Dick Francis's Gamble - Felix Francis [50]
Gregory turned towards Patrick. “I told you that we should never have taken him on in the first place.”
“In your office, please, Gregory!” Patrick said, almost shouting. He had a pretty good temper in him too, although it was usually slow to rise.
I waited while Gregory reluctantly moved off down the corridor with Patrick. I would have adored being a fly on the wall during their discussion.
“You had better go,” said Mrs. McDowd firmly. “I don’t want you upsetting Mr. Gregory anymore. His heart can’t take it.”
I looked at her. Mrs. McDowd, who saw it as her business to know everything about everyone in the firm. She probably knew Gregory’s blood pressure, and his heart surgeon.
“Tell me, Mrs. McDowd, do you think Herb gambled much?”
“You mean on the stock market?” she asked.
“On the horses.”
“Oh no,” she said. “Mr. Herb didn’t like betting on the horses. Too risky, he said. So much better to bet on a certainty, that’s what he always told me.”
Death was a certainty.
Benjamin Franklin had said so—death, and taxes.
I did go home, but not immediately.
Before I left Hendon I had looked up the locations of MoneyHome agents near to Lombard Street. I was amazed at how many there were, at least thirty within a one-mile radius of my office, the nearest being just around the corner in King William Street.
“This didn’t come from here,” said the lady sitting behind the glass partition. “It hasn’t got our stamp on it.”
I had somehow expected the MoneyHome agency to be like a bank, or a money exchange, but this one was right at the back of a convenience store.
“Can you tell me where it did come from?” I asked the lady.
“Don’t you know?” she asked.
“No,” I said with declining patience. “I wouldn’t have asked if I knew.”
She looked at me through the glass, then down at the payment slip. I had brought with me one of those I had found in Herb’s desk rather than the torn-up squares, which were still at Herb’s flat anyway.
“Sorry,” she said. “I don’t recognize the stamp. But I know it’s not ours.”
“Can you tell who sent the money?” I asked.
“No,” she said.
“What do you need to produce in the way of identification to collect money from a MoneyHome transfer?”
“The recipient’s name and the MTCN.”
“What’s that?”
“There,” she said, pointing at the payment slip. “It’s the Money Transfer Control Number.”
“And that’s all you need to collect the money,” I said. “No passport or driver’s license?”
“Not unless it’s been specially requested by the sender,” she said. “Sometimes there’s a question I have to ask, and then you’d have to give the right answer. It’s a bit like spies and such.” She smiled.
“So in fact,” I said, “you have no way of knowing who has sent the money or who has collected it?”
“The recipient’s name is on the slip.”
The recipient’s name on the slip I had shown her was Butch Cassidy. The names on the others I had were Billy Kid, Wyatt Earp, Jessie James and Bill Cody.
“That isn’t his real name,” I said.
“No,” she said, looking. “I suppose not. But it’s their money. As long as they’ve paid us our fee, it’s not our business who they really are.”
“Does the amount make any difference?” I asked.
“MoneyHome’s head office doesn’t allow us to accept transfers of more than the equivalent of ten thousand U.S. dollars, as that breaks the money-laundering rules. Other than that, the amount doesn’t matter, although we here have a payout limit of four thousand pounds without prior notice. You know, so we can get in the cash.”
“Are your transfers always in cash?” I asked.
“Yeah, of course,” she said. “That’s what we do. Cash transfers. Lots of the immigrant workers round here send cash home to their wives. Poles mostly. And we do a special deal on transfers to Poland, up to a thousand pounds for just twenty quid.”
Overall, it wasn’t very helpful. Herb had clearly set up a system that would be difficult, if not impossible, to unravel. From what I could tell from the lists and the MoneyHome payment slips, it was clear that he’d received large sums of cash from multiple sources, money he must have