“No, an ordinary touring hood—it’s a 12 Vesper. I don’t know what you’re getting at, Mr. Poole, but if you want to see it, it’s in the garage at the back.”
There was a troubled look on Inez’s face that made Poole curse himself as he said good-bye to her. He had to pull himself up short when he realized where his feelings for this girl were leading him.
Mangane greeted him almost eagerly.
“I’ve got something that’ll interest you, old man—er, Inspector,” he said. “I won’t bother you—unless you want them—with details of the investigations I made yesterday—I’ll just give you the gist of them. Cigarette?”
Poole pulled out his pipe and lit it, before settling himself down in a chair at the side of Mangane’s desk with his note-book before him.
“There seems to be no doubt,” continued Mangane, “that the Victory Finance is a sound and genuine company. It’s a private company, the four directors holding all the shares between them; Lorne—Major-General Sir Hunter Lorne—I don’t know whether you’ve heard of him—is chairman and holds 60% of the shares; old Lord Resston holds 15%—he’s only a guinea-pig—never functions; a fellow called Lessingham has 15%, and another ex-soldier, Wraile, 10%. Wraile was their managing-director at one time; he gave that up but kept his seat on the Board. The present manager’s a different type—head-clerk, really—Blagge, his name is.
“The Company’s business is partly investment and partly loan. Their investment list is very sound—I can’t pick a hole in it; their loans are more interesting—and much more difficult to follow. I followed up your suggestions—those loans that Sir Garth had not ticked. The first one—South Wales Pulverization—is a simple case of over-capitalization; the Victory Finance have burnt their fingers over that, I fancy—they’ll be lucky if they recover their advances without interest. Sir Garth spotted that quickly enough—that’s why he queried it—it’s a bad loan, but there’s nothing shady about it that I can see.
“The second one is much more interesting—the Nem Nem Sohar Trust. It’s a Hungarian company—the name means something like ‘Never, never, it is unendurable,’ the Hungarian ‘revise the peace-treaty’ slogan; nominally the Trust is for land development on a big-property basis—the sort of thing that would appeal to a true-blue like Lorne; it is that, but it also has a strongly political flavour—there is actually a clause in the charter urging the elimination of Jews from the national and local government posts. I don’t wonder Sir Garth put a blue pencil through it—I don’t say it isn’t a good thing politically or sound financially, but he’d never touch a thing that was so directly tinged with politics. Whether you think it’s worth looking closer into or not, I don’t know—that’s for you to say.
“The third company that he queried—Ethiopian and General Development—I looked into more thoroughly, partly because there were no notes about it. I’d rather like to know why there are no notes. I told you I knew something about these investigations of his, and that I’d made some appointments for him; one of them was with the managing-director of the Ethiopian and General. Whether he saw him or not, of course I don’t know—I only made the appointment. I tried to see him myself today but he was busy and couldn’t see me—suggested my coming on Tuesday—apparently they have a Board-meeting on Monday. But I saw one of the clerks and I got the company’s last report and schedule of operations from him; I had to buy them—there must be something rotten about that show or I shouldn’t have been able to. I read ’em while I had lunch—I lunched in the City—and talked them over with a pal I can trust—didn’t let on what I wanted to know for, of course.
“That company, my pal told me, used to be absolutely sound—a genuine development concern—lending money and buying up properties that looked promising or that only needed money to make them pay. But the Board’s getting a bit ancient and a bit lazy—inclined to leave things pretty well to their managing-director. According to my friend, this managing-director is playing a funny game; he hasn’t been there more than a year or so but in that time the company’s lost a certain amount of ‘caste’—nothing definitely wrong, nothing demonstrably shady—but the City doesn’t trust it any longer.