned from his long weekend away by now, and, with luck, Patrick would have convinced him over lunch not to hang, draw and quarter me, and even perhaps to let me back into the offices.
Mrs. McDowd answered.
“Lyall and Black,” she said in her usual crisp tone. “How can I direct your call?”
“Hello, Mrs. McDowd,” I said. “Mr. Nicholas here.”
“Ah yes,” she said curtly. “Mr. Patrick said you might ring. But it’s not your number.”
Mrs. McDowd, I decided, was sitting on the fence with regards to me. She was being neither friendly nor hostile towards me. She would clearly wait to see how I fared with the senior partners before committing to an allegiance either way.
“Are Mr. Patrick and Mr. Gregory back from lunch yet?” I asked.
“They didn’t go to lunch,” she said. “They’ve gone to a funeral. They’ll be gone for the rest of the day.”
“That was rather sudden,” I said.
“Death often is,” she replied.
“Whose funeral is it?” I asked.
“A client of Gregory’s,” she said. “Someone called Roberts. Colonel Jolyon Roberts.”
13
What?” I said. “What did you say?”
“Colonel Jolyon Roberts,” Mrs. McDowd said again. “Mr. Patrick and Mr. Gregory have gone to his funeral.”
“But when did he die?” I asked. I’d been talking to him only on Saturday at Sandown Races.
“Seems he was found dead early yesterday morning,” she said. “Heart attack, apparently. Very sudden.”
“The funeral is mighty sudden too,” I said, “if he only died yesterday.”
“Jewish,” she said by way of explanation. “Quick burial is part of their culture and usually within twenty-four hours. Something to do with the heat in Israel.”
She was a mine of information, Mrs. McDowd. The heat in England in April isn’t quite as intense as that in a Jerusalem summer, but, I supposed, traditions are traditions.
And I’d never realized that Jolyon Roberts had been Jewish. But why would I?
“Are you sure it was a heart attack?” I asked her.
Never mind the chief inspector’s suspicious mind, I thought, mine was now in overdrive.
“That’s what I heard from Mr. Gregory,” said Mrs. McDowd. “He was quite shocked by it. Seems he’d only been talking to Colonel Roberts on Monday afternoon.”
“I thought Mr. Gregory was away for a long weekend.”
“He was meant to be,” she said, “but he came back on Monday. Something urgent cropped up.”
“OK,” I said, “I’ll call Mr. Patrick on his mobile.”
“The funeral service is at three,” she said.
I looked at my watch. It was well past two-thirty.
“I won’t call him until afterwards,” I said. “Where is it?”
“Golders Green,” she said. “At the Jewish cemetery, in the family plot.”
I disconnected and sat on the bed for a while, thinking.
Herb Kovak had accessed the Roberts Family Trust file, and the Bulgarian investment details, and, within a week of doing so he’d been murdered. I’d sent an innocent-looking e-mail to a man in Bulgaria about the same development and, four days later, someone turned up on my doorstep trying to kill me.
And now Jolyon Roberts, with his questions and doubts about the whole Bulgarian project, conveniently dies of a heart attack the day after speaking to Gregory about it, as I had told him he should.
Was I going crazy or was a pattern beginning to appear?
A hundred million euros of EU money was a lot of cash.
Was it enough to murder for? Was it enough to murder three times for?
I decided to call Detective Chief Inspector Tomlinson, if only to try to get some more information about the death of Jolyon Roberts.
“Are you suggesting that this Colonel Roberts was murdered?” he asked in a skeptical tone.
Suddenly, the whole idea appeared less plausible.
“I don’t know,” I said. “But I’d love to hear what the pathologist said.”
“Assuming there was an autopsy.”
“Surely there would be,” I said. “I thought all sudden deaths were subject to postmortems.”
“But why do you believe he was murdered?”
“I’m probably wrong,” I said.
“Tell me anyway,” the chief inspector said with a degree of encouragement. “And I promise not to laugh.”
“Murder is pretty uncommon, right?”
“I’ve seen more than my fair share on Merseyside.”
“But generally,” I said, “for us non-homicide detectives, I’d say it was a pretty rare thing to know a murder victim. Wouldn’t you agree?”
“OK, I agree. Murder is uncommon.”
“Well,” I said, “if I’m right and Colonel Roberts was murdered, then I’ve known two murder victims and both of them have been killed within the past two weeks, and I nearly became the third.” I paused.
“Go on,” he said.
“So I looked to see what connection Herb Kovak had with Colonel Roberts and also with myself.”
“Yes?” he said with greater eagerness.
“Lyall and Black, for one thing,” I said. “Herb Kovak and I work for the firm and Colonel Roberts was a client, although not a client that Herb or I would usually have contacted.” I paused again. “But Herb accessed the Roberts file just ten days before he died, in particular looking at the details of a Bulgarian investment that the Roberts Family Trust had made. I saw the record of him having done so on a company computer.”
“And what is significant about that?” the detective asked.
“Colonel Roberts approached me just a week ago over his concerns about that very same investment.”
“Why did he approach you in particular?”
“I’m not really sure,” I said. “He knew I worked for Lyall and Black, and he met me at the races on Tuesday and again on Wednesday. It was a chance meeting the first time, but I’m sure it was on purpose the second day. He was worried that the factory he had invested in hadn’t actually been built as he had been told it had, but he didn’t want a full inquiry as he was worried that he’d been duped and didn’t want the whole world to know. So he asked me to quietly have a look and check that all was well with the investment.”
