And that should have been the end of a fairly unremarkable no-crime event — except that it was only the beginning.
When Jules Harlow in good spirits returned from France he telephoned Ray Wichelsea, engaging him to find him another good young thoroughbred as a wedding gift for his new wife.
‘And by the way,’ Jules Harlow added, ‘any news of Sandy Nutbridge? Is his trial date set yet?’
Ray Wichelsea related the dismissal of the charges and said that all was well. The US District Clerk had returned his — Ray Wichelsea’s — money, and Jules Harlow would no doubt receive his own in a few days’ time, now that he was home again.
The few days passed and became three weeks. Jules Harlow wrote to Patrick Green, Sandy’s lawyer, and explained that as he was in residence again, he was ready to receive his ten thousand dollars.
A week later he received not ten thousand dollars but a short sharp letter:
Dear Mr Harlow,
I am not forwarding the $10,000 received from the US District Clerk but made payable to me, as Sandy Nutbridge has told me you wish me to apply that sum to my fees incurred on his behalf.
Faithfully yours,
Mild Jules Harlow positively gasped. Very seldom did he lose his temper, but when he did it was in a cold sweat of fury, not a red-roaring rampage. He walked tautly into Ray Wichelsea’s office and laid the letter on his desk.
Ray Wichelsea, not wanting to lose a top customer, but alarmed by his manner, read the page apprehensively and went pale in his turn. Sandy Nutbridge, summoned urgently by mobile phone, found himself facing two tight-faced hostile men.
He gave the letter on the desk barely a glance and he shook with his own rage as he forestalled accusation.
‘It’s not true,’ he declared intensely. ‘I never said that. What’s more, he sent a letter like that to my mother, and I’ve had her on the phone... she’s frantic. She borrowed that money. She borrowed fifty-seven thousand dollars... and however will she pay it back if Patrick Green keeps the money? She borrowed against her pension left by my dad. She borrowed from her neighbours and friends and on the security of her sister’s house... and I’ve yelled in Green’s face but all he does is give me a soppy grin, and says he’ll have me back in court if I make a fuss...’
‘Could he?’ Jules Harlow interrupted. ‘Could he have you back in court? And on what charge?’
‘Laundering drug money and selling drugs,’ Sandy Nutbridge said fiercely. ‘Which I didn’t do. But when he tells lies, people believe him.’
Patrick Green felt secure in embezzling fifty-seven thousand dollars from Mrs Nutbridge and ten thousand dollars from Jules Harlow because he believed both of them to be weak foreigners who wouldn’t do much beyond the first agitated squawking. He could make them believe that he wouldn’t be able to disprove further IRS allegations of money-laundering and drug-dealing against Sandy Nutbridge if his fees weren’t paid for the first case. The IRS had believed and acted on his allegations the first time and, because of its habitually suspicious outlook, he had faith it would do it again.
Patrick Green, well pleased with his clever scheme, used the Nutbridge bail money to pay off his own personally threatening debts. He had borrowed too much at exorbitant interest rates from dangerous people, and had come frighteningly close to their debt-collection methods, but no longer now need he fear being punched to pulp in a dark alley. Not a violent man himself, he shrank from even the thought of the crunch of fists. He felt very relieved indeed to have been able to steal the feeble old British people’s money to get himself out of the certainty of pain, and no flutter of remorse troubled his self-satisfaction.
Patrick Green had reckoned correctly that Sandy Nutbridge would month by month send to his mother instalments to pay off what she’d borrowed on his behalf. Green knew it would cost Sandy Nutbridge far more then he could afford to pay lawyers to try to recover his mother’s money through the courts. What Patrick Green had totally overlooked was the nature of the small quiet man whose ten thousand dollars he had pocketed with the help of his colleague Carl Corunna.
Carl Corunna, big and bearded, had reported Jules Harlow, after their meeting, to be an ineffectual mouse, ignorant and easily defeated. Carl Corunna had then insisted that he had earned half the embezzled ten thousand dollars for instructing Harlow to make the cashier’s cheque payable to Patrick Green himself, and not more safely directly to the US District Clerk. Patrick Green, bitterly arguing, finally offered one thousand: they settled on two.
Jules Reginald Harlow, though he might be unworldly in matters of bail bonds, still had an implacable belief that justice should be done. He set about finding himself an attorney of sufficient brain to out-think frauds, and via businessmen with inside understanding came finally to a meeting with a young good-looking electric coil of energy called David T. Vynn.
‘Mr Harlow,’ Vynn said, ‘even if you get your money back, which I have to tell you is doubtful, it will cost you maybe double in lawyers’ fees.’
‘Your fees, do you mean?’
‘Yes, my fees. My advice to you is to write off the loss and put it down to experience. It will cost you less in the end.’
Jules Harlow spent a long minute looking at the boyish outcome of his attorney search. He had expected David T. Vynn to be more substantial, both in body and years: someone more like big, bearded Carl Corunna, he realised. He also remembered, however, that physicists, mathematicians, poets, painters, composers and nearly all innovators (including himself) had been struck by divine revelation in their twenties. He had asked for the best: he must trust that in David T. Vynn he had got it.
David T. Vynn (29) spent the same minute remembering what he’d been told about Jules Harlow (51): that a chamois on a mountainside couldn’t leap as fast or as far as this grey man’s intellect. He had taken this — to him — minor case out of interest in the computer-genius mind.
‘Mr Vynn,’ the grey man said, ‘it isn’t a matter of money.’
‘Of pride?’ The question was nearly an insult, but the attorney wanted to know the strength and origin of his client’s motivation.
Jules Harlow smiled. ‘Perhaps of pride. But of principle, certainly.’ He paused, then said, ‘I don’t know my way around the corkscrews of the American law. I need a champion who does. I want Patrick Green to curse the day he thought of robbing me, and I won’t give up on you unless you yourself admit defeat.’
David T. Vynn thought drily, with inner delight, that Patrick Green had robbed the wrong man.
Client and attorney met again a week later.
David T. Vynn reported, ‘To prevent the movement of large amounts of drug money, there is a law in America that says banks and other financial institutions must inform the IRS, the tax people, whenever ten thousand dollars or more in cash is either deposited or withdrawn from a private account in any one day.’
‘Yes,’ Jules Harlow nodded, ‘I know.’
‘Sandy Nutbridge was arrested because nearly three years ago he had paid into his account three large sums of cash within two days. The payments aggregated twenty-two thousand dollars. The case against him was dismissed not because there was no evidence but because of affidavits from Ray Wichelsea and others that various legitimate commissions on horse sales had by coincidence been paid to him in cash in that time. He had declared the cash as income and paid tax on it. Case then dismissed.’