Death in the City by JRL Anderson

Author:JRL Anderson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bonnier Publishing Fiction

VII

A MATTER OF TEETH

I RANG INSPECTOR Redpath at his home, and gave him the name and address of Stavanger’s dentist. He promised to take the cast to him in the morning, and I arranged to call at his office at noon to learn what he had discovered from the dentist. Then I rang Pusey: it was time, I felt, that we had a conference, and I asked him to get hold of Seddon and, if possible, someone from his old acquaintances at the Foreign Office who would know about current politics in North and West Africa. Pusey suggested that we should meet at his flat at six o’clock and that suited me well, for with luck I should know the outcome of Redpath’s interview with the dentist, and have Miss Macdonald’s list.

*

Waiting is the most wearisome of all activities – if, indeed, it can be called an activity. I had one job to do first thing in the morning – to ring Sir Geoffrey Gillington and ask him to arrange for the manager of the Upper Thames Street branch of the bank to receive Miss Macdonald when she called, and to keep her letter for me. I would try to collect it, I said, about two o’clock in the afternoon. Then I had nothing to do until my call on Inspector Redpath at noon. I put in an appearance at Ingard House to show that I was still busy about the audit, and had a word with Henniker. He was gloomier than ever, and inclined to be angry with me as well. ‘However you look at it, the whole thing is no better than a bucket shop,’ he said. ‘I’m not saying that it started off to be one, but in my view it became fraudulent pretty soon. When the property market was rising every day a slick operator could buy and sell again without much risk. But Ingard didn’t do that – he bought and sold to himself, setting up company after company in the group to buy properties from one another. The result was enormous paper profits for the parent company – Ingard Holdings – which he used to attract investors, and to impress the bank. He paid dividends, of course – when he paid any – out of fresh investment. There was never any real cover for dividends, and the property values now don’t cover one-fifth of his borrowings – from a couple of pension funds and various other institutions as well as from the bank. The shares are worthless, and it goes against the grain to see them still quoted, written down as they are.’

‘What about the oyster enterprise?’ I asked.

‘What about it? There’s a worthless piece of paper saying that there is supposed to be an oyster enterprise, but there’s no evidence that anyone has ever caught a single oyster.’

‘You don’t catch oysters,’ I said, ‘you dredge them.’

‘Well, dredge if you like, but there isn’t any dredging. How long are you going to go on with the farce of keeping this bloody lot in business?’

‘I don’t know.

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