Banker

by Dick Francis

  We blankly shook our heads.

  ‘Our normal doctor’s just retired, and this new man, he’s one of those frightfully bumptious people who think they know better than everyone else. So he’s taken Gordon off the old pills, which were fine as far as I could see, and put him on some new ones. As of the day before yesterday. So when I rang him just now in an absolute panic thinking Gordon had suddenly gone raving mad or something and I’d be spending the rest of my life visiting mental hospitals he says light-heartedly not to worry, this new drug quite often causes hallucinations, and it’s just a matter of getting the dosage right. I tell you, if he hadn’t been at the other end of a telephone wire, I’d have strangled him.’

  Both Henry Shipton and I, however, were feeling markedly relieved.

  ‘You mean,’ the chairman asked, ‘that this will all just… wear off?’

  She nodded. ‘That bloody doctor said to stop taking the pills and Gordon would be perfectly normal in thirty-six hours. I ask you! And after that he’s got to start taking them again, but only half the amount, and to see what happens. And if we were worried, he said pityingly, as if we’d no right to be, Gordon could toddle along to the surgery in a couple of days and discuss it with him, though as Gordon would be perfectly all right by tomorrow night we might think there was no need.’

  She herself was shaking slightly with what still looked like anger but was more probably a release of tension, because she suddenly sobbed, twice, and said ‘Oh God,’ and wiped crossly at her eyes.

  ‘I was so frightened, when you told me,’ she said, half apologetically. ‘And when I rang the surgery I got that damned obstructive receptionist and had to argue for ten minutes before she let me even talk to the doctor.’

  After a brief sympathetic pause the chairman, going as usual to the heart of things, said, ‘Did the doctor say how long it would take to get the dosage right?’

  She looked at him with a defeated grimace. ‘He said that as Gordon had reacted so strongly to an average dose it might take as much as six weeks to get him thoroughly stabilised. He said each patient was different, but that if we would persevere it would be much the best drug for Gordon in the long run.’ Henry Shipton drove me pensively back to the City.

  ‘I think,’ he said, ‘that we’ll say – in the office – that Gordon felt ‘flu’ coming on and took some pills which proved hallucinatory. We might say simply that he imagined that he was on holiday, and felt the need for a dip in a pool. Is that agreeable?’

  ‘Sure,’ I said mildly.

  ‘Hallucinatory drugs are, after all, exceedingly common these days.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘No need, then, Tim, to mention white-faced clowns.’

  ‘No,’ I agreed.

  ‘Nor Parkinson’s disease, if Gordon doesn’t wish it.’

  ‘I’ll say nothing,’ I assured him.

  The chairman grunted and lapsed into silence; and perhaps we both thought the same thoughts along the well-worn lines of drug-induced side effects being more disturbing than the disease.

  It wasn’t until we were a mile from the bank that Henry Shipton spoke again, and then he said, ‘You’ve been in Gordon’s confidence for two years now, haven’t you?’

  ‘Nearly three,’ I murmured, nodding.

  ‘Can you hold the fort until he returns?’

  It would be dishonest to say that the possibility of this offer hadn’t been in my mind since approximately ten-fifteen, so I accepted it with less excitement than relief.

  There was no rigid hierarchy in Ekaterin’s. Few explicit ranks: to be ‘in so and so’s confidence’, as house jargon put it, meant one would normally be on course for more responsibility, but unlike the other various thirty-two-year olds who crowded the building with their hopes and expectations I lived under the severe disadvantage of my name. The whole board of directors, consistently afraid of accusations of nepotism, made me double-earn every step.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said neutrally.

  He smiled a shade. ‘Consult,’ he said, ‘whenever you need help.’

  I nodded. His words weren’t meant as disparagement. Everyone consulted, in Ekaterin’s, all the time. Communication between people and between departments was an absolute priority in Henry Shipton’s book, and it was he who had swept away a host of small-room offices to form opened-up expanses. He himself sat always at one (fairly opulent) desk in a room that contained eight similar, his own flanked on one side by the vice-chairman’s and on the other by that of the head of Corporate Finance. Further senior directors from other departments occupied a row of like desks opposite, all of them within easy talking earshot of each other.

  As with all merchant banks, the business carried on by Ekaterin’s was different and separate from that conducted by the High Street chains of clearing banks. At Ekaterin’s one never actually saw any money. There were no tellers, no clerks, no counters, no paying-ins, no withdrawals and hardly any cheque books.

  There were three main departments, each with its separate function and each on its own floor of the building. Corporate Finance acted for major clients on mergers, takeovers and the raising of capital. Banking, which was where I worked with Gordon, lent money to enterprise and industry. And Investment Management, the oldest and largest department, aimed at producing the best possible returns from the vast investment funds of charities, companies, pensions, trusts and trade unions.

  There were several small sections like Administration, which did everyone’s paperwork; like Property, which bought, sold, developed and leased; like Research, which dug around; like Overseas Investments, growing fast, and like Foreign Exchange, where about ten frenetic young wizards bought and sold world currencies by the minute, risking millions on decimal point margins and burning themselves out by forty.

  The lives of all the three hundred and fifty people who worked for Ekaterin’s were devoted to making money work. To the manufacture, in the main, of business, trade, industry, pensions and jobs. It wasn’t a bad thing to be convinced of the worth of what one did, and certainly there was a tough basic harmony in the place which persisted unruffled by the surface tensions and jealousies and territorial defences of everyday office life.

  Events had already moved on by the time the chairman and I returned to the hive. The chairman was pounced upon immediately in the entrance hall by a worriedly waiting figure from Corporate Finance, and upstairs in Banking Alec was giggling into his blotter.

  Alec, my own age, suffered, professionally speaking, from an uncontrollable bent for frivolity. It brightened up the office no end, but as court jesters seldom made it to the throne his career path was already observably sideways and erratic. The rest of us were probably hopelessly stuffy. Thank God, I often thought, for Alec.

  He had a well-shaped face of scattered freckles on cream-pale skin; a high forehead, a mat of tight tow-coloured curls. Stiff blond eyelashes blinked over alert blue eyes behind gold-framed spectacles, and his mouth twitched easily as he saw the funny side. He was liked on sight by almost everybody, and it was only gradually that one came to wonder whether the examiner who had awarded him a First in law at Oxford had been suffering from critical blindness.

  ‘What’s up?’ I said, instinctively smiling to match the giggles.

  ‘We’ve been leaked.’ He lifted his head but tapped the paper which lay on his desk. ‘My dear,’ he said with mischievous pleasure, ‘this came an hour ago and it seems we’re leaking all over the place like a punctured bladder. Like a baby. Like the Welsh.’

  Leeking like the Welsh… ah well.

  He lifted up the paper, and all, or at least a great deal, was explained. There had recently appeared a slim bi-monthly publication called What’s Going On Where It Shouldn’t, which had fast caught the attention of most of the country and was reportedly read avidly by the police. Descendant of the flood of investigative journalism spawned by the tidal wave of Watergate, What’s Going On… was said to be positively bombarded by informers telling precisely what was go
ing on, and all the investigating the paper had to do was into the truth of the information: which task it had been known to perform less than thoroughly.

  ‘What does it say?’ I asked; as who wouldn’t.

  ‘Cutting out the larky innuendo,’ he said, ‘it says that someone at Ekaterin’s has been selling inside information.’

  ‘Selling…’

  ‘Quite so.’

  ‘About a takeover?’

  ‘How did you guess?’

  I thought of the man from Corporate Finance hopping from leg to leg with impatience white he waited for the chairman to return and knew that nothing but extreme urgency would have brought him down to the doorstep.

  ‘Let’s see,’ I said, and took the paper from Alec.

  The piece headed merely ‘Tut tut’ was only four paragraphs long, and the first three of those were taken up with explaining with seductive authority that in merchant banks it was possible for the managers of investment funds to learn at an early stage about a takeover being organised by their colleagues. It was strictly illegal, however, for an investment manager to act on this private knowledge, even though by doing so he might make a fortune for his clients.

  The shares of a company about to be taken over were likely to rise in value. If one could buy them at a low price before even a rumour of takeover started, the gain could be huge.

  Such unprofessional behaviour by a merchant bank would be instantly recognised simply because of the profits made, and no investment manager would invite personal disaster in that way.

  However, [asked the article] What’s Going On in the merchant bank of Paul Ekaterin Ltd? Three times in the past year takeovers managed by this prestigious firm have been ‘scooped’ by vigorous buying beforehand of the shares concerned. The buying itself cannot be traced to Ekaterin’s investment managers, but we are informed that the information did come from within Ekaterin’s, and that someone there has been selling the golden news, either for straight cash or a slice of the action.

  ‘It’s a guess,’ I said flatly, giving Alec back the paper. ‘There are absolutely no facts.’

  ‘A bucket of cold water,’ he complained, ‘is a sunny day compared with you.’

  ‘Do you want it to be true?’ I asked curiously.

  ‘Livens the place up a bit.’

  And there, I thought, was the difference between Alec and me. For me the place was alive all the time, even though when I’d first gone there eight years earlier it had been unwillingly; a matter of being forced into it by my uncle. My mother had been bankrupt at that point, her flat stripped to the walls by the bailiffs of everything except a telephone (property of the Post Office) and a bed. My mother’s bankruptcy, as both my uncle and I well knew, was without doubt her own fault, but it didn’t stop him applying his blackmailing pressure.

  ‘I’ll clear her debts and arrange an allowance for her if you come and work in the bank.’

  ‘But I don’t want to.’

  ‘I know that. And I know you’re stupid enough to try to support her yourself. But if you do that she’ll ruin you like she ruined your father. Just give the bank a chance, and if you hate it after three months I’ll let you go.’

  So I’d gone with mulish rebellion to tread the path of my great-grandfather, my grandfather and my uncle, and within three months you’d have had to prise me loose with a crowbar. I suppose it was in my blood. All the snooty teenage scorn I’d felt for ‘money-grubbing’, all the supercilious disapproval of my student days, all the negative attitudes bequeathed by my failure of a father, all had melted into comprehension, interest and finally delight. The art of money-management now held me as addicted as any junkie, and my working life was as fulfilling as any mortal could expect.

  ‘Who do you think did it?’ Alec said.

  ‘If anyone did.’

  ‘It must have happened,’ he said positively. ‘Three times in the last year… that’s more than a coincidence.’

  ‘And I’ll bet that that coincidence is all the paper’s working on. They’re dangling a line. Baiting a hook. They don’t even say which takeovers they mean, let alone give figures.’

  True or not, though, the story itself was bad for the bank. Clients would back away fast if they couldn’t trust, and What’s Going On… was right often enough to instil disquiet. Henry Shipton spent most of the afternoon in the boardroom conducting an emergency meeting of the directors, with ripples of unease spreading outwards from there through all departments. By going home time that evening practically everyone in the building had read the bombshell, and although some took it as lightheartedly as Alec it had the effect of almost totally deflecting speculation from Gordon Michaels.

  I explained only twice about ‘flu’ and pills: only two people asked. When the very reputation of the bank was being rocked, who cared about a dip in the ornamental fountain, even if the bather had had all his clothes on and was a director in Banking.

  On the following day I found that filling Gordon’s job was no lighthearted matter. Until then he had gradually given me power of decision over loans up to certain amounts, but anything larger was in his own domain entirely. Within my bracket, it meant that I could arrange any loan if I believed the client was sound and could repay principal and interest at an orderly rate: but if I judged wrong and the client went bust, the lenders lost both their money and their belief in my common sense. As the lenders were quite often the bank itself, I couldn’t afford for it to happen too often.

  With Gordon there, the ceiling of my possible disasters had at least been limited. For him, though, the ceiling hardly existed, except that with loans incurring millions it was normal for him to consult with others on the board.

  These consultations, already easy and informal because of the open-plan lay-out, also tended to stretch over lunch, which the directors mostly ate together in their own private dining room. It was Gordon’s habit to look with a pleased expression at his watch at five to one and take himself amiably off in the direction of a tomato juice and roast lamb; and he would return an hour later with his mind clarified and made up.

  I’d been lent Gordon’s job but not his seat on the board, so I was without the benefit of the lunches; and as he himself had been the most senior in our own green pasture of office expanse, there was no one else of his stature immediately at hand. Alec’s advice tended to swing between the brilliantly perceptive and the maniacally reckless, but one was never quite sure which was which at the time. All high-risk Cinderellas would have gone to the ball under Alec’s wand: the trick was in choosing only those who would keep an eye on the clock and deliver the crystal goods.

  Gordon tended therefore to allocate only cast-iron certainties to Alec’s care and most of the Cinderella-type to me, and he’d said once with a smile that in this job one’s nerve either toughened or broke, which I’d thought faintly extravagant at the time. I understood, though, what he meant when I faced without him a task which lay untouched on his desk: a request for financial backing for a series of animated cartoon films.

  It was too easy to turn things down… and perhaps miss Peanuts or Mickey Mouse. A large slice of the bank’s profits came from the interest paid by borrowers. If we didn’t lend, we didn’t earn. A toss-up. I picked up the telephone and invited the hopeful cartoonist to bring his proposals to the bank.

  Most of Gordon’s projects were half-way through, his biggest at the moment being three point four million for an extension to a cake factory. I had heard him working on this one for a week, so I merely took on where he had left off, telephoning people who sometimes had funds to lend and asking if they’d be interested in underwriting a chunk of Home-made Heaven. The bank itself, according to Gordon’s list, was lending three hundred thousand only, which made me wonder whether he privately expected the populace to go back to eating bread.

  There was also, tucked discreetly in a folder, a glossy-prospectus invitation to participate in a multi-million project in Brazil, whereon Gordon had doodled in pencil an army of que
stion marks and a couple of queries: Do we or don’t we? Remember Brasilia! Is coffee enough?? On the top of the front page, written in red, was a jump-to-it memo: Preliminary answer by Friday.

  It was already Thursday. I picked up the prospectus and went along to the other and larger office at the end of the passage, where Gordon’s almost-equal sat at one of the seven desks. Along there the carpet was still lush and the furniture still befitting the sums dealt with on its tops, but the view from the windows was different. No fountain, but the sunlit dome of St Paul’s Cathedral rising like a Fabergé egg from the white stone lattice of the City.

  ‘Problem?’ asked Gordon’s almost-equal. ‘Can I help?’

  ‘Do you know if Gordon meant to go any further with this?’ I asked. ‘Did he say?’

  Gordon’s colleague looked the prospectus over and shook his head. ‘Who’s along there with you today?’

  ‘Only Alec. I asked him. He doesn’t know.’

  ‘Where’s John?’

  ‘On holiday. And Rupert is away because of his wife.’

  The colleague nodded. Rupert’s wife was imminently dying: cruel at twenty-six.

  ‘I’d take it around,’ he said. ‘See if Gordon’s put out feelers in Research, Overseas, anywhere. Form a view yourself. Then if you think it’s worth pursuing you can take it to Val and Henry.’ Val was head of Banking and Henry was Henry Shipton. I saw that to be Gordon was a big step up indeed, and was unsure whether to be glad or sorry that the elevation would be temporary.

  I spent all afternoon drifting round with the prospectus and in the process learned less about Brazil than about the tizzy over the report in What’s Going On… Soul-searching appeared to be fashionable. Long faces enquired anxiously, ‘Could one possibly… without knowing… have mentioned a takeover to an interested party?’ And the short answer to that, it seemed to me, was No, one couldn’t. Secrecy was everywhere second nature to bankers.