Keeping Secrets

by Andrew Rosenheim

‘Illegal? No, not at all. It’s just not done. Conflict of interest, I suppose – in any case, clients don’t like it much. Lots of his didn’t, at any rate. But he made an absolute killing for himself by shorting some high-tech shares. And he did it again with some dotcom companies. Perfect timing both times.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Renoir, trying not to sound too interested. You could never tell with the English: they would say the most indiscreet thing about someone, then look askance if you asked them to elucidate. ‘Is that usually a rational kind of thing, or sixth sense?’

  ‘Usually luck. In Benedict’s case, however, people wondered a bit – he had got very chummy with some pretty ropey CEOs. He wasn’t so close to them after he’d made his killing, which made people wonder even more. If you’re going to trade on the basis of inside information you might at least have the courtesy to be discreet about it. Not Benedict – he’s an arrogant sod. So there were Chinese whispers for a while, even a little gossip that the Fraud Squad might take a look. But it died away; it almost always does except in the most blatant cases.’

  ‘So that’s how he made his money. Burdick’s Farm couldn’t have been cheap.’

  ‘I know,’ said Alastair, looking amused. ‘I hate to think what Helena paid for it.’

  ‘I thought you said Benedict made a killing on options.’

  ‘That was long gone – he likes to live high on the hog. That’s where a rich wife comes in.’

  ‘She seemed rather nice.’

  Alastair lifted an eyebrow. ‘I feel sorry for her myself.’

  ‘Really? Why’s that?’

  ‘She’s foreign, a little wacky – weren’t you next to her at dinner? – and not particularly attractive. Given such credentials, it couldn’t possibly have been her money that attracted him, now could it?’

  ‘Ah,’ said Renoir, thinking if he persisted with the ‘ahs’ he could pass for an Englishman in as little as fifty years.

  ‘She’s said to be the jealous type, and with good reason – Benedict’s never been faithful to a flea.’ And suddenly Alastair stopped, and as the damning sentence hung in the air Renoir saw that he was embarrassed, which puzzled him until he realised it was because of Kate. Presumably Benedict had run around on her, too, those many years ago.

  Renoir didn’t like parties; at most of them he felt like a teenage girl playing wallflower. This wasn’t helped in London by the tendency of Kate’s circle of friends to talk among themselves. They raised a barrier against entry which apparently could be eroded only by time – a recurrent face, if sufficiently recurrent, was gradually accepted. They weren’t shy, they weren’t reserved; they were simply comfortable only with people they already knew. By now, Renoir had graduated to nodding status.

  It was a drinks do on Kensington Park Road, held in the vast ground floor of a house owned by a barrister whose wife had been friends at Cambridge with Kate. It was exactly like all the other drinks parties he had gone to with Kate, responding puppet-like to the stiff white cards which said At Home. Then they discovered that neither liked going. They were only here tonight because it was Kate’s friend’s birthday.

  Now one of the waitresses, in black skirt and white blouse, refilled his wine glass as he struggled to look interested while the two women next to him talked about their children at Marlborough. Spying Alastair across the room, he made his excuses and edged his way across to him. He was speaking with a tall man whom he introduced as a fellow broker and, inevitably, from ‘School’.

  ‘Ah,’ said Renoir with by now almost professional competence. Alastair said, ‘Jonathan was a broker, but he’s poacher turned gamekeeper now. He’s one of the regulators who keep us traders in order.’ He turned to his friend. ‘Jack used to work in Silicon Valley. He’s an old hand with the SEC.’

  The man called Jonathan looked curious, so Renoir explained. ‘I used to have a bit to do with them over insider trading.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Jonathan with an appraising look. ‘There’s not much we can teach you over here.’ He paused briefly to spear a smoked oyster with a toothpick. ‘You’re much stricter than we are here.’ Looking reflective, he added, ‘Though we are getting tougher.’

  ‘Is it a constant problem?’ asked Renoir, not sure what would be politic to ask. ‘Or does it come and go?’

  Jonathan laughed. ‘Insider trading isn’t seasonal, if that’s what you’re asking. It picked up a lot after the financial reforms of the seventies, paradoxically perhaps, but I wouldn’t say it’s increasing particularly now.’

  Alastair asked, ‘Are certain industries worse than others?’

  Jonathan looked thoughtful. ‘Lots in high tech, partly because the ups and downs are so dramatic. If you don’t cash in when a share’s riding high, it might be worthless two weeks later. With a utilities share, probably the most you’d see is a fall of five per cent in its value when results are bad. With a dotcom listing it might be three hundred per cent.’

  ‘So it’s mainly high tech over here then?’ asked Renoir, remembering what Alastair had told him about Benedict’s dodgy dealings in dotcom shares.

  ‘Disproportionate amount there, certainly. But you get it in all sorts of business. Manufacturing companies, media, pharmaceuticals.’

  ‘Oil?’ asked Renoir.

  ‘Sure. Insider trading is sector-blind, as it were.’

  ‘Jack lives with Sarah’s sister, Kate. She’s in oil.’

  ‘Kate Palmer?’ Jonathan’s face lit up. ‘Is she here?’ Scanning the room, he spotted her. ‘Excuse me a minute. I must say hello to her. She helped me with a case and I never thanked her.’

  And he walked over and started talking animatedly to Kate. Renoir started to ask Alastair more about his friend when they were interrupted by a woman kissing Alastair on the cheek. Seeing Renoir, she shook hands and said with a giggle, ‘The apple farmer, yes?’

  It was Helena Benedict. ‘Ah, look at my husband,’ she mused aloud, and both Alastair and Renoir followed her gaze towards the far end of the room. Benedict was there, drink in hand, looking debonair in a dark suit and yellow tie, speaking with obvious flirtatiousness to a blonde woman in pearls.

  ‘It’s charming, is it not,’ declared Helena, ‘how Conrad remains friends with all his exes? He’s always talking to them.’

  Alastair gave a little hollow laugh. ‘Better than non-speaks, surely,’ he said.

  ‘Of course,’ said Helena. ‘You English are so gentlemanly. Though I wonder why he hasn’t said hello to all his girlfriends here tonight.’ She said this so pointedly that Renoir again followed her eyes and found he was looking straight at Kate. She was still talking to Jonathan, but seemed slightly distracted. Her glance kept moving over towards Renoir, but she didn’t ever catch his eye. Then he realised: She’s looking at Helena.

  ‘Give him time, Helena,’ said Alastair, trying to keep things light. ‘He’ll get round to them all. We English always do. It wouldn’t be polite not to.’

  ‘Well,’ Helena began, but before he heard what she had to say, Renoir felt a smart tap on his shoulder, and turning round found Kate.

  ‘Darling,’ she said, ‘hurry up or we’ll be late.’

  Late for what? he almost said, but then remembered it was the pretence they had long before cooked up to get away when a party went flat, or either was trapped by a bore.

  He looked at her and nodded slowly. ‘Okay,’ he said and turned back to say goodbye to Alastair and Helena. Over his shoulder Kate said, ‘Hello, Helena, we must rush. Bye, Alastair.’

  And as he followed her, he heard Helena say, ‘Come see us some time, Kate. I’d love to show you what we’re doing to the house.’ Which Kate pretended not to hear.

  At supper, in the local trattoria off High Street Kensington, Kate didn’t mention the party, talking instead about her plans for the Gatehouse. ‘Once this wretched speech is out of the way, I’ll really get cracking.’

  ‘I’m sure I can do a lot of it if you just tell me what you want.’

  ‘Renoir
, I am not letting you pick material for the bathroom curtains.’

  ‘Why not? I think a military motif would look terrific. Or the stars and stripes. But seriously, I’d feel a lot more comfortable if you’d signed the contracts with your brother. Wouldn’t you?’ Renoir asked.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, smiling, as if affectionately tolerating his nagging.

  ‘It worries me, you know. What if something happened to Roddy?’

  She shrugged. ‘We’d buy it from his son and heir.’

  ‘He’s seven years old.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said cheerfully, ‘but Alastair is the executor, so I think it would work out, don’t you?’ When he didn’t reply, she reached over and put her hand on his. ‘It will be okay,’ she said.

  He gave a nod as vague as her reassurance, so he was startled when she said with new certainty, ‘We should close some time after the tenth. That’s what the lawyers tell me.’

  The bill came and he picked it up. ‘I’ll get this one.’

  ‘Why?’ she asked.

  ‘I’m flush.’

  ‘I know,’ she said, ‘you still haven’t ordered the trees. You’re going to have to plant in autumn now, aren’t you?’

  ‘Yes. Have you been reading up or something?’

  ‘Burdick told me when I asked him about starting to farm.’

  ‘When was that?’

  ‘After I’d met you. I was thinking ahead even then.’

  ‘Oh,’ he said, feeling only half relaxed, ‘so you had it all planned. Me, the apple farm, the Gatehouse.’

  ‘Don’t make it sound so clinical. I was in love.’

  Was? he wanted to ask. Instead he said, growing intense despite himself, ‘Listen, if it would help speed things up with Roddy, I do have some money, you know.’

  For a moment it looked like she wanted to tell him something, something important which she probably thought would surprise him. But she gave a light false laugh instead. ‘No,’ she said, ‘dinner will do.’

  Afterwards they walked along the High Street and as they passed Barker’s, Kate took his arm. ‘I saw that witch Helena chatting you up,’ she teased. ‘Don’t you go having any ideas.’

  ‘That man at the party,’ he began.

  ‘Which one?’

  ‘Jonathan. The friend of Alastair’s. He—’

  ‘They were at Eton together.’

  ‘He said he knew you.’

  ‘Of course. I’ve met him through Alastair and, you know, the whole bunch,’ which seemed a fair depiction of her circle of acquaintances in London.

  He nodded. ‘The thing is, he said he knew you from work. You helped him with a case he investigated.’

  He looked sideways but couldn’t see Kate’s face. She said in a low voice, ‘Well, I doubt it was very much help.’

  ‘Tell me about it,’ he said, trying to sound casual.

  ‘There’s not much to tell. In the newsletter we changed the rating of a Scottish exploration company, quite dramatically – from good to poor. He thought somebody at the company might have got wind of this early, because there was a lot of trading activity just before the newsletter went out – shorting the shares. When the price fell after our rating drop, somebody cleaned up.’

  ‘Somebody inside?’

  ‘Apparently.’

  ‘When was this?’

  ‘Oh, it must have been three or four years ago. Why?’ she asked a little sharply.

  ‘When we first met in Cupertino, you seemed very naive about this sort of thing. You acted like you were surprised people got up to this kind of shenanigans.’

  ‘Did I?’ she said vaguely, then gently laughed. ‘Renoir,’ she said, ‘you were enjoying yourself so much telling me about it that I reckoned you were trying to impress me. I hoped you were at any rate. And I didn’t want to spoil it by stealing your thunder, now did I?’ They were under a street lamp in Kensington Square, and he saw her give him such a loving smile – entirely authentic, no tells there – that he was a little ashamed of his questioning. But only a little.

  The question remained, what was Kate up to? Renoir recognised his own prejudiced feelings, but from Alastair’s account it was clear Benedict cut so many corners that he was virtually an outright crook. He couldn’t touch anything without leaving greasy fingerprints behind, and Renoir was worried that he had drawn Kate into something illegal. He needed to find out what was going on. For Kate’s sake, he told himself.

  There had been a recent phone bill and he examined it minutely, finding repeated calls to one number he didn’t recognise. He dialled 141 and the number and got a taped message from Conrad Benedict. But that didn’t really tell him anything.

  Neither did the few pieces of correspondence he managed to unearth, after a thorough examination of Kate’s desk, in the small room in the flat she used as an office. Several letters and cards from ancient relatives and a godfather; it seemed only members of an older generation conducted correspondence any more. Midway through a desk drawer, he almost jumped when the phone rang, worried that somehow it was Benedict returning his call.

  ‘Hi, Renoir!’ It was Emily, sounding happy.

  ‘Hi, Ems,’ he said. ‘I’m afraid your mom’s not home yet.’

  ‘That’s okay, I can talk to you.’ And she did for several minutes, alternating between a minute description of her school day and the arrangement for collecting her for her exeat that weekend. She grew especially excited when he told her that her bedroom at the Gatehouse was ready.

  ‘Oh, Renoir,’ she said, just before ringing off, ‘Mummy hasn’t mentioned the time I snuck off to come and see you. Was she very cross about it?’

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘because I didn’t tell her you had. I just said there’d been a mix-up which meant I ended up taking you back to school.’

  ‘Thank you, Renoir.’

  ‘There’s one condition, okay?’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘That you’ll never do it again. Promise?’

  ‘Done deal,’ she said, an expression Kate complained Emily had learned from Renoir.

  Resuming his search, he found a card from Kate’s mother, written shortly after his weekend there alone.

  Darling

  Glad you’re back and hope you enjoyed the trip. We had a successful shoot on Saturday and jolly dinner party that night. Jack filled in for you – though there’s nothing like the real thing! He was so helpful – he put all those boxes with your father’s papers in the cellar for me since I’d forgotten to ask Stacey.

  Will we see you the weekend after next? I gather from Hal the workmen are almost finished. You must be so excited.

  All sorts of love,

  Mama

  And that was it. He had already sensed that if he were going to get anywhere it would have to be a real hub of information, and that sat on the small hard disk on Kate’s laptop. But access there was nigh impossible. He used an ageing PC for any work of his own, and there was never any reason for him to use Kate’s machine. It was her chief work tool and, by unspoken agreement, off limits to anyone else – even Emily had to play hearts on Renoir’s plodding computer.

  Then he got a small break. Kate was working at home late one afternoon, sitting at the small French bureau she used as a desk, when he stuck his head around the door and asked if she’d like a drink.

  ‘Too early,’ she said, looking at her watch, then suddenly gave a small howl. ‘I didn’t know it was so late.’ She stood up and grabbed her coat. ‘I’ve got to catch the last post. Back in a minute.’

  ‘I’ll go,’ he offered but she shook her head. For which he was grateful twenty seconds later when the door slammed and he was alone, looking at the listing of emails on her screen.

  There were three from Carlisle (who was very demanding), there was a press release from Shell, several queries from a researcher they employed on a freelance basis, a bunch of the usual MSN announcements and an Amazon offer or two. Nothing unusual or of obvious import. He clicked back and saw Kate had
384 messages on her machine. And he had about five minutes before she returned.

  He managed to keep his wits about him and opening the inbox clicked on the FROM column, which after a seemingly endless second or two listed the messages in alphabetical order. He scrolled through looking for ‘Benedict’, but to his intense disappointment found nothing. About to give up, he noticed that at the bottom of the screen under the ‘C’s there were half a dozen emails listed as CONRAD. He looked at their dates and saw the first was from early December. He opened one from January and read:

  One o’clock. Same time, same place, unless you want to risk Boodle’s and dress as a man.

  The next one was five days later:

  Tuesday’s best for me so let me be piper. One o’clock. I may be five minutes late.

  So far, just confirmation of their weekly meets. He skipped the next two and opened one from the end of February, which said:

  Are you sure Acer’s the 10th? It has to be exact. A day off and we’re well and truly cooked. You make sure.

  He was trying to digest when he heard a noise in the stairwell corridor and panicked momentarily, relaxing only when he heard a neighbour’s heavy tread continue down the hall. He was running out of time. And then he realised he was missing half the dialogue. Switching to the Sent messages he clicked on the TO column and drummed his fingers impatiently on the bureau’s top while the laptop alphabetised. There were roughly the same number of messages sent to Benedict as she had received, and he opened the first one, from December.

  One o’clock at the Cavendish Hotel then. If we must. And I guess we must.

  That was not the voice of an adulteress, though the ‘I guess we must’ sounded more collusive than he would have liked. He moved forward to February and picked the second message there, which was a reply to Benedict’s querying the date:

  Yes, it’s the 10th. Script follows tomorrow.

  And he was about to open the email sent the following day – what was this ‘script’ she referred to? – when he heard voices in the stairwell. Shit – he had forgotten how little time he had. Clicking desperately, he returned to the home page, then moved swiftly out of the room. He heard the key in the lock and knew he would never get back to the living room in time; Kate would see him coming down the hall. He took two steps into the bathroom and closed the door behind him. When he heard Kate coming towards her office he flushed the lavatory, then ran water in the basin and washed his hands. Drying them, he went out and found her sitting before the laptop. He said with false concern, ‘Did you make the post?’