The Drowned Man Read Online Free Page B

this one as well. Huge problem in Asia with the betting syndicates corrupting the game. Some £280 million wagered last year on the Indian Premier Cricket League alone. Something of an issue in England, too, as you might expect. Carpenter was maintaining a watching brief on the file.”
    Counter shook his head, this time in open consternation.
    â€œWhat?” Peter said.
    â€œDon’t tell anyone, but sooner or later the cricket thing is going to blow up, too, and my section will wear it if we don’t lay charges. Charges by the ton.”
    â€œShouldn’t the sport betting problem reside with, say, the Serious Fraud Office?”
    â€œThe issue has become prosecution. The best hope we have is to follow the betting money, and that should be the SFO ’s bailiwick. But the money is hard to trace, and until we trace it, we rely on bribery offences, suborning officials, criminal charges of that nature. You see how ‘Special Projects’ can be a catch-all, a curse?”
    Peter suspected that the Yard would continue to walk the devil’s tightrope on both the betting scandal and the phone-hacking outrage. On the former, he knew that the Yard had largely handed off discipline of the gambling syndicates to the regulatory bodies for international cricket. Prosecutions under the U.K.
Gambling Act
were notoriously problematic. Frank’s best strategy might be to delay.
    Peter reminded himself why he was here. His brief was very simple: drive up to Lincolnshire and talk to the Carpenter family. He returned to Carpenter’s strange assignment.
    â€œSo, Carpenter could be spared?” he repeated.
    â€œI asked the staff and he volunteered, and I agreed to vacation time.”
    â€œHave you been able to chart his movements in Montreal?”
    â€œHilfgott’s chief assistant in Montreal, name of Neil Brayden, has done that for us. Carpenter was booked for four days in a downtown hotel. It’s confirmed that he stayed there the three nights before his death. Carpenter told me before he left that he was going to do some gadding about. He said he hoped to go up to Ottawa to see the Parliament Buildings and over to Quebec City to take the view from the Plains of Abraham. I confess, I don’t know my Canadian history.”
    Peter tried a last ploy to draw Frank out. “Were you convinced the letters were real in the first place?”
    Counter smiled. “That’s the old Peter. Sly like a badger. Well, Nicola swore they were real. Of course, preserving her credibility in this fiasco requires her to maintain that. I have no idea, to be honest. But I admit, our confidence that Foreign would wear the stains from any blunders led us to minimize the effort we should have brought to bear. Young Carpenter not only said that he knew Montreal, having been there with his mother once, he had also taken courses in American history. The icing on that cake was his expressed hope to take a fortnight of leave. If we would pay the airfare and the first week of hotels, he would cover his other expenses.”
    Peter wondered if Frank Counter knew what he was admitting — that he had played bureaucratic games, colluded with Nicola, and taken a flutter without knowing whether another department would “wear the stains” of failure. Now the only escape from his lapse of due diligence was a cover-up, and that’s what he was trying out on Peter now. Frank should have known better, Peter thought.
    Counter sat back in his chair. “We underestimated the risks. But now we’ve lost one of ours. I’m glad you’re on this, Peter. We want our man back.”
    They sat in silence. And then Peter — out of impatience, or perhaps indignation — pulled off his second parlour trick of the day.
    â€œFrank, Bartleben showed me Carpenter’s personnel file, the original. It was tea-stained. The stains are recent.”
    â€œYou are a Sherlock,” Counter