Trail of Greed: Fighting Fraud and Corruption... A Dangerous Game (8 page)

On the drive home I thought over what had happened that day and promised myself to call Alice and get a decent chance to speak to her.

Pierre and I had agreed that we would have supper together and compare our impressions of the day. I had invited him round to the house and, not being the best of cooks, decided on a carry out Indian meal from the Rajput in Cupar, which was only five miles away. I figured it would also be fitting as Dad had been a great fan of Indian cuisine.

Pierre arrived, as agreed, about seven and we settled ourselves comfortably in my small dining room with a mountain of spicy food and rice and a few bottles of beer.

Once the edge had been taken off our hunger I asked Pierre about his few days up north. He had had an excellent time. The weather had been fine. He’d played a couple of rounds of golf. He’d visited a couple of distilleries and had brought back two of bottles of whisky for Mike and me. They were in the hotel.

We then got onto the day’s events. I told him about Steven and the fact that there might be some comment in the papers the next day.

“Your question was just right,” said Pierre. “I was watching Purdy when you delivered the missing three and a half million. I’ve rarely seen a guy look quite so concerned – and he did not like it one bit.”

“I have to admit he recovered rather quickly,” I replied. “Sure. But as far as I’m concerned he definitely showed signs of being very uncomfortable.”

As I opened another beer, he asked me if Steven had any background knowledge of AIM.

“No, but he has agreed to do a bit of discreet digging.” Pierre added a few more observations. “When I joined Purdy afterwards he seemed to be only three quarters there. He was chatting to everyone more or less as normal but you could see that his brain was churning away in the background. I noticed him glance across at you a couple of times.”

“I know. I saw it too – especially when I was talking to Steven. Did you see me with the little old lady? She told me before we went in that she was worried about the return she was getting from her investment and that was why she was there. When she came up to me afterwards it didn’t take long for Purdy to send over a couple of guys to break up our conversation. Interesting, isn’t it? She gave me an envelope of papers to look at and asked me if I could give her a call because she wanted some advice from me. Hold on a minute.”

I got up and went through to the sitting room where I had deposited Alice’s papers and brought them back to the table.

“Have a look at these and see if they seem familiar to you.”

I handed the envelope to Pierre and he pulled out what turned out to be a couple of statements full of numbers and copies of a few letters and standard quarterly news bulletins.

Pierre perused them one by one and handed them over to me.

“Just like the stuff I get,” he said. “Bloody hell,” I said, looking at one of the statements. “Are you telling me that they hit you guys with a two and a half per cent management fee as well?”

“Sure. It’s standard practice, so I’ve been told. Mind you who knows if everyone has the same level of management fee? There’s potential there for a bit of fiddling.”

I did a quick calculation. “At two and a half per cent that’s a hundred grand for you,” I said.

“I know,” Pierre replied ruefully. “Not funny is it?” I grabbed a piece of paper and a pencil. “Let’s see now. If he is buggering about with clients’ money and siphoning off, say, three per cent just to be conservative, that’s one and a half million on fifty.

If he’s taking two and a half per cent management fees as well from everybody that’s another one and a quarter million which makes a nice round sum of two and three quarter million quid.”

I paused for a second as I did a few more mental calculations.

“And if he’s been doing that for the last five years or so that comes to a very useful thirteen point seven five million pounds, less a bit of tax somewhere.”

I sat back in my chair and looked across at Pierre. “Bob, I’ve told you the money doesn’t really mean much to me. For your information I got about ninety million when I sold the company and not too much went on tax. Most of it has been invested sensibly. I don’t really have to worry. But,” he said, with emphasis, “I do not like being taken for a fool and I don’t like crooks, especially those that prey on the elderly.”

“There’s another thing.”

“What?” “The two guys that Purdy sent over to break up the chat I was having with Alice wanted to have a little meeting.”

“Why?” “Ostensibly to sell their products to a potential investor.”

I then told him about the veiled threat I had received at the end of the meeting.

Pierre’s reaction was immediate. “That does it, then. We need to do something.” “Like what?” I asked. Pierre thought for a moment. “Here’s what I would like to do. We agreed that we’ve both got time on our hands. You can’t work in the garden and play golf all the time. I’m a bit bored. As far as I’m concerned today was confirmation of my suspicions. We need to see how we can expose the bastard.”

I thought this over for a minute. He was right. These kinds of crimes never got investigated properly. One reason was that they were often too difficult to prove. Another was that regulatory authorities seldom had teeth and the police, being more and more short handed and more and more snowed under by paperwork, just didn’t have the time. Government by objectives had gone crazy and playing by the rules was a slow process.

We were a couple of old farts who had time on their hands. Pierre could obviously supply financial backing and I had got to the stage in life where bending a few rules to achieve a morally correct objective was not going to bother me one bit.

I summarised this to Pierre and grinned. He lent over the table and stuck out his hand. I took it and thereby committed myself to a course of action which was going to have some startling consequences.

“Let’s plan the next steps.” We banged around a few ideas for the space of half an hour. As far as Purdy was concerned I was the thorn in his flesh. Pierre was just a client. We agreed to keep it that way. Our connection would be kept secret.

I would talk to Steven as soon as possible and get him digging on the promise that, whatever came out of it, he would get an exclusive.

I would go and see Alice and find out if she knew any other fellow investors. Meanwhile we should bring Mike into the equation.

“He has contacts from his old army days – guys that can do a bit of following or digging and if we can find out anything that proves that Purdy has a lot more money than he should have we’ll have a lever on him.”

We agreed to get Mike over the next morning and get things moving.

Pierre left to go back to the hotel and I turned in, reeking of curry and beer. As I dropped off to sleep I thought of Liz. She would definitely approve of what I was doing.

I called Mike the next morning and he agreed to come over and we’d meet at Fernie Castle for a bar lunch.

After we had related to Mike the events of the conference and he was completely up to date on everything he was more than happy to get involved.

“So you want me to see if I can dig up any dirt on Mr Alan Purdy?”

“Can you?” we asked.

“No problem. I have a couple of guys who would be just right. I knew them in the army. Mac lives up near Perth and does freelance house painting which bores him rigid but he likes the freedom it gives him. I’ll see if he’s free. Can I offer to pay him?”

“I’ll organise that,” said Pierre. “There is also Doug, who used to be an explosives expert, but that’s beside the point. He can do other things. He can’t find work very easily at the moment. He’ll be up for a bit of tax-free cash.”

The plan was launched. I knew what I was going to do, Mike would organize Mac and Doug and Pierre would stay in the background.

“Right little bunch of musketeers, we are,” said Mike, finishing off his beer. “We should call ourselves the Three Musketeers. We need a name. I like names.”

“The Three Musketeers is a bit old-fashioned,” said Pierre. “Well, how about The Bruce Brothers?” I said with a grin. “One of my favourite films.”

We discarded that as being too frivolous and after bandying about a bunch of alternatives – some of them distinctly unusable in female company – we decided we would be APA Consulting (Athos, Porthos and Aramis).

As we were about to leave I mentioned to Pierre that we had an invitation to go through to visit Heather for lunch on Saturday. He was delighted and we decided that he and I would meet Mike on the way so as to arrive together. Our sister could be a bit daunting on occasions and I preferred the idea of presenting a consolidated front.

Mike had to go back home. He had an appointment in Dundee, he said.

“Which will no doubt result in a new photograph in the living room?” I asked mischievously.

“You never know.”

Pierre looked mystified.

I called Alice when I got back home and asked her if I could come over and see her the next day. She promptly suggested that I come for lunch. She would rustle up a salad.

I set off the next morning at ten thirty and drove north at a leisurely pace, over the hills and down into the fertile valley of the Tay. It was sunny and I felt invigorated. I had something to do. My brain was operating again and trying to imagine what we were going to discover.

I have to admit that most of my life had centred around the need to forge a career and look after my family. The idea of having the luxury (the time and the money) to do something to help others – to right a wrong, to punish a wrong doer – in some way or other appealed to me. I had a new purpose.

I skirted the fair city of Perth and drove north. Alice had given me directions to her house once I got to the village. They were simple to follow and I arrived at about a quarter to twelve.

Lunch had been prepared (cold salmon salad) in the little verandah that was tacked onto the back of the cottage. I was offered a sherry. The verandah was neat and tidy and let in lots of light yet protected us from the wind. At this time of year it was an ideal place to sit and chat.

And Alice could chat. In her own home there was none of the nervousness she had displayed when we first met. She explained how she lived, how she busied herself with the affairs of the village. She and her husband had come to live there after he had retired from his production management job with a large American paper-making company. They had been lucky because he had, over the years, accumulated a sizeable number of stock options and they had turned out to be quite valuable when he had cashed them in.

They had had two children – one was living down south (down south meant anywhere on the other side of the English border) and the other had emigrated to Australia.

I let her prattle on through lunch and, when she went through to fix some coffee I thought to myself what a nice little old lady she was, although she was probably only about ten years older than me. That Purdy was stealing from her was, in my book, disgusting.

When she brought back the coffee we turned to the subject of her investments and AIM.

“That man is definitely a crook,” she announced. “I watched him when you were asking about the ‘missing millions’. He’s a crook, there’s no question about it. I can feel it.”

I smiled at this conclusion which was uttered with such conviction, yet based on little more than female intuition as far as I could tell. But over the years I have discovered that female intuition can be a pretty powerful tool.

“I suspect you’re right but we can’t condemn the man without proof.”

“Why not?” she shot back. “A crook’s a crook.” “Alice, we don’t know yet for sure if he is. That he might be is all we can say at the moment. I and the friend I told you about feel that there is definitely something suspicious and we’ve decided to see if we can find out for sure.”

“That’s good.” She was clearly excited about the idea that this man would get his just desserts.

“So, in the meantime, what do I do about my money?” “I’d move it, if I were you,” I replied. “I can put you in touch with a good trustworthy financial advisor who will plan a proper investment strategy for you. But talk to him first before you move it. Let him handle that. He’s used to it. There may be ways around the penalty clauses. If there are, he’ll find them. What you can do for the moment is write to AIM and ask them how much you would get if you cashed in everything now. Just tell them that you have some important costs coming up and you might need to free up your cash. So you need to know how much you would get back if you sold out.

That will serve two purposes – you’ll be able to show their reply to Jack Thomson, who is the financial advisor, and also it might get Mr Purdy worried. After all, he didn’t like my question and he saw us chatting together after the meeting. He’ll probably put two and two together.”

That was how, sitting quietly in a verandah in a little village in Perthshire, I stuck a red hot poker into a hornet’s nest – but I didn’t know it at the time.

I gave her Jack’s phone number and she agreed to do what I had suggested. I told her I would keep the copies of her paperwork and asked her to send me a copy of whatever reply she received from AIM.

Before I left I asked Alice if she knew of any other people who were AIM investors.

“Only one,” she told me, and gave me a name and address in Perth. A David MacLean.

“He’s an old colleague of my husband’s. They worked for the same company. He retired a few years before Malcolm. But he must be about ninety by now, if he’s still alive.”

I thanked her for the lunch, promised to keep in touch and set off back home.

During the journey home I wondered how I might be able to track down other Alices or Davids. If APA was going to achieve anything we were going to need as much knowledge as we could dig up. Perhaps Steven would have an idea.

I picked up Pierre at the hotel on Saturday morning and we drove through to Doune for our lunch appointment. I took him the more picturesque route through Glendevon.

The Ochil Hills stretch across that part of Scotland from North Fife to Stirling. They form a natural barrier to the Highlands farther north and Glendevon is one of the few roads piercing them. Driving through the glen is the quickest way to get a feel for the rugged wild country farther north. The road twists its way through the glen and comes out into the last low-lying countryside before you hit the mountains. From the shadow of the steep-sided glen we emerged into blue skies stretching to the north where the ominous grey shapes of the mountains filled the horizon.