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 you?”
“Sherri Kovak,” she said. “And where’s my damn brother?”
There was no easy way to tell Sherri that her brother was dead, but it was the nature of his death she found most distressing.
She sat in the big armchair and wept profusely while I made her a cup of hot sweet tea.
In between her bouts of near hysteria, I discovered that she had arrived early that morning on an overnight flight from Chicago. She had been surprised, and rather annoyed, that Herb had not been at the airport to meet her as he had promised, but she had eventually made her own way to Hendon by train and taxi.
“But how did you have a key to get in?” I asked her.
“Herb gave me one when I was here last year.”
Herb hadn’t mentioned to me last year that his sister was visiting or even that he had a sister in the first place. But why would he have? We had been work colleagues rather than close friends. He also hadn’t mentioned to me that he was a compulsive online gambler.
I wondered if I ought to inform DCI Tomlinson that Herb Kovak’s next of kin had turned up. Probably, but then he’d be back around here with a list of awkward questions when it was clear to me that, after a night of sitting upright on an airplane, what she needed most was a good sleep. I’d call the chief inspector later.
I found some fresh bed linen in an airing cupboard and made up the bed in the smaller of the two bedrooms. I then guided the overtired and still-crying Miss Kovak from the living room to the bed and made her take off her shoes and lie down.
“You sleep for a bit,” I said, covering her with a blanket. “I’ll still be here when you wake.”
“But who are you, exactly?” she asked between sobs.
“A friend of your brother’s,” I said. “We worked together.” I decided not to mention to her just yet that her brother had left his entire estate to me and not to her. And I wondered why that was.
Sherri Kovak was almost asleep before her head reached the pillow. I left her there and went back to Herb’s desk and the credit card statements.
It was gone nine o’clock, and I called the office number on my mobile. Mrs. McDowd answered.
“It’s the man with the ingrown toenail calling in sick,” I said.
“Shirker,” she announced with a laugh.
“No, really,” I said. “I won’t be in the office until later. Please tell Mr. Patrick that I’m sorry but something has come up.”
“Trouble?” she asked.
“No,” I said. “No trouble, but something that I need to deal with.”
I could almost feel her wanting to ask what it was. Mrs. McDowd liked to know everything about the goings-on of her staff, as she called us. She was always asking after Claudia, and she seemed to know more about my mother than I did.
“Tell me, Mrs. McDowd,” I said in a friendly tone, “did you know that Herb Kovak had a sister?”
“Yes, of course,” she said. “Sherri. She lives in Chicago. She and Mr. Herb were twins. She visited him last summer.”
“Did you proffer this information to the policeman when he interviewed us all on Monday?”
“No,” she said firmly, “I did not.”
“Why not?” I asked her.
“He didn’t ask me.”
Mrs. McDowd clearly didn’t like the police very much.
“Please tell Mr. Patrick that I’ll see him later today,” I said.
“Right, I will,” she said. “It’s a good job you’re not here now anyway. Mr. Gregory is angry, fit to burst.”
“What about?” I asked.
“You,” she said. “He’s absolutely livid. Claims you’ve brought the whole firm into disrepute. He wants your head on a stick.”
“But why?” I asked, rather worried. “What have I done?”
“Don’t you know?”
“No,” I said.
“Read the front page of the Racing Post.”
I went along the hall to check on Sherri Kovak. Her long blond hair was obscuring her face so I waited in the doorway for a few seconds listening to her breathing. She was sound asleep. Best thing for her, I thought. Sadly, the horrors of real life would still be waiting for her when she woke.
As quietly as I could, I slipped out the front door and walked down towards Hendon Central in search of a newsagent’s.
I could see the problem even before I picked up the paper. The inch-high bold headline read:
FOXY FOXTON AND BILLY SEARLE IN £100,000 GAMBLE?
I bought the paper with shaking hands and stood reading it in the shop.
In addition to the headline there were photographs of Billy and me, mine taken during my racing days, wearing racing colors and cap.
The article beneath was as equally damning as the headline:
Leading National Hunt jockey Billy Searle was observed in a heated argument at Cheltenham Races yesterday with former fellow jockey Nick (Foxy) Foxton. The topic of their acrimonious exchange? Money.
According to the Racing Post correspondent at the track, the amount under discussion was in excess of a hundred thousand pounds, with Searle demanding instant payment of this amount, which he claimed he was owed by Foxton. At one point Searle was heard to ask why he, Foxton, wanted to murder Searle. Could this all be connected with Foxy’s new job at City financial firm Lyall & Black, where he gambles daily with other people’s money on the stock markets?
Well-known trainer, Martin Gifford, stated that Foxton had informed him on Tuesday that Herbert Kovak, the man whose murder last Saturday led to the postponement of the Grand National, was Foxton’s best friend and a fellow stock market speculator who had also worked for Lyall & Black. Gifford implied that Foxton may have known more about the killing than he was telling.
Not surprisingly, people yesterday were asking if Foxton’s argument with Searle could have had some sinister connection to the Aintree murder. The Rules of Racing clearly ban gambling by professional jockeys, but no such restriction applies to former jockeys. The Racing Post will endeavor to keep its readers up to date with this story.
The article cleverly didn’t actually accuse Billy Searle or me of any wrongdoing, it merely asked leading questions. But there was little doubt that the tone of the piece was designed to imply there was a criminal conspiracy between us, which also had something to do with the death of Herb Kovak.
No wonder Gregory Black was steaming around the office fit to burst.
I was surprised my phone wasn’t ringing off the hook.
Bugger, I thought. What should I do now?
I called Patrick on his mobile. I didn’t fancy using the office number just in case Gregory himself answered, as we all sometimes did if the receptionists were busy on other calls.
“Hello, Nicholas,” said Patrick. “I thought I told you to be discreet. I hear that Gregory’s after your blood. I’d keep your head down if I were you.”
“I will,” I said. “But it’s all a pack of lies.”
“You know that, and I know that. But, unfortunately, John Doe on the street will believe what he reads in the paper.”
“But they have completely distorted the truth. It’s so unfair.”
“Tell that to the politicians.” He laughed. “I have already told Gregory not to believe what he reads, but he says, quite rightly, that you shouldn’t have been having a public argument with a client in the first place. He’s pretty mad.”
“It wasn’t an argument,” I claimed in my defense. “Billy Searle just started shouting and swearing at me for no reason.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Patrick said. “It’ll all blow over in a couple of days.”
I wish he’d been right.