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Copyright

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

This edition first published in 2000

Copyright © Harry Bingham 2000

The Author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication.

Source ISBN: 9780006513544

Ebook Edition © JULY 2016 ISBN 9780007440993

Version: 2016-07-22

Dedication

Dedicated to

my beloved wife, N.

‘Who think the same thoughts without need of speech And babble the same speech without need of meaning’

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

The Beginning: Leeds, Yorkshire, 1998

Leeds, Yorkshire, 1959

Leeds, Yorkshire, 1998

Summer 1998

Autumn 1998

Winter 1998–99

Spring 1999

Summer 1999

Autumn 1999

Winter 1999–2000

Spring 2000

Summer 2000

Autumn 2000

Winter 2000–2001

Spring 2001

Summer 2001

The Ending

Epilogue

Keep Reading

Acknowledgements

About the Author

About the Publisher

The Beginning Leeds, Yorkshire, 1998

There are a million ways to torment your kids, but from beyond the grave Bernard Gradley had found a new one.

Technically, of course, he was within his rights. Every legal aspect had been considered, the document drafted and redrafted under Gradley’s dictatorial eye. Augustus Earle had resisted every change. He knew the difference between right and wrong, and he fought to preserve the family’s disintegrating rights. But Gradley was unforgiving. He demanded a document ‘watertight as a Scotsman’s wallet’ and wouldn’t rest until he had it. And once he did, he signed it, then put it away from him for ever, a document hard and mean as the dead man’s heart.

Earle pitied the family. The mother, who had for so long defended her kids from their father’s severity, had done nothing to merit this. And if the kids weren’t perfect, their punishment would far outweigh their faults.

They would come in hope. Their father had built a mighty fortune, and isn’t wealth supposed to pass down the generations more reliably than genes? Well, hope might bring them, but other emotions would send them away. Grief, sorrow, anger, rage.

The clock readied itself to strike twelve noon. The family would be here any minute. With tension mounting in the pit of his stomach, Earle patted the documents nervously into line, beneath his desk lamp: the will and the letter, heavy as a curse and more certain.

Leeds, Yorkshire, 1959

You don’t find too many saints on a construction site, but Bernard Gradley was in a class of his own. It wasn’t just the night of the accident that he’d ‘borrowed’ one of the site’s dumper trucks for a private job, it had been pretty much every night for the past eight months, cash in hand every time. Plus it turned out that Gradley had three pieces of heavy equipment as well as numerous cement mixers and the like ‘on lease’ to local building firms. Given how hard he worked by day and the extent of his extra-curricular activities at night, it was hardly surprising that he dozed off once when he shouldn’t. He was found in the morning, badly concussed, wandering the site. The dumper truck, wheels still spinning, was lying upside down on the remains of the site engineer’s cabin. With his foreman’s insults boiling in his ears, Gradley left the site for ever, saved from prosecution only by the company’s embarrassment at its own negligence.

Gradley was seventeen years of age. His father was dead, his mother alcoholic, his numerous brothers and sisters all of school age, his job prospects all but annihilated by the accident and its aftermath. It was, as he told his children later, the morning when his career took flight.

Before even returning to his lodgings to bathe his head, he walked to the centre of town to make some purchases: a suit and tie, white shirt and decent shoes, a briefcase, some stationery, and, costing as much as everything else together, a pair of binoculars with lenses hand-ground in East Germany.

His routine was quick to develop. On the first day he would get up, put on his dust-stained working clothes and set out on foot to do the round of construction sites in the area. His first move was to find himself a vantage point from which he could watch the activity on site. He took no notes and drew no pictures, but his eyes, glued to the binoculars, never left the scene. He spent several hours in that way, sometimes a whole day if the site was large. Finally, and only when he had seen enough, did he make his way to the nearest working man’s café or pub.

There he ordered food and drink and unfolded a copy of the Racing Post on the table in front of him. As he always took care to arrive at peak hours, however, there was no chance of him being left alone for long, and with an air of reluctance he’d put away his paper and begin to engage in the talk swirling all around him.

Posing as an unemployed labourer seeking work, he probed for the information he needed. What equipment did they use? What worked well, what didn’t? What were the foremen like? The site engineer? The construction manager? How many people were on the site altogether? Were they ahead of schedule or behind? He took care never to look inquisitive. He avoided direct questions, cracked a lot of jokes, slagged off bosses in general, told tall stories about bits of equipment he’d worked with in the past, encouraged even shy men to open up about their jobs, to complain about the idiocies they were forced to endure. He bought oceans of tea, laughed inordinately, and forgot nothing.

The next morning he returned to the site unrecognisable. This time he wore his suit and tie, his hair shone with Brylcreem and his shoes looked as if their owner had never heard of builders’ dust. He sought out the construction manager whom he already knew by description and usually also by sight. His pitch was simple. From his briefcase he took out a sheet of paper entitled ‘Site Costings: Current’. On it he had written carefully in pencil a complete list of the workforce and equipment employed on the site. By each item on the list were three columns showing the number of units, the cost per unit, and the total cost. He spent some time explaining rather elaborately that of course such an analysis was only illustrative and no doubt the manager had his site much better arranged than ‘the chaos typical around here’. The manager would look away, agree that the site was better managed than that, but encourage Gradley to continue ‘just supposing that things were that bad, but only for the sake of argument, mind’. At that point, Gradley knew he was home and dry, but still he took his time.

He talked about different construction routines, analysed them with equipment and without, and costed them out to show how the labour saving more than paid for the extra cost of the equipment. Every time he started, he hesitated, saying “Course, I don’t know why I’m telling you this, it’s obviously second nature to someone like yourself.’ Each time, however, he could be coaxed back into his patter, knowing that every routine he analysed was used on site and in most cases was even more inefficient than those he described. Eventually, and only after protestations, he pulled out a second sheet of paper from his case. This one was entitled ‘Site Costings: Potential’. There was the same list, and the same three columns. But this time the workforce was dramatically smaller, the need for construction equipment much bigger, and the total site costs a full third lower than they had been. Beneath the total was a number neatly written in pencil and underlined twice, labelled ‘Percentage Saving’.

The closer he came to landing his fish, the slower he wound the reel. ‘I feel like a complete bloody fool teaching my grandmother to suck eggs,’ he’d say, ‘I should be getting you to teach me my business instead.’ He got the site manager to walk with him around the site, making sure the manager watched every activity with new eyes whilst not appearing to see a single thing himself. Instead, he told stories about mythical site managers fired for incompetence when their bosses saw how ineptly things were being run, and others who had been promoted and given company cars for finishing impossible projects under budget and ahead of schedule. He larded his talk with things he had heard in the café the day before: the things the workers complained about, the ridicule they directed at their bosses, the petty cheating which goes on everywhere.

As the time for leaving drew near, Gradley almost seemed to forget that he had introduced himself as a construction equipment rental agent. He needed the site manager to bring his attention back to the equipment available, the pieces of machinery needed to bring the site’s costs from the first list to the second. Once they did get stuck in though, it was amazing how quickly the site’s equipment needs grew. No point in having just one bulldozer when a second could be used to clear the rubble. No purpose in using just one mechanical hoist when there were workers enough to be busy with two. Whenever the manager suggested another piece of kit, Gradley would pause with a little frown, before exclaiming: ‘Bloody brilliant! I would never have thought a site like this would need one of those, but you’re absolutely right. Bloody visionary, you are. Just like that sod I was telling you about who was promoted twice in two years just when everyone thought he was going to be fired for being pissed morning, noon and night. Mind you, while you’re at it, you may as well have another of them to cover the north end. No point in skimping.’

And by the time Bernard Gradley left the site, smiling at the workers who had entertained him the day before and who would be losing their jobs within a matter of weeks, he swung in his briefcase a lengthy order for construction equipment not a single item of which did he possess.

The next stage was easier. The construction industry has always been one of boom and bust, and while one firm is so busy with orders that no customer is attended to properly, another firm only a short distance away may be laying workers off and leaving equipment idle for want of work. Gradley had a knack for finding companies of the second sort. For them it was a godsend to have Gradley appear off the street and offer to take their surplus gear for long enough to tide them over until the next burst of activity. The rates he offered were not great, of course, nothing in fact compared with what he charged his own customers, but anything was better than nothing.

The business did well. The sixties was a time of renewal and change, and nobody benefited more than the construction industry. Slums were cleared. New tower blocks and housing developments rose in their place. Go-go businesses heady with twenty years of unbroken peace and growth built glitzy new headquarters of glass and cement. Even Britain’s creaking manufacturers, like geriatrics in the sun, forgot their weaknesses and spent money on factories and warehouses. Gradley Plant Hire Limited, as the company was called, took on staff and expanded from Leeds out into Yorkshire, and from Yorkshire out into the counties beyond.

As the business grew and strengthened, Gradley found the time to marry, have kids, to divorce acrimoniously when the marriage went bad. He was a rich man now, worth thirty million by some accounts, forty or more by others. His business wasn’t just successful, it was one of the biggest of its kind in the country, so strong it no longer depended on him, its father, for its prosperity. Instead of making him happy, the fact left him discontented. He longed for the old days, back when it had been just him, no money, and ambition as big as the sky. A man of some leisure now, he experimented with buying racehorses but had no luck. He then discovered motoring and began to build up a collection of cars, all British.

The hobby killed him. One day in mid-July, he was driving at speed when he suffered a minor heart attack. The attack itself was not fatal but he briefly lost consciousness. At a bend in the road the car carried straight on. It bounced off a stone wall into a tree. Gradley died instantly.

All that remained now was to divide up his fortune.

Leeds, Yorkshire, 1998
1

The sweep of tyres, the jerk of a handbrake, a clatter of car doors, then a knock at the door. The family arrived, swept into his room and now waited, silently, eager for money.

‘Welcome,’ said Earle. ‘Welcome to you all.’

It was a poor welcome he had to give. There were five of them, of whom Earle recognised only the mother, Helen Gradley, a nervous, pale woman, mid-fifties but a decade older in appearance. As Bernard’s divorce solicitor, Earle had threatened her with every trick in the book to win a favourable settlement. In theory, Helen had been the party at fault. She’d had an affair and admitted as much. Hers wasn’t such a great crime, not when her husband’s relationship with his business was more passionate, more permanent and more exclusive than anything she had done. But Bernard hadn’t seen it like that, of course. He’d wanted to give her ‘what she deserves – nothing’. He threatened a custody battle, on grounds that Earle was obliged to fabricate, and the friendless woman gave way. She got the kids, he kept the money. She settled for a small London house and an allowance which would terminate once the youngest child, Josephine, reached eighteen.

In the years after the divorce, Gradley had thrown money at his kids, hoping to win them from their mother. They were to be indulged, she to be kept poor. The strategy had worked up to a point. The kids, especially the three sons, George, Zachary and Matthew, had taken the money and been spoiled by it. They had grown used to their life of fast cars, jet travel, nice flats in the right parts of London. Their mother’s house in Kilburn struck them as grotty, too embarrassing to show their friends. But if Gradley had wanted to win their love, he’d failed entirely. His sons loved the cheques, but despised the chequebook. They knew the gifts were motivated more by bitterness than by love, and Gradley himself couldn’t help but resent his own generosity. He reminded his kids of how useless they were, how indolent. He told them repeatedly how he had made his fortune, conjuring an empire from the desert sand.

And now the emperor was dead, what was left but to divide the empire? The five inheritors – the tense mother, the stony-faced sons, the grave and serious daughter – waited in silence.

‘Welcome,’ said Earle again, ‘though I can only regret the sad occasion which has brought us together.’ He felt the tension again, more strongly this time. Why? He alone knew what the will contained. He alone was unaffected. His voice rose a little as he continued. ‘You know, of course, why we’re here. The deceased, Bernard Gradley, told me that none of you had any knowledge of his will. Perhaps I should begin by confirming that this is indeed the case.’

He looked around, but he already knew the answer. The hungry faces of the three sons and their mother’s agitation told him. They knew nothing and wanted everything.

‘While it would be wrong of me to speak ill of the dead, especially when the deceased has been such an important client of this firm’s,’ Earle paused. His words sounded crass and for a moment he was stuck. He had a weak voice which became high, almost falsetto, when he was nervous. He fought to regain his control, to drop back an octave. ‘While, er, it would be wrong to do so, this will, I’m afraid, is not a document which, er, was a pleasant one to draft. And, er –’ He tailed off, his voice trailing into a squeak.

‘D’you want me to read it?’ drawled one of the sons, dark and lean, frightening somehow.

‘That won’t be necessary,’ said Earle sharply, and – thank goodness – deeply. The challenge got him restarted. ‘You may read the will yourself in due course and you may well wish to show it to your own legal advisers. In summary, however, the desires of the deceased are as follows. His mother, Mrs Victoria Gradley, will receive a sum of three hundred thousand pounds to be held in trust on her behalf by certain trustees. His brothers and sisters will each receive, on top of certain small personal bequests, the sum of one hundred thousand pounds.’

Earle’s listeners registered these facts tersely, hungering for what was to come. In their minds, their father’s company was already sold, the money counted and divided. A few hundred thousand quid to their granny, aunts and uncles wasn’t much to give up. They shifted forward. The punch line was drawing near.

‘The residual estate is hard to value,’ Earle continued. ‘The principal asset, of course, is the one hundred percent ownership of Gradley Plant Hire Limited, though there will naturally be a considerable liability in the form of inheritance tax. We have estimated the residual estate to be worth some thirty to thirty-five million pounds after payment of tax. Out of this sum, you, Mrs Gradley,’ and he nodded at Helen, whose nervousness had grown rounder and harder with each passing minute, ‘you will receive a sum of five thousand pounds per annum payable until your death. I am sorry, I am very sorry, that I was not able to prevail on my client to be more generous.’

Helen Gradley was white faced, but otherwise blank. There was shock, certainly, but Earle guessed that none of them had expected Gradley to be generous towards his ex-wife. The real issue was how the money was to be divided amongst the kids. Helen didn’t need the money herself, just so long as the kids were fairly treated. Nobody said anything, all of them willing Earle to continue.

‘And as for you,’ Earle said, looking at the four children, the flinty men and the expressionless girl. ‘As for you, Mr Gradley expressly required me to read the following letter.’

Earle picked up the letter which lay by the will and broke open the seal. Gradley’s writing was clear and heavy. Earle read slowly and distinctly, master of his voice once more:

To my children,

I’m dead now, proud of some things, ashamed of others. I’m proudest of my business, of course. I loved Gradley Plant Hire. I gave it everything and it rewarded me for it. With my business, things worked just as they were meant to. You lot think profit is just another name for money, but you’re wrong. Profit means health. It means rosy cheeks and a happy smile. Gradley Plant Hire was a bouncing baby and its father loved it.

With you lot, things were never so simple. I wanted to teach you about life. I wanted to teach you about work and pride and discipline. I wanted you all to love my business the way I did.

And I failed, didn’t I? God knows what you lot really think, but I swear to you I only ever saw you think about the business when you wanted to cadge money from me. My eldest son George is the crown prince of idleness; Zack’s a bloody philosopher; and Matthew and Josie will probably drop out just as soon as they’ve got anything to drop from. If I tell you that I wanted to be a good dad to you, you probably won’t believe me, but for what it’s worth, I swear to you I did. I still don’t know what went wrong. I don’t know if it was your fault or mine. But don’t accuse me of not wanting things to work out better, because I did, I really did.

Maybe it doesn’t matter now. You’re not here to worry about our family failures, you’re here to see how much I’ve left you. Well, I wouldn’t want to disappoint you, so I’ve come up with a way of giving each of you what you most want.

Josephine first. I had the most trouble with you. You never minded spending my money on clothes and parties, but you never really wanted to be rich, did you? Being nice to people was more your thing. Swotting away at school and do-gooding. I thought of getting you a truckload of designer clothes, but of course they’d all have been the wrong colour or too bloody short or too bloody long. If it came from me there was always a problem, wasn’t there? Then I had a brainwave. You remember how you used to come into my office when you were little? You used to tidy my pens and play at being my secretary. You didn’t grumble about my business then. You didn’t want to try to change me from what I am. You know what I think now? I think that was the last time we were ever happy together, like a dad and his little girl are meant to be.

Very well then. To you, Josephine Gradley, I give an enrolment at a secretarial college of your choice plus five hundred quids’ worth of Marks & Spencer’s vouchers to get yourself properly kitted out. If I’m wrong and you’re more ambitious than I’ve realised, then you’ve got the brains and looks to get yourself whatever it is you want. I don’t need to worry. You’ll be OK.

As for my sons, George, Zack and Matthew, well you were easier to deal with. You only ever wanted money and your only ambition was to get your hands on mine as soon as you could. Fair enough. But there’s one condition. I worked my balls off to get my money, while you lot haven’t done a day’s work in your lives. Maybe that’s my fault. Maybe I didn’t bring you up right. If so, I’m sorry. I hope there’s time to make amends.

The rest of my estate – Gradley Plant Hire mostly – will be put into a trust. The trustees will look after things for three years, keep the company ticking over and that sort of thing. Then in three years’ time, three years from today, we’ll see what you’ve achieved. If any of you can produce the sum of one million pounds in a bank account under your name and your exclusive control, then you get the lot. Everything. You’ll have to show, of course, that you haven’t just borrowed the money or anything like that. It needs to be yours and only yours and not owed to a bank or the taxman or the man in the moon. But don’t worry, the lawyers have gone into all that and the rules should be perfectly clear. If more than one of you kids has come up with the million, then the one with the most gets everything. I like winners, not runners-up. You can do what you like then. You can sell the company and spend the rest of your life on a tropical island for all I care. You’ll have earned it.

If, by any chance, you don’t come up with the million, then I’ve obviously misjudged you and you don’t truly want my money. In that case it will all go to charity and you can each make your own way in the world, just like I did. At least you’ll have the knowledge that anything you do get has come your way through your own hard work and honesty.

Good luck. I really mean it. Make me proud of you.

Love from your father, Bernard.

Helen Gradley was weeping copiously now, cocooned in Josephine’s arms. Her tears were not just tears of grief, they were tears of shock, tears of ultimate defeat. Josephine was crying too, but her grief was different. She was hurt by her father’s viciousness towards her. She was upset at finding what her privileged life was about to turn into. But most of all she was upset that her father’s last act should be one of spite and unkindness. He’d deserved a better memorial.

Earle brought his attention back. He had been staring, and staring at pretty, vulnerable young women is not recommended behaviour for family solicitors. The three young men remained almost expressionless. Only a tightening of their lips and a hardening of their eyes betrayed any emotion. Zachary, the dark one, had his eyes almost completely narrowed, his hand over his lips, concealing his feelings, appraising the situation, planning the next step.

Earle shivered.

‘Gradley Plant Hire and your father’s other assets are now held in trust, and they will be looked after for you by a group of very able trustees. Should any of you meet your father’s conditions, you will find everything in very good order in three years’ time. The will goes into all these matters in greater detail, and you may of course read it at your leisure. You may also wish to consult your own legal advisers, but I regret to say that in my opinion there should be no difficulty in enforcing the terms of the will. I’m really very sorry.’

2

Helen Gradley had lost the key to her own front door. Standing on the step outside, she rummaged uselessly through the rubbish in her handbag and began to cry.

‘Don’t worry, Mum,’ said Josephine. ‘I’ve got it.’

On the long drive home Helen’s shock had dissolved repeatedly into tears, but the hard centre of her pain had, if anything, grown. Since the divorce, she had never quite brought herself to believe in the permanence of her poverty. Though she had been in work, she was a poor housekeeper, prone to surges of extravagance she could ill afford. A few years back, she was diagnosed as suffering from repetitive stress injury caused by poor typing posture, and she had invalided herself from the workforce with a speed and decisiveness none of her kids had been able to overcome. On hearing the news of her ex-husband’s death, she had been openly delighted. ‘At least his money will be of some use now,’ she’d said. The will devastated her. Her worn carpets, her threadbare curtains, her hopeless dreams of a better life were all here to stay. The cavalry wasn’t coming. Rescue was impossible.

Josephine unlocked the door, took her mum upstairs to bed, and left her there with a hot-water bottle and a promise to look in soon. The kids needed to speak openly with each other and weren’t able to do so in their mother’s grief-stricken presence.

By the time Josephine emerged, her three brothers were sitting at the kitchen table round a pot of tea. Zachary, named after his grandfather, but always known simply as Zack, had arrived that morning with a bottle of champagne, expecting to celebrate later, but nobody felt like it now. With their mother quiet, they could turn at last to the thing on all their minds.

‘Poor Mum,’ said Josie. ‘It’s awful for her. She’d so relied on the will to make everything better.’

‘Don’t be silly, Josie. It’s awful for all of us. The old bastard’s probably laughing himself sick,’ said Matthew. He had sympathy for his mother, but his sympathy for himself was very much greater. Matthew’s broad, good-looking face was puckered up into a boyish scowl. His cupid’s-bow mouth pouted in an eight-year-old’s sulk.

‘He’s not an old bastard. He’s our dead father,’ said Josephine.

‘Of course he’s our father,’ said Matthew. ‘None of us wished him dead and all of us would bring him back if we could. But we all know that he was a bastard when alive, and he certainly acted the bastard in his death. And face it. He’s succeeded. He’s screwed up my life. He’s screwed up your life. He’s screwed things up for all of us, not just Mum.’

‘You mean we’ll all have to earn a living like every other person in the world.’ Josephine’s voice was high and tense. She knew Matthew spoke the truth, yet she thought it wrong to speak ill of their dead father only days after laying him in his grave. And, despite everything, in his own infuriating way, he had loved them.

‘Oh come on, Josie,’ said Matthew, unable to keep his voice from whining. ‘It’s like being imprisoned. None of us has ever really expected to earn our livings, and now we’re going to be locked up like everyone else in tedious jobs, suits, mortgages, pension plans, and all the rest of it. It’s a life sentence.’

‘You’ve got a job with that American investment bank, Madison, haven’t you? That’s not so bad.’

‘It’s not a proper job, just a summer job. I need to finish my economics degree before I look for anything permanent. And Madison won’t have me back. I only took the job because Dad made me, and I haven’t done a stroke of work since arriving.’

‘You’re talented enough –’

‘Of course I’ll find something eventually, but that’s not what I expected, or any of us. It’s a life sentence, Josie, and it’s what that bastard wanted.’

Tears rose to Matthew’s eyes as he spoke. He had a vision of his future as it should have been – leisured, pleasured and easy – and of his future as it now was: leaden, penniless and hard. He’d toil away for forty years and his reward would be this: that he’d have enough cash to avoid cold and hunger in his old age. George saw Matthew’s tears and moved the conversation forwards, giving his brother the opportunity to wipe his eyes with the back of his hand.

‘You’re right,’ grunted George. ‘But I’m worse off. I’ve got seven lousy O-Levels. I was chucked out of school. I’ve never done a day’s work in my life. I’ve got a couple of thousand quid in my current account, I’ve got my car, and that’s it. My flat’s rented. If I look for a job, I’ll be lucky to get something stacking shelves.’

He wasn’t exaggerating. George had been expelled from Sedbergh for holding a champagne party for a dozen friends, mostly female, in his housemaster’s sitting room. His housemaster had arrived back early from a weekend away to find the music blaring, the lights blazing, and champagne ringmarks all over the fine antiques it had been his life’s passion to collect. George’s education had finished that very night and, without regrets, he’d plunged straight into the life of the international playboy. He mixed with the young, rich and idle from Europe and the States, rotating between the ski slopes of Gstaad, the yacht clubs of the Riviera, the grouse moors of Scotland, and the glittering parties of London, Paris and New York. The one talent that George had developed to the full was getting money out of his father. For some reason, Bernard Gradley paid up for George’s extravagances with a freedom none of the others enjoyed. The others put it down to their physical similarity: the same heavy build, the same ginger hair and piggy eyes. George himself didn’t bother to question his father’s generosity. He just took the money, endured the criticism, and took off for the next party.

‘Can’t we get the will overturned or something?’ he added. ‘I mean there must be a law against this kind of thing.’

‘Oh grow up,’ snapped Zack. ‘Of course there isn’t a law against it. It was Dad’s money and he’s allowed to give it to whoever he wants. We can get a lawyer to look at the will, but it’s bound to be watertight. Dad wouldn’t screw up something like that. He was a bastard, but he was a competent bastard.’

Zack scowled, dark and intense, silencing the room. Brilliant, abrasive and arrogant, he had always been the boys’ natural leader, despite George’s three year advantage in age, and Zack’s assessment carried complete authority.

‘At least you’ve got a proper job,’ sulked Matthew.

This was true up to a point. Zack had gone to Oxford to study law, but had grown quickly bored and switched to philosophy. The move had enraged his father. ‘You show me somebody who’s made any money studying the meaning of life and I’ll sell him my business for a tenner,’ he roared, and obstructed Zack at every turn. But Zack could be as stubborn as his father and, having completed his degree with flying colours, went on to pursue a doctorate in a particularly obscure area of philosophy. Unfortunately, just as he was close to finishing his thesis, some new work published in the United States seemed to overturn the conclusion he was trying to prove, and he abandoned his work in a fit of annoyance.

At his dad’s insistence, he’d looked for a job and reluctantly signed up with a big London accountancy firm. He’d been there for four months and hated every minute. A week ago, a simmering quarrel with a senior partner exploded into a major row and Zack fully expected to be fired upon his return to work.

Zack shrugged. ‘I may have a job, but that’s the point. I don’t want a job. I want to be rich enough not to need one. Same as you.’

Matthew reached for the teapot and poured himself tea. He swigged it and breathed out with a sigh. ‘Let’s have a minute’s silence out of respect for the poor sods in hell who’ll have to put up with Dad for the next million billion years.’

‘Matthew! Honestly!’ exclaimed Josephine, shocked.

‘Hear, hear,’ said George, lifting his mug in a mock toast. ‘Here’s to the late and unlamented Bernard Gradley. May he enjoy as much kindness and generosity in the life hereafter as he showered upon one and all in his time on earth.’

Matthew and George looked at Zack for his support. Zack was the leader and the two brothers needed him. Zack held their gaze in agonising silence. Nothing in his face moved. The dark pools of his eyes had narrowed to slots, guarding the secrets within. Matthew and George searched his expression for an answer but found nothing.

‘Well?’ asked Matthew at length, the whine returning to his voice. George was calmer, but equally intent, perhaps already guessing the turn Zack’s thoughts had taken.

‘Well what?’ replied Zack, with a slight tremor. He slowly rose, walked to the fridge and took out the champagne. He uncorked the bottle and carefully poured himself a glass. ‘I don’t know about you guys, but I’m quite happy.’

‘Happy? How can you be happy?’ Matthew and George spoke as one.

‘Well, the most I’d been expecting was a quarter of Dad’s fortune. Today I’ve discovered I can have all of it.’

‘What the hell do you mean?’

‘Just what I say,’ said Zack calmly. ‘I’ll make a million. In three years. Then I’ll have everything. I couldn’t have hoped for more.’

‘How are you going to make the money?’

‘I don’t know yet. But I will. And in three years’ time, I’ll be very rich indeed.’

Matthew and George were stunned. If Zack said he would do something they both believed he’d do it. But Zack said nothing about sharing the money out, and neither of his brothers wanted to bet a whole lot on his generosity.

Matthew’s boyish features gathered in a frown. Zack might be the brilliant one, but Matthew was deeply competitive. He could seldom resist a challenge, and on this occasion he wasn’t going to try.

‘You may make a million, Zack. But I’ll make more. I’ll beat you to Dad’s money. I’ll get it. Not you.’

The two brothers, one dark and angular, the other broad and fair, gazed at each other like gladiators before bloodshed. George spread his hands in despair.

‘You’ll share out the money, guys, won’t you? I mean whoever wins. I’m sure you will.’

Neither Zack nor Matthew spoke, but their faces gave George his answer. If he wanted his father’s cash, there was only one way to get it.

‘Oh Jesus,’ he said. ‘I don’t believe it. Alright. I’ll have to make my million too, I suppose. Oh, Jesus.’

‘You babies,’ said Josephine. ‘You stupid babies.’

Upstairs Helen Gradley began to cry again in deep sobs that racked the little house.

Summer 1998
1

As morning broke over London four young people awoke to face the day.

First was Matthew, who, as on so many mornings, awoke to find himself in a bed not his own. Beside him there slept an attractive girl, naked. He brushed her hair away from her face. Alison? Amanda? No, Amelia. He’d met her at a party the night before and they’d left together. She was pretty but mediocre in bed, he remembered. No, that was unfair. It was Matthew who’d been off form. The will had got to him, as had Zack’s aggressive response. Amelia had been just fine, and her skin looked lovely in the morning light. Matthew tweaked the duvet up over her bare shoulder and crept out of bed.

He dressed silently in front of the mirror. His light fluffy hair needed to be damped and combed, but he didn’t want to run the bathroom taps in case he woke the sleeper. He patted his hair ineffectually into place. He looked like a stubbly choirboy with untidy hair. Matthew grimaced at his reflection but it didn’t help. It just made him look like a sulky choirboy.

He crept downstairs and found a bit of paper and a pen. He searched a bit further and found an envelope in the dustbin addressed to Miss Amelia Somebody-or-other. Good. Amelia, then, not Amanda.

‘Dear Amelia,’ he wrote. ‘Thank you for a wonderful night last night. I thought you were absolutely terrific. Sorry I had to rush off this morning – urgent business elsewhere, and I didn’t want to wake you. All the very best, Matthew.’

He was practised in such notes and had stopped signing off with ‘love from’ or ‘we must get together again’. His one-night stands were mostly with partners who were no more looking for true love than he was, but on occasion he had been caught out and the word ‘love’ had come back to haunt him. So now he aimed to be generous, warm-hearted but final. As far as he could remember, Amelia wouldn’t have a problem with that, but in any case she didn’t have his phone number. He closed the front door quietly and walked across the park towards his Chelsea flat.

Once there, he showered properly and dressed again with care. He was a good-looking chap, Matthew, and fussy as a showgirl over his appearance. He got himself some coffee, a pad of paper and a pen. Across the top of the page he wrote in block capitals: ‘Plan: One million pounds in three years.’ He underlined it.

Then he paused. He wasn’t going to list all the things he was missing, he believed in a positive approach. Underneath his heading he wrote, ‘Assets: temporary job on Madison trading floor.’ Then he was stuck. He had no money, no qualifications, and his job was already half-lost. He thought for a long time.

At school he had always been Zack’s younger brother. Zack had seldom appeared to work, but ended up with a string of A grades and a scholarship to Oxford. Matthew had worked hard, his exam results were peppered with B grades and worse, and his teachers thought him lucky to have won his place at Cambridge. Never once had Zack made things easier by showing humility or understanding. Matthew had a point to prove, and prove it he would.

His coffee went cold. He got himself another and thought some more. Eventually, he picked up his pen again and wrote: ‘Plan A: Get a permanent job at Madison. Become the best trader ever to hit the trading floor. Get a million pounds in bonuses – after tax!! Comment: very hard to achieve but worth a try.’

Then shaking his head, he continued: ‘Plan B: Get a permanent job at Madison. Become a very skilful trader. Get some big bonuses. Then –’ But he broke off. He knew what he had in mind but it would be foolish to put it into writing. It was going to be a challenging three years.

2

Just as Matthew was throwing away his sheet of paper, his elder brother Zack was at the office getting one out. He’d been happy enough to fling down a challenge to his brothers yesterday, but this morning it didn’t seem so smart. A week earlier Zack had told his senior audit partner to shove his head somewhere it would neither reach nor fit, there to entertain himself by auditing his kidneys. Predictably, the partner had stormed off, put in a request for Zack’s dismissal, and the firm’s disciplinary machinery ground into action. The final review meeting was tomorrow and it was a near certainty that Zack would get the sack.

Accountants don’t become millionaires. They may, of course, if they work hard, do well, and save prudently, but not in three years. Not aged twenty-six. On the other hand, ex-philosophy students with no job, no references, and no capital aren’t exactly in the millionaire bracket themselves. Zack needed a job – a proper job – but to do that he needed not to be fired. Scowling and gritting his teeth, he wrote out a grovelling letter of apology. Zack blamed ‘my extreme grief following the death of my father’ and begged ‘to be given a second chance to show my deep commitment to the firm’.

Zack tucked the letter into an envelope, addressed it, then pretended to spit on it. Along with tact, modesty, patience, kindness and a few other virtues, the art of apology was one Zack had yet to master. He dumped the envelope into the internal mail system and snapped at a secretary to check it was collected and delivered. That was that. No more to be done on that front.

Meantime, there was a larger problem to be solved. How was Zack to make his million? Right now he couldn’t say, but there was only one place to try: the City of London, one of the world’s great financial centres, and home to more banks than any other city in the world. But how to gain entry? His accountancy firm would give him a terrible reference, and he had nothing else to show except a failed doctorate and a useless philosophy degree. Good banks don’t hire losers.

Zack scowled again, adding to the natural intensity of his narrow face. Matthew was the best looking of the three brothers, but many women found Zack’s darkly brooding looks irresistible. Matthew was always baffled that Zack didn’t appear to notice, let alone take proper advantage, his only serious romance to date being a long and stormy one with a girl at college. Zack picked up the phone and dialled an Oxford number.

‘Ichabod Bell speaking.’

‘Ichabod, it’s Zack. Zack Gradley.’

‘Zack, my boy, nice to hear from you.’ Zack’s old philosophy tutor was genuinely enthusiastic. ‘What can I do for you? Are you coming back to finish your doctorate? I can’t believe you’re going to be a godforsaken accountant all your life.’

‘No, actually, I wanted to ask a favour.’ And Zack explained what was on his mind.

Ichabod Bell thought for a moment in silence, then said, ‘Come to dinner in two weeks. College High Table. There’s someone I’d like you to meet.’

‘Who?’

‘Jolly good. Saturday, in two weeks, then. Seven thirty for eight. Look forward to it.’

‘Who am I meeting?’

‘Oh, you’ll love him. Give you a chance to catch up on all your rowing gossip. Glittering mornings on the water, the thrill of the race, all that stuff.’

‘Ichabod, you know perfectly well I’ve never sat in a rowing boat in my life.’

‘Nonsense, Zack, you’ve been a lifelong fan of the sport. Nobody quite like you for memorising race statistics and all that rubbish. Just come to dinner.’

And he rang off. Zack had no idea what Bell was planning. All he knew was that he had two weeks to become expert in the noble sport of rowing.

3

George was woken shortly before midday by a loud thumping. He tried ignoring it but the noise wouldn’t go away. He pulled on a dressing gown and went to the door.

A group of beautiful young people stood in the hall outside. Beautifully dressed, beautifully tanned, slim, athletic and many-accented, they were among the wealthiest, laziest, most easily bored young people in Europe, George’s friends of the last eleven years. A petite, bird-like French girl headed the deputation.

‘Georges!’ she exclaimed, using the French pronunciation of his name. ‘You aren’t even up and we’re already late. You need to be ready this moment or we’ll miss the races. Papa’s horse is running at two-thirty, remember.’

‘Oh God, Kiki. Is it Deauville today? I’d completely forgotten.’

In his previous life four centuries ago – or was it only four days? – George had suggested chartering a plane to take them to the races at the French casino town of Deauville. The plane had been due to leave at midday, so they were already holding it up and incurring extra charges.

‘But Georges, of course it is Deauville today. And we are due at the casino this evening. You can’t have forgotten because, look, I have remembered, and I have even got up early, and I never get up early and I never remember anything, so you must have remembered, except you haven’t.’

Kiki’s illogical proof tumbled out in a single breathless flurry. Her dark brown hair fell down her slim neck in artful wisps, positively inviting male touch. She wasn’t beautiful, Kiki, but she was pretty.

And she spoke the truth. It was a minor miracle that she had remembered an appointment and been ready on time, something George had never known before. Damn! He fancied Kiki desperately and had arranged the trip mostly to be with her. If she had got herself ready, did that mean she returned his affection? Possibly, possibly not. But if he jumped on the plane to Deauville he could hardly get out of paying his share, and the last thing he needed was an evening of champagne and roulette at five hundred francs a chip.

‘Kiki, I’m so sorry. I’ve been terribly ill. Stomach upset. I don’t think I’m up to flying. You go on anyway. I’ll come another time.’

‘Oh, poor Georges! You don’t look well at all. Very pale and your hair is all stuck down one way and sticking up the other way. You should be in bed.’

‘I was in bed.’

George didn’t look ill, or at least no iller than normal. Of the four kids, he’d drawn the short straw in the genetic sweepstakes and ended up every inch his father’s son. He had Bernard Gradley’s pale English skin, his piggy little eyes, his stockiness, his uncontrollable ginger hair. The sick-as-a-dog look came naturally.

‘Well you must go straight back and eat a lot of chicken broth.’

‘OK, Kiki. Have a good time.’

Kiki left in a swirl of the young and beautiful. A handsome young man, playboy son of an Italian billionaire, positioned himself next to her as they left. George crawled back into bed, pulled the covers over his head and groaned.

4

And as George lay in bed groaning, Josephine was making grunting sounds of her own. She had rummaged round in the attic of her mother’s Kilburn house and found something she’d remembered playing with as a child. She grunted as she lugged the heavy typewriter downstairs into the kitchen. It weighed a ton and the attic had covered her in dust.

Never mind. There are worse things in life than dust. She sat down at the ancient keyboard and opened a battered textbook. ‘ASDF are the home keys for the left hand.’ She spread her fingertips over the dusty keys, thumbs resting lightly on the space bar. It’s a new feeling, but one she’ll need to get used to. She can forget about A Levels. She can forget about Oxbridge.

It is Wednesday 15 July 1998. There are three years less one day to go until Bernard Gradley’s deadline: 1095 days.

5

Thursday morning. The red lights of digital clocks display the times around the world’s financial centres. News messages roll incessantly across a dot matrix wall panel while the glow from banks of computer screens fights back the dark. Every now and then a phone rings briefly in the silence. But apart from a few early-morning cleaners there is no one here to check the screens or answer the phones. No one except Matthew. It is five fifteen am.

Matthew was attached to a group of four traders dealing in the smaller European currencies: the Swiss franc, the lira, the Dutch guilder, the Swedish krona, the peseta, a few others. Between them his four traders mustered six passports, thirteen languages, and a shared passion for dealing.

Matthew’s job was to support the group in any way it wanted. He was meant to forage for information, calculate spreadsheets, run errands, and get the coffees. So far the only job he’d done at all was getting the coffees. He couldn’t stand the trashy coffees from the vending machines, so four times a day he went to the Blue Mountain Coffee Company’s boutique to get the world’s most heavenly cappuccinos at £1.80 a cup. If it weren’t for this unaccustomed service, the traders would have had Matthew fired weeks before. As it was, they rated his survival chances at just about zero. As Luigi Cuneberti, the Swiss-Italian who traded Swiss francs and lire, put it: ‘Matteo, we give you a job when Italy has paid its national debt and the lira is worth more than the dollar.’

That needed to change.

All banks have the same information from Reuters, Bloomberg, Telerate. A million computer screens can be accessed with a few key strokes. Data is updated every second, news reported as it happens. It’s not information that makes the difference but judgement. And judgement requires the right facts in the right format at the right time.

Matthew set to work. He scrolled through the overnight news stories on Reuters, printed off the full list of headlines plus the handful of stories he thought important. Next, he called the bank’s main Far Eastern offices: Tokyo, Hong Kong, Singapore, Sydney. Some markets were quiet, others not. After every call, he made detailed notes.

Then, he went out on to the street to an international paper stand, where he bought eight European newspapers plus the European edition of the Wall Street Journal. He wasn’t fluent in any language other than English, but he had spent enough time skiing in Courcheval and Zermatt, enough time in the bars of Tuscany and the beaches of Mallorca, and enough time with girls in all these places to get the gist of what he read. He made clippings of the articles he thought important, and added them to his growing stack.

He looked at his watch. Six forty-five am. He had more to do, but was out of time. He collected up his work and ran it through the copier five times: once for each of his traders, once for himself.

As the pages copied, Matthew realised three things.

First, he had absorbed a surprising amount since being at the bank, despite his weeks of indolence. Second, there was an almost infinite amount of research he could do. Today’s effort was only a start. And third, he had eight weeks of his summer job remaining. At the end of those weeks, he had to convince Madison not just to hire him, but to hire him right away without waiting for him to complete his degree. That was unheard of. But if Madison turned him down and forced him to return to Cambridge in October, he’d have failed to meet his father’s goal before he’d even started.

6

Through the glass doors at the end of the room, Luigi came in. He exchanged insults with the Italians working in fixed income and blew a kiss at a secretary he was trying to seduce. Then he arrived at his desk, banged down a coffee and bagel, and stared at Matthew.

‘Santa Maria!’ said Luigi. ‘You have the time wrong, my friend, no? Or a brain disease? It is serious, I hope? Hey, what is this?’ Luigi held the neatly stacked papers on his desk at arms’ length.

‘It looks like work. It smells like work,’ he said, sniffing, ‘but, there is nobody here except Matteo.’ Luigi’s face grew sombre. He swept some clutter off his desk and knelt on it. He raised his eyes to heaven and added, ‘Grazie a Dio! A miracle has happened and I am unworthy.’ He got back to his feet, scanning the package more seriously now.

‘You’ve spoken with Tokyo about the trade surplus overshoot?’

‘Yes,’ said Matthew. ‘The figures look enormous and are well above the consensus, but the Tokyo market seems to have shrugged it off. Our economist out there tells me that if you dig into the data, it’s mostly one-off items. There’s a reasonable summary in the Wall Street Journal actually.’

Luigi stared at Matthew, then flipped through his package to the article which was highlighted. His eyes scanned it briefly.

‘Hmm. So no issue then.’

Matthew hesitated a moment. ‘I’m not sure that’s right,’ he said. ‘If I made out the headlines properly, I think the Italian press is a bit more excitable.’

Luigi followed his train of thought. It wasn’t the data itself which mattered, it was other people’s interpretation of it. If Italian investors got the wrong end of the stick because of bad reporting, then they might misjudge their trading strategy until they wised up. Luigi turned to the articles from the Italian press. Again, he scanned the articles in a few seconds.

‘Interesting. I know the Banca di Roma needs to close out a short yen position at the moment. Be interesting to see how they react.’ Luigi meant that the Banca di Roma needed to buy some yen. If it thought the price of yen was going to soar, they’d want to buy quickly before the price had moved.

Luigi was a good trader. He scanned the rest of the documents and picked up his phone. He wouldn’t put it down for more than a few minutes until the end of the day. Right now, he was checking facts, sensing attitudes, exchanging banter with traders and investors, trying to sense the mood of the market. One idea always leads to a dozen others, and when Luigi picked up an interesting lead, he pursued it. He said not another word to Matthew.

The market was in full swing by eight thirty by which time the other traders – Anders, Cristina, and Jean-François – were in and busy. Each of them reacted the way Luigi had to the new-look Matthew. But they were restrained in their praise, waiting to see how long his new work ethic would last.

Luigi called the Banca di Roma, letting the conversation play from his speakerphone. The two men bantered briefly before switching to business.

‘Hey, you better be getting out of that giant short position you’ve got on the yen. Did you see the trade numbers? You’re going to get toasted today unless some kindly person takes you out of it.’

‘Bullshit, Luigi,’ said the Banca di Roma guy. ‘We couldn’t care less about the yen. We don’t have a short position and anyway a month’s data is neither here nor there. The Tokyo market didn’t move much.’

This already told Luigi a lot. If Banca di Roma really didn’t care what happened to the yen, their trader wouldn’t have prompted Luigi to keep the discussion going. Luigi now had a choice. He hesitated so briefly that Matthew, who was following the conversation intently, only just noticed.

‘Amico mio,’ said Luigi, ‘the market didn’t move because the data was bullshit.’ He quickly summarised the reasons why the yen hadn’t moved. ‘If you try to get out of your position too quickly, my friends in the market here will stiff you. You do need to close out your position because there are more big numbers coming out in Tokyo and Rome next week and God knows where rates will be by Friday. But you need to go slowly and use your head.’

The Banca di Roma guy almost audibly relaxed. He asked a couple more questions about last night’s number and then a whole lot more about how to exit his position, which was in fact very large. Luigi talked him through it and promised to stay in touch through the day. Then a call came in on another line and Luigi hung up to take it.

Matthew spent the day doing what he could to sift out the nuggets which mattered from the flood of information which roared through the bank. As he picked them out, he made sure that his increasingly frenzied team of traders got them quickly and clearly. He worked so intently that it had got to eleven thirty without him going out for the coffees. When Luigi noticed, he picked his half-eaten bagel from the dustbin and threw it accurately at Matthew’s head.

‘You’re still only here for the coffees.’

At five thirty that afternoon the market fell quiet. The frenzy which had raged across London for nine hours had moved on to New York. New York would pass the baton to Chicago and San Francisco. Then the West Coast would hand the baton on to Tokyo and just a little later to Hong Kong and Singapore. The Asians kept long and lonely watch as the sun rolled over the endless miles until once again European traders woke up to play the everlasting game.

Matthew helped his traders tidy up after the day, making sure each trade was properly documented with a complete and legible trading note. Thanks to his help, Matthew’s team finished its paperwork fifteen minutes after the close of the market. All around other traders were cursing and fidgeting as they grappled with the unwelcome slips of paper.

Luigi had to rush off to a dinner date, or so he said. The crude comments thrown at him by Anders and Cristina suggested that anything he wanted to do in the hour and a half before dinner time was likely to be done lying down, and not by himself. Matthew grabbed Luigi before he left.

‘I’d like to ask you a question. Why didn’t you stiff the Banca di Roma guy earlier on today? I could see he’d have let you if you’d wanted to.’

‘Matteo, Matteo,’ said Luigi, patting his cheek, ‘if he wanted to get out of his position quickly, he would have tried to spread his trades among as many banks as possible. We’d all have stiffed him, but he’d have felt better about it that way. As it was, he trusted me. I did maybe sixty percent of his trades today at a rate which was fair to me and fair to him. He is grateful to me because he was scared this morning and I didn’t shit on him when I could have done. The Banca di Roma does a lot of business, and right now they love me. Signor Matteo, you can make a lot of money by stiffing people, but you only make it once. Give your clients a good service and they come back.’

Luigi started to walk off to his ‘dinner date’, then turned and added with a wink, ‘And you never know. If you stiff even your best clients perhaps once a year, they are probably too stupid to notice.’

7

Ichabod Bell greeted Zack with a glass of sherry.

‘Decided to drop all that tripe about money, I take it. Damned if I can name a single ancient Greek millionaire, but I can think of a good few philosophers whose credit is still good today. Anyway, blast you, you’re nowhere near good enough to make the grade. You want to be an accountant, right? I forget. No, silly me. Too exciting. An actuary. Much better. Less stressful. Very reliable pension arrangements. How’s your rowing?’

‘I’ve studied nothing else for two weeks. Am I allowed to know why?’

Ichabod ignored him.

‘Gong’s already sounded. Let’s go in to dinner. Mind you taste the wine. Tonight’s a fund-raiser and the Dean’s serving only the best.’

Upstairs in the dining hall, panelled in six-hundred-year-old oak, Zack found his place in between a history lecturer he had liked when a student, and a Sir Robert Grossman, whose name rang a bell but nothing more. Once everyone was seated, the chaplain rose.

‘Surgete,’ he said in Latin, indicating with his hands that the company should rise for grace.

Everybody did so except for Ichabod, a fierce atheist. A long Latin grace followed. Zack took the opportunity, as did most others, to squint downwards at the menu card on his plate. Trout, beef, chocolate mousse, cheese. The ingredients would be good enough, but Zack knew that the college kitchens were of the traditional British school. The chef’s idea of a luxurious gravy was to stir a bit of wine in with the stock granules. Vegetables would be boiled into surrender, the beef roasted into submission. At least the wine would be first-rate.

The first two courses passed in agreeable banter with the history lecturer, who brought Zack up-to-date on college politics and scandal. As the plates were being cleared, Zack turned to the man on his left, Grossman, who had also turned.

‘Well, young man, are you enjoying the wine?’

Zack hated nothing more than a patronising old fool, but tonight he was on his best behaviour.

‘The wine’s great,’ he said. Then, a snippet from his two weeks’ research suddenly falling like a silver penny into his lap, he added: ‘Do I remember you used to row for the college eight?’

Grossman was instantly transfixed.

‘Yes, indeed! Captained it, actually. We had a damn good season and damn near went Head of the River. You’re a rower are you? Best sport in the world, I always say. Clever of you to remember my name. Still, I suppose I did have quite a reputation in my day.’

Rowing was the great love of Grossman’s life. At Oxford he’d been a bit too dumb to make it academically and a bit too ugly to have much luck romantically. In a bright and talented world, Grossman felt marooned. Then he discovered rowing. Rowing gave him friends and an activity at which he excelled. In his memory at least, his time at Oxford had been a succession of bright mornings and golden afternoons, racing triumphs and disasters, drinking feats, puking and songs.

Zack left his previous conversation partner dangling as Grossman rattled away like a racing commentator. He and Zack talked rowing right through to the end of dinner, comparing techniques, race statistics, competitors, anecdotes. Zack boasted a photographic memory, and his research bore up easily under the barrage. Pudding, cheese, wines and port passed in an increasingly alcoholic haze. Rowers, it seemed, were heavy drinkers.

When the time came to move downstairs for the cigars and more drinks, the Dean appeared silently at Grossman’s elbow. Time for a chat about leaking roofs and vacant fellowships. Grossman understood the hint, and, firing a few last sentences at Zack, walked off in the Dean’s wake. Zack grabbed Ichabod as they went downstairs.

‘OK. I’ve talked rowing for two hours without a break and I still don’t know why. Who is Grossman, anyway? And I warn you, I’m three quarters dead with boredom.’

Ichabod grinned. ‘I knew you’d love him.’

Back in the senior common room they helped themselves to cigars and more alcohol. Zack’s head was spinning. He was glugging down wines worth twenty pounds a glass, enjoying them but not tasting them.

‘Grossman is your future employer,’ said Ichabod. ‘Deputy Chief Executive at Coburg’s, the merchant bank. A fading light there, but still a big hitter. Worst rowing bore I’ve ever met, and I’ve met a few. I’ll never understand how second-raters get to the top in business. It must be surprisingly easy.’

Zack looked at the gentle don in his corduroy jacket. Bell’s financial acumen stretched no further than remembering (most of the time) where he’d left his wallet. It was hard to picture him as an international mogul. The pair chatted a little longer. Then the Dean came into the common room with Grossman in tow. The Dean looked serious, while Grossman beamed in delight. The Dean had the happy gift of being able to take a very large cheque from people and leave them feeling like they’d won the lottery.

Ichabod left Zack and walked over to Grossman. Zack felt two pairs of eyes on him and he buried himself in conversation with his historian friend. Later, as dons and guests began to disperse into the warm summer night, Ichabod and Grossman, who was obviously the worse for drink, approached Zack.

‘You’re heading off to London, aren’t you, Zack? Perhaps Sir Robert could give you a lift?’

Grossman and Zack compared addresses and found they lived only three blocks from each other. The deal was swiftly done and Zack soon found himself sliding out of Oxford in the banker’s chauffeur-driven BMW. If possible, Grossman drunk was more boring than Grossman merely tipsy, and Zack had to endure another barrage of anecdotes, most of them missing a punch line and many of which he’d already heard at dinner. At one point, Zack managed, as it were, to put his oar in, mentioning that he was looking for a job in corporate finance, preferably with a good British bank.

Grossman looked at the younger man.

‘Corporate finance, eh? You’re the sort of fellow we’re always on the lookout for. I’m at Coburg’s, you know. Deputy Chief Executive.’

Zack tried to look surprised.

‘Coburg’s? Really? I’ve always so admired the bank. I was hoping …’

‘Hoping to join, eh? Well, come in for an interview. I’m sure you’ll do well.’ Grossman said, slurring his words. ‘I’m a sharp judge of character, y’know, and I’ve had my eye on you this evening.’ Zack had watched Grossman drink the best part of three bottles of wine at dinner, not to mention sherry before and port after, and had listened to him talk virtually non-stop. What Grossman was like when he didn’t have his eye on someone, Zack couldn’t imagine. ‘Besides,’ added Grossman, ‘that man Bell with the funny name –’

‘Ichabod. Ichabod Bell.’

‘Quite right. Itchy-dog Bell. Fellow told me you were one of his best ever students. I wasn’t surprised. Not a bit. I could tell you had a good head on you. Anyway, come in to Coburg’s for an interview. I’ll tell ’em to look out for you.’

And so he did. When Zack called Coburg’s, the man from personnel said, ‘Ah, yes, Grossman’s friend,’ and scheduled a day of interviews for Zack then and there. The interviews were strange, dream-like affairs. The interviewers went through the motions, but both sides knew that the important thing had already been decided. Two weeks following dinner with Grossman, Zack received an offer of employment. The post paid twenty-seven thousand pounds per annum plus a January bonus. Peanuts, of course. Less than the rent on his flat. But that wasn’t the point.

The point was he’d done it. He’d been admitted. He was a season ticket holder to the City of London, the enchanted forest where money really does grow on trees.

8

‘D’you know what Josie wants to talk about?’ asked Matthew.

‘Not me,’ said Zack. ‘Probably just wants to escape Mum for the evening. I’d go nuts in that grotty little house with Mum crying away all the time.’

‘Poor Mum. She certainly took the will terribly hard. I should visit her, but I’m working all hours at the moment.’

‘Mmm,’ said Zack, who was in between finishing at his accountancy firm and starting at Coburg’s. Despite his leisure time, he hadn’t called on his ailing mother. A silence began to grow, filled only by the rumble of traffic from Camden High Street. ‘Where’s George, d’you know?’ he said, changing the subject.

‘No, no one knows. Josie left loads of messages at his flat, but he’s either not there or not responding.’

‘I wonder what he’s up to. He’s going to have a bit of a job financing his lifestyle now.’

That was true enough. George’s playboy life had been paid for by huge dollops of cash from their father. No more cash, no more jet-setting.

‘You never know,’ said Matthew. ‘He’s probably persuaded a billionaire friend of his to give him a couple of million to tide him over. He was always good at getting cash out of Dad. Better than us.’

Zack shrugged. ‘I don’t think we need worry. George would get through a million in a matter of months.’

Both men laughed. They weren’t worried about George getting his million. Zack was the cleverest of the brothers, Matthew the most determined. George wasn’t smart and he hated work. Both brothers had always vaguely resented the ease with which George had taken cash from their father, but now it was payback time. Zack knew that Matthew was his only serious rival, and he was Matthew’s. The two men looked at each other warily. They were tense, defensive, nervous.

When the doorbell rang, Zack stood up quickly. ‘That’ll be her now. If you get the door, I’ll get her a drink.’

Matthew opened the door and found a stranger. It was Josephine alright, but as he’d never seen her. She wore a navy blue skirt with a white cotton blouse. A single gold chain was her only jewellery. Her long, dark, naturally curly hair was pulled back and pinned up. A few weeks before, Josephine had been a slim, pretty, lively girl with a passion for dance and parties. Today, she was professional, competent, unobtrusive. For maybe the first time, her mouth was tucked down, not up, at the corners.

‘Jesus Christ, Josie,’ murmured Matthew. ‘So soon?’

‘Yes, I was lucky. I got a last minute place at the Cavendish Secretarial School and I’ve been there a week now. It’s going OK.’

‘And this stuff – from M & S, I suppose?’

‘Yes. I’d never realised how much £500 could buy. I’m all set up now as you see.’

She gave a half-twirl as though to show off a party frock, but her heart wasn’t in it.

‘It’s not right, Josie. It’s not right.’

She looked away, not wanting to let Matthew see her quivering eyes.

‘I haven’t many options, have I? Besides, it’s how most girls my age get by.’

Matthew raised his arm, offering her a cuddle, but she gently pushed it away. She’d cry if he cuddled her and she wasn’t here to cry. Once inside, Josephine took a tumbler of gin and tonic with a sigh of relief. She stretched out her legs on Zack’s gleaming glass coffee table, uncomfortable beneath her brother’s dark unemotional scrutiny.

‘M & S, huh?’

‘That’s right.’

Zack just nodded. Josie saw his eyes pass the information to his brain, which stored the fact as just another item to be memorised and filed. He cut to the chase.

‘Well, Josie, are you going to reveal why you’ve got us together or shall we guess?’

‘I don’t think it should be all that hard to guess,’ she said, keeping her voice steady and reasonable. ‘Mummy’s shocked, she’s depressed. Even after a month, she’s showing no sign of improvement. I think we need to do something.’

‘She needs to get out,’ said Zack. ‘Get a job.’

‘She can’t. She can’t type any more, and secretarial work is all she’ll do.’

‘Oh, come on. We all know she could type if she wanted. She could do anything if she just pulled herself together.’

‘Zack! She’s in a bad way. She’s finding things hard.’

‘What are you suggesting? We take it in turns to sing her lullabies?’

Josie’s temper began to rise despite herself, despite her foreknowledge that Zack would be difficult.

‘I’m saying that she needs help. From all of us. Now.’

Zack snorted and threw himself back in his chair, leaving it to Matthew to ask more gently, ‘What? What did you have in mind?’

‘Mum had relied on the will to make her comfortable. Dad failed her, but we don’t have to. We can all get jobs. I’m hoping to find work as soon as I finish my course. We can all put as much as we can towards a regular income for Mum, maybe club together to get her somewhere decent to live. She’s never liked it where she is now.’

‘She’s perfectly capable of going out to work herself,’ snapped Zack.

‘How would you know? When did you last see her?’

Matthew once again sought to make peace.

‘Have you thought about taking her to the doctor’s? Trying her out on antidepressants? She probably just needs snapping out of it.’

‘I have taken her to the doctor’s, yes,’ said Josie, still taut. ‘He spent three minutes with her, then wrote out a prescription for Prozac, which stopped her from getting to sleep, then gave her nightmares. If you want her to see another doctor, then it’s a private specialist she needs, paid for by us.’

Matthew lapsed into silence. He didn’t like the thought of leaving his mum without help, but he didn’t like the idea of offering his money before Zack had offered any of his. Zack lay slumped in his chair, swilling his whisky round his tumbler, then sat forward, alert again.

‘No,’ he said.

‘No? What do you mean, no?’

‘No, Josie. I’ve got three years to make a million pounds. I’m not going to work my knackers off only to miss the target by a few quid at the end, because Mum was too lazy to go out to work for herself.’

‘It’s not laziness!’

‘What else do you call it? The moment you start giving in to these sort of people, they learn to do less and less.’

‘These sort of people, Zack? She’s –’

‘And there’s no need to worry about money. In three years’ time, we’ll see to her properly. Either one of us wins Dad’s money, in which case he’ll see her right. Or none of us wins, in which case we’ll certainly have enough between us to look after her. It’s not a problem.’ Zack looked at Matthew for his agreement, which he gave with a nod. ‘I’m sure George would agree too. Stop worrying.’

‘She needs help now.’

‘Josie, you’re out of the will anyway. You may as well use your salary to look after Mum. It’s not as though she eats much or spends anything on clothes and stuff. We’ll pay you back in three years. If there’s a shortfall, you can always mortgage the house. Christ, in three years we just won’t have any problems. We’ll send you back to school for a start, and chuck that Miss Moneypenny outfit of yours in the incinerator.’

Josephine was furious. Angry and upset. She put her drink down on the table, hands shaking badly. She stood up.

‘For your information, this Miss Moneypenny outfit is what I expect to wear when I start to earn my living. And if you think I’m going to mortgage Mum’s home on the off chance that one of you three babies wins the Lottery in the next three years then you must be nuts. And if you think that it’s OK, now that she really needs you, to ignore her completely, then you’re totally out of line.’

Zack made no answer, but contempt was written on his face in lines of white.

‘Matthew, tell him.’ Josie appealed to her brother.

Matthew sat like a five-year-old, hoping that by keeping silent he could stay out of trouble. He didn’t have Zack’s abrasive selfishness, but he didn’t have his sister’s warm-hearted sense of justice either. He swallowed, but shook his head.

‘For God’s sake, you two. She’s not just some batty old cow. She’s your mother.’

Zack sat forward and opened his mouth. The others knew what Zack was thinking. He was thinking of saying that she was a batty old cow as well as his mother. Josephine was ready to throw her tumbler at him if he said it, but Matthew beat them both to the draw, interjecting quickly: ‘Josie, of course she’s our mum. But Zack’s right, you know. It makes no sense at all for us to devote our time or money to looking after her right now, when that could mean that we lose Gradley Plant Hire and all the money held in trust. Everybody is better off if we make sure that Dad’s money comes into the family instead of going to some godawful charity.’

‘So you’ll cooperate will you? Pool the money you make at the end of three years and divide up Dad’s money into quarters?’

It was a question addressed to both of them, but Matthew deferred to Zack, and Zack’s silence was implacable.

‘And now? What happens now?’ persisted Josie.

‘Well, I can see it’s going to be tight for the next three years,’ Matthew answered. ‘It’ll be hard for all of us. But we need to think of the future. And Zack’s right, you don’t want to be a secretary for the rest of your life. You will need a way out of that, you know.’

‘I’ll need a way out of that,’ repeated Josephine distantly. ‘So the answer’s no? You won’t help? Nothing?’

‘Of course we’ll do what we can.’ Matthew looked at Zack, who was adding to his whisky and looking away. ‘But realistically it won’t be much. But we’ll do what we can.’

‘I see.’

Josephine put down her drink. Her hands had stopped shaking. She picked up a heavy bronze statuette on a polished granite base from the glass coffee table in front of her. She turned it over in her hands. The statue was of a racing car. It had been a gift from Bernard Gradley to Zack, who had never liked it, but had never thrown it away either. She looked at it. It reminded her of her father’s campaign to win allegiance with money, and of his failure to do so. Love buys love, money buys money.

She held out the statuette and dropped it. It fell heavily and landed in the dead centre of the table, shattering the glass. Two diagonal cracks running from corner to corner split it into four pieces. Half the glass slid from its mounting and crashed on to the thickly carpeted floor. The remaining bits of glass stayed sticking out, suspended. The statuette lay on the floor surrounded by debris.

‘So sorry,’ she said, and left.

9

Where was George and what was he up to? Those were questions he was asking himself right now. He was somewhere in Cornwall, he knew that much. His car was parked in a lay-by off the A30 somewhere close to Bodmin Moor. It was late evening in mid-August and George watched as the last blue light surrendered to the gathering stars.

Somewhere in the car was an insect which George wouldn’t find until it bit him. He wound his seat back as far as it would go. It wasn’t far. A Lotus Esprit is not designed for men of stocky build to camp out in, as George had by now proved many times over. But his first attempt outside in a tent had been a disaster, with a summer storm leaving him soaked and desperate and since then he had preferred the car’s cramped interior to any tent, no matter how spacious.

He closed his eyes with a sort of fantasy idea that closing his eyes would send him to sleep. It didn’t. His legs sent him a message which he mostly ignored, but it had to do with bucket seats, feather beds, and their relative merits. Somewhere outside the car, an animal screamed. George remembered seeing video footage of a puma loose on Bodmin Moor, apparently still not caught. But they couldn’t attack Lotuses, could they? He wound up the window, just in case.

As he slumped back into his seat, the insect found George, and slap around though he did, George failed to find the insect. He struggled for the light switch, found it, and swatted round aimlessly for a minute or two, using the copy of the Financial Times which lay rolled up beside him.

As the light was on and the paper in his hand, George looked again at the familiar page. A section of classified ads, all but a few of them with blue lines through them. He’d carry on with the rest tomorrow, then it would be time for the next paper and the next set of ads, and so it would be until his last dribble of cash ran out, leaving him stranded in his Lotus Esprit, too poor to afford a gallon of petrol.

Zack and Matthew might laugh about his billionaire friends, but George knew the rules of the international jet set better than they did. If you wanted to be part of it, you either had to pay your way or be young enough and pretty enough to sleep your way. George hadn’t the cash or the body for it. As soon as people found out his wallet was empty, he’d be dumped faster than last season’s clothes. He’d sooner do the dumping himself.

He threw the paper down. On his answering machine at the flat, there had been three messages from his sister and one from Kiki. He missed them both.

He turned off the light again and tried to sleep.

10

Matthew emerged on to the floor of the deserted trading room. Except for the red digital wall-clocks and the flicker of screens, the room was in darkness. Matthew turned on an Anglepoise lamp over his desk. He liked the dark and the hour of silence before the cleaners arrived at five am. He fetched a cup of black coffee and got to work.

In the five weeks since he had really got started, Matthew had his routine well developed. By the time Luigi came in with fresh coffee at seven, Matthew would have prepared five neat piles of painstakingly referenced and highlighted bundles of research. At first the piles had been a welcome luxury. They had since become little short of essential: the Saint Matthew Gospel, as Luigi put it.

The fictional lira which marked Matthew’s progress with Luigi had nudged up to nearly one dollar. In practice, Matthew knew, Luigi would vote in favour of Madison’s offering him a full-time job to start once he had completed his degree. But that wouldn’t do. He had three years to make a million, and he wasn’t going to spend one of them studying economics. Matthew needed a job and he needed it now.

Later that day, Matthew was to have an interview with Brian McAllister. The son of a Glaswegian truck driver, McAllister ruled the trading floor with quiet voice and omniscient eye. By reputation, he knew each trader’s market better than they did themselves. He was willing, as most traders were, to take large risks in search of profit. Less commonly, he was also willing to refrain from risk whenever he judged the conditions were wrong. Many people had made bigger profits than Brian McAllister, but none had made smaller losses.

McAllister’s judgement would decide Matthew’s fate, and there was no court of appeal.

Just after nine, Luigi came by his desk. ‘Matteo, where does ze lira stand today?’

Matthew pretended to check his screen. ‘Hey, Luigi, what d’you know? The lira equals one dollar exactly.’

‘And how is the Italian deficit, please?’

Matthew touched some buttons on his keyboard. A new screen flashed up. ‘Well, look at that. Rupert Murdoch’s just bought the Italian government for a zillion dollars and the deficit’s been eliminated.’

Luigi grinned. ‘Seriously, Matteo, Big Mac will ask me why you suddenly work, when before you were the most goddamn lazy prick I have ever seen. How do we know which one we’re buying?’

‘My dad died six weeks ago,’ said Matthew, who had said nothing about it earlier. ‘About five weeks ago, I realised I needed to look after myself now. So I did.’

Luigi nodded seriously. His trader’s eyes scanned Matthew’s face, looking for the truth behind his words. ‘I’m sorry, Matteo, I didn’t know.’

Luigi walked off to find Big Mac, as McAllister was known behind his back, never to his face.

Luigi’s conversation lasted perhaps five minutes. Given the number of demands on McAllister’s time, that counted as a long interview. Matthew drummed nervously on his desk and felt inside his jacket pocket to reassure himself that a certain document was still there. Luigi returned, and one by one Anders, Cristina, and Jean-François went to speak with McAllister. Matthew believed they would support him. Each of them had said to him privately that his support over the last weeks had really given them an edge in the free-for-all of the market. Their trading profits still depended on their daily judgements, but Matthew had helped them and they were grateful.

Jean-François came back. He patted Matthew on the back. ‘Allez,’ he said, and gave a wink of support.

Matthew walked over to McAllister’s office. McAllister had taken advantage of the thirty second gap between Jean-François’s departure and Matthew’s arrival to take a call from his counterpart in the Paris office. The phone call blared from a speaker on McAllister’s desk. The subject of the conversation appeared to be how the French bond markets would react to a European summit being held the following day.

McAllister saw Matthew come in and signed him to sit. Privacy was unheard of on the trading floor. Conversations were yelled across the room. Phone calls were recorded. Pierre d’Avignon, on the phone to McAllister, wouldn’t raise an eyebrow if he knew that somebody else had just come in to sit in on his call. D’Avignon asked McAllister a question, something to do with the European summit.

‘An interesting question,’ said McAllister, in his strong Scots accent. ‘I’ll get our analyst here to do some research on that point and we’ll get back to you tomorrow.’

‘OK, but it needs to be tomorrow first thing, before the markets open.’

‘Aye. First thing tomorrow.’

‘And put one of your best guys on this, eh, Brian?’ said d’Avignon. ‘We’ve got five hundred million dollars’ worth of bonds on our books at the moment, and we don’t want to make a mess.’

‘Don’t worry. You’ll have the best.’

D’Avignon hung up. McAllister looked at Matthew.

‘Got that?’

‘You want me to do the research?’

McAllister nodded.

‘Yes. No problem,’ croaked Matthew. He knew virtually nothing about the European summit which d’Avignon was on about, but if he screwed up, he could wave his job goodbye. His mouth turned dry.

‘Good. We’ll talk about your job after your conversation with d’Avignon tomorrow morning.’

Matthew was dismissed, but he continued to hold McAllister’s gaze. The Scotsman’s eyes were pale blue and piercing. It was like gazing into the eyes of God.

‘Thank you,’ said Matthew. ‘There’s just one thing I’d like to ask you.’ He paused. McAllister said nothing, waiting. God, he was intimidating. ‘I don’t want to finish my degree. The last few weeks have made me realise that I love trading. I don’t believe that completing my degree will make me a better trader. I want to work hard and I want to start now. I like Madison and I’d like to work here if I possibly can.’

Matthew paused to review the effect of his words, but McAllister’s face was as empty as granite. Matthew decided he might as well play his only trump card and drew a letter from his pocket. He gave it to the Scotsman.

‘I’ve been offered a job by Coburg’s. I don’t want to work there. I want to work here. I know as well as you do that Madison is going to wipe the floor with Coburg’s, and I want to be part of that. But above all I want to trade and I want to start now. And if that means I need to start at a second-rate firm, then I will.’

McAllister barely glanced at the photocopied letter in front of him. Matthew had pinched the letter from Zack’s flat the evening Josie smashed his coffee table. Except for a couple of initials and the name of the department, he’d hardly needed to alter it. ‘Dear Mr Gradley, We are pleased to be able to offer you a job as Assistant Manager in our Global Markets Department. We are keen that you should start with us directly, and I would ask you to confirm your start date with us as soon as possible.’ The letter continued with banalities. Matthew had photocopied the doctored original, then inspected it under a magnifying glass. He was confident that the changes were virtually undetectable.

McAllister tapped the letter lightly with his finger to indicate that Matthew should take it back.

‘Don’t write off Coburg’s,’ he said softly. ‘They’ve been around for more than two hundred years, twice as long as we have. We’ll be doing well to last that long ourselves.’

The interview was over.

11

George drove away from the little cluster of buildings. Once out of sight, he pulled out his Financial Times and put a line through another box. This was getting ridiculous. He’d try for another two weeks – three at most – then give it all up. Zack or Matthew could try to win their father’s fortune. He’d apply for a job stacking shelves. He’d make new friends, find new things to do. Maybe in time he’d go back to school and get some exam results and a proper job. He’d live the way most people lived. But for now he’d go on trying, just a little longer.

He looked back at his newspaper. Next on the list was Gissings, based in the village of Sawley Bridge up near Ilkley in Yorkshire. He phoned a number and was put through to somebody who put him through to somebody else. George explained his interest and asked if there were any documents he could have a look at. Yes, there were documents. Would he like them posted? Yes, please, said George, but it wasn’t convenient to post them to his business address at present. Perhaps they could send them to the hotel he’d be staying at – The Devonshire Arms near Skipton. That was fine. They’d send the documents out right away. Did he want to make an appointment for a site visit now? No, that was fine, he’d look through the documents first.

George switched his phone off. He was headed north anyway to view some Scottish outfit, a long shot. He’d pass by the Devonshire Arms, apologise for changing his plans and pick up the documents from a mystified receptionist. He was getting good at doing that. Just like he was getting pretty good at keeping himself pretty much respectable while living mostly in a two-seater Lotus Esprit with an engine capacity bigger than its luggage hold.

He looked back at the ad. Gissings, eh? He didn’t feel hopeful, but he didn’t feel ready to stack shelves either.

He drove off, wearily.

12

First step, gather information.

Matthew dug into the bank’s news database to get the dates of all European summits over the last ten years, then printed articles from Europe’s leading papers in the run-up to and aftermath of each summit. Then, switching to a new database, he collected bond market data around the key dates. Then, finally, he called up relevant research reports published by the major investment banks and printed about thirty reports of a few pages each. The database was charged at twenty-five dollars a sheet and he ran up a bill of a couple of thousand dollars in an hour and a half. It didn’t bother Matthew and it wouldn’t bother anyone else either. When a single trade, even a small one, can easily win or lose five thousand dollars for the bank, cost control is a game reserved strictly for losers.

By this point it was four in the afternoon and Matthew had a vast pile of paper by his desk, of which he’d read almost nothing.

Matthew worked his way swiftly through the pile. Most of it was dross, but amidst the rubbish were diamonds scattered and he needed to find them. He skimmed document after document and built a shorter stack of those he thought important.

Then he started to crunch some numbers. He printed graphs. He looked at the markets for bonds, currencies and shares. He categorised the previous summits in a dozen different ways and reran his numbers searching for a pattern.

By eleven in the evening, Matthew knew what he wanted to say. He also knew how he was going to say it and prove it to an audience much more knowledgeable than himself.

He got more coffee and started to build a presentation. His presentation had a dozen slides, five appendices containing sixty graphs and another two appendices with some of the most interesting statistics and research comments he’d unearthed. The whole document was around a hundred and twenty pages long. He stepped wearily over to the fax machine. It was one thirty in the morning. Matthew had been in the bank nigh on twenty-two hours.

He wrote out a cover page and punched d’Avignon’s number into the fax. It rang a couple of times and then started to pull the first page through the scanner. Matthew walked off to get another coffee. Something had gone wrong with the vending machine and the coffee tasted like metal. He drank it anyway.

When he came back, the fax had stopped. An error message slowly printed out. D’Avignon’s machine was out of paper. By the time anybody was in the office to refill it, it would be far too late to send the documents across. Damn. He tried a different number, of a machine he thought would be somewhere close to d’Avignon’s office. Five pages ticked their way slowly through. Then, the same result. Damn, damn, damn. It was now two o’clock, three o’clock Paris time.

Matthew considered his options briefly. They were few and far between. Matthew copied the presentation and dropped it on to McAllister’s desk with a scribbled note on the front cover. He walked downstairs and hailed a cab from the rank across the street.

‘Where you going, mate?’ asked the driver.

‘Paris,’ said Matthew, ‘rue de la Colonne.’

They made it to Paris in four hours flat, which would have been impossible but for the cabbie’s conviction that there was no speed limit on French autoroutes. Matthew kept silent about the difference between autoroutes and autobahns and snoozed in the back as the flat French countryside slipped past in the gathering dawn.

They entered Paris before rush hour and drew up outside Madison’s elegant Paris office. Matthew asked the driver to wait and dashed inside.

D’Avignon had arrived only shortly before. Mildly startled to see Matthew in person, he apologised for his empty fax machine and waved Matthew into a seat. Matthew handed over the presentation, d’Avignon called McAllister on the speaker phone, and the conference call began. Matthew led them through his work. He reckoned the discussion might last for twenty minutes all told and that he might speak for perhaps seven minutes of that. In the cab on the way across, he had run through his introduction a dozen times, until falling asleep somewhere after the turn-off to Lille.

Matthew felt confident of his conclusions. All the evidence seemed to confirm that after a few days of thinking that the end of the world had happened (or alternatively that the millennium had arrived early) the bond markets would turn their attention to something else. Matthew ran through the relevant data and summarised his conclusions. He spoke without interruption for six and a half minutes exactly. There were a couple of questions on points of detail, as McAllister and d’Avignon flipped through the charts and other material in the appendices. Neither trader challenged Matthew. After a brief discussion about how best to place the firm’s bets, d’Avignon rang off. He thanked Matthew for coming over and invited him unenthusiastically to tour the building. Matthew declined. D’Avignon looked relieved and dived off to take a call coming in from Milan. Matthew went downstairs to his waiting cab and they crept out of Paris in swelling traffic, heading north to Calais and London.

Back at his desk, Matthew came in for a bit of stick.

‘Go to Paris for breakfast but don’t even bring me back a bloody croissant,’ complained Luigi. ‘It’s a good job I tell Big Mac to fire you yesterday.’

‘Oui, but it was an expensive breakfast,’ said Jean-François. ‘I don’t think the firm pays for taxi rides outside London, so I think you pay, no, Matthieu?’

‘I don’t know if I can afford to. Big Mac still hasn’t told me if I’ve got a job.’

Matthew glanced over towards McAllister’s office to see if this was a good time to interrupt. The door was closed, and the lights were off. Luigi followed Matthew’s glance.

‘Big Mac’s away on holiday, Matteo. He only came in this morning for an hour or so. He’ll be back a week on Monday.’

Matthew had been too tired to be nervous earlier, but now that changed. Matthew stared at the empty office. It would be ten days before he got a decision. Ten days, and meantime he didn’t know if he was still in the running for his million or if he’d fallen at the first hurdle. Anxiety took its first long feed from Matthew’s stomach lining. He turned away unhappily, aimlessly. As he did so, a bagel crust flew through the air and struck him on the neck. Luigi.

‘How much longer you keep us waiting for cappuccino?’

Autumn 1998

Autumn in England, and nothing to report. Leaves are just starting to give up their greens in favour of a sickly yellow, which will soon give way to a matt and uninteresting brown. After this brief show of what is politely known as colour, the leaves will fall to make a slimy brown carpet beneath the bare trees and boys will fight for the shiniest conkers. Meanwhile, after a sodden August bank holiday, the usual parade of crying children and stationary traffic, the skies have turned an iron grey.

Bid farewell to the sun. It is 1 September 1998, and there are 1046 days to go until Bernard Gradley’s deadline.

1

‘Good morning, sir.’

The red-coated doorman held the door open. Zack walked through with a shudder. In an age of automatic doors, revolving doors, doors you could just push through, Coburg’s had to employ some ancient flunkey in a red tail coat to do the job. That said it all. Coburg’s is one of Britain’s biggest merchant banks, but its glory days are long gone. The big American banks – Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, Madison, Weinstein Lukes – bestride the globe, while Coburg’s, a village beauty in a world of supermodels, clings to its past and tries not to look.

Zack knew this. He knew that Coburg’s wouldn’t make his fortune. But it was a doorway into international finance, the only industry in the world where millionaires aren’t rare, they’re commonplace. Even amidst Coburg’s dilapidated glories, Zack could smell the money and he loved it.

His boss was a posh nonentity called Fabian Slater, who collected him from reception and took him on a quick tour of the bank. Zack shook hands, exchanged greetings, and avoided saying anything he felt. Slater said, ‘In my opinion, the best way to get ahead is to lie low for a couple of years, soak up as much as you can.’ Zack smiled and said nothing. He had other ideas. He shook more hands, met more people in more departments: mergers and acquisitions, equity capital markets, debt capital markets, credit.

There wasn’t much to see. On a trading floor, you can smell the marketplace. On a busy day, when the markets are roaring, a well-run trading floor looks and sounds like barely organised mayhem. You can hear the flood of money pouring through the room. But that’s Matthew’s world, not Zack’s.

Zack belongs to the quieter world of corporate finance. To its unremarkable offices, the world’s biggest businesses come to sort out their financial needs. Some come to raise money, in the hundreds of millions, billions even. Some come to play safe, to protect against the risks that a difficult world is full of. Others come to play fast and loose, taking dangerous bets concealed from their shareholders by a paragraph of flim-flam in an annual report. Best of all, this is where companies come when they’re in the mood for attack. Scared of your competitor? Buy him. Noticed an outfit with faster growth? Grab it. Think you could run that guy’s business better than him? Buy him up, push him out, rip up his company and flog it.

Traders think testosterone is all about how loud you can shout, and how big are the risks you take with other people’s cash. Zack knew different. The quiet world of corporate finance, where bankers and company executives talk in whispers, has its own testosterone load. It doesn’t shout. It isn’t flashy. But it’s just as greedy, just as ruthless, just as hard.

‘Just one more person you ought to meet,’ drawled Slater. ‘Girl called Sarah Havercoombe. D’you know her by any chance? You must have overlapped at Oxford, I think.’

‘Sarah? Sarah Havercoombe? Yes. I know her.’

By God, he knew her. At Oxford, he and Sarah had had a stormy on-and-off relationship for three years. She was blisteringly well-connected and rich with it. Her father was a viscount with an ancestral seat in Devon. Unlike most aristocratic families, the Havercoombes had nurtured their wealth prudently and amassed it buccaneeringly. The family stake in a Hong Kong company, Hatherleigh Pacific, made them one of the two hundred or so wealthiest families in the country.

‘Sarah,’ called Slater, as he walked up to a young woman, faced away from them, mannishly dressed in a pink cotton shirt and a plain navy skirt, ‘I think you know our latest recruit. I’ll leave you together, shall I?’

Slater left them, while Sarah Havercoombe looked round and started in surprise. She hadn’t changed. Short brown hair, nearly blonde, worn with the inevitable hairband. Wide, strong face, clear-complexioned, but a bit too solid to count as beautiful. Minimal make-up, but plenty of confidence. Her widely spaced eyes lit up in surprise.

‘Sarah! Hi!’ said Zack, ‘I didn’t know you worked here.’

‘Well, I do.’

‘So I see. I’ve just joined. Less than an hour ago, actually.’

‘Welcome aboard, I suppose.’

Zack could feel the electricity already starting to rise behind this inane exchange, and wondered if she felt it too. Their relationship had been the most passionate either of them had ever known. It had been passionate in a sexual sense for sure. Scarcely a day had passed without their making love at least once and usually two or three times or more. But it had also been passionate in a worse sense. They had argued incessantly. They were strong-willed and had nothing in common. She loved balls, parties, horses, country houses. He loved philosophy, cynicism, and hating the things she liked. They had argued, stormed, and made love. Their friends had told them they didn’t belong together. Their heads had agreed but were powerless in the teeth of their bodies’ overwhelming mutual longing. Only when Sarah had finally left Oxford did distance allow the inevitable to happen.

‘What’s new?’ asked Zack.

‘I’m engaged,’ she said, ‘to a chap you might know. Robert Leighton.’

Sarah sounded like she expected Zack to know who she meant, but he didn’t. He raised his eyebrows.

‘He was at Eton while you were there, but I wouldn’t expect you to remember him … He’s nice and kind, he likes what I like, he loves me very much.’

Zack hadn’t meant anything by his question. He just asked it to say something and to defuse the electricity rising in the air. But her answer told him something. She felt the crackle of static too and she thrust her engagement at him as a defence.

‘That’s great news. I’m delighted. I hope everything works out really well for you both. I’m sure it will.’

‘Yes, I’m sure it will. And thanks.’ Their eyes met briefly then moved away. ‘Here, have you met the equity origination group yet?’

Zack walked off to shake more hands and grin at another set of people whose jobs he didn’t understand. Their voices were firm with each other now, just pleasant, nothing too familiar. But all along his right-hand side, where she walked beside him, he felt a prickle beneath his skin. Careful as he was to remind himself to keep guard, to step back, to break contact, two thoughts persisted.

First, he remembered just how good their sex had been. It had puzzled both of them that their sex could be quite so good when their relationship was such a disaster. It was almost as though their bodies understood something the rest of them had yet to grasp.

Second, it occurred to him for the first time that the future husband of Miss Sarah Havercoombe would step right into one of England’s richest families. For Miss Sarah Havercoombe, a million pounds would be small change indeed.

2

The sign must have been painted thirty years ago. ‘The Gissings Modern Furniture Company (Ltd)’, it boasted in giant pink lettering. ‘Our modern furniture means modern style but modest prices!’ The feeble pun was complemented by a picture of a secretary, complete with miniskirt and beehive hairdo, gesturing inanely at a suite of office furniture. No doubt it had looked cool in 1963, but in the late 1990s prices would have to be very modest indeed to tempt the average buyer.

George slowed his Lotus and turned in between the factory gates. Beyond the factory, there were a few fields of rough grazing, then open moor. It would be a bleak place to work in winter, comfortless in summer. A couple of men dawdling across the yard glanced at the newcomer, then stared. Not many Lotuses came to The Gissings Modern Furniture Company nowadays.

George turned the engine off and listened to its musical notes dying away. The yard which doubled as a car-park was covered with a mixture of rainwater, gravel, wood chippings, and machine oil. George poked his beautifully shod foot out of the car and stood up carefully, making sure his turn-ups weren’t dirtied by contact with the ground. He drew his Dior sunglasses from his jacket pocket, put them on and walked over to the door marked ‘Reception’.

A listless woman at the reception desk put down her copy of Puzzler magazine and stared at the apparition. George stared back. ‘Tom Gissing, please.’

The receptionist gestured towards a hideous suite of furniture in the corner of the small lobby. ‘Please sit down,’ she said. ‘I’ll let Mr Gissing know you’re here.’ George sat on one of the Gissings chairs in the corner, which wheezed and creaked as he lowered himself. Just for a moment, George wondered why he’d come.

In time, an elderly man limped over to George.

‘Mr Gradley? George Gradley?’ he said shaking George’s hand. ‘I knew your father, you know, back in the sixties when he was starting up. Tried to have him join our Chamber of Commerce and Rotary Club, but I fear he was a little fast for our ways. Still, he did well for himself and we’d have liked to have had him. You do look like him, you know. Everyone must tell you that. I’m very sorry, of course, to have learned of his, er, accident’ – the old man couldn’t bring himself to use the word death – ‘I always feel these things are terribly hard on the young. So much less experience of loss, you see. Nothing, really.’

As the old man rambled on, he led George to the proudly named executive office. A secretary, only about thirty but already ageless, watched them grimly.

‘D’you want tea?’ she asked.

‘Coffee, please,’ said George.

‘The machine’s knackered, so you’d best have tea,’ she said and left the room. She was short and squarely built, much as George himself was, and much as Bernard Gradley had been too. The ginger hair which crowned George’s head was there on hers too, worn in a bob. Her face was a bit wonky and her chin was too broad to be quite feminine. But George’s face was crooked too and his features were hardly delicate. To a stranger, the two of them would look like brother and sister. The old man took George to a table at one end of the room and twitched at some papers which lay there.

‘Mr Ballard from the bank told me you would be coming. It’s a relief to see you, not the receiver. I am afraid we had more or less resigned ourselves to that fate.’

‘Yeah, well, I haven’t made any decision yet.’

‘No, of course not. Well, you couldn’t. I mean, you’ll want to see the shop floor, and the cutting room, and the paint shop. And we have some wonderful designs on the drawing board right now. All we really need is a bit of a cash injection and I really believe we’d get ourselves going properly again. And our workers are excellent, you know. We’ve always kept the traditional craft methods here, and all our lads are properly trained. Lord, some of them must have forty years’ experience and I know there’s a round dozen of them who have been here longer than I have. Quality. That’s what we’ve never sacrificed. Our buyers don’t always recognise it these days. Don’t really care whether a joint is dovetailed or glued, you know. But if you do things the right way, it’ll tell in the end. Quality never goes out of fashion. That’s my motto. Well, my father’s actually. But he was right about that.’

A mug of tea slapped down in front of George.

‘Ye didn’t tell me how ye liked it, so I gave you two sugars.’

‘Thank you, Val,’ said the old man.

George didn’t like tea much, but the day before he’d enjoyed a rare day in London celebrating a friend’s new racehorse at the Café Royal in Regent Street. The meal had been served on the whitest china. The bergamot scent of Earl Grey tea had mingled with the smell of freshly baked cakes, warm napkins, women’s perfume, polished wood, and the promise of smoked salmon and brown bread. Kiki had been there, petite and elfin in a pale blue dress, gorgeous and inaccessible. She’d complained because ‘I had to fly to Paris two times for the dress fitting, then go back again because I swear there aren’t any nice shoes in London.’ As she complained, she’d twirled around angling for compliments which George and others had willingly supplied.

The smell of the tea steaming in front of him brought him back to reality. The tea was strong enough to poleaxe a navvy and the sugar had been added with a shovel. Jesus Christ. George was penniless. In a month or so’s time when his cash ran out, George wouldn’t even be able to afford a mug of tea like this one. And as for mingling with the likes of Kiki, the thought was absurd. The only way she knew how to have a cheap day out was to forget her purse, and that only meant somebody else picked up the bills. George shoved his mug away.

‘Let’s take a look around,’ he said.

The old man led him around the factory. A sawmill operated at one end of the complex. Logs came in, were sawn and treated, and lay stacked in neat rows. Right now it was clear that the sawmill was not exactly busy. The few men who were there made no pretence of working when they saw their boss. Instead they stared bluntly at George and George was not left in much doubt whether they approved of what they saw. The day was dull with rain on the moors, but George tucked his sunglasses more firmly on to his nose.

The factory floor was busier. Around half the men glanced up and continued to work, the rest gave George the same candid appraisal he had received in the sawmill. The verdict, he guessed rightly, was the same.

The old man hadn’t lied when he spoke of craft methods. The factory used machine tools, of course, but each piece of furniture was sawn and assembled by hand. Gissing showed George how they had been forced to compromise standards by the imperative of cutting costs. Dovetailed joints had given way to tongue-and-groove, tongue-and-groove to nails and glue. Old man Gissing seemed to want to lament each nail until George dragged him off. The tour finished with the paint shop, the warehouse, and a totally absurd factory shop, whose last customer had died in the shock of the Profumo scandal.

Back in the executive office, the old man pulled out the company’s accounts. It was a relief to see they had been run off using a computer, not a quill pen. George pored over the papers. Until a little over two months ago, he’d never looked at a balance sheet in his life and vaguely thought that double-entry book-keeping was something practised by the shadier sort of bookmaker. He’d had plenty to learn.

He looked at the annual accounts for every year since 1980. He looked at the monthly reports for each of the last thirty-six months. He had Tom Gissing explain to him in laborious detail the intricacies of the ‘LIFO’ inventory reporting system, the reducing balance method of depreciation, the acronyms used to identify the machine tools logged on the register of assets. He even drank two mugs of peaty tea.

After eight solid hours he understood the story. Back in the early eighties, recession had actually been kind to Gissings. Larger competitors had seen their export markets wither and hadn’t chopped their costs quickly enough. Gissings, without an export market to lose, had trimmed costs, redesigned its products, and made money. It had earned revenues of £1.9 million on costs of £1.7 million. Mr Gissing, as managing director, had elected to pay the shareholder, Mr Gissing, a handsome dividend of £50,000. But that was a long time ago.

The profit spurt of the early eighties dwindled away as other companies found their feet. For the last part of the decade, the company had bumped along at break-even, squeezing capital expenditure here, trimming marketing budgets there, forsaking product development in favour of cosmetic changes which came too little, too late.

The recession of the nineties had been cruel. In the last year before the economy tanked, old Tom Gissing had somehow persuaded his bank to approve a loan of £400,000. The idea was to provide the impetus for a major renewal. The production area was to be expanded and modernised, and new computer design systems would be introduced. Perhaps – just perhaps – if all had gone according to plan, The Gissings Modern Furniture Company would have found a new lease of life.

But recession came. Gissings’ markets trembled and collapsed. The money from the loan went to meet the company’s losses. Worse still, the prime contractor on the construction work went bust with the job half done and Gissings’ advance payments in his pocket. Redesign of the product range was halted. Costs were trimmed when they should have been slashed. The £400,000 loan ballooned into £550,000, with arrears of interest. Penalty interest was now being charged and the dangerous snowball gathered momentum at a compound rate.

Meanwhile, old man Gissing had lost his will to fight. He spent his time sorting through the company archives and threw his remaining energies into setting up a ‘museum’ to lure visitors to the factory shop.

The bank had been tolerant, but its patience was at an end. Three weeks ago the bank had called in its loan. Gissings had thirty days to find the cash. If it failed, the official receiver – a cross between a bailiff and an undertaker – would step in. He would auction the company for whatever he could get, and if he thought the company would fetch nothing, he’d close it down and sell the assets piece by piece. Either way, Tom Gissing wouldn’t end up with a brass farthing.

The thought terrified the old man. Losing the company to someone else would be hard, but watching the firm die would probably kill him. That was why he had called in the accountants. The accountants had come in, drawn up a report, and stuck an ad in the ‘Businesses for Sale’ page of the Financial Times. That was where George had found the name, and where he’d obtained the report which had encouraged him to make the visit. But whatever rosy words the accountants used, the company was in a desperate plight.

It was now eight days before the deadline and the evening was drawing on. George had read everything, examined everything. He had seen all he wanted and still had no idea whether this walking dead company could ever live again. On the other hand, there were some simple facts he hadn’t lost sight of. He had no money, so buying anything at all would be a triumph of sorts. Also, he had traipsed across Britain for two months in search of a company he could buy for next to nothing. So far he’d found nothing at all. The good companies were totally unaffordable. The bad ones much worse than hopeless. And Gissings, for all its faults, had one major advantage: it still sold one and a half million quids’ worth of furniture each year. That meant there was something to work with.

The old man came back into the room. In the deserted factory buildings only George, the old man and his secretary were left. In the course of the day Tom Gissing had floated away from reality altogether. At times he seemed to think he was selling his company for a small fortune. At other times he treated George like a business partner and spoke of how they would develop the business together. Sometimes it was as though George were a historian, there to record the proudest moments of the company’s glorious past. It was pathetic. George wanted out.

Gissing dumped another load of papers on to the table.

‘I expect you’ll be wanting to see these next. Some of our very earliest brochures. See this? The Thunderer! What a name for a desk, eh? Very daring at the time, I can tell you.’

George interrupted rudely.

‘I’ve come to buy your company.’

The old man sank into a chair.

‘Yes. Yes, of course. Quite right.’

‘Have you had any other offers?’

The old man shook his head. ‘No.’

‘It’s not worth much right now, is it? Not with half a million quid of debt. Not when you haven’t made a profit for six years.’

‘No, well, I suppose you’re right. Still you never know. Things look a bit rough, but we’ve never lost hope.’

‘Yeah, well, whatever,’ said George. ‘I want to make an offer for the lot. Factory, designs, inventory. The lot.’

The old man licked his lips, which had gone suddenly dry. ‘How much?’ he croaked, his voice barely audible.

The question threw George. He’d only just made up his mind to make an offer, and it hadn’t occurred to him to think of a price. He shoved his hands into his pockets for inspiration.

‘I’ll give you a pound,’ he said, tossing a coin on to the table. It spun for a moment then fell over. ‘If you give me the company, I can recapitalise it and make it live. If you don’t, the company and all your hard work will die. The bank will kill it. You know it will.’

George hadn’t intended to be cruel, but he was feeling awkward, and awkwardness made him tactless. He wondered whether he should say something, an apology maybe or something to try and buck the old man up, but he was held fast in the room’s gathering silence. For an infinite moment, the old man stared down at the golden disc. His rheumy blue eyes filled suddenly with tears. His lips opened and closed without sound. Finally his hand, shaking violently, closed over the glittering coin.

‘Good luck,’ he said. ‘Take care of things. You will take care, won’t you?’ The old man began to shuffle from the room. The pound coin was clenched so tightly in his hand that George feared he would cut himself. Then at the door he turned and added, ‘Oh – the name. It’s yours to do as you please with now – but I’ve always liked the name. Gissings Furniture. It’s got a ring to it. Anyway, best of luck.’

His footsteps moved hesitantly away down the dark corridor which then fell silent.

The old man’s secretary had watched the whole scene. Her eyes blazed with contempt.

‘Delighted to have you on board, sir,’ she spat.

She held George’s eyes a moment, then she too turned and walked away, her face angry and complex, her deep eyes invisible. Minutes passed, and George was left, the only person in the whole factory.

His factory. His headache. His problem. His key to a million pounds.

3

McAllister’s ten days were up, but he was busy. Matthew watched his office like a hawk. McAllister was either in meetings or on the phone all day. Anxiety continued to chew at Matthew’s stomach. Get off the phone. Give me the answer.

Eventually, at four o’clock, McAllister caught Matthew’s glance and signalled him over. Matthew hurried across and was about to take his seat when McAllister asked him to close the door. That door was never closed. It was never closed, except, if rumour was true, when McAllister fired people. Matthew shut the door and sat down awkwardly.

‘I’ve three things to say to you, Matt. First, you did a fine job on that piece of work the other day. Too many traders, not just in this bank but everywhere, think that their market feel is so good that they don’t need to understand the facts. That’s bullshit. Every good trader has market feel, but a fine trader is a salesman, an economist and a diplomat as well. I think you understand that and I like it.

‘Secondly, we are going to give you a job here. You can finish your present assignment and then we’ll send you off to New York for the training programme. If you flunk that, or if your teachers there think you need to complete your degree, then we’ll chuck you out and that’s that. But I don’t see why you should fail. I think you will make a good trader.

‘The third thing is this. My good friend, Bob Landau, who runs the trading floor at Coburg’s, tells me that your brother is expected to do well in the corporate finance department there. They’ve never heard of you, and it’s pretty clear that you don’t know much about them. There are rules which matter a lot in banks and they matter most of all on the trading floor. At some point most traders break them. They don’t record a trade when they should do. They exceed a position limit. They tell a lie or conceal the truth from a client. I regret that this game is what it is. But I know that paying young men what we pay them and motivating them as we motivate them will encourage mistakes. What I tell traders in this firm is this: you can make one mistake and usually we will forgive it. But if you make two, it suggests you’re not capable of learning from your errors and we don’t want you here. You, Matthew, have used up your mistake.’

4

Home late after a party. The music had been excellent, the drink OK, the men crap. Josie tittered to herself, releasing a belch into the gentle autumn night, not walking quite straight as she turned into the street for home.

But beneath her giggles and her party dress, she was sad. Her best friends had been planning their skiing holiday and chatting about their fast approaching university life. Josie hadn’t the money to go skiing and she wasn’t going to university. She’d joined in, but sadly. Before the party broke up in a familiar scurry for taxis, mobile phones and sports cars, Josie had left, needing to catch the last tube.

She was annoyed with her mum. She knew, as Zack had said, that their mother’s plight was in part self-inflicted. But what was she to do? Ignore her? Leave her without an income? Tell her to get on her bike, get a job, get on with life? Roll up her increasing depression and put it out with the garbage? Her seventeen-year-old self wanted life now, skiing now, A levels, university, career, everything. She wanted the life she’d been promised and was angry at whatever stood in its way.

She unlocked the front door. In the living room, a light was on. Helen Gradley sat in the armchair, head slumped, a needle of saliva hanging from her mouth. Her hands were blue.

‘Mum? Mum! Jesus Christ.’ Josie leaped to the phone, dialling 999. ‘Ambulance, please.’ She reached for her mother’s mouth. There was no flow of breath that she could feel. ‘It’s my mum. Please come quickly. I think she’s dead.’

5

Buying a company is no different from buying a used car. You can go for a test drive, you can lift the bonnet, you can haggle on price. But once you’ve handed over your money and driven away, there’s no comeback. When the car overheats, when the big end blows, when the hydraulic system escapes the engine in a cloud of steam, it’s tough.

Some people are experts. They can spot a repainted panel from twenty yards and a dodgy dealer from twenty miles. They don’t need help. They can do the whole job – inspect the car, negotiate a price, agree the deal – by themselves. Lucky them. But most people aren’t like that. We either call in experts to inspect the car – the AA, the RAC or whoever – or we get used to clouds of steam, expensive call-outs, and handing money over to people who burst out laughing as soon as we’ve left the forecourt.

It’s the same with companies. If you want to buy a company, then, before you scribble out your cheque, you’ll lift the bonnet and have a damn good look. And, unless you’re very smart or very foolish, you’ll want to have an expert with you when you do. What’s more, if you’re about to write a cheque for a hundred million pounds, or a billion, or more, you probably won’t mind writing a little tiny one – not more than one percent of the purchase price – to the expert who looks after you so well. The experts in company takeovers are called corporate financiers, and if the good ones aren’t always happy you can be sure it’s not for want of money. One percent of a billion is ten million pounds.

Right now, two corporate financiers from Coburg’s had the bonnet up and yawned with tedium.

The room they sat in was twenty foot by fifteen. One side was wall-to-wall windows with a view out over the sweeping roofs of Liverpool Street station. One wall held the door and a low side-table for coffees and suchlike. The other two walls were covered in pale beech shelving stacked with eighty-eight lever-arch files. A further six files lay open on the table in the middle. Each file was thick with documents. The index to the files was fifty-five pages long, plus a three-page ‘Guide to Additional Material’. Zack rubbed his eyes.

‘Jesus Christ. Is it always as dull as this?’

The two men from Tominto Oil had gone off for lunch, so Zack and Sarah could speak freely. It was weird working together. She was engaged to be married, he was as attracted to her as ever. They weren’t even friends, really, just colleagues. Perhaps they had never been friends, just lovers who argued. So now they kept themselves to themselves, talked about work, tried to be polite, to ignore the electricity which filled the air.

‘We’ve got ninety-four files to cover. That’s not so bad. I once saw a data room with three hundred and seventy files, for a deal that lasted a year and a half then never happened. That was bad.’

Sarah spoke dismissively. She felt uncomfortable. Putting the two of them in the same project team was like mixing air and petrol and hoping there wouldn’t be a spark. But Piers St George Hanbury, the project leader, didn’t know their history, and Sarah did her best to muffle the possibility of any real contact, let alone a spark.

They were part of a Coburg’s team helping a Texan oil company, Tominto Oil, buy a Scottish one. The Scottish one, Aberdeen Drilling, was being auctioned off by its parent company, which was currently talking to four serious bidders, including Tominto. Zack and Sarah and the two men from Tominto Oil were in the Aberdeen Drilling data room: the room which held every important document to do with the company. This was the Aberdeen Drilling engine, and the bonnet was up. Each bidder was allowed one week to look. They were allowed to read everything, take as many notes as they wanted, but they were allowed to copy nothing.

At the end of the week the bonnet would be brought down again and Tominto and Coburg’s would need to go away, discuss what they’d seen, and work out a price they’d be prepared to offer. If their bid was the highest of the four submitted, they’d sign a contract, buy the company, and drive it off into a happy, and hopefully breakdown-free, future. If their bid was one of the three lowest, the seller would shake his head, say so sorry, and leave them to watch all their work go swirling down the plughole. The Tominto people would go back to running their company and the Coburg’s corporate financiers would go chasing the next deal.

And what if the data room wasn’t complete? What if, amongst the myriad documents – management accounts, tax filings, statutory accounts, environmental reports, supply contracts, customer analyses, and a thousand other things – what if one or two nasty surprises were carefully left out, so that the poor old buyers didn’t have a clue? Well, it’s like the better end of the car trade. When you buy a company, you sign a contract which gives you a limited warranty. The warranty protects against any nasty surprises which you haven’t been told about. If something should have been in the data room and wasn’t, and it ends up costing you money, then you can go to the seller and demand a refund.

So sellers have a different strategy. Sellers put everything into the data room. Everything. They fill it as full as they possibly can. If they have time bombs, they bury them. They bury them under a mountain of detail so dull, that Buddha himself would kick the walls and scream. Every time Zack and Sarah were tempted to skip a page, they were stopped sharply by the thought that as they flicked forward they might miss it. The time bomb. The thing they were in the data room to find.

There were the two guys from Tominto Oil as well, but they weren’t the experts. In its forty-year life, Tominto Oil had purchased only about five companies worth more than a few million dollars. Coburg’s closed more deals than that every two or three months. The guys from Tominto are like you looking under the bonnet. ‘The thingamajig looks dirty,’ you say. ‘Is that doodah meant to have that bend in it?’ Stand back, sucker. Get out of the light and let the experts look.

Zack and Sarah went back to their files. Sarah was tapping notes into a portable computer. Zack had a laptop too but he wasn’t using it, he was using something more powerful: his memory. Since early boyhood, Zack had developed a pretty much photographic memory. He could look at a page, take it in, then just move on, knowing that he could bring it back to mind as clearly as if he had it in front of him. They weren’t allowed to copy stuff, but Zack didn’t need to. He was photographing it.

The silence settled again: Sarah tapping keys, both of them turning pages, looking for trouble, feeling strange in each other’s presence. Page, after page, after page.

6

Terminal 4 at Heathrow is the most exciting of them all. Long-haul destinations flick up on departure screens like locations in a Bond movie. African chiefs in full tribal regalia rub shoulders and crash trolleys with neat Japanese businessmen. Arabs travelling with enough baggage to fill a jeep mix with students holding a single battered rucksack and a passport crammed with visas. This is a true melting pot, the world in chaos. It is exhilarating.

But amidst the confusion, a silent but complete apartheid rules. Economy travellers to the left. Business travellers to the right. And to the very far right, in their own quiet corner, first class and Concorde passengers are massaged gently through the inconvenience of having to walk to the plane at all. In that land of whispers, the rich, the famous and the powerful disappear down their own gangways, flattered, pampered and attended every step of the way.

Matthew was standing in the economy queue, and he wasn’t enjoying it.

In the days when his father had paid for his airline tickets, Matthew had usually travelled business class, even first class if he could stand the inevitable argument. Today, with an economy ticket, Matthew gazed at the long queue stretching ahead of him and looked again at his watch. It was now only fifty minutes to takeoff and the queue seemed to be stuck. Only the rear view of a particularly attractive French girl kept him from losing his temper altogether. She was casually dressed in jeans and a crisp white cotton shirt, but the designer look was unmistakable and her figure was a pleasure to behold. She pushed a single large suitcase and carried a soft white leather bag on her shoulder. Matthew wanted to see her face but was half afraid that if she turned her head she would disappoint him. Right now, she looked perfect.

Just then the queue which had been stuck broke into a confusion at the far end by the check-in desk. The neat line of people dissolved into a scrum. Like everybody else, Matthew pushed forward to see what was happening.

The plane due to leave for New York at six that evening had developed some mechanical failure. They had found a replacement, but the replacement was a smaller 767, instead of the scheduled jumbo. The remaining passengers would not be able to travel that night. All passengers would be given a choice of accommodation at a nearby airport hotel or cash to allow them to travel home. All passengers would be able to travel out first thing the next day on a plane arranged especially for them. British Airways apologised profusely for any inconvenience caused. Passengers should contact the ground staff if they required help.

Matthew was apoplectic. He was flying to New York to join Madison’s notoriously tough training programme, which started tomorrow. On the first morning, the bank’s president was to give an introductory talk famous for its brevity. ‘Take a good look at the students on either side of you,’ he was reputed to say. ‘Chances are that by the end of the programme, one of those students, or you, will have flunked the course. And there is no second chance, so do your best. And remember: in times to come, your fellow students may be your friends and colleagues. Right now they are also your competitors.’

It wouldn’t be his fault if he were late. Brian McAllister had kept him in over the weekend on some dumb project that needed finishing and this was the last flight to get him there on time. Because he was a trainee, he had to fly economy, a saving which now threatened to tip him off the flight. But Madison wanted results not hard-luck stories, and Matthew looked set to be the first student not even to arrive on the first day.

‘Merde!’

The thought was Matthew’s, but the words came from elsewhere. It was the French girl in the white shirt. Her face was no disappointment at all. Long, dark brown hair fell smoothly from a centre parting, beautifully framing her oval face. She had clear fair skin, a slight pink blush, high cheekbones. She looked like a madonna, travelling light. Though obviously annoyed, she remained entirely composed. She was perfect, thought Matthew, absolutely perfect. Just for a moment the flight was forgotten.

The French girl wasn’t really talking to anyone, just announcing her feelings, but Matthew felt he might as well respond.

‘Unbelievable, isn’t it?’ he said, brilliantly.

‘Terrible. I need to be in New York tonight. I have changed my booking twice already.’

‘Me too. Let’s see if we can get any joy here,’ said Matthew, throwing his weight into the mêlée ahead.

‘I don’t think you will have any fun there. Not unless you have something which the fifty people ahead of you don’t have. Come.’

She turned and set off rightwards to the serene world of business class. Matthew hesitated a moment, then followed. When he caught up with her a few yards from the check-in counter, she was in tears and her hands twisted round her handkerchief in agitation. He hurried to keep alongside her. At the desk she threw down her passport and her ticket. Between sobs she gasped, ‘We have to go to New York tonight. We have to.’

She then seemed to break down completely, and in an instant had nestled herself inside Matthew’s startled embrace. She was beautiful, beautiful, beautiful. Her body melted into his, seeking protection. He held her. He didn’t mind.

Then, with a further convulsion, she jerked free. Tugging at the ring finger of her left hand, she pulled off two rings and flung them on to the counter. One held a simple sapphire surrounded by a circle of tiny diamonds. The other was a plain gold band.

‘If you are going to ruin our honeymoon, you may as well have these as well!’ she cried.

The rings skittered across the counter. One of them fell into the stewardess’s lap, while the other flew on to the conveyor belt taking luggage to the cargo hall. The stewardess made a cricketer’s leap and snatched the ring up before it was carried away.

The diversion was enough for Matthew to regain his cool. As the stewardess grabbed the ring, he stole a glance at the passport on the counter in front of him. Sophie Clemenceau. As the stewardess resurfaced again, red-faced but holding both rings, Matthew stepped in. Drawing his companion further into his arms, he said, ‘I do apologise. Sophie doesn’t mean that at all. She knows it’s not your fault. She’s just upset.’

‘This is your honeymoon?’ asked the stewardess.

‘That’s right. You’re looking at the brand new Mr and Mrs Matthew Gradley.’ A squeeze below the level of the counter thanked him for the information.

‘Oh, it seems a terrible shame to spend your first night on honeymoon in the airport hotel. It’s not very nice, to be honest.’

‘Well, I suppose we don’t have much of a choice. I’m sure Sophie will be OK after a few days, though she is very superstitious.’

Sophie did a good job pretending that she wouldn’t get over the shock in a few months, let alone a few days. Matthew felt his shirt sticking to his chest where it was soaked from her tears.

‘Just a second. Let me see what I can do. I wouldn’t have wanted my honeymoon to be spoiled by anything like this.’

The stewardess whisked away. Matthew went on petting the sobbing Sophie. It was no torture. He hoped the stewardess would take her time. With her gone, Sophie held herself away from Matthew’s body but she stayed put.

‘Good thinking,’ he whispered into her hair.

‘Good job,’ she responded before getting on with more heavy-duty sobbing.

He stroked and she sobbed for a few minutes more. She was heaven, better than perfect. Matthew, her pretend husband, was virtually ready to marry her for real on the spot. All too soon the stewardess returned, smiling.

‘Luckily we have a couple of seats available in first class. They were booked, but nobody has shown up for them. I’ll book you in right away with the compliments of the airline.’

Within a minute they slipped away, hand in hand down the fast-track passport channel. A happy glance behind told them that the fifty or sixty frantic passengers they’d left screaming and shouting at the check-in desk were still there, still yelling. Matthew turned to Sophie.

‘Do tell me about our wedding. I seem to have forgotten it.’

She laughed. Her teeth were very white.

‘Tsk. Forgotten already? I have a good mind to divorce you.’

‘Better wait till we’re airborne. We wouldn’t want them to change their minds. That was quite a show you put on.’

‘I’ve been able to make myself cry since I was seven. I used it to make sure I never got in trouble for starting a fight, even when I had.’

They parted after passport control, she to the Harrods boutique, he to the newsagent for magazines. But their seats were together, and the armrest between them was already adorned with a bottle of champagne and flowers. Matthew, arriving first, was obliged to describe the happy day in exact detail to the inquisitive cabin crew until Sophie’s arrival rescued him.

They were left alone for a while as they made themselves at home in the luxurious seats. Matthew stretched out his legs and felt with difficulty for the seat a long way ahead of him. The menu promised good things, and a video library exclusively for first class assured him of a good evening’s entertainment. He glanced sideways again at Sophie. She had pulled a navy lambswool jumper out of her bag and had thrown it over her shoulders. She was casual, assured and beautiful. She wore her two rings on her ring finger, but Matthew could see the faint circles of pale skin which betrayed their normal positions. So she wasn’t married.

Matthew urgently wished he was more to her than a casual accomplice in a petty fraud. One of the stewardesses came over again.

‘We don’t have details of your destination address on arrival in New York. We have a complimentary limousine service to take you wherever you’re going to.’

Matthew paused. The gentlemanly thing would be to allow Sophie to give her address. He could get a cab from the airport. He already felt a sense of loss at their approaching parting. He had made up his mind to get to know her as well as he could on the flight over. If she was as great as she seemed, he’d do his utmost to mix pleasure with business during his five-month stay in New York.

Sophie pulled out an address slip. ‘It’s the intersection of Park Avenue and 75th Street. Upper East Side.’

It was the same block as Matthew was going to. The sheet of paper on which the address was printed had a familiar look to it. Hudson House. A small hotel with one very large corporate client. When the stewardess was out of earshot again, Matthew leaned over to Sophie.

‘Are you with Madison by any chance?’

She looked at him sharply.

‘I’m beginning the training programme tomorrow. That’s why I was so keen to make the plane.’

‘Me too. On both counts.’

‘Pleased to meet you.’

They formally shook hands, carefully so none of the cabin staff could see. It was only forty minutes after the moment that her tears had been gluing his shirt to his chest, and about thirty-nine minutes after Matthew had decided to see more of her.

Now he was both relieved and tense. Relieved because he would see her every single day for the next five months. Tense because he remembered the famous speech he was due to hear tomorrow. The beautiful Sophie Clemenceau might become a friend and colleague. If Matthew had his way she would also become his lover. But for five months she was also to be a competitor.

7

George had found a solicitor in Ilkley to draw up the Sale Agreement which would legally transfer Gissings into his name. He had instructed the solicitor to make the document totally one-sided and sent two copies round to Gissing. He assumed he’d have to make some concessions to get the old man’s consent, but one copy of the contract came back by return signed in a shaky hand, ‘Thomas Gissing, Proprietor and Managing Director, 1963–98’. There were no amendments.

Eleven weeks since hearing his father’s will, George owned a company. Its annual turnover was £1.5 million. Excluding the bank loan, its assets were valued in the accounts at around £350,000. So far, George had spent one pound plus a few hundred in solicitor’s fees. He should be feeling good.

He wasn’t. It was now Monday. On Friday, The Gissings Modern Furniture Company was required to repay more than half a million pounds to the bank. Val Bartlett, old Tom Gissing’s secretary and now his, was able to find about fifteen quid in the company’s petty cash tin. There was a float of perhaps five pounds in a decaying vending machine. George’s car would fetch twenty grand second-hand. And that was it.

George made an appointment to see David Ballard, the company’s bank manager.

As luck would have it, Ballard had been Bernard Gradley’s bank manager when Gradley had first opened an account, and they’d done good business together. Both men’s empires expanded. Ballard took over responsibility for all lending to mid-sized companies in Yorkshire and the North West, while Gradley’s business spread across the nation. Despite their different paths, the two men had maintained a respectful friendship. If George needed a favour to get him started, Ballard should be the ideal man to grant it.

Ballard’s office overlooked the old market square in Richmond, a well-to-do market town in North Yorkshire. The room was furnished by Ballard himself, not his employer, and the result was welcoming and warm. Ballard had been offered promotions, but he refused anything which took him away from Yorkshire. His clients loved him and his bosses left him alone. He welcomed George with coffee and biscuits.

‘Well, well, George. It’s a while since I’ve seen you. Very sorry to hear about your father’s death. Very sorry indeed. You must be very cut up, I suppose. How’s poor Helen taking it?’

Ballard munched on the biscuits as he spoke. He was a fat man with greying hair and moustache. He had the no-nonsense mouth of the tough banker and the twinkly eyes of a kind and humorous man. Crumbs from his biscuits lodged inside his moustache.

George shrugged. According to Josie, their mother was in a very bad way indeed, having teetered on the brink of following their father into the night. As it was now … but Ballard didn’t need to know the real, gloomy story. A brightly-coloured fairy tale would do for him.

‘Mum’s taken it OK to be honest,’ said George. ‘As you know, there wasn’t much love lost between Mum and Dad by the end. She’s just pleased that the money’s coming into the family proper after being under lock and key for so long.’

The will was secret, but Ballard knew as well as anyone how much Bernard Gradley was worth. If George could con him into believing he was about to inherit millions, then getting him to show a bit of grace with Gissings shouldn’t be so tough.

‘Yes. A few million must dull the edge of pain I suppose. Especially if you couldn’t stand the old bastard – and I speak as a friend of the old bastard, as you know. Still you haven’t come here to talk about that, I guess. Proud proprietor of old Tom Gissing’s shop, eh? Wouldn’t quite guess it. Not from the look of you. Still, stranger things have happened. How can I help?’

‘Well I owe you half a million quid, give or take.’

‘That’s right. But it’s give not take. Five hundred and forty-eight thousand, seven hundred and eighty-two pounds. Due close of business on Friday.’

‘That’s fine, but I wonder if we could sort out an extension. Two or three months perhaps?’

‘An extension? With all that cash from your dad?’

There was a twinkle in Ballard’s eye, but his mouth was unforgiving, and it was the mouth talking.

‘Nothing has yet been released by the estate’s executors,’ said George truthfully. ‘There are death duties, valuation of the business, all the rest of it. Until I get my slice of the pie, I’m as poor as a church mouse. What I want is to defer the loan until I can recapitalise the business, write off the debt, give it a healthy balance sheet once again.’

‘You have a letter from the executors? I might be able to grant a deferral if you had a letter.’

George stuttered for a moment. He could get a letter. It just wouldn’t say what he needed it to say.

‘Er – I guess so. What I don’t know is whether I can get it in time. There’s a whole bunch of executors and the legal palaver seems to take for ever.’

Ballard checked some figures on his desk.

‘The interest payment due on Friday is around six grand. If you get that to us plus another thirty grand as an advance on the next series of interest payments, then I’ll give you a temporary extension. Let’s say three months, shall we?’

George nodded without being able to speak. In his mind’s eye, he’d expected Ballard to nod the whole thing through without a hint of difficulty. As it was, Ballard had hardly helped at all.

Emerging blinking into the market square, George chased a traffic warden from his illegally parked car, pulled out his mobile phone and started to dial. He had five days to find thirty-six grand. If he couldn’t, he would be the shortest lived proprietor The Gissings Modern Furniture Company (Limited) would ever know.

8

Not dead, thank God, but very, very ill.

An ambulance had come quickly. A kind paramedic had been swift to reassure a distraught Josephine that her mother’s pulse was steady, her breathing weak but constant. The journey to hospital was an unremembered rush of sirens and flashing lights. Once there, Helen Gradley was thrust fast and unemotionally on to the processing line of the modern NHS. Her case was serious and, queue-jumping the groaning hordes in casualty, she was placed immediately into intensive care. Through that night and the days that followed, diagnosis and prognosis became clearer.

Helen Gradley had had a stroke, a stoppage of blood to the brain. The consequences were hard to predict, even for a specialist. Some people lost speech, lost coordination, lost memory, then recovered the lot within weeks and months. Others might lose less, but lose it for good. With Helen, whose stroke had been severe, only time would tell.

And Josephine? That first night at the hospital she had sat up all night with her mother. Doctors had come and gone, giving conflicting advice, rushing off at the command of a pager, too busy to do their job. Josie, in her party dress still, held her mother’s hand, whispering encouragement. She remembered the mood she’d been in, climbing the hill towards home: her anger, her passionate demands for her old life back. That was all gone now. Helen Gradley, for so long the shield between her children and their father, the victim of an unfair divorce and a cruel will, lay in bed, helpless as a baby, looking to her daughter for help.

Josephine was just seventeen. She had never expected to earn a living, let alone care for a disabled parent, but she knew her duty. ‘It’s OK, Mum. I’m here,’ she said.

9

It’s a common problem amongst bankers. You work hard all day. You come home tired as a dog in a heatwave. Then when at last you collapse into bed, you can’t even sleep. Worse still, you do sleep and your dreams are full of the rubbish you’ve spent your day with. Numbers walk past in an endless stupid procession. You’re no longer you. You’re just a cursor flashing in a crowded spreadsheet, roving up and down, sorting out numbers, the last traffic cop left alive in Gridlock City.

It was three o’clock in the morning and Zack threw off the covers. He groaned. Outside there was a distant whistle of traffic from Camden High Street and the sound of a milk float clinking. Zack tried to let the sounds drift in and over the clickety-click of marching numbers.

He put the light on, splashed water on his face, then decided to have a shower. Maybe that would wash the rubbish away. He stood under the jet of water and scrubbed himself with the Boots aromatherapy shower gel which Josephine had given him for his birthday. It was a rather pointed present, bought for less than a tenner – Josie’s way of reminding him that she was struggling to cope. Damn her. She’d quit complaining when Zack saved their father’s fortune single-handedly. When she had a few million quid in her pocket – money which Zack would have put there – she could buy him a decent present. The purple gel (‘Refreshing and Relaxing’) dripped off Zack’s bony figure under the spray. Numbers still chattered, but not as much.

He threw on a dressing gown stolen from the New York Plaza in happier days, and padded into the kitchen. Nothing in the fridge except a yoghurt past its sell-by date. He opened it and sniffed it. It smelled OK. What’s the difference between a yoghurt pot and Australia? The yoghurt’s got a living culture. Ha, ha. Zack ate the yoghurt and stared at the lid. The sell-by date. More numbers. He’d be dreaming about the bar code next. If he scrabbled around in the dustbin he could probably find a till receipt to read.

He went back into the bedroom and sat on the edge of the bed. Sarah Havercoombe seemed completely indifferent to him and, besides, she was engaged to be married. Coburg’s was beginning to bore him and he wasn’t close to his million pounds. He didn’t even know how he was going to make it. Meanwhile, Matthew was on Wall Street learning to trade, and George was god-knows-where doing god-knows-what. Maybe Josie was right, maybe they were all a pack of fools. Still, there didn’t seem to be much else to do except try. Go on trying until they’d reached their sell-by date.

Why was that phrase in his head so much? Sell-by date. The numbers had gone, but the phrase stayed. Probably something to do with that blasted Aberdeen Drilling data room. All those piles of contracts and accounts. Random phrases stuck around just like the numbers. Zack got into bed again and turned off the light. The yoghurt sat in his stomach feeling funny. It probably had been off. He tried to sleep. Sell-by date. Sell-by date.

Five minutes later, he threw off the covers and turned the light back on. Frowning with concentration, he began to bring a page from the data room into his mind’s eye. The page came, blurry at first, then in sharp focus: ‘Standard Warranties for Consultancy-type Agreements’. Zack read the words below the title. It was drafted in legal language so dense you could saw it into blocks and build with it, but to Zack the meaning was clear. He brought another page to mind. It appeared, then cleared, like the one before: ‘Insurance Arrangements: Provisions and Exclusions’. Zack gazed at the remembered page. Things were becoming clear. No wonder he couldn’t sleep. Just one more check to make: ‘Schedule of Principal Consultancy Projects, 1988–98’. The page began to clear, but Zack hardly needed to look at it to know what it said.

He turned off the light and slept like a baby.

10

Through the slatted blinds behind the students, the Hudson River emptied into the Atlantic Ocean. The waters were crowded with traffic and in the late summer sun, the Statue of Liberty waved her torch, calling order to the congested skies. The gateway to the free world isn’t too keen on the weary and dispossessed these days, but it sure has time for anything which can be packaged, shipped and sold. Away to the south west, too far to be seen in the haze, the port authority’s cranes kept the flood of goods moving swiftly on.

None of the students had their eyes on the scene. You could stack up all the cargo passing through the air and sea ports of New Jersey and New York in a year and you’d have a mountain big enough to boast a skiing industry. But the whole enormous pile wouldn’t be worth a thousandth part of the invisible cargo which passes noiselessly down the electronic thoroughfares of Wall Street.

The market for US government bonds is worth over six trillion dollars. The foreign exchange market turns over a trillion dollars each and every working day. The US stockmarkets are capitalised at fourteen trillion bucks. The market for corporate bonds and bills, and certificates of deposit, and a hundred other varieties of security add trillions more to the total. And each of these bits of paper belongs to investors, skilled and unskilled, wise and foolish, twisting and turning to dodge losses and snuffle out profit.

Wall Street does various things, some good for the world, others not so good. But its main function is simple: it’s a bureau de change where investors can sell one bit of paper and buy another. And every time a bit of paper changes hands, leaving an investor happy and excited about the future, there is another person even happier. That person is the Wall Street trader who did the trade. For every dollar that changes hands, a tiny amount of change stays in the hands of the trader. In some markets, the amount of change is almost microscopic. In the foreign exchange markets, the Wall Streeter might keep just a few hundredths of a cent. In the stockmarket it might be half a cent, sometimes as much as two or three.

But traders don’t care that their take is small. If you multiply by a million dollars, one tenth of a cent is worth a thousand bucks. Multiply by a billion, and that tenth of a cent is worth a million dollars. And if you’re sharp enough and smart enough to squeeze out two tenths of a cent, then the investor still hardly cares – what’s two tenths of a cent to him? – but you’ve doubled your take to two million bucks. Keep at it and before long you’ll have your nice house in Long Island, your German sports car and your decent sized yacht. Your kids will go to the right schools, your wife will be invited to the right parties, and you will no longer keep in touch with your pals from college who got better grades than you but who made the life-destroying error of opting for a career in engineering or civic service.

Life as a Wall Street trader can be very sweet. And that, of course, is why the students were there.

Matthew looked around. Sophie was sitting diagonally in front of him. He caught her eye and smiled at her. She smiled back. It hadn’t been his imagination. She was still gorgeous, with her perfect figure and a complexion so nice you wanted to sing to it. Matthew definitely wanted to get to know her.

A tall blond Californian barged along the row of seats and sat down next to Matthew.

‘Mind if I sit here? My name’s Scott Petersen. Nice to meet you.’

Scott Petersen was an inch or two taller than Matthew, an inch or two broader and maybe an inch or two better looking. Matthew disliked him at once.

‘Hi. Matthew Gradley.’

They shook hands.

‘From England, right?’

‘Right.’

‘At least that’s easy,’ said Petersen, looking round the room. ‘We’ve got twenty-two North Americans, same number of Europeans, then maybe fifteen or twenty from everywhere else. Mostly Pacific Rim, I guess, but I bumped into a couple of South Americans earlier and I know there’s a Russian and some kind of Middle Eastern oil princess.’

Matthew nudged his neighbour. Down the row to Matthew’s right came a plump dark-skinned girl, her hair piled up and fastened with a couple of heavy gold clips. Gold glittered and clunked at her fingers, wrist and neck. She walked looking straight ahead, her heavy-set face impassive.

‘That’s her,’ whispered Petersen. ‘I’ve heard she only just managed to graduate from college and her English is none too good either. But her family controls oil reserves worth tens of billions of dollars and –’

Petersen shrugged. He understood it, but he didn’t like it. At Madison merit is the only way to get ahead, but merit comes in different shapes, and the podgy figure of the oil princess was one of them. Matthew turned to her.

‘How do you do,’ he said. ‘Matthew Gradley.’

‘Yes. How do you do,’ replied the girl in a heavy accent. ‘Fareshti Al Shahrani –’

Anything further she had intended to say was interrupted as the entrance door opened and a man strode across to the podium. The students fell silent. The man was Dan Kramer, the Lion of Wall Street.

The old-fashioned walnut podium concealed a battery of switches controlling the sound system, lights, blinds, screens, projectors – everything. But Kramer stood away from the podium. He hadn’t any slides, and his voice needed no amplification. He was not a large man, but with a mane of dusty blond hair bristling round a granite face, he didn’t need to be large to be awe-inspiring. When Time magazine had done a cover story on Kramer entitled ‘The Lion of Wall Street’, the nickname became permanent. When he was calm, he looked fierce. When he was angry, he was terrifying. Today Kramer was not angry, but he was emphatic.

‘My name is Daniel Kramer. I am the Chairman and Chief Executive of Madison. I would like to welcome you all to this training programme today.’

He grinned, but his smile cheered no one. It showed too many teeth and lasted a few seconds too long.

‘You succeeded in obtaining a job here because the people who interviewed you believed that you have what it takes. We try hard to be right because it’s a waste of our time being wrong. But we do get it wrong, about one time in three. When we screw up, we say sorry and ask you to leave. We don’t want you to have a nasty life, but we want you to lead it outside of this organisation.

‘Those of you who remain with us will sometimes wonder if you made the right choice. The work is hard, the pressure is relentless. Each time you think you’ve mastered a task, we will increase your responsibilities, demand more from you. You will meet every challenge or you will leave the firm. If you continue to succeed, you will earn sums of money that are unimaginable to all but a tiny fraction of the population. You will also have the satisfaction of knowing that you’ve made it in one of the world’s most demanding workplaces. So much for your rewards.

‘More important to me are the rewards for the firm. I am sometimes asked to define our strategy. That’s easy. In every country where we operate, we recruit the best. Once we’ve recruited them, we retain them. Then we just get on with our jobs, as best we can. That’s it. The rewards for the firm will follow.’

Kramer continued to prowl to and fro across the floor of the amphitheatre.

‘Are there any questions?’

Coming from him, this wasn’t a question. It was a joke. Nobody asked a question, nobody ever had since Kramer started giving these speeches. He smiled once more. Too many teeth again and the smile lasted long after the light had vanished. Without another word, the Lion of Wall Street stalked from the room.

Matthew knew beforehand that Kramer wasn’t exactly a touchy-feely kind of guy. And Matthew didn’t just cope with competition; he thrived on it. All the same, Kramer was genuinely menacing, and Matthew’s mouth felt dry. He glanced downwards and across to where Sophie was sitting. She looked completely composed. She wasn’t licking her lips, or shifting in her seat, or fiddling with her pencils, or doing any of the other things that the other students were doing. She just looked beautiful and desirable. Matthew forgot Kramer.

He opened his folder and took out a card which he’d bought that morning. He scrawled something inside, scribbled Sophie’s name on the envelope, and tossed it accurately on to her desk.

She looked round to see where it had come from and sent Matthew a polite smile. She opened the envelope and read the card. She smiled, not politely this time, and sent Matthew a look, which meant ‘Yes’. With a bit of luck it even meant, ‘Yes, please, I’d be delighted’.

The inscription inside the card was brief. It ran: ‘Dear Mrs Gradley, as today is the first day of our honeymoon, perhaps you would care to dine with me this evening? Eight at The Riverside. Your loving husband, Mr Gradley.’

11

Hank Daggert, the Chief Executive of Tominto Oil, didn’t care too much for the mother country. He liked some things, of course. He liked Maggie Thatcher, the flexible labour market and North Sea Oil. But the list of things he didn’t like was much longer. He disliked the Queen, trade unions, New Labour, John Lennon, unarmed policemen, the BBC, hot tea, warm beer, and cold rooms. He didn’t like the bunch of old Etonians who were helping him buy Aberdeen Drilling but he hadn’t much choice. He was buying a British company and he figured that picking Coburg’s, the biggest independent British bank, was the best way to succeed. All the same, Daggert listened to Piers St George Hanbury with growing irritation.

‘You’re telling me there was a time bomb in that data room all along?’

‘Yes. We believe you should reduce your bid by ten million pounds or insist that the seller insures you against any liability you might be taking on.’

‘Jesus. We’re only a fortnight away from making our final offer. Couldn’t you have told me this sooner?’

‘Yes, I understand. The problem was very carefully hidden, and it took us some time to spot it. But we thought you would sooner know late than not at all.’

‘You’re telling me,’ growled Daggert. Tominto Oil was worth about a billion dollars and Daggert owned about five percent of it. Hank Daggert wasn’t exactly a sweet old man, but if you were a shareholder in Tominto Oil you loved him just the same. ‘Just take me through the problem one more time. I want to be sure I understand.’

Piers Hanbury was too important to care much about details. He was one of the biggest deal-makers in the City of London and he wasn’t unduly fussed over a hundred million pound deal with a miserable little million pound fee. He was there to look distinguished and make the client feel happy.

‘Zack, why don’t you walk us through this?’ said Hanbury smoothly. ‘It’s your discovery, after all.’

Hanbury was polite in front of a client, but he’d been absolutely furious with Zack the day before. ‘Why the hell didn’t you bring this up sooner? We don’t stand a chance of doing the deal now.’ Hanbury was sore.

One thing about buying companies is different from buying a car. With a car, when you call out the AA to inspect it, you pay the AA a flat fee irrespective of whether you end up buying the car. That way you can be sure of getting impartial advice. If you agreed to pay only if the inspection was clean, you’d find yourself with clean reports for cars only a tow-ride away from the breakers’ yard.

For some reason, which no one on earth can explain, it doesn’t work like that when it comes to buying companies. Corporate financiers only get paid if they win the deal, if their client beats the other bidders. The temptation to encourage the client to bid too much is almost overwhelming – and every now and then, there are those who don’t try so hard to resist. Piers St George Hanbury was one of them. If Zack had found the problem when they were in the data room a couple of weeks back, Hanbury would have found other reasons for getting Tominto Oil to pay up for Aberdeen. But now they’d debated the price and fixed it, when bloody Zack Gradley comes along with a ten million pound hole. The deal was running into the sand.

‘OK,’ said Zack. ‘The seller had a problem. They were all ready to sell Aberdeen Drilling, when along comes a major headache. A Norwegian consultancy project they’d worked on returned to haunt them. They’d advised on the construction of a North Sea pipeline into Bergen. They did their work, got paid, and forgot about it. But to win the contract, they had offered a guarantee. Either the work’s OK or they’d pay to put it right. That was the deal.

‘Now, just as they were getting ready to invite you guys into the data room, the Norwegians come along. It turns out there was a major foul-up which the Norwegians say is the fault of Aberdeen Drilling. Well, maybe, maybe not. It hasn’t been tested in a court of law, but let’s just suppose the Norwegians are right and Aberdeen did screw up.

‘Normally, that wouldn’t be too bad. They’ve got insurance. If they have to pay out to the Norwegians, they just get the cash back from the insurers. But here’s the problem. When they signed the Norway contract, they weren’t insured. There was a cock-up in accounts and they were a week late in making a premium payment, something to do with staff sickness, I think. Anyway, the week the contract was signed, they weren’t insured. The sellers are desperate to sell before the liability hits, plus they want to make sure the buyers don’t see what’s coming.’

‘But you said all this was in the data room? Why would they go and tell us if they wanted to keep it quiet?’

Zack smiled.

‘They had to put it in the data room or else you could claim the money back on the warranty. So what they did was smart. They dismantled their time bomb. They broke it into four little pieces and hid three of them in the data room and one in the press. Any of those bits on their own is harmless. But the four of them together stand to make a very loud bang.’

‘Go on.’

‘The first part of the bomb was concealed in some standardised consultancy agreements. That’s where they told us that all their consultancy work was guaranteed. Any problems down the line would need to be paid for. The second part of the bomb was buried in a footnote way down in a mountain of stuff to do with insurance contracts. The footnote pointed out that there was a period of a few days where these insurance arrangements didn’t apply. The third part of the bomb was a note mentioning when the Norwegian contract had been signed, which was – surprise, surprise – bang in the middle of the time when the insurance was on the blink. If you like, the deal was signed after the insurance had passed its sell-by date.

‘And here’s the clever bit. The most dangerous part of the bomb – the bit which would have aroused our suspicions instantly and sent us hunting down all the other parts – they didn’t even put inside the data room.’

‘But I thought –’ began Daggert.

Zack cut him off. ‘Yes. You thought that if they didn’t put something in the data room, then we were covered by the warranty. That’s true – unless that thing was already public knowledge, defined as something already being in the press. So what they do is, they take their bomb’s most dangerous part to a Norwegian journalist. A journalist who works for a Norwegian oil industry magazine with a circulation of about five thousand. They say what they have to say. The journalist writes a couple of paragraphs, in Norwegian of course, and bungs it in the magazine. Hey presto. It’s public knowledge. The story’s not big enough to be picked up elsewhere, and if it is, it’ll probably hit the English-language journals too late for the deal. After all, there aren’t all that many people with fluent Norwegian and an avid interest in the offshore oil business.’

Daggert shook his head. ‘So how the hell did you guys find this bomb? You read Norwegian oil industry magazines for fun?’

Zack shook his head. ‘Thinking about the data room afterwards, I realised that they’d concealed the first three pieces very carefully. They were a long way apart. Each one was buried in documents almost too boring to read. I realised that they had a perfect bomb, all they needed was some explosive. So then I started looking for the explosive. We used our databases to search the English-language press, then the press worldwide. Up pops this Norwegian article which mentions a sum of ten million pounds. And there we had it: a bomb, primed and ticking.’

Zack tossed the article across the desk with a translation. Daggert scanned it. It didn’t say much: just that there was a problem and that the Norwegians would be putting in a claim for the money. But it was enough.

‘You got notes on the other stuff, the other parts of the bomb?’ Zack shook his head. Daggert looked at his two subordinates: the ones who had been with Zack and Sarah in the data room. ‘Did you pick up this stuff?’ They both shook their heads and the more senior guy glowered at the junior guy, as though it was his fault. Daggert’s voice grew sharper. ‘You don’t have any record of this and you want me to drop my bid by ten million pounds?’

Hanbury leaned forward. Here was a chink of light. They could be honest with the client, but still maybe encourage the client not to change his bid. That would be the best of all worlds. He began to speak, but the arrogant young Gradley beat him to it.

‘I do have records, just not written ones.’

‘What?’ Daggert was pissed off. Was Gradley playing games?

‘I have a good memory. I don’t forget a fact.’

Daggert gave a sharp laugh. ‘That’s easily tested.’ He reached for the yellow legal pad of one of his subordinates. It was crowded with notes from the data room. Daggert flicked through the pages and looked at Gradley, his eyes openly challenging. ‘OK. File fifty-seven. Tab eight. Tell me what it says.’

Zack brought the file to mind, then the tab, then turned the tab to find the first page. He let the page swim out of memory into focus.

‘Employee grievance procedures,’ he said. ‘Disciplinary committees. First and second warnings. That kind of thing.’

Daggert nodded and flicked forward again through the notes. He smiled. This would be a good test. ‘File ninety-one. Tab four. There are some numbers on that page. Read them to me.’

Zack found the page and let it swim into view. Then he smiled and began to go red.

‘What’s up?’ said Daggert. ‘Something amuse you?’

‘Er, well, no not exactly,’ said Zack, his red deepening. This file hadn’t been one of his. It had been one of Sarah’s and he hadn’t looked at it fully. But as he tried to bring the picture to mind, he realised he had seen it after all. He had been standing up, getting a cup of coffee from the table at the side of the room. Sarah had been sitting in front of him, leaning over the file. Her light brown hair fell down either side of her neck, leaving it exposed, vulnerable, kissable – Zack had stared at her with yearning and found himself staring also at the file open in front of her: file ninety-one, tab four. ‘Sorry,’ continued Zack. ‘I was smiling because I remember Sarah – er – walking into the room about that time. I guess that must have been a nice experience for me.’

‘Nice to see a good team spirit,’ growled Daggert, glancing at Sarah, who went red in turn herself. But she wasn’t angry, just embarrassed. ‘Did you get a chance to look at the numbers too?’

‘Yes. Of course. The numbers you wanted were eighteen point six, fourteen point eight …’ He continued flawlessly. Daggert followed from the notes in front of him. Zack was perfect.

‘OK. Stop. You’ve proved your point. Good catch, young man. Piers, we’ll drop our bid by ten million pounds. Is that clear? We offer a hundred and fifteen million only.’

Hanbury swallowed. Damn Gradley. Damn him.

‘That’s perfectly clear. You do of course remember our advice that the winning bid is unlikely to be less than one twenty-five. I must warn you that your revised bid is most unlikely to win.’

The oilman glared at the aristocratic Hanbury.

‘Damn right. And we won’t overpay either.’

12

‘Kiki? It’s me. George.’

‘Georges, darling, how are you?’ Kiki’s English was excellent but she knew that a French accent sounded sexier and she exploited the fact for all it was worth.

‘I’m OK. Look, can you come over to my flat right away? I need to see you.’

‘Now darling? I’m going out right now. I have my hat on.’

‘You’re always just going out. I’ve ordered you a cab and it’s waiting outside your hotel now. Kiki, I need to see you.’

She paused for a moment, wondering whether to provoke him with a longer refusal.

‘OK, Georges. But you will need to admire my new suit very much. It is new today.’

George promised.

‘And I really am going out, so I will only be able to stay with you for two minutes.’

‘That’s OK.’

‘Maybe only one minute, if I have to spend time getting ready.’ Getting ready for Kiki meant fussing over her immaculate make-up and leaving expensive brand name cosmetics in other people’s bathrooms.

‘Kiki, I’ll give you a personal pedicure if I have to. Just get a move on.’

She came. An hour and a half late, of course, and carrying a bag from Harvey Nichols. But she came. Her new suit was stunning. Coral pink and perfectly fitted, it was as eye-catching as its price tag. George gave it as much praise as it deserved and almost as much as Kiki demanded.

Nobody annoyed George more than Kiki, but nor had any girl ever attracted him as much. Other than a kiss one New Year’s Eve in Monaco – which had meant a lot to George, but nothing at all, it appeared, to Kiki – nothing had passed between them. He was heavily built and, dressed differently, could easily have passed as a Yorkshire farmer: slow-talking, stolid, strong. She, in contrast, was petite, pretty, brightly coloured, fluttering constantly from one thing to another like a bird hopping from twig to twig. They were unlikely friends, but George kept her doggedly in his sight, as she skipped from Gstaad to Monaco to London to New York to Palm Beach to Milan and back home to her chateau in the Loire valley.

As for her, she showed no outward sign of attraction to George – or at least no more to him than to anyone else in her wide circle of friends. Yet it was noticeable that, wherever she went, her path always circled back to George’s flat in London. She sat on his sofas, showed him her latest purchases, scattered her make-up, showed him photos of the party she’d just come from, agonised with him about what to wear for the next one, patted his cheeks, called him darling, rumpled his hair and left him in a frenzy for the next visit.

At length Kiki stepped down from the coffee table where she had been pirouetting.

‘OK, Georges, my darling, you have been a very good boy. But I think you wanted to see me not just because of my nice new suit. No?’

George seized the moment. In a few sentences, he told Kiki the story about his father’s will, the challenge it threw down, how George and his brothers accepted the challenge, how George now had just three days to find thirty-six grand.

‘Kiki,’ he finished, ‘I have a question. You’ve always told me that you love this flat and how fed up you are staying in hotels whenever you come to London. Well, there’s about nine months rent prepaid on this flat and I’m ready to move out tomorrow. If you can take the flat off my hands, I’ll be eternally grateful.’

Kiki had listened very quietly and seriously to George’s narration. Now that he came to the end, she said, ‘But Georges, this flat is so masculin. I need something a little more feminin, you know. All this blue and gold, it is good for you and it was très fashionable last year, but this year the colours are lighter, you know.’

She waved her hand around but her speech tapered off. Despite her words, her face was solemn.

‘Georges, you really need this money, no?’

George nodded.

‘And if I give you the money, then you will give it to some bank manager who will take it away and not give it back to you, no? And you say that this business of yours is a very bad business, no? That it will probably go down the hole? Oh Georges, and then you will have no money and then I will not be able to see you because you will have holes in your shoes and I do not like men who have holes in their shoes.’

There were tears in her eyes.

‘But I suppose you need to have this stupid money because you are a man and because your brothers are men too I suppose and because you have to look tough with them and so I will have to give you the money and then you will lose it all but you will be a very tough man and you won’t mind and then I will hate you because you have no money and you don’t mind even though you have holes in your shoes so I cannot see you.’

She was crying now. Big tears fell soundlessly from her trembling eyes. George stood up to find her a tissue. In an instant she was in his arms, her face buried in his chest. After a while, she stopped weeping and looked up at him. He held her gaze and bent down towards her. Who kissed whom first? Who knows? But, within a second, each was kissing the other, first on the mouth, then inside. Kiki’s lips and tongue burned with passion. Her tiny body pressed into George’s bulky frame. George hugged her with all the passion that years of longing had given him.

After a time, how long neither knew, they stepped back to look at one another. Kiki had stopped crying, but her cheeks were flushed and damp. George stepped forward again seeking to gather her up with renewed passion but she moved away.

‘Now look what you have done, you beastly man,’ she said, dabbing her face. ‘I will have to start over now. Then we have to go and find your stupid money. Then we have to go and find some proper curtains. What do you think? Maybe pink? I have seen some oh-so-nice ones in that gorgeous little shop on the Fulham Road, but they are silk of course, so then we would need to get rid of these funny old sofas which would be all wrong. Oh, Georges, you are nothing but a problem to me.’

She whisked off into the bathroom. He was molten with feeling for her. But already he could sense her tripping away again, a kingfisher pursued by a bear.

In due course she emerged from the bathroom looking immaculate. She took George off to see her ‘avocat’. The avocat was a London solicitor retained under the terms of Kiki’s trust fund with the near impossible responsibility for keeping some sort of hold over Kiki’s purse strings. The solicitor approved the proposal gratefully. Kiki’s London hotel bills were astronomical. There was, however, a problem. The solicitor was more or less obliged to meet any bills which Kiki ran up as long as the goods purchased were bought at a ‘fair market value’. Unfortunately the nine months rent remaining on George’s flat were valued at only £27,000 under the existing tenancy agreement. The solicitor, despite Kiki’s despairing wails, insisted that he would be in breach of trust if he paid any more than this for the flat.

There was only one solution. George asked Kiki if she wanted his car. Of course she wanted his car. She berated him for ever having considered that she might not want his car. She had no driver’s licence (she admitted in response to the solicitor’s enquiry) but how could she ever learn to drive if she wasn’t even allowed a car?

And so the deal was done. George gave up his flat and sold his car in exchange for a total of £47,000. The money flew from Kiki’s trust fund into George’s account. From George’s account £36,000 sped into the Gissings company account and from Gissings straight to David Ballard’s bank. The final transaction was cleared at four o’clock on the Friday afternoon.

Kiki told George off for ruining her week, making her see that beastly avocat, spending so long on the telephone and making all the wrong choices when he’d had his flat decorated the year before. George and Kiki swept around the most expensive boutiques in Sloane Street, the Kings Road and the Fulham Road ordering items for the flat. At the rate she spent money, she would get through another £50,000 within a matter of weeks.

At two o’clock on Saturday afternoon, Kiki remembered she was meant to be at a cocktail party in New York that evening and she shot off to the airport to jump on the next Concorde. George saw her off. At the fast-track customs channel, they stopped. They couldn’t delay a goodbye any further. Kiki turned to her companion, her face showing the signs of passionate struggle.

‘Goodbye, Georges.’

‘Kiki.’

George wanted to kiss again properly, as they had done before. He couldn’t believe that she didn’t want to too, but she shook her head and her troubled eyes were begging him ‘No’. She reached up to kiss him high up on the cheek and hugged him as she hugged practically everyone she knew.

‘Good luck with your horrid factory.’

‘Bye. Don’t … don’t lose touch.’

She left him there, watching till she passed out of sight. George ached with longing. He wondered if he would ever see her again. He also wondered where he was going to spend the night.

13

Zack was depressed. He was working hard on stuff so boring it hurt. The Aberdeen Drilling deal, as expected, had run into the sand. Tominto Oil had put in a bid of £115 million and been politely told that its bid was too low but thanks so much for trying. It was goodbye and good riddance. The winning bidder hadn’t yet closed the deal, but it hardly mattered. Whoever won, it wasn’t Tominto. Zack’s first deal was a washout. In climbing the ladder to a million quid he still hadn’t put his foot on the first rung.

What was worse, he was beginning to realise something about his chosen profession. To make money in corporate finance you don’t just have to be good, you have to be old. Chief executives making life and death decisions don’t simply want wise heads, they want old ones. Forced to choose between the two, they’d pick the old one every time. It’s not like that on the trading floor. In the markets, you can be old and grey, but if you bet wrong and the office boy bets right, then, before you know it, you’ll be sweeping the floors and the office boy will be on the phone to the Long Island estate agents. Zack could be the most brilliant mind in the City of London, but without long years of experience he’d never make bonuses big enough to release his father’s fortune. If he weren’t careful, Zack wouldn’t just be beaten by Matthew. He’d be humiliated.

And there was one final irritation. Every day he had to see Sarah, work with her, be professional, keep his hands off, not make love. He was as hopelessly in lust as he’d always been and he was being forced to sit and watch politely as she and her millions got married to some aristocratic lumphead. Zack was depressed.

It was eight o’clock in the evening and he was finishing up for the night. On his way out he walked by Sarah’s desk. She was still there working, bent over a presentation, hair tucked behind her ears.

‘Hi, Sarah.’

‘Zack. Hi. On your way out?’

‘Yes. I wondered if you’d like to come out for a beer?’

This was the first time either of them had suggested moving beyond careful professionalism into something like friendship. Sarah hesitated.

‘Um. I’d like to, but I’ve some stuff to finish up. Robert’s coming to pick me up in forty-five minutes.’

Robert Leighton, the fiancé. The obstacle. Zack sighed.

‘OK. Some other time? Tomorrow? It’s stupid you and me working together so closely and pretending we hardly know each other.’

‘Yes, but let’s be realistic. You would never have chosen me as your colleague and I wouldn’t have chosen you. But that’s how it is and so far it’s worked. Why mess things up?’

Zack spread his hands. He didn’t tell her, ‘Because I’m filled with lust and I want your money.’ Instead he said, ‘A drink can’t hurt. It’s been years now. I’ve changed. I know I was difficult then, but it doesn’t have to be that way now.’

‘Not difficult, Zack. You were impossible.’

She was pushing him. In the old days, he would never have let himself be pushed. They were already on the brink of an argument. Zack defused things carefully.

‘OK. I was impossible. I apologise. I was impossible and you were stubborn.’

His turn to challenge her. Would she acknowledge any fault? She nodded.

‘Yes. I was stubborn. I still am. I haven’t changed. I still like all the things I used to like. Hunting, balls, everything you loathe.’

‘That’s OK. You can murder every furry thing in England for all I care. It doesn’t bother me now. It’s Robert you have to share a life with. I’m just inviting you to share a drink.’

Sarah took a deep breath and looked at Zack. It felt like the first time they’d properly looked at each other in all this time. They hadn’t changed much. He was tall, angular, dark, intense. She was fair, square-chinned, athletic, honest-looking. Physically, everything had always worked between them, the only thing that ever had.

‘OK. A drink sometime. That’d be nice.’

‘Good. Great. I’ll hold you to that.’

They nodded at each other, Zack’s cue to leave. But he couldn’t tear himself away. His body fizzed with desire. Sarah had pulled her hair from behind her left ear and was fiddling absent-mindedly with the short brown strands. Zack watched. He knew Sarah. Playing with her hair meant she was thinking about sex.

‘Working on anything interesting?’ he asked, not because he wanted to know but because he wanted to stay.

Sarah laughed. ‘Not unless you count tax loopholes as interesting. It’s the sort of thing you’d probably be good at.’

‘I’m interested already.’

‘Well then, you’d better take a copy of this presentation and read as much as you want to. It’s as boring as hell to me.’

Zack took the presentation that Sarah gave him and riffled through it. He felt a sense of gathering excitement.

‘What’s the idea?’

‘It’s all in there,’ said Sarah, but Zack wasn’t leaving. She pushed her chair back and began to explain. ‘In every tax law, there’s a loophole. The point of this game is to find ways of passing as much money through the loopholes as fast as you can, until the tax authorities catch you at it and stop you doing it.’

‘And if they catch you?’

‘Well, you’re not doing anything illegal. In fact, you’re following the law to the letter, you’re just doing something completely different to what was originally intended. So when the taxmen discover their tax revenues are vanishing out of sight, they get a new law passed to block up the loophole. Then our tax experts put their twisted minds to work thinking up new ways to subvert the law. That’s why you’d be good at it. You’ve got the most twisted mind of anyone I know.’

‘And I can take a copy?’ asked Zack, waving the presentation.

‘Yes,’ replied Sarah laughing. ‘I’ve already said so. Just bring it back.’

Zack impulsively moved forward. He wasn’t sure if he was trying to kiss Sarah on the cheek or on the mouth, but anyhow she moved in surprise and he ended up kissing her half on the mouth, half on her upper lip. It was awkward and stupid. He apologised for his clumsiness and rushed off to copy the presentation, excited as a six-year-old.

Corporate financiers need to be old and wise and grey. Tax dodgers don’t. They just need to be right.

14

The factory shop had been cleared out. The museum exhibits which old Tom Gissing had lovingly pieced together lay shoved to one side, roughly covered by a dustsheet. George watched silently as the last of the workers filed in. There were no seats and the workforce, mostly men, stood, arms folded and muttering. Gissings wasn’t just the biggest employer in Sawley Bridge, it was pretty much the only one. George didn’t just own a factory. He controlled a community.

There was no platform, so George had had a Gissings desk pushed up against the wall. He sat on it and looked out at the sea of faces. Next to him stood Val Bartlett, old Tom Gissing’s secretary, with a sheaf of papers they had spent six long weeks putting together. Her mouth was taut and thin-lipped, turned down at the corners. The muttering from the assembled workers had an aggressive edge. George felt nervous.

When everybody was present, the murmur died away. All eyes were on George, who clambered heavily on to the desk. At least the old-style Gissings quality should bear his weight. He had some notes in his pocket, but he didn’t take them out. He knew what he wanted to say.

‘Thank you all for coming. My name is George Gradley and I am the new owner of this company. What I want to do is to tell you how things stand and what needs to change.

‘First, the good news. In the last twelve months, this company has sold one and a half million quids’ worth of furniture. That means there are still plenty of people who like what we do enough to fork out for it.

‘Now the bad news. We sold less last year than we did the year before, and less that year than the one before that. In fact, sales have fallen every year for five years.

‘I wouldn’t mind too much if our costs had come down. But they haven’t. They’ve gone up or stayed the same. As you all know, our costs are higher than our revenues. Much higher in fact. About two hundred thousand a year, and that’s before interest.

‘There might be some consolation if Gissings had been building for the future. But it hasn’t. It’s been building for the past. The factory extension is half-finished, but there’s no cash to finish it. Meanwhile our product line hasn’t changed in three years and it’s a decade out of date. Our marketing brochures are terrible and our prices are uncompetitive. Our most loyal customers are starting to look elsewhere, and I don’t blame them.

‘All this would be bad, but not disastrous if we had time to put things right. But we don’t. We owe the bank more than half a million pounds and we’ve got just under two months before the money’s due. We don’t have a chance of getting that much cash together in that space of time. But we do have a chance – a tiny one – of doing enough to persuade the bank that it should give us more time.

‘I know none of you knows me. Probably nobody in this room likes me or wants me here. But I want you to know that I’m speaking the truth. You all know Val, my secretary. I’ve asked her to show those of you who are interested all the facts and figures. You can see anything you want to. Our sales, our costs, our debts, everything. She understands all of this as well as anyone. Better than me, in fact. So talk to her. This is your company. You have a right to understand what’s going on.

‘Any questions so far?’

George looked around. Nobody moved. It had been obvious to everybody that Gissings was in trouble, but nobody had ever told them how bad. George could tell that the workforce believed him. But trust was a different matter and the toughest part of the speech was still to come. He felt nervous but committed.

‘So what are we going to do about it? Well, in the long term, if we get there, we’re going to turn Gissings into a thriving, expanding company, with a healthy balance sheet, a bloody good product line and a fat order book. But right now, our aim is to survive and we can’t do that with our costs the way they are. As of today, I am suspending thirty-five of you. Val will read out the names in a moment. I say suspending because I hope to take you back on as soon as I can. But that won’t be much comfort to you because your pay cheques are stopping as of now and in all probability we’ll go bust within a matter of months anyway. I owe you some redundancy money. Some of you, who have been with us longest, are owed quite a lot. Well, you’re not going to get it, because we don’t have it. You can take us to court if you want, and you’ll win. But you won’t get your money because by the time you get your award, this company will have been picked bare. I’m sorry, but that’s how it is.’

Val stood beside him with the thirty-five names. Everybody in the sawmill would go. There was no point in a sawmill, when you could get better quality product delivered more cheaply. On the factory floor, everyone who had looked up and dawdled on George’s first tour of inspection was going. Those who had stayed working were the lucky ones.

‘As for the rest of you, I’m cutting your pay by fifteen percent. If any of you want to give up more than that for the good of the company, then I’ll write your name in gold on the factory gates just as soon as we can afford the paint. I’m not allowed to cut your pay like that. Once again, you can take me to court, and you’ll win. But you won’t get any cash back and you won’t have a job, because the company will be as dead as a doornail. For what it’s worth, I don’t intend to take one penny in pay, until this company has made enough money to cover its costs including interest. And I’m going to work my tits off to see that it does.

‘Are there any questions?’

There was silence from the assembled company. Weak sunshine threaded its way through the dirty plate-glass windows. The yard beyond looked grey and empty. Standing on his desk, George felt exposed and vulnerable, but also renewed. He had said what needed saying, done what needed doing. He stayed standing. ‘Any questions at all?’

The silence lasted half a minute or so. Then somebody at the back of the room cleared his throat.

‘Why the fuck don’t you just write a cheque to the fucking bank for the fucking money and leave us poor bastards alone?’

15

‘Now try without the rails. Use your stick if you need to.’

The nurse was patient and kind. Helen Gradley let go of the wooden rail that ran along the wall towards the mirror and stepped forwards, her stick thrust in front of her, not for support so much as proof that the ground in front continued solid. One step. Two step. Three step. The nurse and Josephine counted them out as Helen watched her reflection grow larger.

‘Well done, Mum. You can do it. Four more steps.’

It was an encouragement too far. Helen leaned forwards, letting the point of her cane slide away from her. There was a moment of suspense as competing forces tussled for supremacy, then gravity played the ace of trumps and Helen Gradley and her stick fell crashing to the floor. She began to cry. A rising smell warned that her bladder control had come tumbling down as well.

‘Oh, dear,’ said the nurse. ‘Bumps-a-daisy. Best call it a day.’ To Josephine she added: ‘You often get incontinence with a stroke, I’m afraid. I’ll get some stuff to clean up.’

She left the room, briskly efficient. Josephine let her mum continue sitting, just rubbed the back of her neck for reassurance. Her mother’s recovery was proving painfully slow. No one at the physical therapy centre had suggested it directly, but Josie caught an undertone which hinted that Helen could be trying harder. She didn’t disagree. One of the doctors had proposed a further trial of antidepressants and Josephine had readily agreed.

She looked at her watch. Time to go, back to her job as secretary in a big London bank. Her employers were amazingly generous, giving her time off to be with her mum when she needed it, but there were limits. Josie picked up the cane from the floor and tossed it from hand to hand. Part of her handled it as it was meant to be handled: a cane, a mobility aid, a support for the weak. But part of her felt the stick as a man might feel it: a hockey stick, a baseball bat, a sword.

Winter 1998–99

Two months into the training programme. Long days of economics, bond maths, computer analysis. Evenings of study and developing friendships. Manhattan cold, but getting colder. The park empty of leaves, stores crowded with merchandise. The weekends are full of skating, window-shopping, Christmas lights, phone calls home.

It is 14 December 1998. There are 942 days to go until Bernard Gradley’s deadline.

1

Could it be that Matthew was falling in love? If so, it would be a first. Until now, Matthew’s love life had been like dining off sushi: plenty of variety, but nothing more than a mouthful. And now? Well, it was too soon to say and they were still just friends, but Sophie was charming, clever, ambitious, cool-headed and she liked Matthew. What was more, she was beautiful and dressed like a dream, enough to satisfy – more than satisfy – Matthew’s not inconsiderable vanity. He wooed her carefully, attentive but not pushy.

Tonight he was taking her to a trattoria in Little Italy. He’d make his move then. And for the first time in his prolific romantic career, he really felt anxious about the outcome. Could it be love?

Perhaps love or perhaps just nerves. Because before evening came, Matthew was to face the toughest test of the course so far, when the first of the trading games took place. Calling them games was a joke, really. They were more serious than any exam. You’d never make an outstanding trader without knowing the bond maths, the economics and all the rest of it. But if you got one hundred percent in all of that and still couldn’t trade, you could kiss your dream home in Long Island goodbye.

The game was simple enough. The students were divided into three groups. One group were investors, the second salespeople, the third traders. The investors each had a pile of fictional money and fictional government bonds. Their aim was to invest their assets to make as much money as they could. The investors worked alone and competed against each other.

The salespeople and traders worked in pairs. Each pair represented an investment bank. The banks started with no government bonds and just a small amount of money. Their object, too, was to make money. As much as they could, as fast as they could. These are the rules of Wall Street.

As it happened, Matthew was to be a trader, Sophie a salesperson. They teamed up, to Matthew’s delight, calling themselves the Banque Entente Cordiale. They were competing against each of the twenty or so other investment bank pairs in the game.

There were just a couple of other rules. Investors were not allowed to trade with each other, only with the banks. Suppose, for instance, that Fareshti (the podgy oil princess who played an investor) wanted to buy a particular government bond – say, the bond falling due in 2017. She’d need to contact a number of salespeople to check the price they were selling at. When she found a good price, she’d agree the deal and scribble out a ticket to record it.

And where did Sophie get her prices from? Simple. She got them from Matthew. And where did Matthew get his prices? Simple again: he made them up. But when Matthew quoted a price, he had to try to pick a price fine enough to win the deal, but fat enough to leave a margin for the Banque Entente Cordiale. Remember: any trading floor is just a glorified bureau de change. If Matthew thought he could sell a bond at $103, he’d be happy to buy it at $102. He didn’t care that he was only making a buck. The biggest houses on Long Island belong to people who just skim a few tenths of a cent on every trade. They just do a lot of trades.

There was one other ingredient. A course tutor sat by a flip-chart, and every now and then turned a page to reveal a news item. It might be about consumer spending, an election result, or the death of a president. With each announcement, the market reacted. Investors who were sitting pretty one moment could watch their assets tumble or soar as prices shifted.

And that was that. No other rules. At the end of the game, everyone’s assets were counted up. And, as the T-shirt philosophers of New York put it, he who dies with the most wins. Roses and champagne were awarded to the winning investor and the winning investment bank. There were no penalties for failure, except one. The penalty was that the trading games were the most important tests of the course, and the course had a failure rate of one in three. The Lion of Wall Street would not go hungry.

The game was about to start. Sophie and Matthew had worked out some ground rules, but it wasn’t like an exam, you couldn’t revise for the future. Matthew put his mouth to Sophie’s ear.

‘Good luck,’ he whispered.

‘Bonne chance, Monsieur Gradley. Good luck.’

A whistle blew and the game began.

The students were arranged in three rows. The investors sat along one side of the room, while the salespeople sat in another row down the middle. The traders sat opposite their salespeople, but they weren’t required to stay there. If they wanted to get up, to mix with the other traders in search of a deal, they were welcome to do so.

At first though, there was no movement and not much noise. The students had been brought up to be polite and, for a while, decorum reigned. A few investors, thinking they should invest some of their cash in bonds, asked a couple of salespeople for prices. The salespeople sorted out a price with their traders. Any haggling was done with apologies and laughter. The traders stayed seated.

Then the tutor in charge of the flip-chart turned a page. The announcement was visible to everybody. GREENSPAN BULLISH ON INFLATION PROSPECTS. Alan Greenspan was the head of the powerful US Federal Reserve. If he thought inflation would stay low, then bonds should rise as investors bought into positive economic prospects.

The traders quickly changed the prices they were giving their salespeople, but not all traders thought alike. The quiet equilibrium changed. Investors started shouting out their requirements to the salespeople. The noise increased.

The salespeople now asked their traders for prices several times a minute. The traders knew that prices were constantly shifting and worried about getting out of line. They began to leave their seats to check out what others were doing or to deal directly with other traders. When their salespeople needed a new price, they had to yell to get their attention. The volume of trades increased. The room grew noisier.

Then, unannounced and unnoticed by half the room, the flip-chart was turned to reveal another message. CONSUMER SPENDING SIGNIFICANTLY HIGHER THAN EXPECTED. So perhaps Greenspan had been wrong. Perhaps inflation was more of a risk. Bond prices needed to come down again. By how much? There was no right answer, no wrong answer. There was only the answer of the market.

Sophie shouted at Matthew to check he had seen the message. He had, but he hollered his thanks for the tip-off. Sophie was taking more orders now, building up the flow of deals. It was good business, but demanding. Matthew wanted to avoid sitting on a big stack of bonds in case he was caught short by a change in the market. So for every deal that Sophie brought him, he had to do one or two more to square his position again.

The flip-chart messages came faster now.

‘Give me a price to buy the 2017s and a price to sell the 2012s,’ shouted Sophie.

Matthew thought on his feet. Investors didn’t wait long when the market was moving so fast.

‘I’ll buy the 2017s at $99. I don’t want to sell the 2012s, because I’m short of them as it is. Ask $105 for them. No one in their right mind will take that price.’

Matthew knew that a decent investor could get the 2012 bonds much cheaper from elsewhere.

‘OK. 2017s to buy at $99. 2012s to sell at $105.’

Matthew raised his thumb in agreement. Another rule of theirs: always confirm the price. Other pairs hadn’t agreed to do this and got into arguments as misunderstandings spread.

Meanwhile Matthew plunged back into the throng of traders. By acting fast he could buy bonds off one trader and sell them back to another at a slightly higher price. It was tough to do. Decent traders understood the market and cut out the middleman, but not everyone was that slick. Matthew noticed a couple of the Japanese in particular were struggling.

He tried to remember their names. Sophie prompted him: Takashi and Atsuo. Matthew greeted them warmly amidst the frenzy and made some little joke about the swelling chaos. He stayed close and helped them out a couple of times in small ways. In the bond markets, real or fictional, no friend is better than a stupid friend.

He was interrupted again by Sophie.

‘Matthew. We’ve done both deals. Bought 100 lots of 2017s at $99. Sold 200 lots of the 2012s at $105. I’ve updated the accounts.’

Matthew broke off what he was doing and leaped across to Sophie’s desk.

‘Jesus, Sophie. Who did these trades? The 2012s are trading at $100. We’ve made $5 clear profit on each bond.’

In a game where the profit margin seldom rose above a dollar, $5 was wealth indeed.

‘Fareshti,’ said Sophie. ‘I think she’s finding it tough.’

They looked across to Fareshti, who was sitting bolt upright in her chair. Her face was pale and her eyes open in a blank stare. Her pad of paper lay face down on the desk and she clearly hadn’t a clue what her position was. While Matthew and Sophie watched, she pulled off her heavy gold earrings and laid them next to the thick gold necklace which already lay on the desk. She looked as though the jewellery had been weighing down on her, crushing her even.

‘I spy with my little eye an investor who needs the help of the Banque Entente Cordiale,’ said Matthew.

Sophie glanced at him.

‘That’s not fair. She doesn’t know what she’s doing any more.’

‘I don’t know about you, but my nearest and dearest forgot to provide me with a few billion dollars’ worth of oil. I propose to earn my living as a trader instead.’

Sophie half-smiled in incomplete agreement. ‘C’est vrai. D’accord. But I don’t like it.’

She called to Fareshti, who woke up pleased to hear a friendly voice amidst the din.

‘Give me your pad,’ said Sophie. ‘Let me help you get up-to-date.’

A grateful Fareshti tossed her pad over to Sophie who bent over it with her calculator. The princess, meanwhile, put her hands to her neck and massaged it, staring down at the heap of gold in front of her. Drilling a few metres down into the desert sands was simpler than this. But her parents thought she should have a Western business education and this was it. She watched Sophie gratefully.

After a while, Sophie rose and handed the pad back to Fareshti, who held it uncertainly and without looking at it.

‘I think you may have too many of the long bonds and you’re short of the shorter maturities,’ said Sophie. Fareshti was totally blank.

‘I think you should sell 150 units each of the 2012s and 2017s and buy a similar number of 1999s and 2005s. We can do that for you if you want.’

Fareshti nodded. Sophie was so kind and she didn’t shout. Sophie turned back to find Matthew who was lost again in the hubbub.

‘Fareshti would like …’ Sophie began.

She was hinting that Matthew’s prices could be way off market. He pretended to think deeply and called back some prices which would allow him $10 of profit on each bond.

‘But that’s the very best I can do,’ he yelled. ‘And I can’t hold those prices for long.’

Fareshti was oblivious to the charade. She nodded through the trades which Sophie proposed and let her write them down. The princess removed her thick gold bangles and watch and laid them down on the mounting pile of gold. She massaged her wrists.

The game went on. The flip-chart turned. The chaos rose to a crescendo and hung there.

Fareshti mostly held back from doing any more trades. But every now and then she shook herself and did another trade as though to prove she could play the game as well as anyone. Every trade she did, she did through Sophie. Every time, Matthew took $10 or $15 profit on each bond. At one point, Sophie protested.

‘We’ve done enough.’

‘Sophie, for Fareshti this is only a game. For us, it’s life or death. You won’t be feeling sorry for her if you’re kicked off this course for underperforming. Besides, Fareshti’s not the only one to be taken for a ride here.’

Matthew spoke with some certainty on this last point. Takashi-san and Atsuo-san were also contributing handsomely to the Banque Entente Cordiale’s profits.

‘OK. But remember, we’re already doing very nicely. We don’t need to gouge the last dollar.’

Finally, three hours after the game had started, a second whistle blew. Game over.

A stunned Fareshti put her hand to her head and withdrew her last remaining ornament, a heavy gold hair clip. It joined the rest of the glittering pile on her desk. Otherwise, she hardly moved.

The course tutors gathered up all the trading tickets, which would be processed by a clerical team over the next few hours. Around four o’clock, the results would be announced and prizes awarded. But Matthew and Sophie already knew their result. They had started the game with $5000. They had ended with $32,420.

And Sophie, as Fareshti’s trusted advisor, knew her result too. As an investor, Fareshti had started the game with a much larger amount of money – $100,000 to be precise. She had finished with $68,920. The Banque Entente Cordiale had by no means pocketed all of Fareshti’s missing $31,080, but it had had more than its fair share.

Takashi and Atsuo left the room congratulating themselves on their first taste of trading. On their way out, they took care to thank Matthew profusely for his help. Neither of the two Japanese was aware that they had lost considerably more money than they had started with. Nor were they aware how much of it had ended in Matthew’s pocket.

As the room cleared and the noise died away, Matthew and Sophie looked at each other properly. It seemed ages since they had done more than glance at each other or yell messages across the din.

Even after three hours of mayhem, Sophie looked flawless. Even in the thick of the game, she had kept her cool. She had dealt calmly with the questions that flew at her from all sides, while at the same time accurately updating the bank’s accounts. She had been the only person in the room, male or female, to have kept their jacket on throughout the game. But now the turmoil was over, she threw her jacket on to the ground beside her. She leaned her head back as far as it would go and ran her hands through her hair. Then she whirled forwards again and grabbed Matthew by the arms.

‘We’ve won, Matthew. I think we’ve won.’

‘I think we have.’

She stayed holding on to his arms. Matthew moved his hands gently, ever so gently, to her waist. Her lips parted, but not in reproof.

They kissed. If the whole world had folded away around them, they wouldn’t have noticed or cared. They kissed again and again.

‘Oh, Mrs Gradley. We must win more often.’

‘Indeed, Mr Gradley, I think we should.’

The Banque Entente Cordiale did win the champagne and the roses, notching up $11,250 more than its nearest rival. Scott Petersen, the tall Californian, was the winning investor, with $121,870. The worst performing investor was Fareshti Al Shahrani. Her eyes were full of tears, but she sat upright and proud, as a princess should. She continued to believe that Sophie had rescued her from a worse fate, and she thanked her again as the class disbanded.

Matthew and Sophie did not visit Little Italy that night. They returned to Matthew’s apartment, called out for pizza and celebrated their win in a way that satisfied even Matthew’s most ardent dreams.

2

Zack burst into Hanbury’s office. Hanbury, who was married, was on the phone to his mistress and was less than pleased to be interrupted. He waved Zack out of the room, but Zack, typically, took this as a signal to sit down. Hanbury finished his call abruptly, ‘Look, I’ll see you at the opera tonight. Don’t be late,’ then turned to Zack. ‘What do you want?’

‘I’ve got a way to rescue the Aberdeen Drilling deal. I think we can get back into it.’

‘We’ve already lost. The deal’s over. And I don’t want you bursting in –’

‘Yes, but we bid too low. I know it’s late, but if we came back with a bid, say ten million higher, even twelve –’

‘Oh, don’t be stupid. We’ve lost. The other guys won. Our fee went down the pan. It’s over. Now, will you –’

‘But you haven’t heard my idea. Listen. Tominto Oil lost a lot of money drilling unsuccessfully for oil in Nigeria. In total, it threw away sixty million bucks without tax relief. Aberdeen Drilling, on the other hand, has a profitable subsidiary out there –’

‘I don’t want to know. Shut up and get out.’

‘What do you mean, you don’t want to know? I’m bringing you the solution here.’

Hanbury had a quick temper and Zack’s mistimed intrusion guaranteed a vintage display. The senior banker stood up, incensed.

‘This is the last time I’m going to tell you. The deal is dead and I don’t need your kindergarten tax scams. Now get out of my room and stay out.’

Zack had worked hard on his tax idea. His concept was that under Nigerian tax laws, Tominto’s losses could be used to offset Aberdeen Drilling’s profits. After intensive research, he was pretty sure it could be done, and had fondly imagined that Hanbury would be only too pleased to get back into the race. Zack was suddenly angry. Angry, and out of control.

‘Jesus Christ! I come in here with a good idea – an idea to save a deal and earn a fee – and you are too pompous, too arrogant, too fucking stupid to even hear it. I don’t know why I bothered.’

Zack turned to go, but Hanbury flew to the door and flung it shut. Hanbury put his face a couple of inches away from Zack’s and hissed at him.

‘How dare you say that? How dare you? If you want to continue another day in this bank, you will put a letter of apology on my desk by nine o’clock tomorrow morning. A full and complete apology. If I am satisfied – if I am – then we will talk with personnel about getting you transferred to an area where you won’t come into contact with clients, because I’m damned if I’ll ever trust you with a client again. Is that perfectly clear?’

If Zack had been able to think clearly, he would have been best advised to apologise profusely, to beg forgiveness on his knees if he had to. Piers St George Hanbury was Coburg’s most successful dealmaker, and whatever he wanted, the bank would give him. But, as Sarah Havercoombe for one could testify, Zack wasn’t the sort to think clearly when he was angry. He leaped to Hanbury’s desk.

‘I’ll give you a letter of apology, right here and right now.’

He grabbed pen and paper, and wrote in capitals: ‘DEAR MR HANBURY, I AM VERY SORRY THAT YOU ARE SUCH A POMPOUS DICKHEAD. YOURS MOST SINCERELY, ZACK GRADLEY.’

Leaving the letter on Hanbury’s desk and shaking with anger, Zack sped from the room.

He left the bank in a foul mood. The row seemed pretty much fatal. If Hanbury carried out his threat to prevent him from seeing clients – to move him to the so-called back office – then Zack’s career would be killed stone dead. At first the gap in pay was small, the difference in responsibility hardly noticeable. But as time moved on, and the front office staff made it to associate director and then just director, their peers in the back office were wondering if they would ever make it beyond manager. A well-regarded thirty-year-old in the front office would be deeply upset if his end-of-year bonus was less than his already generous annual salary. His back office colleague took home a thousand pounds extra at Christmas and was grateful.

Zack left the building, eyes on the ground, collar raised against a thin December sleet, and stepped blindly out on to the zebra crossing leading to Bank tube station. A silver-green Jaguar, which had been driving too fast along the little street, squealed to a halt, skidding in the wet.

‘Screw you, you goddamn idiot. Look where you’re going.’ A distinguished-looking man with swept-back silver hair stuck his head out of the car window, the better to yell at Zack.

‘Screw you yourself, you geriatric shit-for-brains,’ yelled Zack, pleased to have an opportunity to vent his feelings.

‘Next time I won’t apply the brakes, you jerk.’

The man in the car was really shouting. His silver hair had come away from his head and shook like an angry mane. His accent was mid-Atlantic. Zack couldn’t tell if he was a Brit who had just come back from a long stay in the States, or a Yank who’d been in London too long. Either way, he looked like a viscount and swore like a trooper. Zack couldn’t help liking him. Zack yelled something obscene and stomped off.

He felt better for the row. Sod Hanbury. Zack would never apologise. Besides, he’d had a better idea.

3

David Ballard slowed his black BMW. Meeting a herd of sheep on the road up to Sawley Bridge, he had been forced to squeeze up on to a muddy verge, and one side of the car was spattered with heavy clay. It was a freezing afternoon, and by the time Ballard got home, the mud would be frozen solid. The car took a bigger bite out of his salary than he could justify, but he drove twenty-five thousand miles a year visiting clients, and the BMW gave pleasure with every one. He’d wash the paintwork down that evening.

Ballard drove slowly into the factory yard. Armed with ladders and paintpots, a couple of workmen, swearing at the cold, were getting ready to paint over the sign above the gates. Ballard was angry. Very angry.

He brought the car to a stop in the yard, next to the only other vehicle, a Transit van marked ‘Gissings Modern Furniture’. They’d be painting over that next, thought Ballard and marched angrily upstairs to George’s office.

George was at his desk, immersed in paperwork.

‘Hello, there,’ he said on seeing his visitor. ‘You should have let me know you were coming and I’d have got that five hundred grand ready. As it is, you’ll need to wait a little longer.’

Ballard was in no mood for jokes.

‘What the bloody hell is this I hear about you changing the name of the company?’

George was taken aback. Ballard was a shrewd but genial man, with twinkling eyes and a chuckle never far from his lips. He usually looked and acted like everyone’s favourite uncle. Not now. George responded coldly.

‘I don’t see what that’s got to do with you, as long as we comply with the terms of our loan.’

‘Don’t give me that shit. Is it true or isn’t it?’

‘For your information, yes, it is true.’

Ballard was seething. The red of his face contrasted oddly with the iron grey of his hair. His voice was furious, but controlled.

‘I saw Tom Gissing last night at the Rotary Christmas shindig. He told me you were changing the company’s name. It was the only thing that still mattered to him and you knew it. I honestly think he wouldn’t have minded the insulting way you bought the company, if you had brought it back to life with his name on it. In fact, he’d have been the first to thank you. As it was, he spent the whole damn evening crying on my shoulder. I called him this morning to check he was OK. No answer. I went round to see him and found him dead. Heart attack.’ Ballard paused, before delivering the final accusation. ‘That attack was your fault and God damn you for it.’

White-faced, George rose, went to a filing cabinet and drew out a piece of paper. He tossed it across the table to Ballard.

‘Here’s our application to change the company name. We’re changing the name from The Gissings Modern Furniture Company (Limited) to Gissings Furniture Limited. The original name is hopelessly out-of date, but I’ve never even dreamt of getting rid of the founder’s name. Nor will I now he’s dead.’

‘And what about the sign above the gates? That just says Gissings Furniture as it is.’

George shook his head.

‘I cut everybody’s wages by fifteen percent and said if anyone gave up more than that, I’d write their names in gold up above the gates. My secretary gave up thirty percent, so her name’s going up, just like I said. The Gissings Furniture bit is staying put.’

Ballard breathed out heavily and stroked his moustache with his hand. His face changed back from red to pink.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I shouldn’t have accused you until I knew the facts. I take it back and I apologise.’

He extended a hand, which George accepted. ‘Don’t worry about it. I don’t blame you for being upset. I’m sorry to hear about Tom Gissing. I still hope to make him proud.’

‘Yes. I hope you do too. I do apologise, George. It was hasty of me.’

‘Yeah, well, I suppose I am partly to blame,’ said George. ‘I’ve been playing my cards fairly close to my chest here, so it’s only natural that rumours get started. Fact is, I’d like to get more people involved with waking up this corpse, because it’s more than one man can do by himself. The trouble is, I don’t seem to have anyone’s trust. It’s like pulling teeth all day long and I honestly don’t know what’s the matter.’

‘Bit of advice to you, George,’ said Ballard, winking. ‘Never tell your bank manager when you’re having a hard time. He might get scared and call in his loan. But you’re alright. I assume you’ll be getting your hands on your dad’s cash any day now. Good job, given that your loan extension runs out in less than a month.’

Ballard’s face had changed and George could no longer read his expression. There was something odd about it. George didn’t spend time wondering. He’d felt bad about deceiving Ballard and now seemed as good a time as any to come clean.

‘David, there’s something I need to tell you.’

‘Not bad news, I hope.’ Ballard’s face was secretive, laughing.

‘Well … it’s not good.’

‘Don’t mind what it is, so long as you pay the loan off in a month. That’s what we agreed, isn’t it?’

‘Yes that’s what we agreed –’

‘Well, that’s OK then.’

‘David, I’m not getting the money. The will … it’s a long story. But there’s no money.’

‘No money?’

‘Not a penny piece. I suppose you’ll have to close us down, will you?’

Ballard’s expression was emerging into the open now. He was chuckling.

‘Don’t worry. If there’s a delay, just get me a letter from the executors.’

‘I can’t … what’s funny? This isn’t bloody funny.’

‘D’you know who your dad’s executors are?’

‘The solicitor, Earle, is one of them, I think. I don’t know about the others.’

‘You think your dad might have thought of his oldest friend in the banking industry perhaps?’

Ballard was laughing at George, as George slowly put two and two together.

‘You’re an executor? You knew I didn’t have any money? Then why did you let me buy the company? Why didn’t you put it into receivership as you’d planned?’

‘Two reasons. First one is, I got thirty-six grand out of you.’

‘And the second?’

‘Second, I figured that Gissings was so far gone, it’d take a genius to save it. Your dad would have saved it.’ Ballard shrugged. It was the bank’s money, after all, not his. ‘I thought I’d take a chance on you.’

George was stunned, stunned and flattered. He slowly worked Ballard’s logic through to its conclusion.

‘So you won’t close us down when we can’t pay you?’

Ballard shrugged. Once again, the banker had taken over from the genial uncle.

‘I may close you down or I may not. It depends on how the business is going and which way I expect to get the most money back. But so far, George, you’re doing OK.’

4

Nine o’clock came and went and there was no sign of Zack. Hanbury and the two men from personnel looked at their watches and tutted.

Hanbury sat in the corner making incessant phone calls. The two personnel people chatted and fiddled with two pieces of paper which lay in front of them. One was the sheet of A4 on which Zack had written his message of ‘apology’ to Hanbury the night before. The other was a letter, which began: ‘Dear Zachary, we regret to inform you that your employment with Coburg’s Bank plc has been terminated with immediate effect.’ The letter was not signed.

Finally, forty minutes late, Zack arrived. He hadn’t shaved. It looked like he hadn’t slept, and he certainly hadn’t changed his clothes or showered. He smelled of alcohol. Hanbury, experienced in these things, guessed it was champagne. The older of the two men from personnel waved Zack to a chair.

‘Now, Zack, we’ve had a long talk with Piers here, and heard his version of events yesterday. We also have – er – a document you wrote last night. Now, we want to be reasonable about this …’

‘Well, I’m sure Piers and I agree on what happened,’ said Zack. ‘He screwed up a major deal with an important client and refused to listen when I came up with a way to rescue it. I assume he’s come to apologise.’

The two men from personnel looked at each other. Hanbury stared into space. He was going to enjoy this. The man from personnel tried again.

‘Now, Zack, be sensible. We haven’t made any final decisions about your future, and if you behave sensibly now, I’m sure we can find an area suited to your talents.’

‘Uh-huh. What did you have in mind? The catering department? Or was it the loo-cleaning team?’

The man from personnel pushed the unsigned redundancy letter across the desk.

‘This isn’t effective until it’s signed. You are at an early stage in your career and you don’t want to blow it all up now. A full and frank apology will give you a second chance that you’re lucky to have. I doubt whether you’re cut out for a front office job, but if you are, we’ll give you the chance to prove it. We need somebody to beef up the settlements desk and somebody with your abilities could do very well there. I must warn you though, your last chance is about to expire.’

Hanbury was loving this. The way he saw it, Zack had no choice but to take the offer. He’d urged personnel to make the offer, because he thought Zack’s humiliation would be more complete that way, locked up in a dead-end job without prospects. And if Zack stayed with Coburg’s, Hanbury could keep an eye on things. He’d make sure Zack never escaped to the front office, make sure Zack was always the last to be promoted, the last to get a bonus.

Zack had been right. Hanbury was not the cooling off type. He planned to imprison Zack for the rest of his working life, and he, Piers Hanbury, would relish every second.

Zack quickly scanned the letter. Immediate termination. Six months’ salary tax free. The services of an outplacement agency for up to twelve months. It was a good package. Coburg’s hired and fired as much as anyone else these days, but they still aimed to be decent about it. Zack paused for a long while, then turned to look at Hanbury. Hanbury looked straight into the younger man’s eyes and gloated openly.

‘I withdraw the words I wrote about you yesterday,’ began Zack.

‘Quite right,’ Hanbury smirked. ‘Settlements will suit you to a T. I’m sure you’ll enjoy the challenge.’

Without altering his expression, Zack continued. ‘On second thoughts, I’m not remotely sorry that you’re a pompous dickhead. You’re such an ugly sod that nothing else would really suit you.’

There was silence round the room. Hanbury was visibly astounded. The man from personnel laboriously withdrew an antique fountain pen and signed the redundancy letter. He shook it dry and slipped it across to Zack.

‘You are a very foolish young man. You will live to regret this.’

Zack grabbed the letter.

‘This is binding, right? Irrevocable?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Six months’ salary, tax free, no questions asked?’ The man from personnel nodded.

‘Good. Then you won’t be needing this. Merry Christmas.’

So saying, Zack took a sheet of paper from his pocket. He tore it in two, down the fold. He dropped both halves on the table and walked out of the room, without so much as glancing back.

Piers Hanbury put the two torn pieces of paper together. It was a letter from Zack to personnel. The text read simply:

As I have just been offered a superior job in a superior bank on a superior salary and with a significant signing bonus, I feel obliged to tender my resignation with immediate effect. For the record, I have not enjoyed working with Coburg’s. I do not respect its leadership. And I shall look forward to competing vigorously and successfully against it in years to come.

The letter was not signed. Piers Hanbury read it through slowly, then walked out of the room without a word. The two men from personnel read it through, too. They read it a second time, then the older man picked up the two pieces of paper, walked over to the dustbin and dropped them in. Really! Sometimes he felt he no longer understood the City these days.

5

It was a vile December morning. Cloud wrapped the village and the factory with it. Everything was clammy and cold. The gunge covering the factory yard was frozen with a sort of oily crust. From the moors, a north wind whipped down and snuck its way through Gissings’ decaying windows. It was a grim and depressing place to work. A grim and depressing way to earn a living, especially if you didn’t draw a salary and your current account was written in shrill red capitals.

George started work early, and punctually at eight thirty loud footsteps down the corridor alerted him to Val’s return. She marched in, dressed in the kind of tweed they wrap horses in. Square and crudely cut, her suit brought out her shape to perfection, thought George unkindly. The contrast between her and Kiki was so extreme, George could hardly help comparing them mentally every time he saw Val or thought of Kiki. Nowadays, both happened often.

‘Are you taking the piss?’ she asked George directly. She’d seen her name above the gate, then.

‘No,’ said George. ‘Anyone with your degree of loyalty to this company deserves recognition. If this company had any cash, I’d happily give you some of it. But since I can’t do that, I’ll do what else I can.’

‘I don’t want your pathetic little gifts,’ spat Val. ‘Anything I do isn’t for your benefit and it certainly isn’t so that I can win gold stars like some schoolchild.’

‘I know, Val. I don’t want to fight. If you ask me to, I’ll have them paint over the sign again right away. I just wanted to keep my promise first. But there’s something more important. I don’t know whether you’ve heard, but you ought to know. Tom Gissing died of a heart attack the night before last. He died quietly, it seems. I’m very sorry.’

George wasn’t prepared for the reaction he got to this news. Val’s normally strong features collapsed. She sat down on George’s desk, knocking papers to the floor, and wept, her deep-set eyes flooding her wonky face. George offered her a handkerchief, which she took.

After a while, she stood up. She struggled to compose herself, but George interrupted her. ‘Don’t worry about today, Val. Do whatever you need to do. Take time off. Come back when you’re ready. Just let me know when to expect you.’

‘Probably never,’ she responded distantly. ‘There’s no reason for me to stay here on a stupid salary working to save a three-quarters dead company, if Tom Gissing isn’t even around to appreciate the results.’

‘How can you say that? What about all the workers here who rely on the place for work? What about their families? What about the company itself?’ George was genuinely appalled. Christ, if even Val Bartlett was deserting him, he hadn’t much hope with the rest.

Val jerked as though stung. ‘How dare you? How dare you?’ she hissed. ‘When Tom Gissing said that sort of thing he meant it from the bottom of his well-meaning heart. When you say that, it makes me puke.’

‘Jesus, Val. What have I done that’s so bad? Don’t I work hard enough? Aren’t I trying to do the right things here? Is there anything more that I could possibly do for this place?’

‘Of course there bloody is. Why don’t you open your wallet, pay off the bank, restore people’s salaries and give jobs back to the people you’ve fired? I know costs need to be cut, but the way you’ve done it is just revolting for a man as rich as you.’

‘As rich as me? Are you off your head?’

‘As rich as Bernard Gradley’s son. That’s right. I don’t know how many millions you’re worth. And I don’t know why you’re pissing your life away here. But you make me sick and I’m not coming back.’

She turned to go, but George grabbed her by the arm. She would have protested, but George’s face was stone and his grip steel. He pulled her out of the office.

They walked downstairs, through the reception area and out into the frozen yard. The only vehicle there was the Gissings Transit van, which George had commandeered shortly after taking over. The van hardly ever left the yard, but George refused everybody the use of it all the same. George went to the back of the van, unlocked its doors and flung them open.

Inside was a mattress and bedding. A paraffin lamp swung from a hook in the ceiling. A camping stove and utensils lay next to a few tins of food and an elderly loaf of bread. A jerry can of water and an enamel bowl marked the beginning and end of the van’s sanitary arrangements. A furniture rail behind the driver’s seat carried a rack of George’s designer kit. Suits, jackets, trousers and shirts. The place had the look and the smell of long occupation. A water spill from the morning had turned to ice on the floor.

‘As rich as Bernard Gradley’s son,’ he said. ‘Welcome to the castle.’

He swung the doors back shut, but, on a gesture from Val, didn’t lock them. He turned and walked back upstairs to his office. Val didn’t return, and after about half an hour George wandered to the front of the building to see what had become of her.

She was still by the van along with a group of twenty or so workers. More were coming and others leaving on their way back to the factory floor. George realised that for one short hour his van was going to be the region’s top-ranking tourist attraction, with Val Bartlett acting as proprietor and guide. He went back to work, but couldn’t concentrate.

About fifty minutes later, Val returned. Her broad face was unsmiling, but there was laughter in her eyes.

‘I don’t think you’ll have quite the same problem in getting cooperation from now on,’ she said. ‘Especially after one of the lads found one of your bank statements underneath your mattress.’

‘I hope you charged admission. At fifty pence a peek, I’d have got enough to keep going another week.’

The rest of the day passed busily. For the first time, George sensed real enthusiasm from the workers. A committee working to update the product range was suddenly brimful of ideas and creativity, when previously its meetings had passed in stubborn opposition to every whiff of change. Old Gissing had been right. These people did know their jobs. They loved furniture and it showed. For almost the first time, George felt that buying Gissings had been a pound well spent.

At the end of the day, George and Val walked downstairs. They were, as often, the last to leave, just as they were always among the earliest to arrive. It was a clear night and already freezing. It would be savagely cold. George walked up to the back door of his van. For the first time, he didn’t need to pretend he had somewhere else to go. He threw open the rear doors.

‘I’d invite you in for a drink,’ he said, ‘but you know how it is.’

The elves and the pixies had come while George had been at work. The van was tidied top to bottom. Somebody had constructed a bed frame to hold the mattress. Beneath the bed, two drawers held the clobber which had been lying around the floor. A simple table held the camping stove and a tinsel-draped sprig of pine standing in a red-painted pot. There was a six-pack of beer, and beneath a wrapping of newspaper, George could see a pie dish containing something meaty and hot. With a touch of humour, somebody had pinned an old Gissings marketing catalogue to one of the battens running down the side of the van. ‘The Thunderer! A desk for today!’

George was moved to the point of tears. It had been a hard and lonely time since his father died, and for the first time someone had stretched out a helping hand. He turned to Val to see if this had been done at her instigation, but she was as surprised as he was.

‘Well,’ George commented, once he had found his voice. ‘Someone’s keen to show off their carpentry skills. Gissings’ spirit and all that.’

‘Gissings’ spirit or not,’ said Val, ‘you’re not stopping here any longer.’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘Think I want to work for a gypsy? You’re coming home with me, especially as it’s Christmas soon. You can park yourself in my lounge until you think of somewhere better to go.’

George would have protested, but he couldn’t. Val had grasped his upper arm in a formidable grip of her own and frog-marched him to her battered Metro. They drove off leaving the Transit door swinging open in the wind.

6

It was a dingy Christmas, that first Christmas. Helen was in a worse way than usual. She’d managed to swallow half a dozen Valium a couple of days earlier because she liked the lift they gave her. But the biochemical pendulum was relentless and by Christmas Day itself she was experiencing all the withdrawal symptoms of one of the world’s most immediately addictive substances. She wept and was irritable and exaggerated the extent of her disability.

Josie sat in the front room playing patience with her, as George and Matthew contrived to burn the roast potatoes (George through forgetfulness, Matthew from jet lag), while Zack, unbelievably, was on the phone to work.

‘Your new employers …’ said George, searching for the name.

‘Weinstein Lukes,’ said Zack.

‘Yeah, whatever. Do they ever give you a day off?’

‘Not so far, but you never know. Besides, these days I’m working mostly on oil and gas deals, so a lot of our clients are Middle Eastern. They like to get a call on Christmas Day. It makes them feel special to know they’re screwing up an investment banker’s holiday.’

‘How the hell did you get the job?’ asked Matthew, who had been dying to ask the question ever since hearing of Zack’s switch, but had been trying to restrain himself, for fear of giving away his envy.

Zack shrugged. ‘Natural genius,’ he said, and began to make another call. Matthew bit his lip while George went back to scraping the burnt bits off the potatoes.

George felt deeply outclassed. Matthew had jetted in the day before, Virgin Atlantic Upper Class, and was going back the next day the same way. Zack was all mobile phones and multinational business deals. Meanwhile what had he, George, the eldest, made of his first five months cut off from his father’s pocket book? He was dependent on his secretary’s charity. He had no income. And his one remaining asset – a clapped-out furniture factory – threatened to be a complete waste of the pound he’d spent on it. Meanwhile, Kiki was inaccessible, his mother was a wreck, and his brothers were bent on humiliating him with their phones and their salaries and their million dollar mouths. George left Matthew with the potatoes while he went next door to sit with Josephine.

‘You burned the potatoes? You’d better stay with Mum, while I check what’s happening through there. You have remembered to baste the turkey haven’t you?’

‘Baste the turkey?’

But George was speaking to a retreating back. Josephine slung Zack out of the kitchen and he sat on the stairs with his phone, muttering about the signal weakness and getting impatient with a junior analyst, who, it seems, was actually in the office that day getting something finished. Matthew and Josie between them sorted out a Christmas lunch and put it on the table. George went to help his mother up and into the dining room, when he noticed that she had wet herself, just a dribble, but more than George wanted to deal with.

‘Oh, Jesus. Josie, can you help?’

‘What is it? … Oh, God, George. I thought I asked you to look after her.’

‘Well, what did you want me to do? Sit her on a potty?’

‘Can you two be quiet, please? I’m on the phone.’ Zack’s voice from the hallway.

Josie went into the hall and, before Zack could put his hand over the mouthpiece, said loudly and clearly: ‘Zack, your mother’s just peed herself. Can you come and help change her, please?’

Looking daggers at his sister, he bounded out into the street to finish his call. The signal faded somewhere between the hallway and the pavement and the door slammed shut behind him. Zack began to curse as he stamped his feet for warmth and stabbed the redial button to reconnect.

From the dining room, Matthew called, ‘Is anyone coming? The food’s getting cold.’

By the time the others came, he was slumped over the table fast asleep, a prisoner of his jet lag. It was a dingy Christmas, that first Christmas, and it made no one happy.

7

The bears, doom-mongers of the financial markets, had predicted a crash, but no one had guessed that Japan would lead the way. The immediate cause was trivial. Yet another Japanese bank was caught handing over bribes to organised crime. Some of the individuals involved were linked to the ruling party. There was a fine, some arrests, some resignations. Nothing out of the ordinary.

The early reaction was subdued. A mild correction moved bond prices down about half a percent. The Japanese stockmarket seemed unperturbed and even rose a little. There was a holiday coming up, and, even in Japan, people’s minds wander.

But the first day was just a tremor, the earthquake had yet to come. Exactly why it came will remain a mystery. Perhaps investors were bothered by the evening news footage of disgraced dignitaries being slapped into handcuffs. Maybe it was the thundering speech of denunciation by an opposition leader. But whatever the reason, when the market opened the following day, bond prices began to tumble and the stockmarket followed suit. A slip became a landslide. By the end of the day, the bond market had fallen three percent, the stockmarket fifteen.

European investors saw the chaos in Japan and wondered if they would be affected. Trading was anxious and indecisive. If New York opened strongly, there was nothing to fear. If American investors took fright, there could be catastrophe. It was an edgy morning.

The headline in the Wall Street Journal that day read: ‘Fifteen percent fall in Nikkei index – US investors nervous’. The best-known TV pundit filmed his morning comment from a mock-up of a Wall Street window ledge. He predicted calamity, then jumped. It was only a stunt, but hardly calming.

The market opened quietly. Nobody wanted to make the first move. But then, one by one, investors decided to play safe. Playing safe means selling out, and when everyone sells, there’s no one to buy. Bit by bit, the screens glowed red. Bond market nerves tipped over into the stockmarket, which made up for lost time by falling even faster. By the end of the day, the bond market was down three percent, the stockmarket eighteen.

Soaked in sweat, traders left their desks and stumbled outside for a drink. Eighteen percent. Some traders had cause for celebration. These were the ones who had started the day ‘short’ – owing securities instead of owning them. Their debts had collapsed in value and their profit on the day looked incredible. Many more were as miserable as these traders were happy. Even careful traders were reporting huge losses. These unhappy souls watched their hard-won annual profits blown away in a single day. Their bonuses had certainly gone, their jobs in doubt. They pondered the injustice and avoided the bars where winners drifted on rivers of champagne.

And on an upper floor of a Wall Street skyscraper, a committee sat down to think. This was the Madison Market Risk Committee, chaired by Dan Kramer, Chief Executive and Lion of Wall Street.

The bank had had a bad day. It had chosen to bet on a rally in US markets. It hadn’t bet much, but even a small wrong bet produced a big loss. The bank’s computers indicated that Madison had lost around $80 million, before tax.

Nobody on the committee was too upset. Next to annual profits of way more than a billion, eighty million wasn’t much more than a blip. These things happen. But there were other things to consider. In the wake of a violent upset, business goes quiet for banks like Madison. Firms on the point of issuing bonds or equity pull out of the deal. Investors trade less. Phones fall silent.

Until nine in the evening, the committee deliberated. Madison was famed for its prompt and decisive management, and it wanted to issue a press release in time for the morning news. In the end the verdict was unanimous. A press release was quickly drafted and approved.

The key paragraphs ran as follows:

Madison reports that today’s correction in the financial markets has resulted in a pre-tax loss of approximately $80 million. The bank is confident that no further losses of any magnitude are expected and the bank continues to believe that the long-term outlook for the financial markets is positive.

Nevertheless, to ensure that costs remain firmly under control during the adjustment period, the bank intends to implement an immediate review of staffing levels throughout the firm. Significant down-sizing is anticipated. A further announcement will be released in due course.

The announcement was covered extensively in the press the next morning. It was taken as a very positive sign that Madison had publicly stated its confidence in the markets. Once again, the bank’s management was held up as a shining example of leadership and decisiveness. One of the popular papers covered the story under the caption ‘Markets breathe easy as Lion roars’. The battered markets nudged upwards once again.

On the training programme, the students were less enthusiastic. Rumour had it they would all be dismissed that very day. The American students left their desks to lobby the people they hoped to work for after the course. The foreign students hung on the phones, trying to find out the mood in Tokyo and Buenos Aires, Paris and London.

Matthew and Sophie, happily and publicly in love, dived downstairs for coffee after coffee. They talked about the news, the rumours, the gossip from home. Matthew had called Luigi Cuneberti, who sounded despondent. Matthew tried to laugh it off as Italian overreaction, but Luigi corrected him.

‘Hey, Matteo. I’m Italian-Swiss you know, and when we Swiss get depressed we really mean it. This is bad news and especially tough for you new guys. But don’t do anything dumb. If you don’t make it this time, you’ll always get another chance next year.’

Matthew didn’t have a year to spare, but he could hardly tell Luigi, let alone use it to plead with McAllister. Sophie was anxious too. The Paris office had been in the midst of a major expansion, and it looked as though all that would be put on hold. New recruits would be distinctly unwelcome.

Matthew and Sophie held hands across the table, kissed, and worried. At least they had each other.

8

The bagpiper finished playing. A champagne cork popped and there was a round of applause. Hank Daggert, Chief Executive of Tominto Oil, and now Chairman of Aberdeen Drilling too, raised his glass.

‘Here’s to our newest subsidiary and to a long and profitable future as part of Tominto Oil.’

Douglas Mackenzie, Chief Executive of Aberdeen Drilling, beamed, resplendent in his kilt. In place of the dirk traditionally worn on the leg, he wore a miniature drill bit complete with diamond tip. Daggert loved the idea, and Mackenzie had ordered him one from the same silversmith as a present.

‘And here’s to young Gradley,’ added Daggert after everyone had drunk, ‘without whom, none of this would have been possible.’

Everyone lifted their glasses again and drank. There was a sprinkling of applause, which he acknowledged with his usual thin smile.

The evening following his row with Hanbury had been an eventful one. Once Zack had decided not to apologise, he had to move fast. From his mobile phone, he called a few numbers. The first person he reached was the head of the energy group at Weinstein Lukes.

Weinstein Lukes is a big league investment bank, one of a handful of global big-hitters. This group of banks – Goldman Sachs, Madison, Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch, maybe a couple of others – dominates the financial world. Whenever and wherever a major corporate upheaval takes place, whenever companies are born, married or die, you may be sure that one of this select band will be hovering at the bedside or altar, sickly smile and can-do attitude firmly in place.

Zack told his contact, a businesslike American called Amy-Lou Mazowiecki, what he wanted and what he had to offer. Mazowiecki listened to Zack and answered briefly.

‘OK. Get over here now.’

Zack leaped into a cab, arriving at eight in the evening. A secretary whisked him up to the tenth floor, which was given over to meeting rooms. She left him in one with a view of the river and a tray of tea and coffee. Mazowiecki came in soon after.

‘OK. Shoot,’ she said.

Zack said his piece. He was currently an employee of Coburg’s. Coburg’s had been advising an oil company on an acquisition. The project leader had failed to identify a major liability and Zack had done so instead. He had also thought of a tax scheme to make good the liability and had been laughed out of the room by his boss at Coburg’s. In his view, however, the client was as keen as ever to complete the deal at the right price. He furthermore believed the client would be happy to work with a bank other than Coburg’s.

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