‘Shit!’ she yelled. I thought her black hair was standing on end with fright till I realized I was just unfamiliar with how untamed it looks first thing. She runs a hand through it approximately twice a minute. By late afternoon, it usually manages to look less like it’s been dragged through a hedge backwards then sideways.
‘Ssh,’ I admonished her. ‘You’ll wake Sleeping Beauty.’
‘You’re up!’ she exclaimed. ‘Not only are you up, your mouth’s moving. Hold the front page!’
‘Very funny. I can do mornings when I have to,’ I said defensively. ‘I happen to have a breakfast meeting.’
‘Excuse me while I vomit,’ Alexis muttered. ‘I can’t take yuppies without a caffeine inoculation. And I see that being conscious hasn’t stretched to making a pot of coffee.’
‘I’m saving myself for the Portland,’ I said. ‘Help yourself to an instant. It’s still better than that muck they serve in your canteen.’ I plucked the letters from her hand, tucked them in my bag and left her deliberating between the Blend 37 and the Alta Rica.
Josh was already deep in the Financial Times when I got to the Portland, even though I was four minutes early. Eyeing him up across the restaurant in his immaculate dark blue suit, gleaming white shirt and strident silk tie, I was glad I’d taken the trouble to get suited up myself in my Marks & Spencer olive green with a cream high-necked blouse. Very businesslike. He was too engrossed to notice till I was standing between the light and his paper.
He tore himself away from the mating habits of multinational companies and gave me the hundred-watt smile, all twinkles, dimples and sincerity. It makes Robert Redford, whom he resembles slightly, look like an amateur. I’m convinced Josh developed it in front of the mirror for susceptible female clients, and now it’s become a habit whenever a woman comes within three feet of him. The charm comes without patronage, however. He’s one of those men who doesn’t have a problem with the notion that women are equals. Except the ones he has relationships with. Them he treats like brainless bimbos. This makes for a quick turnover, since the ones who have a brain can’t take it for more than a couple of months, and the ones who haven’t bore him rigid after six weeks.
In spite of keeping his emotions in his underpants, when it comes to business he’s one of the best financial consultants in Manchester. He’s a walking database on anything relating to insurance, investments, trust funds, tax shelters and the Financial Services Act. Anything he doesn’t know, he knows where to find out. We met when I was still a law student, eking out my grant by doing odd jobs for Bill. My first ever undercover was in Josh’s office, posing as a temp to track down the person who was using the computer to divert one pound out of each client account into his own unit trust account. Because our relationship started on a professional footing, Josh never came on to me and it’s stayed that way. Now, I take him out for a slap-up dinner every couple of months as a thank you for running credit checks for me. The rest of the work and advice, like this, he bills us for at his usual extortionate hourly rate, so I got straight to the point.
I outlined the problem facing Ted Barlow while we scoffed our bowls of fruit and cereal. Josh asked a couple of questions, then the scrambled eggs and bacon arrived. He frowned in concentration as he ate. I wasn’t sure if that was because he was thinking about Ted’s problem or appreciating the subtle pleasures of the scrambled eggs, but I decided not to interrupt anyway. Besides, I was enjoying the rare pleasure of hot food so early in the day.
Then he sat back, mopped his lips with the napkin and poured a fresh cup of coffee. ‘There’s obviously some kind of fraud going on here,’ he said. With anyone else, I’d have made some sarcastic crack about stating the obvious, but Josh did his degree at Cambridge and he likes to establish the ground under his feet before he builds up the speculation, so I managed to keep my mouth zipped.
‘Mmm,’ I said.
‘I would say that the chances are the bank has a pretty shrewd idea of what that fraud is. They obviously think, however, that your Mr Barlow is the villain of the piece, and that is why they have taken the steps they’ve taken, and why they are refusing to discuss their detailed reasons with him. They don’t want to alert him to the fact that they have worked out for themselves what he is up to, so they have shrouded it in generalizations.’ He paused and spread a cold triangle of toast thickly with butter. The way he was chugging the cholesterol, I didn’t feel at all confident he’d live long enough to retire at forty. I don’t know how he stays so trim. I suspect there’s a portrait of an elephant in his attic.
‘I’m not sure I follow you,’ I admitted.
‘Sorry. I’ll give you an example I came across a little time ago. I have a client who owns a double-glazing firm. They had a similar experience to that of your Mr Barlow – the bank closed down their credit and a few days later, the police were all over them. It turns out that there had been a spate of burglaries around the North West that all followed the same pattern. They were all houses that had a drive at the side with access to the rear of the house. The neighbours would see a double-glazing firm’s van turn up. The workmen would start removing the ground floor windows, while one of them was removing the household valuables through the back or side of the house and loading them into the van. The neighbours, of course, thought the family were simply having replacement windows installed. They might wonder why the workmen disappeared at lunchtime and failed to return, leaving plastic sheeting over the window holes and the old windows sitting in the drive, but no one wondered enough to do anything about it.
‘The common factor that all those houses shared, it eventually transpired, was that they had all been canvassed by the same double-glazing firm in the weeks previous to the burglary. And of course, the canvassers had established whether both husband and wife were working, thus uncovering which houses were empty during the day. The police suspected my client and paid a visit to his bankers. They, of course, were only too aware that after a grim spell my client’s account had started to look very healthy again, and that much of his recent incomings had been in cash. After the police visit, they put two and two together and regrettably made a pig’s ear of it. Partly the fault of my client, who had omitted to mention his recent investment in a couple of amusement arcades.’ Josh’s sardonic tone told me all I needed to know about his opinion of slot machines as investments.
‘It was, of course, all sorted out in the fullness of time. The burglaries were the brainchild of a couple of former employees, who paid backhanders to unemployed youths of their acquaintance to go and get jobs as canvassers with this double-glazing firm and report back to them. However, my client had an extremely sticky time in the interim. That experience leads me to suspect the bank think your Mr Barlow is the brains behind whatever is going on here. You said they mentioned a high default rate on remortgages?’
‘That’s about all they did say,’ I replied. ‘More toast?’ Josh nodded. I waved the toast rack plaintively at a passing waitress and waited for Josh’s next pearl of wisdom.
‘If I were you, that’s where I’d start looking.’ He sat back with the air of a conjuror who has just completed some amazing feat. I wasn’t impressed, and I guess it showed.
He sighed. ‘Kate, if I were you, I’d ask my friendly financial wizard to run a credit check on all those good people who have taken out remortgages and whose conservatories have now vanished.’
I still wasn’t getting it. ‘But what would that show?’ I asked.
‘I don’t know,’ Josh admitted. He didn’t know? I waited for the sky to fall, but incredibly it didn’t. ‘But whatever happens, you’ll know a lot more about them than you do now. And I have that curious tingling in my stomach that tells me that’s the right place to look.’
I trust Josh’s tingle. The last time I had personal experience of it, I quadrupled my savings by buying shares in a company he had a good feeling about. The truly convincing thing was that he told me to offload them a week before they crashed spectacularly following the arrest of their chairman for fraud. So I said, ‘OK. Go ahead. I’ll fax you the names and addresses this morning.’