I knew all too well what that felt like.
“What the hell’s going on?” Patrick had appeared in the reception, obviously summoned by the noise. “What are these men doing here?”
“It seems they are here to arrest Mr. Gregory,” said the unflappable Mrs. McDowd.
“Arrest Gregory? But that’s ridiculous. What for?”
“Conspiracy to defraud and conspiracy to murder,” DI Batten said.
“Fraud? Murder? Who has he murdered?” Patrick demanded, turning towards the policeman.
“No one,” said DI Batten. “Mr. Black has been arrested on suspicion of
Patrick wasn’t to be deterred.
“So who, then, is he suspected of conspiring to murder?”
“Me,” I said, stepping forward.
Patrick said nothing. He just stared at me.
Later in the afternoon, life in the offices of Lyall & Black at 64 Lombard Street returned to some sort of normalcy, if having one of the senior partners arrested for conspiracy to defraud and murder could ever be considered normal.
I went into my office for the first time in almost two weeks to find that Rory had moved himself into Herb’s desk by the window. Diana was still where she had always been.
“By rights, that should have been Diana’s,” I said to Rory. “She’s the more senior.”
“She had yours until half an hour ago,” Rory replied with a sneer. “Patrick said you weren’t coming back.” His tone implied that he was sorry I had.
Diana, meanwhile, remained silently resentful as I opened the window to let in some of the warm spring day. Perhaps the weather had changed for the better as well.
Maybe Diana wouldn’t have to wait too much longer to get back to my desk anyway. That is, if my desk remained at all. At the moment, I couldn’t see Lyall & Black surviving as a firm beyond next week. Once news of a fraud investigation got out, our clients would desert us quicker than rats from a sinking ship. Everything in financial services comes down to client confidence, and confidence in a firm involved in fraud would be close to absolute zero.
The quickest way to create a run on a bank was to publicly warn that there might be one. Depositors would quickly lose confidence in the institution and would queue around the block to get their money back. But of course no bank leaves cash lying around in its vaults just in case of such an eventuality. The money will have been lent out to other customers as mortgages and business loans. Hence the bank can’t pay. As word spreads that the bank is in trouble, even more depositors come looking for their money, and the whole crisis self-perpetuates and then crashes down like a house of cards. The bank’s credibility, which might have taken several hundred years to establish, can be destroyed in as little as a day. As it had been with Northern Rock in the UK and Indy-Mac in the U.S., and so would be with us. But, in our case, there would be no government bailout.
Yes, indeed, we had all better start looking for new positions by another firm’s window. But what chance would we have with a reference from Lyall & Black? Not much.
There were nearly a hundred unanswered e-mails for me on the company server, plus twenty-eight messages on my office voice mail, including quite a few from irate clients with whom I had missed meetings. There were also two from the Slim Fit Gym, reminding me again that they wanted Herb’s locker back.
“Where’s the key?” I asked Rory.
“What key?” he said.
“The key that was pinned to Herb’s bulletin board.”
“Still on it, I expect,” Rory said. “I swapped the whole desk cubicle.”
I went over to one of the empty cubicles and checked. The key was still pinned to the board. I took it off and put it in my pocket.
I sat down again at my desk and started going through the mass of e-mails but without really taking in any of the information contained in them. My heart simply wasn’t in this job anymore.
If and when Claudia beat this cancer, we would do something different, something together.
Something more exciting. But maybe something a little less dangerous.
“I’m going out,” I said to Rory and Diana, as if they cared.
As I walked down the corridor I had to step over some big tied-up polyethylene bags stacked full of files and computers. The Fraud Squad was busily packing up the stuff from Gregory’s office. I was quite surprised they hadn’t thrown us all out of the building to pack up the whole firm. That would come later, no doubt, when they had discovered a little more.
The receptionist at the Slim Fit Gym was really pleased to see me.
“To be honest,” she said in a broad Welsh accent, “it’s beginning to smell a bit, especially today in this warm weather. It’s upsetting some of our other clients. There must be some dreadfully sweaty clothes in there.”
The key from Herb’s desk fitted neatly into the hefty padlock on the locker, and I swung open the door.
The receptionist and I leaned back. It smelled more than a just a bit.
There was a dark blue bag in the locker with a pair of off-white training shoes placed on top, and I think it was the shoes, rather than the clothes inside the bag, that were the culprits as far as the smell was concerned. Perhaps Herb had suffered from some sort of foot-fungal problem that had spread to his shoes and then clearly festered badly there over the last three weeks. But whatever the cause, the smell was pretty rank.
“Sorry about this,” I said. “I’ll get rid of it all.”
I tucked the offending shoes into the bag on top of the clothes and left the receptionist tut-tutting about having to disinfect all the lockers.
I walked back towards Lombard Street and dumped the whole thing, together with all the contents, into a City of London-crested street litter basket. I didn’t think Mrs. McDowd would be very happy if I took that smell back into the office.
I had walked nearly a hundred yards farther on when I suddenly turned around and retraced my steps. I had searched everything else of Herb’s. Why not that blue bag?
Neatly stacked, in a zipped-up compartment beneath the clothes, was over a hundred and eighty thousand pounds wrapped in clear plastic sandwich bags, three thousand in twenty-pound notes in each bag. There was also a list of ninety-seven names and addresses, all of them in America.
Good old Herb. As meticulous as ever.
Mr. Patrick would like to see you,” Mrs. McDowd said to me as I skipped through the door with the bag of loot over my shoulder. “In his office, right now.”
Patrick was not alone. Jessica Winter was also there.
“Ah, Nicholas,” said Patrick. “Come and sit down.” I sat in the spare chair next to the open window. “Jessica and I have been looking at how things stand. We need to implement a damage-control exercise. To maintain the confidence of our clients and to assure them that it’s ‘business as usual’ at Lyall and Black.”
“And is it business as usual?” I asked.
“Of course,” he said. “Why wouldn’t it be?”
I thought that was pretty obvious. Members of the Fraud Squad were still in the room next door, bagging up evidence.
“No,” Patrick went on, “we mustn’t let this little setback disrupt our work. I will write to all of Gregory’s clients, telling them that for the time being I will be looking after their portfolios. It will just mean we all have to work a little harder for a while.”
But for how long, I wondered?
The maximum sentence for conspiracy to murder was life imprisonment.
“So how about the Bulgarian business?” I asked.
“Jessica and I have just been looking at it,” Patrick said. “Or what is left to look at after those damn police have been in here taking stuff away.”
“And?” I asked.