Dick Francis's Gamble - Felix Francis [32]
“Ah yes,” he replied, digging into his coat pocket. “I had another key cut. We would like to hang on to one for the time being just in case we need to pop back to look through his things further.”
“Right,” I said, taking the offered key. “Are you based down here, then? I thought you were Merseyside Police.”
“I am,” he replied. “But I’m working on this case out of Paddington Green all this week. I will be going home on Friday.”
“And you’ll let me know when I can start making funeral arrangements?”
“The Liverpool Coroner will be in contact with you in due course,” he said rather unhelpfully, and then he departed, carrying his box of potential treasures under his arm.
I sat for a while at Herb’s desk, looking again at the credit card statements.
There were between twenty and thirty Internet gambling or online casino websites on each statement. Half of them I didn’t recognize, but their names showed what they were. One was called www.oddsandevens.net and another www.gamblehere.com. It didn’t take a genius to work it out.
Not every statement had all the same sites, but some were on all of them, and all appeared at least half a dozen times. I started adding up. In total there were twenty-two different credit cards and five hundred and twelve different entries on the statements. The total owed was ninety-four thousand six hundred and twenty-six pounds and fifty-two pence.
Some of the entries on all of the statements were credits, but overall the average loss per entry was a fraction under one hundred and eighty-five pounds. I checked the actual amounts against those on the handwritten lists but, as the chief inspector had said, not one of them matched.
It wasn’t so much the amount of money that amazed me, even though it did, it was the number of different entries. Again I wondered how Herb had had the time to play or gamble online with five hundred and twelve different log-ins. I did some more mental arithmetic. Without work, eating or sleeping and spending every moment of the day for a whole month at the computer would have given him just an hour and a half on each account. It was impossible.
I stood up and went into the kitchen.
My mother always maintained that one could learn most about a person by looking in their fridge. Not with Herb. His fridge was starkly empty, with just a plastic carton of skim milk and a halffull tub of low-fat spread. His cupboards were almost equally bare, with a couple of boxes of breakfast cereal and half a loaf bread gone stale. On the worktop were ajar of instant coffee and two round tins with TEA and SUGAR printed on the outside and with some tea bags and granulated sugar on the inside.
I filled the electric kettle and made myself a cup of coffee. I took it back to the desk in the living room and went on studying the credit card statements.
I spotted that there was something else slightly odd about them.
They didn’t all have the same name or the same address at the top.
Some of them had this flat’s address and others the Lyall & Black office’s address in Lombard Street. Nothing too unusual about that. But the names on them also varied. Not very much, but enough for me to notice.
I looked through them again, carefully making two piles on the desk, one for each address.
There were eleven statements in each pile and eleven slight variations in Herb’s name: Herb Kovak, Mr. Herb E. Kovak, Herbert Kovak Esq., Mr. H. Kovak, Herbert E. Kovak, Mr. H. E. Kovak, H. E. Kovak Jr., H. Edward Kovak, Bert Kovak Jr., Herbert Edward Kovak and Mr. Bert E. Kovak.
No two statements had the same name and address.
Now, why did I think that was suspicious?
I heard the key turn in the door and thought that DCI Tomlinson must have forgotten something. I was wrong.
I went out into the hallway to find an attractive blond-haired young woman struggling through the front door with an enormous suitcase. She saw me and stopped.
“Who the hell are you?” she demanded in a Southern American accent.
I’d been about to ask her the same thing.
“Nicholas Foxton,” I said. “And