Dick Francis's Gamble - Felix Francis [36]
Herb had to have had another bank account, but there was no sign of it anywhere in his desk.
I looked at my watch. I had called Claudia nearly half an hour ago, and the journey should have taken her only ten minutes from Lichfield Grove, Finchley, to Seymour Way, Hendon. I went to the door to see if she was outside somewhere, but there was no sign of her or the Mercedes.
I waited in the doorway for five further minutes with slightly increasing irritation. I didn’t really want to call her again, but she was beginning to try my patience.
Once I would have been so excited by the prospect of seeing her, I wouldn’t have minded if she had been half a day late arriving. On one occasion I had been at Heathrow Airport at least two hours before her flight was due to land just to be sure not to miss her passing through customs.
But now, and not for the first time, I wondered if our relationship had run its course.
She finally arrived some thirty-five minutes after I had called. She stopped in the middle of the road and put down the passenger window. I leaned through it and picked up my computer from the seat.
“Thanks,” I said. “See you later.”
“OK,” she said, and drove off quickly.
I stood in the road waving but even if she could see me she didn’t wave back. There had been a time when we never parted without us waving vigorously until we were completely out of sight of each other.
I sighed. I had invested so much of my emotional capital in my relationship with Claudia, and the thought of being single again, having to start out once more, did not fill me with any joy. And I wasn’t at all sure I wanted it to end.
Claudia still excited me, and the sex was good, albeit somewhat rarer than it once had been. In fact, sex had been nonexistent over the last couple of weeks with Claudia always making some excuse. So what had gone wrong? Why was she suddenly not so loving towards me?
I wondered if she was seeing someone else. But who? Surely not one of her artistic layabout friends from her time at art college. The thought of her being intimate with one of them was enough to make me feel ill and not a little bit angry.
Miserably, I went back into Herb’s flat and sat down again at his desk, but even with my computer I couldn’t concentrate on any work due to thinking about the article in the paper and also about Claudia. After about half an hour, I called her mobile, but it went straight to voice mail. I didn’t leave a message because I didn’t know what to say.
Instead, I logged on to the Internet through Herb’s router and checked my office e-mails, many of which were junk from various finance firms offering rates of return that were well above the norm for the market.
Nestled amongst the trash were three work e-mails from this morning, one from Diana confirming the sales of all Billy Searle’s assets and the impending transfer from the firm’s client account to his bank, one from Patrick asking me to research a new personal pension plan being offered by one of the leading providers in the light of new pension legislation and the third from Jessica Winter advising me to wear a bulletproof vest if I was planning on coming into the office.
I thought it a particularly insensitive comment considering what had happened to Herb only five days previously.
I looked again at all the junk mail.
If a promised return appeared to be too good to be true, then it invariably was just that—too good to be true.
I thought back to my conversation with Jolyon Roberts at Cheltenham the previous day. Had the promised return on the Bulgarian property development project been too good to be true? Not as far as I could remember. It had not been the level of return that had been the concern, rather the distance away and the potential difficulty in acquiring accurate and up-to-date information on the progress of the project. In fact, just the problem that Mr. Roberts believed to be the issue.
I started to type “Roberts” into the company client index but thought better of it. The office mainframe computer kept a visible record of