Trail of Greed: Fighting Fraud and Corruption... A Dangerous Game Read Free Page A

assumed that his reticence had to do with the horrors he’d seen or the friends he’d lost. I knew now that there had been another reason. What a pity we had not been able to talk about it. Perhaps if Mum had gone before him he might have let it out but that hadn’t been the case. She had survived him by four years and he would never have talked about something like that while she was still alive.
    Next problem. How do I tell Mike and Heather? I had asked Pierre if he was aware that he had acquired, apart from me, another younger brother and a sister. He had known, he had told me, and I suggested he leave it to me and I would organise the breaking of the news to them. The question was “What was the best way to do that?”
    Heather was eighteen months younger than me and we had been close playmates as children. We had, however, gone to different schools and different universities so our paths had separated. We remained good long-distance friends, seeing each other two or three times a year. Her world was very different from mine but we kept in touch. She had married a farmer and lived in the centre of the country outside Doune, where she had dedicated her life to her two kids and a never-ending collection of horses. She had always been keen on horses and had studied veterinary science at Edinburgh. It was through her work that she had met Oliver and that had settled her life for her. I wasn’t sure what her reaction would be.
    Mike was a very different kettle of fish. Mike had come along six years after Heather, so he was my junior by seven and a half years, a difference which had meant that we had shared very little when we were young. When I was discovering the fair sex he was still playing with his Lego.
    But we had both inherited the combativity and competitiveness of our father, expressed through different outlets. I confess to have done reasonably well at my rugby and cricket and had found that I could turn my hand to most sports. Mike also had that gift but took up pursuits that I had not – squash, hockey, biking and the like. The only area where we had a real common interest – and that developed later – was on the golf course.
    Mike had gone into the army. He had discovered that if he joined up as a student he could earn a salary whilst studying. The only commitment he had had to make was to stay in the service for seven years after graduating. This didn’t bother him at all and he had stayed on after his seven years and carved out a satisfactory career for himself. He had been able to retire in his fifties with a perfectly adequate pension.
    He had seen the world, with service in the various trouble spots across the disappearing British Empire, until he was, much to his regret, superseded by a younger generation. During the last fifteen years of his service he developed his administrative talents in a series of logistics postings. He had never married and now lived in Forfar, in striking distance of the Cairngorms, with Oscar, his black Labrador, where they could both continue to keep fit by wandering off into the mountains for a few days whenever he felt like it.
    He was inordinately proud of his dog, claiming to have trained him to sniff out drugs at twenty metres, and he maintained that he could find his way home on his own from anywhere within fifty miles away. I hadn’t believed this piece of boasting and, a couple of years ago, Mike had proposed a bet (a green fee at Gleneagles) that he would prove it. We had driven forty miles up into the mountains and he had simply stopped out in the wilds, let Oscar out of the car and we had driven off back home. He had turned up two days later for breakfast. And on top of that Mike had beaten me three and two over the King’s course the next Tuesday.
    I decided I would tell Mike first about his new brother and then we would both discuss breaking the news to Heather and Oliver.
    I phoned Forfar and got him at home. “Hi, Mike, how’s life?” I asked. His