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.’
‘Splendid,’ he said. I wasn’t sure if he was addressing me or the waitress placing a rack of fresh toast in front of him.
As he attacked the toast, I asked, ‘When will you have the info for me?’
‘I’ll fax it across to you as soon as I get it myself. Probably tomorrow. Mark it for Julia’s attention when you send the details over. I’m hopelessly tied up today, but it’s just routine, she can do it standing on her head. What I will also do is have a quiet word with a guy I know in Royal Pennine Bank’s fraud section. No names, no pack drill, but he might be able to shed some light as to the general principle of the thing.’
‘Thanks, Josh. That’ll be a big help.’ I gave my watch a surreptitious glance. Seven minutes till we got into the next billable hour. ‘So how’s your love life?’ I hazarded.
Martin Cheetham’s office was in the old Corn Exchange, a beautiful golden sandstone building that, in aerial photographs, looks like a wedge of cheese, the windows pocking the surface like dozens of crumbly holes. The old exchange floor is now a sort of indoor flea market in bric-à-brac, antiques, books and records, while the rest of the building has been turned into offices. There are still a few of the traditional occupants – watch menders, electric razor repairers – but because of the unusual layout, the rest range from pressure groups who rent a cubbyhole to small legal firms who can rent a suite of offices that fit their needs exactly.
The office I was looking for was round the back. The reception room was small to the point of poky, but at least the receptionist had a fabulous view of Manchester Cathedral. I hoped she was into bullshit Gothic. She was in her late forties, the motherly type. Within three minutes, I was clutching a cup of tea and a promise that Mr Cheetham would be able to squeeze me in within the half-hour. She had waved away my apologies for not having an appointment. I couldn’t understand how she kept her job, with all this being polite to the punters.
One of the reasons I wasn’t sorry to quit my law degree was that after two years, I began to realize I’d stand all the way from Manchester to London rather than sit next to a lawyer on a train. There are, of course, notable exceptions, lovely people upon whose competence and honesty I’d stake my life. Unfortunately, Martin Cheetham wasn’t one of them. For a start, I couldn’t see how anyone could run an efficient practice when their paperwork was stacked chaotically everywhere. On the floor, on the desk, on the filing cabinets, even on top of the computer monitor. For all I could tell, there could be clients lurking underneath there somewhere. He waved me to one of the two surfaces in the room that wasn’t stacked with bumf. I sat on the uncomfortable
