Текст книги "Trail of Greed"

Автор книги: John Dysart

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Chapter 3

Mike arrived at the small Italian restaurant just five minutes after me. I was already seated at the table which I had reserved in advance. He breezed in, causing a few female heads to turn as he made his way over to me.

Although still a bachelor, and liking it that way, he had never had any trouble in attracting the opposite sex. He was not a big man but he had presence. His graying hair was kept short, military fashion, his features were clean cut, his skin tanned from his outdoor life and he projected an aura of total self-confidence, without any hint of egoism. I’m here, I enjoy life, take me as I am or leave it, it doesn’t bother me.

Not long after he had bought his current house and decided to settle down I had paid him a visit. I had been amused to discover that, in his living room, he had a collection of fifteen or twenty framed pictures on the walls and on the bookcases of attractive women of various ages and seemingly different nationalities.

“All your conquests?” I had asked him. “Not all,” he had replied with a grin. “A bit strange to put them all on display,” I said. “It sort of happened by accident,” he replied and then proceeded to explain.

“In fact the whole idea started as a bit of joke years ago. I had a couple of pictures then and I once forgot to hide them when I invited someone back for the night. On that particular occasion the girl stayed for about a week and then left to go back to Australia. A week later I got a parcel through the post with that photograph over there inside it”.

He pointed to the photo of a fun-looking brunette smiling at the camera, perched on the roots of a palm tree on what looked like a tropical beach.

I strolled over and picked it up for a closer look. As I was putting it back I noticed the message scrawled in blue ink on the back “For your collection! – X”.

“So I decided to leave them out permanently and the collection has just ‘kinda grown’ – like Topsy,” he said with a grin. “I suppose I must attract the type of girl that doesn’t have any permanent designs on me so they think it’s rather fun and when they send me photos ‘for my collection’ I stick them up!”

I didn’t mind his collection at all, but I did know that Heather was rather disapproving of it.

“Well, how’s tricks?” he asked, as he sat down, “and what world-shattering event has induced you to put your hand in your pocket to buy your wee brother a meal? It’s you that’s paying, isn’t it?”

“Oh, nothing much. I’ll tell you after we’ve ordered – and, yes, I’ll pay this time.”

We dispensed with the logistics of ordering lasagne and a bottle of wine, and after a bit of small talk – Seen Heather recently? – How’s Oscar? – I decided to plunge in, but not without dipping my foot in the water first to judge the temperature.

“Mike, did Dad ever talk to you much about the time he was in France during the war? He never discussed it much with me but, you being in the army, I wondered if he spoke to you about any of his experiences.”

“Nope – hardly a word. All I know is that he was some kind of a liaison officer with the Resistance and it was a question of living on your nerves non-stop for months. I think he lost a few friends and I just assumed he didn’t want to drag up old, bad memories.”

Or perhaps old good memories, I thought to myself. We had, all three, been very fond of Dad – perhaps the relationship with the boys had been closer because we had had more common ground – sport especially – and he had been an only child and hadn’t been quite so comfortable with girls. I was hoping that Mike’s reaction to the news I was about to tell him would be much the same as mine. I suspected it would.

“Why?” He looked at me thoughtfully, put down his fork and took a sip of his wine. “That’s something we’ve never talked about before – so what’s the reason now? Has something cropped up to do with that?”

“Not something, but someone.” He looked intrigued. “Someone who was out there with him? Whoever it is he must be in his nineties by now. Go on.”

“Well, yesterday I had a visitor – a Frenchman – who said he was over here on holiday and he invited me out to dinner at Fernie Castle. He seemed a pleasant enough guy so I accepted.”

“Very nice too. But how did you manage? You don’t speak much French.”

“Oh, that was OK. He speaks perfectly good English. And shut up for a minute. Don’t interrupt while I tell you what happened.”

As I explained the whole story to him Mike’s face went through a series of expressions which would have done justice to a chameleon.

When I had finished he looked at me thoughtfully. “And you believe him?” “Yes, I do. He seemed perfectly genuine. His story’s perfectly plausible. But the real clincher was the photograph. It’s a smaller version of the same photo that hung on the wall in the parents’ bedroom all these years – the one which we now all have a copy of. How else could he have that photo if not from his mother?”

“And the other photo. What did the girl look like?” “Brunette, good looking. A bit in the style of Mum actually.”

Mike sat back and rubbed the top his head with his hand.

“Wow! The old bugger never told us about this.” “He wouldn’t, would he? He came back to Mum, got married and here we are – all three of us. This man – Pierre Collard is his name – insisted that his mother never found out that she was pregnant until Dad had gone back home and, as she had known he was engaged, she never told him. She probably wouldn’t have known how to contact him anyway. I don’t know about you but I can easily imagine how it happened. If she was in the Resistance and Dad was undercover liaising with them life must have been bloody dangerous. I suppose in circumstances like that you would, let’s say, ‘forge mutually comforting relationships’. You certainly would, that’s for sure!”

Mike didn’t comment. “I’ll bet there are hundreds of similar cases. And probably most of the kids born like that were simply told that their fathers had been killed. Easier for everyone.”

Mike sat back, thinking it through. He took another sip of his wine and put the glass gently down on the table. He looked across at me with a grin.

“So what do we do now?” asked Mike. “I suppose we’ll have to tell Heather.”

“First of all, you’ve got to meet him. He plays golf – maybe it’s Dad’s genes. Anyway I invited him for eighteen holes at Ladybank tomorrow. I thought you might come along and hack your way round the course with us. Gives you an opportunity to meet him and, if your feelings are the same as mine, we’d better cart him over to meet Heather and Oliver.”

Mike was obviously still absorbing the news and only half-listening. He was slowly shaking his head from side to side then a wide smile spread across his features.

“The randy sod,” he said, – but there was a genuine tone of affection in the way he said it, “But then, I suppose . . .” His voice trailed off.

“What was that you said? Golf tomorrow? OK, what time?”

“Eleven. I haven’t told Pierre that I would bring you so it’ll be a surprise for him. It’ll be interesting to see his reaction and you’ll get an opportunity to come to your own conclusion about whether he’s telling the truth or not.”

It would also give me the chance to really see what kind of a man Pierre was. It’s difficult to judge the true personality of someone over a couple of bottles of good solid red wine but on a golf course it’s a different matter.

The way a person reacts to success or adversity is a good pointer to their character. And there is a lot of that in a round of golf. How he reacts on losing a hole, or winning a hole, on missing a three-footer on the last green or on driving two balls in a row into the deep rough are all very good indicators of personality.

We caught up on each other’s news for the rest of the meal – my attempts at gardening, Mike’s recent hike in Skye with Oscar – finished off with a coffee and I settled the bill. We made our farewells on the pavement outside the restaurant. Mike promised to be down by nine thirty the next morning and we’d go over to the course together.

I had arranged to pick up Pierre from the hotel. Mike and I arrived just before ten. I left him in the car and went into the reception to find Pierre. He was waiting in the bar reading the newspaper when I walked in. We greeted each other as recently acquainted friends would.

A “Good morning” and “How was your headache yesterday morning?”.

“I decided that I needed some fresh air yesterday,” he grinned, “So I went off to St Andrews for the day. I also thought I’d better get myself some clubs because I haven’t brought mine with me.”

“You needn’t have bothered. You could have hired some at the club for the day.”

“It’s not a problem,” he replied. “I’ve been meaning to get some new ones for a while.”

I then told Pierre that I had a surprise for him. He looked at me curiously.

“I’ve invited your other half-brother to come and play as well. I thought it was a good opportunity for you to meet him.”

I’m sure that he paused for a split second as he was getting up from his chair but he covered it up with a slight stumbling movement, as if he had caught his thigh on the table. A slight look of concern crossed his face – as if he would rather that I hadn’t – but the moment passed very quickly and his composure returned. It had only been for the briefest of moments but it did make me think that perhaps I should have discussed it with him beforehand.

“You don’t mind, do you?” “Not at all,” he said. “I was hoping I would get to meet the others while I was here.”

We walked out to the car, and as we approached it the door opened and Mike climbed out.

He came towards us with a smile and held out his hand to greet Pierre. What could have been a slightly awkward moment passed off very smoothly.

“Delighted to meet you, Pierre. Bob has told me the whole story – or as much as he knows. I must admit it was a bit of a shock at first but I’ve kind of got used to the idea now. I had always thought I only had one older brother so it’s a bit strange to discover that I am now only third in line for the title.”

“In line for the title? What title?” “Oh there is no title. It’s just an expression. And, even if there was, there would have been no castle or estate that went with it. Come on. Let’s go and play some golf.”

Pierre went over to his car, opened up the boot and proceeded to haul out a brand new golf bag filled with a complete set of Mizuno clubs, a box containing a pair of shoes and a shiny caddy. Mike and looked at each other.

“Blimey, that must have cost you a packet,” I said. Pierre grinned. “I felt like treating myself.” We stowed his gear in my car and set off for what every golfer hopes will be an enjoyable eighteen holes, where every drive goes down the middle of the fairway, where all the putts drop and at least one green side bunker shot ends up in the hole. But it never works out that way!

Conversation was a little difficult as Mike was in front and Pierre in the back of the car so I filled in the time on the short fifteen-minute drive by explaining a bit of the history of the course he was going to play. How, back in the 1870s, the locals of the village had invited Old Tom Morris, one of the father figures of golf, to come over from St Andrews and help to design a short golf course for them. He had cycled the fifteen miles and, in an afternoon, laid out a course of six holes then cycled back home again with his twenty five pounds fee in his back pocket. Later they had added three more holes to make it into a good testing nine-hole golf course where, as a boy, I had learned the rudiments of the game.

Since then it had been extended to eighteen holes and it was now recognized as one of the most testing courses in the county and, whenever the British Open was played at St Andrews, it was used as one of the qualifying courses.

We were lucky as the weather was reasonably clement. Clear blue sky, no sign of rain and hardly any wind. As it was mid-week there were few people on the course and it looked like we would be able to take our time. I had no idea how good a golfer Pierre was but I did know Mike’s game. I think the best adjective to describe it is “flamboyant”. There tends to be a great deal of effort put into his swing but not so much technique. I had given up years ago giving him advice. It just pissed him off. The only time I gave him advice now was if, by the fourteenth, it looked like he had a chance of beating me. That was the moment to make little suggestions to him about how to improve his swing.

It was good harmless fun. Mike was happy if he managed a couple of blistering drives, a few long puts and a par or two. These would then form the major part of the conversation in the bar afterwards. He just liked being out in the open air where he could exercise his love – hate relationship with the little white ball.

My approach was different. I did like to work at the game and apply as much intelligence and course management as my old body was capable of. Golf is entirely up to you. You can blame nobody but yourself if you don’t play well. It doesn’t matter what the conditions are, the challenge is to adapt to them and to play to the best of your ability. That’s what makes the game great, as far as I’m concerned.

Nowadays the old bones and muscles are not as they used to be and I have had to accept that I can’t hit the ball so far. But age and experience have improved my short game which means that I am actually still scoring as well as I used to – even if not quite at the level of Tiger Woods. I still console myself with the thought that, if I do chip in from twenty yards, I know that Tiger couldn’t have done any better.

We unpacked our gear, shoed up and strolled over to the first tee.

“How many strokes do I get?” asked Pierre with a grin. “None.” “Wait a minute. That’s not reasonable. I haven’t played for several months; I don’t know the course and I’ve never played with these new clubs before – and on top of that, over here you guys drive on the left!”

Mike and I looked at each other. “I suppose he is our guest,” I said. “Tell you what. We’ll toss a coin. If you call it right you can have one shot on each nine to use when you want, but you must announce it on the tee before you start the hole. OK ?”

He called heads, won the toss and off we went. Pierre, we discovered fairly quickly, knew how to hit a golf ball. Being physically fairly small and wiry, his swing was compact and he relied on timing for distance. No great heaves of the club, just a smooth swing, a nice wrist movement and the ball flew effortlessly off the face of the club. After a few holes he started to get the hang of his new clubs and he and I settled down to a tight contest. He was three down by the eighth but had caught up his deficit by the time we got to the fourteenth. From then on it was stroke for stroke for the next four holes.

All square on the eighteenth tee. Pierre and Mike had got to know each other during the round and seemed to be getting along fine. I had intentionally left them walking up the fairways together as much as possible. I wanted Mike’s impressions of him to be as little influenced by me as possible. That little hesitation when I had announced that he was joining us still made me wonder a bit. When we had shared our dinner and the wine had been flowing I had perhaps not been as alert as I should have been. Once I had got over the surprise of his story I have to admit I wanted to believe him as I had instinctively liked him. There was still the second reason why he had wanted to meet me and that hadn’t come out yet.

We still had the eighteenth to play. It’s actually not a difficult hole when you know it. Seeing it for the first time, however, it looks rather daunting. As you stand on the tee with the flag in the distance waving in front of the clubhouse you’re starting to think of that nice cold beer. But between you and that beer there is a drive across an immense dip in the ground which stretches completely across the course in front of you and is all rough. To reach the fairway there is a carry of about a hundred and fifty yards but it looks more. If you don’t make it you’re dead. It is full of hillocks and patches of heather and the only clear ground is the path that wends its way through this mess of vegetation.

Pierre looked at it with apprehension. I wasn’t going to tell him the distance. It looks further than it really is. I grinned at him.

“All square and one to play?”

“Sure – no problem.” It was my honour. On a good day I could clear it with a four iron but that would be giving away the fact that it was not as long as it looked. So I took out my three wood and fortunately hit a clean one straight up the middle. You can’t see it bounce on the other side but I knew I was fine.

Pierre was up next. “I don’t suppose you’re going to tell me the distance to the fairway?”

Mike and I exchanged glances. Two smiles and two shakes of the head.

He had seen the club I had taken. He knew that I hit the ball just a little bit longer than he did. What he didn’t know, and I did, was that I had landed probably fifty yards clear of the rubbish in front of us.

He teed up his ball, hesitated a bit over his choice of club and finally plumped for the driver.

We could feel the tension and the nervousness as he started his back swing. Unfortunately for him he forced his shot. The hands came through just a bit too quickly and, although he hit the ball cleanly with the centre of the club face, the result was a solidly hit slice. We all watched the ball curve gracefully through the air and finish up amongst the trees on the right of the fairway.

“Bad luck.” Mike and I were both very sympathetic but he realised that he had been had.

“You bastards,” he said, “That ball’s miles over.” “But not straight I’m afraid,” said Mike with a grin. “You wait. The hole’s not finished.” We wended our way down the path and up the other side in a solid spirit of comradeship. It had been an enjoyable game and Mike seemed to be getting on well with his newly acquired half-brother.

We finished the last hole in good spirits. A par for me. Pierre hit a lovely four iron out of the trees and chipped on to about four yards. Mike managed to chip in from twenty yards short of the green which made his day. We conceded Pierre’s putt, explaining that it was a tradition of the club to do so to someone who was playing the course for the first time. I don’t think he believed us but accepted it gratefully.

After stowing away our clubs in the car and changing our shoes we repaired to the bar to refresh ourselves and ease my aching muscles.

“Pints all round?” asked Mike, still looking disturbingly fresh and chirpy.

He brought them over to us at a table by the window, sat down and grinned at us. He was still basking in the glory of that twenty-yard chip on the eighteenth. All the thrashing around in the rough earlier was completely forgotten.

Pierre and I exchanged a resigned glance as he relived his moment of glory. It had been an enjoyable round and amply served its purpose. I had seen Pierre on a golf course and it had helped me confirm my initial impressions of him.

“Well, I suppose we’ll have to organise for you to meet your half-sister now. I haven’t asked you how long you’re planning to stay in Scotland.”

Pierre didn’t answer at once. He seemed to be trying to decide to say something but wasn’t sure if it was the right moment. After a pause he addressed himself to me.

“Do you remember that I told you that there were two reasons for my trip over?”

“Yes.” “Well I’d like to tell you both the second reason. I need some advice, or some help, on a financial matter here in Scotland.”

This came as a bit of a surprise. What kind of financial matter could Pierre be involved in over here?

Naturally I said I would help him if I could, little imagining the dramatic consequences that we were all about to get involved in.

Chapter 4

A quiet beer in the bar of the club house is, I suppose, as good a place as any to be the starting point of a major change in the direction of my life. Especially at the age of sixty-six.

When I look back on it I wonder what Liz would have said if I had come home to her with the news of an unknown brother and the prospect of a much more active retirement than I had envisaged. She’d have taken it in her stride, I think. She had always been very pragmatic about my sense of adventure and my sometimes cock-eyed ideas. Much as we had had a wonderful relationship, since my retirement she had had to adjust to me being around the house much more than before and upsetting the rhythm of her life. She’d probably have welcomed anything that took me out and about.

“So how can I help, Pierre?” “Let me get us all another drink first,” he said and went over to the bar to order.

Mike looked across at me, “What do you think this is all about?”

“I haven’t a clue, but we’ll soon find out.” Pierre came back and carefully deposited the drinks on the table and sat down again.

“The other night over dinner I told you about how my father happens to be the same man you both know as your father. I was distinctly nervous as to the reaction I would get as you can probably well imagine and, if you remember, most of what we talked about was him and how it had all happened.”

“I didn’t tell you much about myself. I first of all needed to know how you would react and how we might get on with each other. The fact that we are sitting here together after a very pleasant morning, enjoying a beer, leads me to believe that you’ve both got over the shock and that we will be good friends. I certainly hope so. I’ll never be able to have the closeness with you two that you have with each other, having been brought up together within a family situation, but I hope we can get somewhere near it.”

He paused for a moment, perhaps waiting for a confirmation, or at least some kind of reaction.

Mike jumped in. “Pierre, I didn’t have the pleasure of the dinner and the wine but Bob has told me the story. He’s convinced.”

“And you?” “Don’t take this the wrong way. You’re a nice guy. You tell me that you’re my half-brother. I would like to believe you. I enjoy your company. Give me just a little more time to get used to the idea. We’ve only just met.”

“Fair enough. I can understand that. As far as I am concerned that’s enough for me to explain the second reason for me being here.”

He then proceeded to give us a quick sketch of his life – his upbringing in a village in Normandy, his schooling and his further education. He briefly told us about how he had lost his wife very soon after they were married and about his decision to throw himself into the business he had started up.

It turned out that he had been in the right place at the right time. He had, with a few friends, started up an IT company in the mid-seventies and it had been enormously successful. He had become a workaholic. All that had mattered in his life had been his company. His only real outside pursuit had been golf. To cut a long story short his original associates had one by one left the company and he had found himself as the last of the original shareholders, sitting on a lot of money. He didn’t tell us how much.

“A couple of years ago I realised that perhaps it was time to stop. My health was still good but I was getting on a bit. Why not enjoy the rest of my life?”

He was watching us closely as he developed his story. “So I sold the company and found myself, at the age of sixty-seven, with plenty of money and lots of free time on my hands. I travelled a bit for a few months and then started to think about what I was going to do. Meanwhile I had to do something with the money. I bought myself a couple of houses and invested the rest. Most of it was with banks in Switzerland, but I wanted to spread it around a bit and, because of my Scottish connection and the Scots reputation for careful investing, I thought I would put some into an Edinburgh asset management firm. I looked around and found a medium-sized outfit called Ailsa Investment Management and came over to meet them. They sounded as if they knew what they were doing.

“It’s a company that only deals with individuals and not with company money. They have a few funds, ranked by risk, and their market is the elderly individual who wants their money to be reasonably safe. The kind of people who want to hand something down to their children or grandchildren when they go but, in the meantime want to generate a reasonable revenue to add to their pension or pay for their old folk’s home or whatever.

“It sounded like it made sense to me so I invested some money with them in their medium-risk fund.”

He paused for a moment or two and took a sup of his beer.

Mike and I exchanged glances.

Pierre put his pint down carefully on the table, pulled out a handkerchief and carefully wiped his lips. He continued.

“This is where I have a problem,” he said. “I put my money in about two years ago. Since then, as I guess you know, Bob, the markets have been doing reasonably well. I looked at the returns of various similar funds around Europe and they are all performing at around six to eight per cent per annum. AIM has averaged three and a half.”

“So we Scots are not so hot after all?” I suggested. “I don’t know. I just don’t like the smell. Their quarterly reports are all very bullish and positive but the performance doesn’t match up. I tried to get details of where they had invested but just got complicated marketing speak that I couldn’t make head or tail of. I don’t have any financial expertise. Anyway, while I was doing all this digging into Dad’s background and managed to find out about you guys’ existence, I discovered that you had a financial background. So I wondered if I could ask you for some help or advice.”

Naturally I replied that I would be quite happy to do what I could to assist.

“In what way do you think I can help?” I asked. “I’m not quite sure yet. I have a feeling that the guy that runs this outfit is, let’s say, not totally above board. It doesn’t seem logical to underperform like that. But maybe there’s more to it.”

“What do you mean?” “Well, he steers clear of the corporate money – perhaps so that he doesn’t have professionals to deal with. He specifically targets elderly individuals. Most of them are probably not very money conscious. Perhaps half of them are already in retirement homes or starting to suffer from dementia. It would be relatively easy to bamboozle them with science.”

“You mean that perhaps his fund is performing perfectly well and he is skimming off a chunk for himself?”

“Exactly. When you think about it, the medium-risk fund is worth fifty million pounds. Let’s say he is actually getting a return of six or seven per cent and is only admitting to three and a half per cent – which is a figure that probably would satisfy most of his investors – then the difference of, say, three and a half per cent is a tidy sum. In fact it’s one and three-quarter millions.”

“Shit!” said Mike, waking up to what Pierre was explaining.

I could see the scenario. And it wouldn’t be the first financial scam. Man’s ingenuity to mount schemes to fleece innocent investors goes back centuries.

If the company was run by a crook who had no morals or was just outright greedy, Pierre could be right. Most of these people relied on “professional” advice and if the company was smooth and convincing it could work. I didn’t know how much regulation there was in the industry but I suspected there would be ways round whatever rules existed. And if you had bent accountants who, for a higher than usual fee, would sign off the accounts you could make a pile of money. Also, if anyone didn’t like the rate of return they were getting they would simply cash in and invest elsewhere.

“Pierre, how much did you invest with these guys?” I shouldn’t have been supping my beer when he replied because I gulped and it went down the wrong way.

“Four million.” “Christ!” was the next contribution from Mike. “And, let’s say, three and a half per cent of four million is . . .”

“A hundred and forty thousand pounds. But it’s not the money. I’ve got so much I don’t know what to do with it. I could easily just take it away and invest it elsewhere. It’s the principle. I don’t like being screwed and, if he is doing the same to a bunch of people who really need their money looked after, then I want to expose him. I’ve got the time to spend and not much else to do.”

I’ve always been disgusted by the thought that there are people who are prepared to stoop to this kind of clearly criminal behaviour. If it was true I could only agree a hundred per cent with Pierre’s reaction. I had railed about the financial services industry often enough – like most of the population of the country – but to be, perhaps, close to an actual case put things in a different light.

“If what you say is true, then I fully agree that something should be done about it. I don’t have a lot to do either and it could be quite fun.”

“Quite fun” is an expression I wish I hadn’t used. It was going to be more than that.

We all chewed this over for a minute or two. Mike got up to renew the drinks. I looked at Pierre with a grin, already trying to imagine how we could go about finding out if his suspicions were true or not.

“So what do you have in mind?” “Well, you’re practically local to Edinburgh. I wondered if you might have some contacts. Also with your financial expertise perhaps you can think of a way of finding out if they are up to anything or not. The reason I came over now is that there is a conference in Edinburgh next week on private investment and the AIM boss – a man called Alan Purdy – is to be the main speaker. I’m going to it to hear what he has to say and I wondered if you might come along too.”

By this time Mike had come back and set the drinks down with a grin.

“I rather like the idea of this,” he said “I know bugger all about finance and money but if these guys are crooks I’m all for bringing it out. Mind you, I don’t know what I can bring to the party.”