Dick Francis's Gamble - Felix Francis [13]
“So how do you make your money?” he asked. “I’m sure you don’t do this for free.”
“No,” I agreed. “We make our money in one of two ways, depending on the client. Most of them nowadays opt to pay us a fixed fee, which is a small percentage of the total we invest for them, and others choose that we collect the commissions from investment providers on the products we advise them to buy.”
“I see,” he said, but I wondered if he did. “How much money do you look after in total?”
“Lots,” I said flippantly, but he didn’t laugh. “Some clients have just a few thousand to invest, others have millions. I suppose the firm as a whole looks after hundreds of millions. Most of our clients are high earners or they have considerable family wealth, or both.”
“And these clients trust you with large sums of their money?” He sounded surprised.
“Yes,” I said. “And they trust us because we have masses of safeguards and checks to ensure that none of it goes missing.”
“And do these safeguards and checks work?”
“Absolutely,” I said, trying to sound affronted that he should even question it.
“Could Mr. Kovak have been stealing from his clients?”
“Impossible,” I replied instantly, but I couldn’t help thinking about what Claudia had said the previous afternoon about not knowing if someone was a crook. “Everything we do is subject to spot-check inspections by the financial services regulatory authorities, and we have someone called a Compliance Officer in the firm whose job is to scrutinize the transactions to ensure they are done according to the rules. If Herb had been stealing from his clients the Compliance Officer would have seen it, not to mention the Regulator.”
He looked down at the staff list. “Which is the Compliance Officer?”
“Jessica Winter,” I said. He found her on the list. “She was the woman who asked you earlier if we could go out for a coffee.”
He nodded. “How well did Mr. Kovak know Miss Winter?”
I laughed. “If you’re suggesting that Herb Kovak and Jessica Winter conspired together to steal from his clients, you can forget it. Herb thought that our dear Compliance Officer was an arrogant little prig, and she thought he was a bit of a maverick. Jessica was the only person in the firm who didn’t like Herb.”
“Maybe that was just a front,” said the detective, writing a note.
“My, you do have a suspicious mind,” I said.
“Yes,” he said, looking up. “And it’s surprising how often I’m right.”
Could he really be right? Could Herb and Jessica have been fooling the rest of us all this time? And could anyone else at the firm also be involved? I told myself not to be so silly. At this rate I would soon be distrustful of my own mother.
“And do you also think Mr. Kovak was a bit of a maverick?”
“No,” I said, “not really. He was just a flamboyant American in a business where people have a bit of a reputation for being boring.”
“And are you boring?” he said, looking up at me.
“Probably,” I said. I was certainly more boring now than I had been as a jockey. But maybe it was better being boring and alive than flamboyant and dead.
I returned to the reception area after my interview to join the other fifteen members of the firm squashed into the client waiting area that had been designed for just a small coffee table and two armchairs.
“What did they ask you?” Jessica said.
“Not much,” I said, looking at her and trying not to let her see in my face the questions about her that the chief inspector had triggered in my mind. “They just want to know what Herb did here and why I thought anyone would want to kill him.”
“Surely he wasn’t killed because of his work.” Jessica looked shocked. “I thought it must be to do with his private life.”
“I don’t think they have the slightest idea why he was killed,” said Patrick Lyall. “That’s why they’re asking about everything.”
There was a slight commotion outside in the lobby as someone not on the company staff list tried to gain access. He was being barred by our rather overbearing uniformed