Dick Francis's Gamble - Felix Francis [52]
“And how long, exactly, is the immediate future?” I asked.
“Until he and I agree,” he said.
“Are you telling me I’m fired?”
“No, of course not,” he said. “Just that it might be better for you to take some paid holiday until the police sort out who really did try to murder Billy Searle.”
“What if they never do?” I asked.
“Let’s hope that is not the case,” he said. “I’ll call you next week. In the meantime I must ask you not to use the remote-access facility and not to contact anyone at the firm.”
Patrick disconnected without saying good-bye, no doubt pleased to have got through the conversation without me shouting at him.
I felt like shouting at someone. Everything that had been fine just a week ago was suddenly going down the tubes. I sat down on the edge of the bed, feeling more miserable than I had since the day I had been told I couldn’t ride again.
I decided that feeling sorry for myself wasn’t going to achieve anything, so I went downstairs and sat down at the kitchen table with my laptop computer.
I spent a fairly unproductive half hour looking at the six e-mails that I had forwarded to my in-box from Gregory’s, concerning the Bulgarian property development.
They were all from the same man, Uri Joram, and the first two were about the grants available to disadvantaged parts of the European Union for industrial developments that would assist in the regeneration of sites previously occupied by state-subsidized factories. Many such factories had quickly gone bust when the communist regime had collapsed and free-market competition had arrived in its place.
As far as I could make out from Mr. Joram’s rather poor grasp of written English, the EU money would only be forthcoming if there was some private investment in the project on the basis that two euros would be granted for each euro invested privately. Jolyon Roberts had told me that his family trust had invested five million pounds, so that alone could have attracted a further ten million from the European tax coffers.
But that was not all, not by a long way.
The four remaining e-mails were about funding for the homes to be constructed close to the factory to house the workers. This was to come from a different source, the EU Social Housing Fund, and required no similar two-for-one arrangement. It appeared that the new factory alone was sufficient to trigger the one hundred percent grant for the housing, which was in the region of eighty million euros.
If, as Jolyon Roberts’s nephew had implied, no houses and no factory had been built in Bulgaria, then someone somewhere had likely pocketed nearly a hundred million euros, most of it public money.
I looked closely at the e-mail addresses. The e-mails had been sent by uri_joram@ec.europa.eu to dimitar.petrov@bsnet.co.bg, with Gregory Black being copied in. The ec.europa.eu domain indicated that Uri Joram worked in the offices of the European Commission, probably in Brussels, and I could deduce that Mr. Petrov must be in Bulgaria from the .bg extension.
It wasn’t a huge help.
I also looked at the telephone number I had copied from the Roberts Family Trust file on Gregory’s computer. I wondered if I should call it. But what good would it do? I couldn’t speak Bulgarian, and even if whoever answered could understand English, they were most unlikely to give me any information that would answer my questions.
What should I do?
It may very well have been a simple mistake made by Mr. Roberts’s nephew. He might have gone to the wrong place in Bulgaria, with the factory and the houses existing elsewhere. Surely there would have been checks made by the European Union officials running the EU Social Housing Fund to confirm that their eighty million euros had been spent properly on bricks and mortar.
I decided that, having been asked by Jolyon Roberts to look into it, I couldn’t just do nothing, so I sent a short e-mail to Dimitar Petrov, asking him to send me the names and addresses of the directors of the Balscott Lighting Factory if he had them.
By the time I realized