I used the internet to look up make-a-wager.com on the Companies House website. All UK companies have to be registered with Companies House and every year they have to submit their accounts. This information is in the public domain. So, as a member of the public, I downloaded it.
I discovered that make-a-wager.com was the internet site for Make A Wager Ltd, company number 07887551. I downloaded all the information I could find, including the annual accounts for the previous year. The company was doing very nicely, thank you, with a turnover in excess of a hundred million with a hefty operating profit of fifteen million. The increase over the previous year was staggering with more than a doubling of turnover and a trebling of profit. There was big money to be had in this business.
George Lochs was not listed as one of the five directors of the company but Clarence Lochstein was. So George/Clarence had never officially changed his name. But it was one of the non-executive directors listed that really caught my eye — John William Enstone.
I did another search and found that Jonny Enstone was quite a busy chap, with no less than fourteen different companies listed of which he was or had been a director. J. W. Best Ltd, his construction company, was there as expected, as was Make A Wager Ltd. I hadn’t heard of the others but, nevertheless, I downloaded the list and saved it on my computer.
Marina called my mobile and said that she would be home a little late that evening. A colleague, she explained, was leaving to work in America, and she and others were giving her a farewell drink.
‘Fine,’ I said, ‘I’ll be here.’
I made myself some scrambled eggs for lunch and ate them with a spoon straight out of the saucepan. Such decadence! My dear mother would have had a fit.
I spent the afternoon doing reference checks on four short-listed candidates for the post of manager of a smallish educational charity. Such checks were the bread and butter of my one-man business. As Carlisle had correctly said, I had a reputation for sorting the wheat from the chaff. Fortunately, the reputation was self-perpetuating as referees seemed reluctant to give me wrong or misleading information in case I were asked to do a reference on them at a later date.
There are two reasons for giving someone a glowing testimonial. One, because they actually are that good and, two, because they are useless and their current employer is trying to offload them on to someone else and thinks that a good reference will help. I knew that it was common practice for poor employees to be given a flattering reference on condition they looked for a new job.
On this occasion, in each of their three written references, all four of the candidates were described as hard working, reliable, loyal and as honest as the day is long. It was my usual practice to call the third listed referee first as I had found that this would often be the weak link if deceit were afoot. By the end of the day I had discovered that only one of the four candidates was as sound as his references would imply. Even he was not squeaky clean, having had to leave his present employment reluctantly due to a minor assignation of the heart with the wife of a senior colleague. Of the others, one was just about all right while the other two had serious honesty problems. One of these was suspected of theft from other staff but the evidence was circumstantial, and the other had threatened to sue her boss for sexual harassment unless she was given a good reference.
I would write my report and leave the charity to make its own decision.
*
It was almost eight o’clock by the time I printed out the report for the charity and shut down my computer. Typing one-handed, indeed with only one finger, was one of the many annoyances of having a false hand. Not being able to massage the typing-induced ache in my right wrist was another.
I thought about food and decided that as soon as Marina arrived home we’d go out for a local Chinese. Meanwhile, I opened a bottle of red wine and flicked on the television.
I was gently snoozing in front of some magnificent wildlife images of life on the Nile when the buzzer from the front desk woke me.
‘Yes,’ I said, picking up the intercom phone from the wall next to the kitchen door.
‘You had better come down here, Mr Halley, at once,’ said Derek.
There was something about the tone of his voice that made me drop the intercom phone and rush for my door. I charged down the flights of concrete stairs to the lobby and was met there not by a complete disaster but by a pretty scary sight, nevertheless.
A very pale-looking Marina was half-sitting, half-lying on the sofa in the lobby, bleeding. She was wearing the light fawn suede coat I had given her for Christmas and it was never going to be the same again. The front was covered in red splodges.
‘Derek,’ I said, ‘go up to my flat, the door’s open, and fetch me a large bath towel from one of the bathrooms. Wet it first.’
He hesitated for a second.
‘Do it, please, Derek.’ The urgency in my voice cut through his indecision and he went up in the lift.
I sat down beside Marina who was staring at me with wide frightened eyes.
‘Fine mess you’ve got yourself into,’ I said with a smile.
‘Just the usual for a Friday night.’ She smiled back and I knew that she was fine on the inside. She was tough as well as smart. It was her beauty that worried me most. I could see that there were two places on her face from which the blood was flowing, one was a deep cut over her right eye and the other was a nasty split lower lip. Head wounds nearly always look worse than they are due to their profuse bleeding, but I could see that these two were bad enough for stitches and I hoped they wouldn’t leave scars.
Derek returned with not just one towel but with a whole armful.
‘Well done,’ I said. I took one and applied pressure with it to the deep cut in Marina’s eyebrow. It must have hurt like hell but she didn’t flinch or complain one bit. She took another of the towels and held it to her lip, which had already started to swell quite badly.
‘Darling,’ I said, ‘I think you are going to need some stitches in these cuts. We’re going to have to go and find a doctor.’ I had one in mind.
‘Don’t you want to know what happened?’ she mumbled through the towel.
‘You got mugged,’ I said. ‘What did they take?’
‘Nothing.’
‘You were lucky,’ I said.
‘You call this lucky!’ She almost laughed. ‘But I wasn’t being robbed. I was being given a message.’
‘What? What message?’
She removed the towel from her mouth and said, ‘Tell your boyfriend to leave things be. Tell him to leave it well alone. Savvy?’
Wow, I thought, I really must have touched a nerve at Sandown yesterday.
Derek hovered around us and asked if he should telephone for the police or for an ambulance.
‘No ambulance,’ I said. An ambulance meant casualty departments and a long wait to be stitched by the duty nurse who, on a Friday night, would be busy with her needle and thread on the fighting drunks. Speed rather than accuracy would be her tenet. No thanks.
‘Did you see him?’ I asked.
‘No,’ she said. ‘He grabbed me from behind. Anyway, he was wearing a scarf or a balaclava.’
Police would mean masses of time and endless interviews with no real chance of catching the non-mugger. He wouldn’t have set this up to get caught.
‘No police,’ I said. ‘Come on, my darling, let’s get you cleaned up and into the car. Time to go and see my doctor.’
‘No, not yet. I want to go upstairs first.’
I picked up the rapidly reddening towels and went to take her left hand to help her up. She pulled it away.
‘Are you all right?’ I asked, concerned that she might have other injuries.
‘Fine.’ She smiled rather crookedly at me. ‘You’ll see.’