Crossfire (34 page)

“I might,” she said arrogantly.

“I’ll delete the pictures if you tell me.”

Even in her cocaine-induced state, she knew that the pictures were the key.

“How can I trust you?”

“I’m an officer in the British Army,” I said, rather pompously. “My word is my bond.”

“Do you promise?” she said.

“I promise,” I said formally, holding up my right hand. Yet another of those promises I might keep.

She paused a while longer before starting again.

“Garraway lives in Gibraltar, and he’s not registered for VAT in the UK. He actually could be, but he’s obsessive about not having anything to do with the tax people here because he’s a tax exile. He only lives in Gibraltar to avoid paying tax. Hates the place, really.” She paused.

“So?” I said, prompting her to continue.

“So all Peter Garraway’s horses are officially owned by Jackson Warren. Jackson pays the training fees and all the other bills, and then he claims back the VAT. He even buys the horses for Garraway in the first place and gets the VAT back on that too. He uses a company called Budsam Ltd.”

“So why is that a fiddle?” I asked. “If Jackson buys them and pays the fees, then
he
is the owner, not Garraway.”

“Yes,” she said, “but Peter Garraway pays Jackson back for all the costs.”

“Doesn’t that show up in Jackson’s accounts or those of the company?”

“No.” She smiled. “That’s the clever bit. Peter pays Jackson into an offshore account in Gibraltar that Jackson doesn’t declare to the Revenue. Alex says it’s very clever because Jackson gets his money offshore without ever having to transfer anything from a UK bank, which would be required by law to tell the tax people about it.”

“How many horses does Peter Garraway own in this way?” I asked.

“Masses. He has ten or twelve with us and loads more with other trainers.”

“But don’t they pay for themselves with the prize money?”

“No, of course not,” she said. “Most horses don’t make in prize money anything like what they cost to keep, especially not jumpers. Far from it. Not unless you count the betting winnings, and Garraway gets to keep those himself.”

“So why doesn’t Peter Garraway register himself as an owner in the UK for the VAT scheme?”

“I told you,” she said. “He’s paranoid about the British tax people. They’ve been trying forever to get him for tax evasion. He’s obsessive about the number of days he stays here, and he and his wife even travel on separate planes so they won’t both be killed in a crash and his family get done here for inheritance tax. There’s no way he’ll register. Alex thinks it’s stupid. He told them it would solve the problem of the VAT without any risk, but Garraway won’t listen.”

I listened, all right.

Wasn’t it Archimedes who claimed that if you gave him a lever long enough, he could lift the world?

I listened to Julie with mounting glee. Perhaps now I had a lever long enough to pry my mother’s money back from under the Rock of Gibraltar.

All I had to do was work out on whom to apply it, and when.

I
spent much of the night downloading Alex’s files and e-mails onto my laptop using the Internet connection in my mother’s office.

I had let myself into the kitchen silently using Ian’s key. The dogs had been unperturbed by their nocturnal visitor, sniffing my hand as I’d passed them and then going back to sleep, happy that I was friend, not foe.

I worked solely by the light of the computer screen and left everything exactly as I’d found it. I didn’t know why I still thought it was necessary for my presence to be a secret from my mother, but I wasn’t yet ready to try to explain to her what had been going on.

It might also have been safer for me if she didn’t know where I was.

After I had left Julie to drive herself home in the white BMW, I’d taken Ian’s car slowly up the driveway of Greystone Stables. My two telltale sticks on their stones were broken. Someone had been up to the stable yard, someone who would now know I wasn’t dead, someone who might try to kill me again. But they would have to find me first.

 

 

I
slept fitfully on Ian’s sofa, and he left me there snoozing when he went out to morning stables at half past six on Monday morning.

By the time he returned at about noon, I had read through all of Alex’s downloaded information on my laptop. Most of it was boring, but amongst the dross, there were some real gems, and three standout sparkling diamonds.

Maybe I wouldn’t need to use my lever after all.

One of the diamonds was that Alex, it transpired, was not only the accountant for Rock Bank (Gibraltar) Ltd but also one of the signatories of the company’s bank account, and best of all, I had downloaded all the passwords and user names that he needed to access the account online.

I would try to log in to the account tonight, I thought, when I had access to the Internet from my mother’s office.

The other diamonds were the e-mails sent by Jackson Warren to Alex Reece concerning me, the first a message sent on the night of Isabella’s kitchen supper, and the second after the races at Newbury on the day Scientific had won. The first had been sent in a fit of anger, and the second as a warning, but nevertheless, it amazed me how lax people could be with e-mail security.

In the army, all messages were encrypted before sending so that they were not readable by the enemy. Even cell phones were not permitted to be used in Afghanistan in case the Taliban were listening to the transmissions and gaining information that could be useful either in a tactical way or simply to undermine the morale of the troops.

No parents, having been called by their soldier offspring one evening from a cell telephone in Helmand province, would welcome then receiving a second call, this time from an English-speaking member of the Taliban, who would inform them that their son was going to be targeted in the morning, and that he would be returning home to them in a wooden box.

It had happened.

Yet here was a supposedly sensible person, Jackson Warren, sending clear text messages by e-mail for all to read. Well, for me to read anyway.

“What the bloody hell do you think you were doing talking so openly in front of Thomas Forsyth?” Jackson had written soon after storming out of the supper. “His mother was one of those who invested heavily in our little scheme. KEEP YOUR BLOODY LIPS SEALED—DO YOU HEAR?”

Capital letters in an e-mail were equivalent to shouting, and I could vividly recall the way Jackson had stormed out of the room that night. He would certainly have been shouting.

The second e-mail was calmer but no less direct, and had been sent by Jackson to Alex at five o’clock on the afternoon of the races. He must have written it as soon as he arrived home from Newbury.

“Thomas Forsyth told me this afternoon that he wants to contact you. I am making arrangements to ensure that he cannot. However, if he manages to be in contact with you before my arrangements are in position, you are hereby warned NOT to speak with him or communicate with him in any way. This is extremely important, especially in the light of the company business this coming week.”

I knew only too well what arrangements Jackson had subsequently taken to stop me from speaking with Alex—my shoulders still ached from them. But what, I wondered, had been the company business? Perhaps all would be revealed by access to the company bank account later.

 

 

S
o how are the horses?” I asked Ian, as he slumped down onto the brown sofa and switched on the television.

“They’re all right,” he said with a mighty sigh.

“What’s wrong, then?” I asked. “Would you like me to leave?”

“As you like,” he said, seemingly uninterested in the conversation as he flicked through the channels with the remote control.

“Bad day at the office?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he said. “You could say that.”

I said nothing. He’d tell me if he wanted to.

He did.

“When I took this job I thought it would be more as an assistant trainer rather than just as ‘head lad.’ That’s what Mrs. Kauri implied. She told me she doesn’t have an assistant, as such, so I thought the role of head lad would be more important to her than to other trainers.”

He paused, perhaps remembering that I was Mrs. Kauri’s son.

“And?” I prompted.

“And nothing,” he said. He turned off the TV and swiveled around on the sofa to face me. “I was wrong, that’s all. It turns out she doesn’t have an assistant because she can’t delegate anything to anybody. She even treats me the same as one of the young boys straight out from school. She tells the staff to do things that I should be telling them to do, and often it is directly opposite to what I’ve already said. I feel worthless and undermined.”

Story of my life, I thought.

At least, it had been the story of my life until I’d left home to join the army. It seemed to me that Ian was already on the road to somewhere else. It was a shame. I’d seen him working with the horses, and even I could see that he was good, calming the younger ones and standing no nonsense from the old hands. He also had a passion for them, and he longed for them to win. Losing Ian Norland would be a sad day for Kauri House Stables.

“Have you been looking?” I asked.

“There’s a possibility of a new stable opening that’s quite exciting,” he said, suddenly more alive. “It’s some way off yet, but I’m going to keep my options open. But don’t you go telling your mother. She’d be furious.”

He was right, she would be furious. She demanded absolute loyalty from everyone around her, but sadly, she repaid it in short measure, and she wasn’t about to change now.

“Which stables?” I asked.

“Rumor has it that one of the trainers in the village is going to open up a second yard, and he’ll be needing a new assistant to run it. I thought I might apply.”

“Which trainer?” I asked.

“Ewen Yorke,” he said. “Apparently, he’s buying Greystone Stables.”

He’d have to fix the broken pane in the tack-room window.

 

 

T
he statements of the bank account of Rock Bank (Gibraltar)

Ltd were most revealing.

I had spent the afternoon rereading all the e-mails that I had downloaded from Alex Reece’s computer inbox and sent-items folder, as well as the Gibraltar folder. Quite a few of the e-mails were communications back and forth with someone named Sigurd Bellido, the senior cashier at the real Gibraltar bank that held the Rock Bank Ltd account, discussing the transfer of funds in and out. Unfortunately, there were no references to account names and numbers from which, and to which, the transfers were made, although strangely they all discussed the ongoing health of Mr. Bellido’s mother-in-law.

When, at two in the morning, I logged on to the online banking system in my mother’s office, I could see that the recent transfers discussed with Mr. Bellido were reflected in the various changes to the account balance.

As Alex had said, money periodically came into the account, presumably from the “investors” in the UK, and then left again about a week later. If Alex was right, it disappeared eventually into some secret Swiss account belonging to Garraway or Warren.

I looked particularly at the transactions for the past week to see if they showed any evidence of the “company business” that Jackson had referred to in his e-mail.

There had been two large deposits. Both were in American dollars, one for one million and the other for two million. A couple more mugs, I thought, duped into investing in a nonexistent hedge fund.

One of the deposits, the two million dollars, had a name attached to it—Toleron. I knew I’d heard that name before, but I couldn’t place where, so I typed “Toleron” into the Google search on my computer, and it instantly gave me the answer.

“Toleron Plastics” appeared across my screen in large red letters, with “the largest drainpipe manufacturer in Europe” running underneath in slightly smaller ones. Mrs. Martin Toleron had been the rather boring lady I’d sat next to at Isabella’s kitchen supper, who would, it appeared, very soon be finding out that her “wonderful” husband wasn’t quite as good at business as she had claimed. I almost felt sorry for her.

Had that really been only eleven days ago? So much had happened in the interim.

I searched further for Mr. Martin Toleron. Nearly every reference was connected with the sale of his company the previous November to a Russian conglomerate, reputedly adding more than a hundred million dollars to his personal fortune.

Suddenly I didn’t feel quite so sorry for his wife over the loss of a mere two million.

As Alex would have said, they could afford it.

 

 

E
arly on Tuesday morning, while my mother was away on the gallops watching her horses exercise, I borrowed Ian Norland’s car once more, and went to see Mr. Martin Toleron.

According to the Internet, he lived in the village of Hermitage, a few miles to the north of Newbury, and I found the exact address easily enough by asking directions in the village shop.

“Oh yes,” said the plump middle-aged woman behind the counter. “We all know the Tolerons round here, especially Mrs. Toleron.” Her tone implied that Mrs. Toleron wasn’t necessarily the most welcome of customers in the shop. I thought it might have had something to do with the never-ending praise of her “wonderful” husband or, more likely, was just straightforward envy of the rich.

Martin Toleron’s house, near the edge of the village on the Yattenden Road, was a grand affair, in keeping with his “captain of industry” billing. I pulled up in front of the firmly closed six-foot-high iron gates and pushed the button on the intercom box fixed to the gatepost, but I wasn’t quite sure what I was going to say if someone answered.