Dick Francis's Gamble - Felix Francis [29]
“Are you certain Mr. Kovak was not in personal financial difficulties?” the chief inspector asked while closing the front door.
“No, I’m not certain, but I have no reason to think he was. Why do you ask?”
He waved a stack of papers towards me.
“What are they?” I asked.
“Credit card statements,” said the chief inspector.
“So?”
“Mr. Kovak appears to have had more than twenty separate credit cards, and, according to these statements, at his death, he owed nearly a hundred thousand pounds on these cards alone.”
I could hardly believe it. Not only because Herb was in so much debt but also because his debt was on credit cards. If anyone knew how expensive it was to borrow on plastic, then a financial adviser would. Even with interest rates historically low, the annualpercentage rate on credit cards was typically between sixteen and twenty percent, with some even as high as thirty. Borrowing money on credit cards was a mug’s game. The interest charges alone on a debt as big as that would be around fifteen hundred a month. That was about half what Herb was taking home in salary, after the usual deductions for tax and National Insurance.
If Herb had owed nearly a hundred thousand on credit cards, then his flat must surely be mortgaged to the hilt. It certainly wouldn’t end up being mine, more likely the bank’s.
And yet he’d always had plenty of money in his pocket. He was extravagant even in his spending, always wearing new clothes and dining out being the norm. It didn’t make sense.
“Can I have a closer look at those?” I asked the chief inspector, reaching out for the papers.
He handed them over, and I skimmed through the first three or four statements. There was no doubt that the outstanding balance on each was very large and, in some cases, close to the maximum limit, but that did not show the full picture, not by a long way. I looked through the rest. They were all the same.
“Didn’t you notice something unusual about these?” I asked.
“Notice what?” said the chief inspector.
“There are no interest payments from previous months. All these charges, on all of these statements, they’re all new.”
I turned a statement over to look at the detailed breakdown and to see what Herb had spent a hundred thousand pounds on in a month and was shocked again. There were no purchases, as such, just payments to and from a plethora of Internet gambling and online casino sites. Masses of them. I looked through all the statements and they were the same. Many of the payments were quite modest but one or two ran into the thousands. Quite a few of the betting sites had actually paid money back to the accounts, but most showed a deficit. Overall, Herb had been a loser not a winner, nearly a hundred-thousand-pound-a-month loser.
All the statements showed clearly that the previous month’s balances had been settled in full by the due date. I mentally added them up. As well as still owing almost a hundred thousand, Herb had paid nearly the same amount in gambling debts to the cards during March alone. Where had he obtained that sort of money? And how on earth had he had the time to gamble on so many different sites with so many different credit cards while working full-time at Lyall & Black? It sure as hell didn’t make any sense.
As Claudia had said, you never really knew what even your closest friends were up to. Could this compulsive online gambling somehow be the reason that Herb was killed? The totals may have been large but the individual entries on the statements were modest, and certainly not big enough to initiate murder.
“There are some other things I would like you to have a look at,” said the chief inspector. “You may be able to help me understand them.”
He turned and walked down the hallway, turning left through a door. I followed him.
Herb’s living room was in true bachelor-pad fashion, with half of it taken up by a single deep armchair placed in front