Illegal Tender (Three Oaks Book 12) Page 4

  I had been right about the wine. I made a quick trip upstairs for some Gaviscon to soothe my acid stomach so that I missed Ronnie’s announcement of dinner but I joined the drift into the dining room. I found that I was placed on my hostess’s right with Keith Calder opposite and his daughter beside me. Keith was the shoot captain and I had come to know him well over the previous few years. Elizabeth had been as good as her word and Miles Cowieson was four places to my right.

  It seemed that my moment of glory was not quite over. Keith looked across the table. ‘We can’t afford to have you as a guest if you’re going to shoot like that,’ he said. ‘We want the birds to last until January.’

  ‘Until the last drive,’ I said, ‘only one bird came near me and I missed it.’

  ‘In that case we’ll forgive you.’ He smiled and turned to the lady on his left. I fell into small talk with Elizabeth, but I could still feel a small glow lingering from Keith’s approval. He and his family are counted as the finest shots for miles around.

  Mary and Joanna, no doubt aided by some local help, had done us proud. The meal was excellent and the wines were passable, again without being extravagant. Ronnie, by keeping his mouth firmly shut, passed muster as a rather rough-hewn butler. If I half-closed my eyes I could almost believe that the grand old days of Her La’ship had returned.

  We arrived at coffee in a murmur of good-natured conversation and an occasional spatter of laughter. I was speaking to Keith’s daughter, Deborah. She had been one of the only two woman Guns that day. ‘Ian wasn’t out today,’ I remarked.

  ‘He had to go to a conference on electronic fraud,’ she said. ‘Mum and I tossed a coin for who went on the shoot and stayed for the dinner and who stayed at home to look after Bruce.’

  ‘And you won?’

  ‘She thinks that she won. She adores her grandson. Ian was fizzing. He’d been looking forward to today.’ Her husband was a detective inspector, the only senior CID officer in Newton Lauder. When the pair had met, Deborah had told me, Ian had been tainted with the policeman’s eternal view of firearms as tools of the devil, to be kept at all costs out of all hands except those of the police. But nobody could mingle with the Calders for long without the family’s enthusiasm and philosophy rubbing off on them and Ian had become an enthusiastic and averagely competent performer at both game and clays.

  The mention of his conference reminded me. I took Gordon’s pages of computer paper out of my pocket. ‘This might interest you,’ I said, addressing my immediate neighbours at the table. My words happened to fall into a gap in the general chatter and an expectant silence came down. Well, so be it. ‘Who uses e-mail?’ I asked the world in general.

  From the nods and murmurs I gathered that most of the men present and about half the ladies were e-mail users.

  ‘This is a deliberate attempt to set up a fraud,’ I said. ‘So it may pay you to be on your guard. Has anybody here had one of these?’ Omitting the opening half-page of computer-babble, I read out the message, drawing a little humour out of the grammatical errors.

  ‘I had one of those,’ said a retired doctor and syndicate member at the opposite corner of the table. ‘I used the reply facility to send back a message saying ‘Nice try!’ and passed a copy to the police. Your husband, Mrs Fellowes, said that there had been many such attempts, targeting people all over the English-speaking world. Some of them have been successful. You’d wonder at people being so trusting. One of my neighbours, Mackillop, lost a couple of hundred — he’s becoming known locally as Mac the Naif. DI Fellowes told me that the Met was co-ordinating the British end of the investigation. Apparently they traced the original message to somewhere in Canada.’

  ‘Vancouver, I’m told,’ I said.

  ‘I believe that’s right.’

  Conversation had become general again, with several of the company reciting examples of who had had such e-mails, who knew somebody who had had one and a few who felt insulted at not having been considered worthy of the attempt. There was some competition at devising the most humorous and insulting replies.

  Laughing at a contribution from Keith, I glanced at Elizabeth. She had gone so white that her make-up showed up as patches of unnatural colour. She looked as though she might faint. ‘Are you all right?’ I whispered.

  She shook her head.

  ‘Let me take you outside.’

  ‘I can’t leave the guests.’

  ‘Of course you can.’ I stood up. Conversation died. ‘Mrs Ilwand is feeling faint,’ I said. ‘I’m taking her outside for a breath of air.’

  Duncan began to get up but Elizabeth made a negative gesture. ‘You stay,’ she said. ‘Don’t break up the party on my account.’

  I helped her to her feet. Most of the men half-rose politely. She leaned on my arm and I led her out of the room.

  The room which had been Peter Hay’s study and which now, virtually unchanged, acted as an office, was handy. I also suspected that we might need its facilities. I was going to settle her on the couch but she moved to the swivel chair behind the desk, lowered herself into it and put her head down for a moment on her knees. When she raised her head again, her hair was flying but she did not care. Her colour had made a partial return.

  She licked her lips. ‘You can guess?’ she asked me.

  ‘You’ve been had?’

  ‘Almost certainly.’ She snatched up the phone, keyed in a number and went through procedures which I recognized as being those for a telephone banking system. She listened and when she disconnected she was looking twenty years older. ‘The account’s been cleaned out,’ she said. Suddenly she banged her fist on the desk. ‘How could I have been so stupid?’ she demanded of the room. In a way, I was relieved. The old crushproof Elizabeth was still capable of making a comeback.

  ‘Surely it can’t have been much of a loss,’ I suggested. ‘The estate can stand it. Tell the police and then write it off to experience.’

  ‘You don’t understand,’ she said. ‘I spoke to you — when was it? — on Tuesday. The cheque for Talisman Farm arrived, special delivery, the next morning. I took it to the bank and paid it straight into the estate account. A million and a quarter, near enough. I was waiting to ask you what to do about it so that it wouldn’t be entirely idle until it was needed for the Agrotechnics flotation. That’s what’s gone.’

  I felt a hollowness in my bowels and almost unbearable tension in my neck, both, I could tell, stemming from a sense of guilt. I was, after all, half of her trustees. But Elizabeth’s returning anger was directed against herself, on top of which she was in a state of shock. When I touched her hand it was ice cold and trembling. If I gave way to my immediate urge to explode it would do nobody any good and might push her over brink. Calm thinking would be more difficult but more useful.

  On consideration, I decided that there was little or nothing to be done late on a Saturday evening. Except . . . ‘Did you also give them your credit card details?’ I asked her.

  She blew her nose violently. ‘No. At least I had that much sense,’ she said shakily. ‘I knew nobody could possibly need both.’

  Well, thank God for one small mercy. No need to hang about, cancelling credit cards and wondering when the accounts for diamond necklaces would come back from Hong Kong. I fetched a large brandy from the sitting room, encouraged her to drink it and then told her to go to bed. ‘I’ll make your excuses to your guests.’

  ‘But what are they going to think?’

  ‘They’ll think that you’re pregnant,’ I said.

  She managed a shaky smile.

  I brought Joanna from the kitchen, where she and Mary were busily feeding dishes through the washer. Joanna took her mistress upstairs, promising to give her a sleeping pill and put her to bed.

  I rejoined the party. I had never felt less like a celebration. From the far end of the table, Duncan looked at me anxiously. I gave him a nod and the kind of look which could have meant anything.

  The absence of the hostess did little to
speed the guests. It had been a good day and nobody wanted it to end. The aftermath of the dinner seemed to go on for ever. It had never been the custom of the house for the ladies to withdraw — Her La’ship would never have countenanced being excluded from the port and gossip. I managed to keep up some sort of conversation while my mind raced around the financial implications of Elizabeth’s folly. I had put a lot of time and effort into consolidating Peter’s rambling estate and business interests into a more compact package that would be easily managed by an heiress who was coming to it afresh. Knock a large sum of money out of the middle and it would be like knocking one stone out of an archway. The whole structure might not collapse, but it would certainly totter. Echoing her own words, I wondered how she could have been so stupid.

  Joanna came in, on the excuse of renewing the supply of cream for the coffee, to mutter that Elizabeth was asleep.

  At last, somebody stirred and by common consent the guests rose to go, leaving messages of concern for Elizabeth. Ronnie emerged from the gun-room to hand each freshly cleaned gun, in its bag or case, to its rightful owner along with a brace of pheasants and to accept, with an expression of pleased surprise, a tip.

  Keith and his daughter managed to hang back. As I supposed, an indulgent atmosphere among the guests suggested that most of them had leaped to the conclusion that Elizabeth was in an ‘interesting condition’, but Deborah had seen Elizabeth’s face and she would have had to be a much less intelligent person not to have guessed what was afoot. We exchanged a few words in whispers.

  ‘When does Ian get back?’ I asked her.

  She handed her gun-bag and her brace of birds to her father and dusted off her hands. ‘He may be home by now,’ she said.

  ‘Ask him to come up in the morning?’

  ‘Of course,’ she said. They slipped out on the heels of the other guests.

  Freed from his duties as a host, Duncan was on the point of dashing upstairs to his wife, but Elizabeth would not have appreciated being woken for an inquisition. I was fainting with weariness myself after all the fresh air and excitement, but I took him firmly into the sitting room, dispensed some more of his own brandy and gave him a summary of the bad news.

  Duncan, to his credit, had never regarded Elizabeth’s fortune as having more than peripheral interest for himself. It contributed some comfort to his lifestyle and saved him from having to worry about what the bank manager might say, but beyond that point his attitude was one of polite disinterest. His reaction was compassionate. ‘Poor kid!’ he said softly. ‘I’ll go up.’

  ‘She’s asleep,’ I told him.

  ‘When she wakes, she’ll need me. There’s nothing we can do just now and no more damage to be done.’

  ‘That would seem to be true.’

  Beatrice Payne had already gone up. Mary, Ronnie and Joanna must already have been on their way home and my fellow guest had made short work of his preparations for bed, because the rest of the house was dark and silent.

  I wasted the minimum of time on my own ablutions. Tomorrow would be another day and a fraught one.

  *

  For what seemed like an hour but was probably only a third of that time, I lay awake and fretted. My old friend had trusted me. I had allowed his granddaughter to take on responsibility for her own affairs more rapidly than she could cope with and the result was a serious upset to the equilibrium of what he had left behind. For this, my fellow executor must take half the blame and I would make damn sure that he knew it. Ralph Enterkin, for reasons which I suspected were no more than laziness, had always advocated leaving Elizabeth to make as many of her own decisions as possible.

  Despite my mental turmoil, a day in the fresh air and a vinous evening had taken their toll and I fell into a deep sleep. I woke at dawn. After a little thought, I decided that the steps to be taken financially were already clear-cut and that I did not know enough about information technology to make any useful contribution to discussions of how and who and where. With no demands on my thought processes, I dropped easily back into sleep.

  The sound of a small car spurting away along the gravel woke me later. There were small sounds downstairs. The staff having worked late, it was to be a do-it-yourself morning. I showered, shaved and dressed and descended the stairs. I had not expected Elizabeth or her husband to have much appetite for breakfast, so I was surprised to detect the smell of frying bacon; but in the kitchen I found the pair sitting over mugs of tea and staring balefully at the back of the only other overnight guest, another remote cousin of Duncan’s relative the Earl of Jedburgh. My fellow guest — a former professional man named Claythorpe, now retired from some unspecified vocation — was busily preparing a substantial cooked breakfast from ingredients which had been left out for the purpose.

  Lured by the delicious smell I was tempted to await my turn at the frying pan. But I am careful of my weight — not out of vanity but for fear of being trapped in the older man’s vicious circle. The heavier you are the less you walk and the less you walk the heavier you become. That was not for me. I put a single slice of bread into the toaster and helped myself to cereal and tea. Elizabeth kept catching my eye and sending unreadable messages. I had never before seen her with dark shadows under her eyes. Only good manners seemed to be preventing the couple from deserting their guests.

  Clearly Elizabeth wanted to bend my ear — but, quite rightly, not in the presence of Mr Claythorpe. During my days in banking, one of the first pieces of advice which I would hand out to anyone who would listen, immediately after ‘Remember, nobody ever calls you back,’ was ‘If you’re in the financial mire, buy a new car.’ The appearance of financial stability is essential. As soon as a rumour spreads that cash may be in short supply, every creditor wants to get in first to cream off as much as possible of what is due to him and every supplier wants payment up front, thus precipitating exactly what they feared. Immediately the word spreads, money is going out faster than it dribbles in and, if there was no cash flow problem previously, there soon will be. Credit is only given to those who have no need of it.

  M Claythorpe took his time over breakfast. Conversation was understandably stilted but breakfast after a big party is not usually notable for bright chatter. I decided that he was not noticing anything special in the air. He finished at last. Ronnie must have made an unheralded early return to the house because Mr Claythorpe was pleased and surprised to find his bags already packed and waiting for him in the hall. He said all the polite things that a departing guest must say but then added to Elizabeth, ‘Try not to worry, my dear. I’m sure that it’ll come out right.’

  Elizabeth made a small sound that might have been ‘What?’

  Mr Claythorpe smiled vaguely. ‘My dear, I saw your face when the subject of e-mail fraud came up. Obviously, you’ve been taken. Not for too much, I hope. Just think of it as a useful tax loss. I’m sure that Mr Kitts can bring you out on the right side. I’ve seen him at work before.’

  With that for a farewell, he pottered out to the last car remaining on the gravel, an old but gleaming Mercedes, and drove carefully away.

  ‘I don’t remember him,’ I said. ‘What did he do?’

  ‘Something senior in the Inland Revenue,’ Duncan said. ‘I forget just what.’

  ‘Maybe he has a point,’ I said. ‘But let’s hope that it doesn’t come to that.’ I looked up at the kitchen clock. ‘Where’s Ian Fellowes got to?’

  Chapter Three

  Now that we were free to do something, however futile, about the missing money, Elizabeth and I were in a fever to get started. Even Duncan, who had never been known to get in a fever about anything, looked at his watch and raised his eyebrows.

  Elizabeth went to collect the cordless phone and telephone a reminder but, Sod’s Law being what it is, Ian’s privately owned hatchback turned in under the big arch a few moments later. But by that time Elizabeth already had Deborah on the phone and, because Ian’s wife is not one of the very few women capable of holding a short co
nversation, it was necessary for us all to wait while Elizabeth was again thanked for her hospitality, commiserated with over being taken in and treated to several stories about Bruce’s early attempts at speech before she could disengage without giving offence. By then, Duncan had admitted the Detective Inspector and we had shaken hands very formally. Ian was making it clear that he was on business and not a friend for the moment.

  ‘The study, I think,’ Elizabeth said, turning in that direction.

  I had been waiting to lend moral support and perhaps to intervene if, as so often happens, a feeling of guilt and inadequacy turned into rage at the nearest potential victim. With Ian’s arrival, that danger seemed to be past. ‘You don’t need me,’ I suggested. The truth is that my mind was sluggish and I wanted to excuse myself from a discussion which was bound to be long, boring, fretful and largely incomprehensible.

  But Elizabeth deposited the cordless phone on the hall table with unnecessary violence and looked at me in surprise. ‘Of course we do.’

  ‘I can barely send an e-mail. I won’t understand one word in three. You tell me the outcome and I’ll help to deal with the financial consequences.’

  ‘But you’re my trustee.’

  ‘And as such,’ I pleaded, ‘I need to make sure that we can get bridging finance without being scalped. And I should consult my fellow trustee.’

  ‘You won’t manage anything on a Sunday,’ Elizabeth said firmly. ‘And you know that Mr Enterkin won’t be getting out of bed before midday. If then.’

  At about that time, Hamish would have been sweeping the ground with the two dogs in case any pricked birds had been missed by the pickers-up and I would much rather have been with him, walking off the fumes of the previous evening and taking pleasure in the happiness of the dogs in their work. But Elizabeth had cut the ground from under my feet. I followed meekly into the study. This, if you discounted the computer, fax machine, two printers, an answering machine, several telephones and a small charging rack with three mobile phones on charge, was the traditional study of a wealthy and old fashioned gentleman, which was exactly what Peter Hay had been. Such of the walls as were not book-lined were panelled in pale oak and embellished with sporting prints. The chairs were deep and comfortable.