Even Money Read online

  As I turned it over, back and forth, I could feel something move.

  I placed it down on the floor and peered inside once more.

  The rucksack had a waterproof liner sewn into the canvas with a drawstring at the top. There was a gap at the back, and I slid my hand down between the liner and the canvas. A space about two inches deep across the whole bottom of the rucksack existed between the liner and the base, and here I found the treasure that the man in the parking lot must have sought.

  I pulled out three blue-plastic-wrap-covered packages and carefully used a pair of kitchen scissors to open them at one end. Each contained sizable wads of large-denomination banknotes, two in British pounds and the other in Australian dollars. I counted each pack in turn and did some rough mental arithmetic.

  My father had taken lodgings in a cheap seedy one-star hotel in Sussex Gardens with about thirty thousand pounds’ worth of cash in his luggage.

  And he had died for it.

  6

  There were five other items hidden in the space, in addition to the money.

  One was a South African passport in the name of Willem Van Buren.

  Another was a small polythene bag containing what appeared at first to be ten grains of rice, but, on closer examination, were clearly man-made. They looked like frosted glass.

  Two others were photocopied booklets about six by eight inches with DOCUMENT OF DESCRIPTION printed along the top of the front cover.

  And the fifth was a flat black object about six inches long and two inches wide with some buttons on it. At first I thought it was a television remote control, but it didn’t appear to have VOLUME and CHANNEL buttons, just 0 to 9 plus an ENTER button. I pushed them all. Nothing happened. I turned it over. There was a battery compartment on the back that, I discovered, was empty, so I took the device through to the kitchen and scavenged the battery from the kitchen clock.

  I pushed the buttons again and, this time, was rewarded by a small red light that appeared in the top right-hand corner for a moment before going out. Nothing else happened. I pointed the thing at the television and pushed again. Unsurprisingly, nothing happened other than the flash of the little red light.

  I didn’t know much about electronics in general, or TV remotes in particular, but I did know that they had to be programmed correctly.

  I would show the thing to Luca, I thought. He was not only my whiz kid at using the computer, he also understood what went on under its cover-Luca had even worked as an electronics maintenance man briefly before he transferred to the racetrack. My own technical ability ran simply to giving something a sharp clout with my hand if it failed to perform as expected.

  I put the battery back in the kitchen clock, which I reset to the right time of twenty to one. I had to be back on the road by nine o’clock in the morning.

  I suddenly felt very hungry. I hadn’t eaten anything since I’d had a bowl of cereal and a slice of toast for breakfast sixteen hours earlier. I hadn’t had the time.

  I looked in the fridge. There wasn’t much there. I usually went to the supermarket once a week on a Sunday to get the essentials like milk, bread and those ready-cooked meals I could simply stuff in the microwave. But this last weekend I had somehow forgotten to go. I shook the plastic milk bottle. There was only enough left for a small bowl of cereal and maybe a cup of coffee in the morning. The loaf of bread was down to the last few slices, and they looked to have passed their best with green mold spots appearing around the edges.

  I found a tin of baked beans in a cupboard and made myself beans on toast, carefully removing a few moldy bits from the bread before placing it in the toaster.

  I spread the bounty from the rucksack’s secret compartment out on the kitchen table in front of me and looked at it as I ate.

  I picked up the two booklets with the heading DOCUMENT OF DESCRIPTION. I hadn’t seen one close-up before, but I knew what they were. “Horse passports,” I believed they were called, and every racehorse had to have one in order to race. They were a detailed record of a horse’s marking and hair whorls. A horse presented at a racetrack for a race had to match the one described in its passport to ensure that another horse wasn’t running in its place. In the olden days, unscrupulous trainers might have presented a “ringer” that would run as if it were another horse. The ringer was usually much better than the horse that should have been running and hence it would start at much more favorable odds than if its true identity had been known. Many such deceptions had raked in the cash before the introduction of detailed horse passports had put a stop to it.

  But the two in front of me were photocopies, not the originals, and could never have been passed off as the real thing. I scanned through them but could see nothing out of the ordinary.

  Next I picked up the human passport, that of Willem Van Buren from South Africa, and looked at the photograph. It wasn’t the same man I had seen in Sussex Gardens, I was sure of that, because the face that looked out at me from the image on the passport was that of my father. Van Buren must have been the name he had used to check into the Royal Sovereign Hotel.

  Did I have yet more sisters, or perhaps some brothers, in Cape Town or Johannesburg?

  I was also intrigued by the little bag of rice-type grains. I took one of them out of the bag and rolled it between my thumb and index finger. It was, in fact, slightly larger than a grain of rice, being about a centimeter long and about a third of that in diameter. I held it up to the light, but I couldn’t see through as it was opaque. I shook it by my ear, but it made no noise.

  Why, I wondered, would anyone bother to hide a few chips of frosted glass? There had to be more to them than the eye, or the ear, could tell.

  I took my tomato-sauce-covered knife and recklessly crushed the grain against the table. It actually broke surprisingly easily. I could now see that the grain was not made of solid glass but was a cylinder with what appeared to be a minute electronic circuit housed inside.

  I looked carefully at the nine still left in the bag. There were definitely no external connections, no terminals to connect to. Again, I would ask Luca. If anyone knew what they were, he would. I scooped the broken bits back into the bag and placed it on the table.

  And then, of course, there was the money.

  What should I do with it all?

  Well, I told myself, I should go and give it to Detective Chief Inspector Llewellyn. But how could I? He certainly wouldn’t take it very kindly that I hadn’t told him about my father’s luggage earlier. He might accuse me again of being somehow involved in his murder.

  I began to wish I had told him straightaway about the seedy hotel in Sussex Gardens. It would have made things much easier, and also I wouldn’t have suffered the fright of my life. I still came out in a cold sweat just thinking about what would have happened if the man had recognized me.

  What should I do?

  I decided to sleep on it, and went to bed.

  Friday at Ascot was wet, with an Atlantic weather front sweeping in from the west and bringing a ten-degree drop in temperature. Trust me, I thought, to choose this day to switch from my thick and usually overwarm morning coat to a lining-free lightweight blazer. I took shelter under our large, yellow TRUST TEDDY TALBOT-emblazoned umbrella, and shivered in the strengthening breeze.

  “Good party?” I asked Luca and Betsy.

  They had been uncharacteristically quiet as we had set up our pitch.

  “Great,” said Betsy without much conviction.

  “Late night?” I asked, enjoying myself.

  “Very,” she said.

  “Excellent,” I said. “A good party has to end in a late night.”

  “Yes. But we could have done without the gate-crashers,” she said, “and the police.”

  “The police?”

  “My aunt called the police,” she said, clearly not pleased.

  “But why?” I asked.

  “About a hundred uninvited guests turned up at her house,” she said. “That’s where the pa
rty was.”

  “Yobs, you mean,” said Luca with a degree of bitterness I hadn’t witnessed in him before. “Your stupid sister. Ruined her own party.”

  “She didn’t ruin it,” Betsy retorted in a pained tone.

  I was beginning to wish I’d never asked.

  “What do you call inviting people to a party on Facebook,” he said.“Not bloody surprising so many weirdos turned up and trashed the place.”

  “And you weren’t much help,” Betsy said icily.

  “And what exactly do you mean by that?” Luca demanded.

  “Look,” I said, interrupting them, “I’m sorry now I asked. Calm down, both of you. We have work to do.”

  They both fell silent, but their body language continued to speak louder than words, and the unspoken conversation was far removed from the loving episode I had witnessed on Tuesday as they had walked, hand in hand, on their way to a drink at the bandstand bar.

  Oh dear, I thought. It wasn’t just the weather that had turned cool.

  The afternoon progressed without any of the excitement of the previous day. The incessant rain understandably kept many punters away from the betting ring. They preferred the dry, warm surroundings of the grandstand bars and restaurants, placing bets with the staff from the tote who would come to them rather than vice versa.

  I was allowed by the racetrack to ply my trade as a bookmaker, for a sizable fee of course, but only at my chosen pitch. I couldn’t wander the bars and restaurants, relieving punters of their cash as they sat at table eating their lunch or drinking their champagne.

  There were no outages of the Internet service, no disruptions of the mobile phones, no last-minute wild swings in the prices. Everything was as predictable as it was boring. Favorites won three of the six races, while a couple of rank outsiders gave us bookies some respite in the others.

  All in all, it was a remarkably unremarkable day. Other than the ongoing frosty relations between my staff, the only memorable feature was the number of technical staff from both the Internet provider and the mobile phone networks who stood around waiting in vain for their systems to crash. Clearly, somebody’s tail had been seriously pulled by the events of yesterday.

  “Do you two combatants need a lift home?” I asked as we packed up in deathly silence. Neither of them said a word.“For God’s sake,” I went on, “do either of you want on go on living or what?”

  It raised a smile on Luca’s face. A slight smile that evaporated almost as quickly as it appeared.

  “The Teddy Talbot bus leaves for High Wycombe and beyond in five minutes whether you’re on it or not,” I said with a degree of exasperation in my tone.

  Still nothing.

  “Do I assume, then, that we won’t be back here tomorrow?” I asked as we made it to the parking lot unrobbed. Even muggers don’t like the rain.

  Royal Ascot Saturday had become one of our busiest days of the year.

  “I’m game,” said Luca.

  I looked expectantly at Betsy.

  “OK,” she said grudgingly. “I’ll be here.”

  “Good,” I said. “And can I expect a thawing of the cold war?”

  There was no answer from either of them.

  I was getting bored with this game.

  “OK,” I said. “New rule number one. No talking, no lift.”

  “I’m sorry,” Luca said.

  “No problem,” I said.

  “Not you, Ned,” he said with irritation. “I’m sorry to Betsy.” He turned to her.

  “Oh…” Betsy burst into tears, gasping great gulps of air.

  She and Luca dissolved into each other’s arms and just stood there, hugging each other, getting wet, like a scene from a romantic film.

  “Oh, for goodness’ sake,” I said. “You lovebirds had better get in the backseat while I drive.”

  I was quite thankful that Luca didn’t in fact sit in the back with Betsy but up front next to me. I don’t think I could have taken all that lovey-dovey stuff all the way to High Wycombe.

  “What do you think that is?” I said to him. I handed over the black plastic object that resembled a television remote that I had put in the door pocket of the Volvo that morning.

  He turned the device over and over in his hands. Then he removed the battery-compartment cover.

  “Here,” I said, and passed him a pack of batteries I’d bought on my way to the races.

  He slid a battery into the housing and was rewarded by the brief flash of red whenever he pushed any of the buttons, just as I had been.

  “The light stays on a few moments longer if you press the ENTER button,” I said. He pressed it, and it did. “Do you think it’s a remote for something?”

  “Dunno,” he said, still turning the device over and over. “It obviously can’t be for a television or a radio, there’s no volume control. How about a garage-door opener or something?”

  “But why the numbers?” I said. “Surely garage-door openers just have one button?”

  “How about if they need a code?” he said. “Maybe you need to push 1066 or something and then ENTER.”

  “Yeah, maybe,” I said. “How about these?” I passed him the small plastic bag containing the unbroken grains, along with the one I had crushed.

  He poured the tiny items out of the bag onto his hand. Then he held the broken one up in between his thumb and forefinger.

  “I assume this one was like the others before you stamped on it?”

  “I used a knife, actually,” I said. “And yes, it was. They’re quite easy to break.”

  “They’re definitely electronic,” he said.

  “Even I can see that,” I replied sarcastically. “But what are they for? They don’t seem to have any connections, and I also know that glass doesn’t conduct electricity, so how do they work?”

  “It’s also a bit small to have its own battery,” he said.

  “So how does it work?” I asked him.

  “If I knew what it did, I’d probably know how it worked.” He continued to study the tiny circuit. “Passive electronics,” he said very quietly, as if to himself.

  “What?” I said.

  “Passive electronics,” he repeated.

  “And what are they when they’re at home?” I said.

  He laughed. “Devices with no gain,” he said. “They’re called ‘passive electronic components’ or ‘passive devices.’ ”

  “So?” I said, none the wiser.

  “Transistors provide gain,” he said. “They can be used as amplifiers to give a signal gain, so, for example, it can drive a speaker in a radio. The signal received by the aerial is very, very small, so, in simple terms, it has to be amplified by a series of transistors in order to drive the speaker so you can hear the music.”

  “The higher the volume, the greater the gain?” I said.

  “Just so,” he said. “But transistors need a power supply. They must either have a battery or be connected to the mains for them to work, so this little sucker can’t have transistors.” He held up the tiny electrical circuit from the broken grain.

  “Passive electronics,” I said.

  “You’ve got it,” he said, smiling.

  “What are you two on about?” asked Betsy suddenly from the backseat.

  “This,” said Luca, carefully handing her one of the unbroken grains.

  “Oh, I know what that is,” she said rather condescendingly.

  “What?” Luca and I said together.

  “It’s a chip for dogs,” she said. “We had one put in our Irish setter last year.”

  “What do they do?” I asked over my shoulder.

  “They’re for identification,” she said. “They’re injected under the skin using a syringe. We had one put in our dog so Mum and Dad could take her to France without having to do that quarantine thing when she came back. She simply got scanned by customs to check she was the right dog with the right vaccinations.”

  “Like horses,” I said.

  “Eh?” s
aid Luca.

  “Horses have them too,” I said. “To check they are indeed who their owner says they are. All of them have to have chips inserted or they can’t run. I read about it in the Racing Post ages ago. I just didn’t know what the chips looked like. I don’t know why, but I somehow expected them to be bigger, rectangular and flat.”

  Luca looked again at the tiny electrical circuit.

  “It must be a passive arfid circuit,” he said. “This little coil must be the antenna.”

  “I’ll take your word for it,” I said. “What’s an arfid when it’s at home?”

  “A radio frequency identification circuit, R-F-I-D, pronounced ARE-fid,” he said slowly as if for a child. “You put a scanner close by that emits a radio wave. The wave is picked up by the little antenna, and that provides just enough power for the circuit to transmit back an identification number.”

  “Sounds complicated,” I said.

  “Not really,” Luca replied. “They exist all over the place. Those alarm things in shops that go off if you try and take things out without paying, they use RFIDs. They simply have the tags on the items, and the scanners are the vertical things by the doors you have to walk between. Also, the tube and buses in London use them in the Oyster cards. You put the card on the scanner, and it reads the information to make sure you have enough credit to travel. They’re very clever.”

  “So I see,” I said.

  “Not everyone is keen on them, though,” he went on. “Some call them ‘spychips’ because they allow people to be tracked without their knowledge. But I think they’ll soon be on everything. You know, instead of bar codes. The supermarkets are already experimenting with them for checkout. You only have to walk past the scanner and everything is automatically checked out without you even having to take it out of the cart. One day, your credit card will be scanned in the same way, and the total deducted from your bank account without you having to do anything except push the whole lot out to your car, load up and drive away.”