Sophie turned to Pierre and asked him something in French which I couldn’t follow. There was a bit of gesticulating of hands and a questioning expression on Sophie’s face. Pierre raised his eyebrows for a moment, asked another question and got his answer. It seemed to me that she was trying to persuade him into something but I had no idea what it was.

Mike meanwhile had turned to me. “Mind if I stay the night, Bob?” he asked me. “My pleasure. Are you going back to Edinburgh tomorrow?”

“Well, no actually. I’m taking the day off.” Pierre then spoke. “And so is Sophie, apparently,” he said to me. I looked from one to the other, puzzled.

“I’m taking Sophie to see a bit of Scotland. We’re going up to Loch Tay. All she’s seen so far is Letham which is not exactly the only part of the country worth seeing.”

“What about the analysis we need done?” “I’ll take care of that,” said Pierre “I should be able to get through it all tomorrow. Let the young ones have a tourist day if they want.”

They both looked slightly embarrassed. I didn’t know Sophie that well yet but I did know my brother. This was definitely a different Mike from the one I was used to.

Pierre and I got up to go. Mike and Sophie exchanged a word or two. We all said our “goodnights” and Mike and I set off home.

No sooner were we in the car than Mike looked across at me with a grin.

“No bloody comments from you about photograph collections. Right?”

“I wouldn’t dare. Let’s go.” I was actually secretly quite glad about the way things were turning out, although I wasn’t going to admit it yet. It smelled very much as if Mike had fallen for this delightful Frenchwoman and, hopefully, she for him. I let these thoughts occupy me on the short drive home and avoided making any humorous remarks. Getting on the wrong side of Mike can be dangerous sometimes.

Mike set off the next morning and I decided to get stuck into the information that we had extracted from the AIM files. I fired in the CD and started scrolling through the files, checking the information with the spreadsheet that Sophie had generated. When I was satisfied that everything seemed to have been picked up I closed down all the detailed files and started to concentrate on the spreadsheet. It was much easier to comprehend what had been going on.

I had a file for each of the three funds. Each contained between two hundred and fifty and three hundred names. There were about twenty columns for each name, finishing with the column which contained the comments. I immediately made a copy of each one to work with and closed down the originals.

Where to start? They were, at the moment, ranked by ascending rate of return so that the poor investors who had received the smallest returns were at the top. There were exceptions, but generally speaking you could see that all the widows over seventy were up in the top third.

Down in the bottom third I found the profiles where the husband and wife were both still alive. They tended to be younger and often the husband had been a banker or an accountant or a lawyer – the type of people who would have a better understanding of numbers. And presumably the fact that both spouses were still alive multiplied the chances of suspicion.

I was totally disgusted at the callousness of the scheme. If you were a widow, eighty-five years old and had been in a retirement home for the last four years, there you were in the top quartile. If you had had a job which had needed an understanding of figures, there you were down near the bottom, coded “careful”. At what point you were moved up the rankings to “normal” or then up to “no problem” I hated to think. The whole scheme was cynical in the extreme.

The commentary box noted dates of death of spouses and dates of going into homes. “No children” moved you up the ranks, presumably because there wouldn’t be anyone to complain after you’d gone. There were even a few dates shown where someone had been diagnosed with dementia. They must have a staff of people tracking the personal circumstances of each of their investors.

I looked for Alice. She was ranked in the normal section. I found Pierre around the middle as well, presumably because he was French. There were a few foreign names, but not many. They were all in the normal section. My guess was that they would be more difficult to track. All in all it was a picture of utter greed.

The next question was to estimate the differential between what this money had really earned and the amount Purdy had grudgingly passed on to his investors. That would have to wait until Pierre had finished his work.

Whatever the amount was I had proof, right in front of me, of the fraud.

I took a break and rustled up a cup of coffee. I’d been looking at these numbers for a couple of hours and the old eyes needed a rest.

I thought things over for five minutes. Purdy knew I was suspicious. He must do because it could only be he who had organized the burglary of the house.

We couldn’t use this information because we had obtained it illegally. How could we obtain information legally that perhaps we could use? I had asked Alice to write to AIM and she was going to give me a copy of the reply. Could I get others to do the same? Purdy would be suspicious if he suddenly got a dozen similar letters from a dozen people querying the management of their money, but maybe that was a good idea. We wanted to rattle him and make him realise that people were getting suspicious. He then might make a mistake and give us information that we needed. Or he might even stop his whole scheme, realising that it was getting dangerous. That he was close to getting discovered.

I called Pierre in the afternoon to see how he was getting on. He was on target and hoped to have some results for us the next day. We discussed the idea of trying to contact some of the people on the list and getting them to email the company with requests for information. We’d go for about twenty and see what happened when twenty emails hit Purdy’s desk on Monday morning.

Pierre, excitable Frenchman that he was, was all for it. I could almost hear him rubbing his hands with glee at the end of the phone. I was a little bit more reluctant but eventually agreed that I would get on the phone that afternoon and see if I could organize something.

Looking at the list I selected twenty names who, by their profiles, seemed to me the type of people who could be persuaded. It took a few hours but, by pretending to be a fellow investor who was a bit concerned, I managed to rustle up fourteen people who agreed to send suitable emails that evening. The only reason my target was reduced to fourteen was because I found that six people either did not have computers or, if they did, they didn’t know how to use emails. I wasn’t going to do a training course over the phone so I kept it to fourteen. I was sure that would be enough to achieve the effect we wanted.

The effect it did achieve turned out to be considerably more dramatic than we had envisaged.

Chapter 12

The next day, Tuesday, Mike and Sophie turned up for coffee mid-morning. Sophie was full of praise for the Scottish countryside and Mike was like the proverbial cat who had found a dish of cream.

We were able to sit outside and enjoy the warm morning sun. Sophie was bubbling, full of praise for what she had seen and keen to go hiking off into the mountains as soon as she could get the opportunity.

After a while we had exhausted the tourist guide to the Trossachs and Mike asked how things were on the AIM front. Sophie came back down to earth and listened while I explained to them the results of my examination of the files. They were both as horrified and indignant is I had been.

“Bob, we’ve got to do something about this guy,” said Mike. “There is no way he should be allowed to get away with a scam like that.”