Angel Touch

by Mike Ripley

  The garage attendant, who’d almost called in a SWAT team when he’d seen me arrive that morning, had a few more palpitations when he watched me climb in the back seat and start peeling off my biker’s gear. God knows what he thought when I emerged in jeans and Roar of Disapproval T-shirt (I’ve no objection to advertising good causes) and got in the driving seat. I tooted Armstrong’s horn as I passed him, but he didn’t wave.

  One of the many advantages of a de-licensed black cab is that unless the cops know it’s de-licensed, the chances of getting pulled for not wearing a seat-belt are fairly remote. This means you can eat a Big Mac, suck on a vanilla shake and drive in relative comfort, though I don’t recommend it for anyone who hasn’t done at least two combat tours driving in Central London.

  I cut up back towards Hackney and Fly’s optician’s, judging I could still make the Banker by three, though I wondered why I was worrying about leaving Werewolf waiting in a pub.

  Fly is a tall, skinny, short-haired, very independent lady who dresses and swears like a Vietnam veteran. (North Vietnam, that is.) I’d once helped her break a habit. No, that’s going too far. She hadn’t actually caught the dragon’s tail, but she was reaching. To my surprise, she’d taken a regular job selling frames and contact lenses, and had stuck at it and was now boss of the shop. Her gimmick was that she wore a different pair of glasses every day, and somehow they all seemed to suit her. She’d even been on the local TV news for it, and it had done wonders for business. Her eyesight, of course, was 20/20 straight arrow.

  I parked Armstrong on double yellow lines outside her shop and dived in. Fly broke off from a customer and headed me off.

  ‘You really come for a cup of decaf, Angel? I hear you’re a city slicker these days.’

  ‘Is nothing secret in this town?’

  ‘Village, Angel. This city is just a collection of villages that happen to share the same map reference.’

  ‘You’ve been reading too many Sunday supplements.’

  ‘You could be right. What’re you after?’

  I put on my all-innocent, how-could-you-think-it-of-me expression. After two seconds, I dropped the pretence.

  ‘I want a pair of glasses. The sort we city slickers wear, but with clear glass in the frames.’

  Fly tapped a pencil against her teeth. ‘Would that be regular workaday frames, sir, or for dress wear?’

  She was serious.

  I picked some black, carbon fibre frames that had been signed by an Italian designer, made in Japan and retailed in England for over a hundred quid. Fly produced an aerosol spray and cleaned the clear glass lenses for me. Then she made me promise to get them back to her in one piece within a week and sold me two tickets to a Ward Bond Retrospective at her film club in Ponder’s End. I’d have to go. She’d ask questions later.

  I wore my new glasses as I drove south to pick up Werewolf. The Banker is a riverside pub, converted from a warehouse or something at the end of Cousin Lane, a cul-de-sac tucked under the armpit of Cannon Street station. There’s no way draymen in London deliver after lunchtime, so I felt fairly safe there, even though I had to rearrange the kegs around Armstrong.

  It’s a great barn of a pub, with a high ceiling, a balcony area and lots of glass in the south wall so you can drink and look at the Thames without having to smell it. The bar had a headbanging range of Fuller’s beers, but I decided I’d better be in training for the Exhilarator, so I opted for an alcohol-free lager, turned my back to the bar and its temptations and scouted for Werewolf.

  The lunch trade had mostly disappeared, so he wasn’t hard to spot. He was at a window table, but he was ignoring the river, being deep in conversation with a middle-aged man wearing a suit and a short, sheepskin car coat with matching, brown suede shoes. Even from this distance, you could guess the guy’s tailor was based in Dublin. And Werewolf was drinking tomato juice. Another bad sign.

  I left them to it, but didn’t have to wait long. Within five minutes, the older guy got up and left. I replaced him at the table opposite Werewolf, who was staring into his tomato juice. He looked up and saw the glasses.

  ‘Bloody hell. I always said you’d go blind.’

  ‘Pardon?’ I said, cupping a hand to an ear because I knew the routine.

  ‘And deaf.’

  ‘Done the business?’

  He made a see-saw gesture with his right hand. ‘Gotta go see a man about a dog at the weekend. In Dublin. Go on Saturday, back Sunday. I’m not stopping.’

  ‘Family trouble?’ I asked diplomatically.

  ‘You don’t wanna know,’ he said. Then, looking at me: ‘It’s just an errand I have to run for ... somebody. Nothing heavy, trust me. You know I don’t tangle with the looney politico fringe. Just don’t ask, okay?’

  ‘Don’t forget to bring me some poteen,’ I said, and left it at that. From the look in his eyes, there wouldn’t be a result in pressing it unless I was really keen on acquiring a broken nose.

  ‘Sorrel’s cooking for us tonight,’ he said, apropos absolutely nothing.

  ‘Great. I’ve booked us to play soldiers tomorrow.’

  He shrugged, then linked his fingers and made his knuckles crack. ‘Good.’

  I made a mental note to make sure I got put on his side.

  ‘She’s keen for you to meet her old man,’ he said, then drained the last of his juice.

  ‘She’s not thinking of proposing, is she?’

  ‘I think she’s up to something,’ he said. ‘But she’s a good cook, and if I don’t get some decent wine in, she’ll skin me.’

  ‘Okay, let’s go shopping.’

  I reached into my wallet and flashed my PKB Amex card at him. His face lit up.

  ‘I feel suddenly invigorated beyond measure,’ he said with a grin.

  ‘Good. I think we should go in character tomorrow,’ I explained, moving the Amex card out of his reach. ‘Hence he glasses. We’re supposed to be bored Yuppies, you know.’

  ‘So we’ll need some clothes ...’ He was catching on.

  ‘A suit at least ...’

  ‘Or two ...’

  ‘And some action footwear. They specified that.’

  ‘Some designer action footwear ...’

  ‘And we have to turn up in style.’

  ‘Meaning?’

  I flipped Patterson’s keys on to the table.

  ‘Do you want to play with a new BMW?’

  I had to run to catch up.

  I’ll gloss over the afternoon’s shopping expedition. Suffice it to say there is now a branch of Suit & Co I dare not go to again, but there is a Tie Rack where Werewolf and I are on a promise with the girls serving there. We also managed to find a couple of bottles of Chilean Chardonnay (trust me, it’s great) in a very posh wine merchant’s where the staff were halfway to calling the cops as we walked in.

  At the end of our shopping spree, we collected Tel’s BMW from Prior, Keen, Baldwin’s garage. This time, the garage attendant just shook his head and walked away, not wanting to know. I think the thing that really upset him was seeing Werewolf slide across the BMW’s bonnet to get to the driver’s door.

  I knew it would be a race back to Stuart Street, and I was pleased that it ended in an honourable draw. The BMW had the power – too much for the traffic conditions, if truth were known – but Armstrong knew the side roads better. I parked outside No 9 just as Werewolf reversed into a space two millimetres longer than the BMW across the road.

  As was traditional, the race didn’t finish until we were both out of our vehicles, leaning on the engines (to prove they’d cooled down) with our arms folded. It was only as we were doing this and grinning inanely at each other that I noticed the red Transit van turning out of the other end of the street.

  I didn’t exactly run up the steps to No 9, but I didn’t hang about either. At that time of the afternoon,
I knew only Lisabeth would be home, so I wasn’t too worried. Lisabeth could look after herself. Muggers went around in threes when she was out.

  As soon as she opened her flat door to my hammering knock, I knew something was wrong. Her mouth had fallen open and her eyes popped even more than usual.

  ‘What’s happened?’ I almost shook her. ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘I didn’t know you wore glasses,’ she said.

  I took them off.

  ‘There. Now what’s been going down?’

  ‘Nothing.’ Lisabeth relaxed. She obviously just had a thing about men who wore glasses. ‘Except the delivery man with the flowers.’

  ‘The man in the Transit van.’ This from Werewolf, who had come up the stairs behind me, his arms loaded with parcels.

  ‘Sorley,’ I said.

  ‘What is a Sorley?’ asked Lisabeth.

  ‘The man with the flowers,’ I said slowly, ‘said what, exactly?’

  ‘What’s with this “exactly” business? He said he had a bunch of flowers – and he really had – for Mrs Asmoyah. When I said she wasn’t here, he asked where she was, and I said Maidstone, and he said she’d moved, and I said then I didn’t know but he could leave the flowers here for Frank, but he wouldn’t. Where’s the harm in that?’

  I assured her there wasn’t any harm and that she’d done nothing wrong. Telling her not to speak to strange men would be like asking if the Pope was free on Sunday.

  Halfway up the stairs to my flat, Werewolf said quietly:

  ‘They’re on the bloody ball, aren’t they?’

  ‘Christ! I thought you were Mormons!’

  You couldn’t blame Sorrel, I suppose. She’d never seen either of us in a suit before – we were running them in, checking for labels we’d missed and so on – and we had stood on her doorstep as if we were about to launch into the ‘Have you heard the Good News ...’ routine.

  Mind you, not many Mormons would turn up at a Barbican flat at 7.30 clutching two bottles of wine. Fewer still would be dressed as Werewolf was. He’d bought a red-striped shirt to go with his charcoal double-breasted, but back at Stuart Street he’d remembered that that was the only shirt he had for the next day. As a consequence, the overall effect of the smart suit was marred by the Miami Dolphins T-shirt and the fact that his brand-new, red-and-black-squared silk tie was in a bow knot around his right wrist.

  That was the first thing to go. Without a word, she untied it and stuffed it into Werewolf’s lapel pocket until it looked like a dress handkerchief, then she moved behind him and pulled the sleeves of his jacket up to the elbows. She looked me up and down and adjusted my tie an inch or so (I’d gone for green silk, and I now had two ties), then said:

  ‘You’ll have to do. My father’s here, so behave yourselves.’

  And she said it like she meant it.

  Innes McInnes was taller than I’d expected, but then how tall should a millionaire be? If he was Sorrel’s father, then he must have been around his mid-forties at least, but he’d worn well. The skin was healthily tanned and the hair thin but not receding, and slicked back from the front. He wore a pencil moustache, above which his nose twitched like a rabbit’s as he sniffed the wine glass he was holding.

  ‘Franzia,’ he said, and there was just a hint of Scottish burr. ‘A very nice Cabernet Sauvignon from California. Try some.’

  Sorrel busied herself fetching glasses while she yelled the introductions. ‘Daddy, this is Roy and Francis.’

  Francis?

  Werewolf avoided my gaze as he sipped wine.

  ‘Very good, Innes,’ he said politely. ‘Have you bought the winery yet?’

  McInnes laughed. ‘It wouldn’t make it taste better if I owned it.’

  ‘But at the moment, you’re drinking somebody else into house and home,’ argued Werewolf. Sorry; Francis.

  ‘He’s Irish,’ I explained. ‘It’s the Ballymurphy school of economics.’

  ‘We used to call it living out of the shop. It never works. The best publican is the one who buys you a drink but puts the money in the till.’

  ‘Publicans usually buy us a drink to go somewhere else,’ I pointed out, and Innes McInnes smiled to show us he had all his own teeth.

  ‘Let’s eat,’ said Sorrel, handing over a second, opened bottle of Franzia. ‘It’ll be ready by the time you’ve worked out which cutlery to use.’

  We three males looked at each other, then meekly trooped to the circular dining table laid out near the window. Below us, the lights of the City did what they were good at; they just sat there and twinkled.

  Sorrel excelled herself with the meal, although her father never mentioned it. Maybe he ate like that all the time. Maybe he’d had his taste buds removed by surgery.

  Starters were bowls of a rich stock soup with julienne of vegetables (if that’s what they’re called when they’re chopped into sticks) and the earthenware bowls had puff pastry hats on, which kept the soup scalding hot. Then she served a carbonnade of large cubes of beef and triangles of wholemeal bread spread with French mustard, the gravy tasting largely of Guinness. (I suspected Werewolf’s influence here.) Another bottle of Franzia appeared then and a big piece of Stilton to round things off. Innes McInnes was obviously a soup-meat-cheese man from way back, but had come up in the world.

  He asked a lot of questions about my interest in Cawthorne, and I answered honestly. (Rule of Life No 5: Always tell the truth; not necessarily all of it, though, and not all at once.) Yet as we talked and ate, he looked mostly at Werewolf and then at his daughter, and occasionally you could see him thinking that maybe he ought to change his will. I hadn’t asked, but I just knew she was his only offspring, and I’d lay odds there wasn’t a Mrs McInnes any more.

  Over the cheese, he picked up on something I’d said about the PKB file on Cawthorne’s dealings.

  ‘I don’t pretend to know what it all meant,’ I said. ‘But some of the references I’ve picked up since, like Meltdown in the Market, Inter-Broker Dealing and so on. I haven’t found out what TT means, though.’

  ‘I can help you there,’ said McInnes, reaching inside his jacket for a pen. ‘Pass me the back of an envelope, Sorrel my dear.’

  Sorrel couldn’t run to the back of an envelope, but found instead a spare section of Filofax pages; just about the most expensive scribble pad you could get, short of using ten-pound notes.

  ‘It means The Touch,’ said McInnes, ‘and it goes like this.’

  He began to jot down figures in two columns, and he talked as he wrote.

  ‘Since Big Bang, all the market prices are flashed up on the electronic screens.’

  ‘The Topic system,’ I threw in.

  ‘That’s right. More screens than the Odeon at Leicester Square.’

  I could relate to that.

  ‘And most of the shows are X-rated, but the naughty boys can alter the programme.’ He finished scribbling and held the Filofax sheet up so we could see it. ‘A company’s prices are shown by dealer, with the median across the top. So, let’s say the company is called Bloggs International.’ He’d written:

  Bloggs ‘A’ Shares: BCF 294-6 E

  A 293-8 25 x 25 E 291-6 1 x 1

  B 294-9 25 x 25 F 294-7 25 x 25

  C 294-9 50 x 50 G 292-7 50 x 50

  D 293-8 50 x 50 H 293-8 50 x 50

  ‘The letters are the firms, the numbers are the prices in pence of a typical Alpha stock, and the volumes they are prepared to deal in at a particular time. Now, the trick of course is to buy at the cheapest price or sell at the most expensive. Best execution, they call it. Let’s say you were buying a particular stock ...’

  ‘Because you’ve found something out about them that nobody else knows?’ I tried.

  ‘You’re catching on.’ McInnes winked at me. Werewolf looked impressed too.

  ‘The Touch
indicates who has what stock. This top line here –’ he pointed with his pen – ‘comes up in a yellow strip, and this is the best bid, best offer line. Each of the dealing firms has a different amount of stock, but you can work out who has what by how keenly the prices compare with the best bid, best offer. Remember, these volumes of stock are in thousands, so one by one is one thousand shares.

  ‘Market-makers may be prepared to offer stock in larger sizes at less attractive prices. Look at this example. Firm A is dealing in 25s at 293-8, that’s 293 pence or 298 pence, buy/sell. Now, he may be willing to buy large at, say, 292, or offer larger than 25 at, say, 299. To get the stock, of course, he has to trade with the other firms.’

  ‘Inter-Broker Dealing,’ I said knowledgeably.

  ‘Very good,’ nodded McInnes.

  ‘So you can use one dealer to trade with the rest and get control of a company?’

  ‘No. In theory, if you buy over five percent of a company, you have to declare it on the Stock Exchange. You must also remember that whatever deal you do, it’s reflected for all to see on the Ticker page of the Topic system.’

  ‘And all the deals will add to the price, especially if other dealers see something going on and have a punt themselves.’ Even Werewolf was interested.

  ‘Absolutely, Francis.’

  I did a double take to see who this Francis was, but McInnes was in his stride.

  ‘So if you want to get as big a share of, say, Bloggs’s stock, as quickly as you can, you take out all the firms offering stock at once, before they can deal among themselves.’

  ‘Taking out the market-makers,’ I said, more or less to myself.

  ‘That’s right,’ said McInnes. ‘Mean anything?’

  ‘It explains a reference on Cawthorne’s file at Pretty Keen …’ I realised what I was saying.

  ‘... Bastards,’ McInnes completed, without batting a manicured eyelid.

  ‘But how do you take out –’ I looked at the Filofax page and did a quick count – ‘eight market-makers at once?’