by Paul Torday
But could I afford to give it up? I knew now that I wanted to. I had inherited a sum of money from Aunt Dorothy, and the sale of the house outside Cirencester would yield a decent amount of money even after tax. Apart from my inheritance, I had my investments in Mountwilliam Partners funds. I had even taken a sum via equity release on my flat in West Hampstead to add to those investments, as Bilbo strongly encouraged partners and employees to do.
‘It’s called putting your money where your mouth is. If you can tell the punters that you have invested in the firm, it helps build their confidence.’
When I added it all up, I could probably survive living at home in Teesdale. If I left Bilbo’s employment, there was no point in trying to get another job in London. No one else would pay me the salary I earned at Mountwilliam Partners. I was getting past my sell-by date anyway: perhaps that was the message Bilbo was beginning to transmit in my direction. There were only so many people I could chat to as potential investors and I was beginning to exhaust the seams of friendship and acquaintanceship. Once I had used up all the people I knew, I was really no better than one of those telephone salesmen who ring you from remote-sounding places, offering investments in some obscure company. In fact, I’m not sure that I had ever been that much different to the cold callers.
Living in Teesdale on my own was one thing; living there with Harriet another. The latter prospect I could look forward to, could endure any amount of financial hardship to realise. The former was less inviting. I wasn’t sure I could do it. I would probably drink myself to death after a year or two through sheer boredom.
My thoughts jumped out of this track and settled into another. Who was spreading rumours about Mountwilliam Partners? And was it true, or was it just Bilbo’s paranoia? If someone was spreading gossip, we were in trouble: firms like Bilbo’s depended on confidence, on the belief that they could do no wrong; that funds were without limit, credit was always available, and investments would always increase in value. Up until now that had always been the case. But supposing that things were about to change?
There was a sense of fragility in the air these days, a feeling of walking on thin ice. I remembered Charlie Summers telling me he had always walked on thin ice, and now that was how I felt too. It was cracking underfoot; far away, great bergs were being calved, and floating out blindly into the shipping lanes. Stories, rumours, counter-rumours were flying around the industry: most of them not yet in the press or in the public domain. Was the miracle of endless growth about to come to an end? For ten years we had been told that the cycle of boom and bust had been broken. Fortified by this belief we had gone out and borrowed: borrowed money on the back of our house prices going up; borrowed money on the strength of our future income; borrowed money, because money was cheap, and could be invested in almost anything without risk. Risk was dead; it had been abolished.
Feeling as I did now, how could I go back to my desk and summon the confidence to make another phone call, to Simon or to Mark or to anyone else on my list? How could I have the nerve to ask them how they were, how things were going, knowing that the conversation would end with an invitation to meet Simon or Mark for drinks somewhere, or for them to join me at Mountwilliam Partners’ next roadshow (more cocktails and canapes in the smartest hotels in Bristol, Birmingham, Leeds, Manchester or Newcastle)? How could I tell them that Mountwilliam Partners was launching another fund, Styx II, and that - if they wanted - there might just be a chance I could get them in on the ground floor, while units could still be bought cheaply?
And if I didn’t go back to my desk and make those phone calls, and reel in the punters, then Bilbo would take my desk and my phone away and put me back out on the street. Then what would I do with my life?
I felt the sun’s warmth on my face, and a bead of perspiration trickled down my back. I came to a pedestrian crossing. Forward, or back?
I stood still for a while. Decisions had to be made, and I didn’t feel capable of making any of them.
Thirteen
It was in this state of indecision that I watched the spring pass by, and the summer begin. London was heating up, becoming stuffy and oppressive. In the air-conditioned offices of Mountwilliam Partners, the trading floor buzzed with activity. The new and adventurous strategy of trading at thirty times margin allowed us to take positions that we would never have dreamed about a few years ago. Global banks and corporations shuddered if they thought we were in their shareholder register. Mountwilliam Partners had become a colossus among other colossi, with pension funds and more staid investment funds than our own piling in behind the private investors, looking for the magical rates of return that only we, and a charmed few like us, could produce.
Bilbo was in his element. He was positively godlike. His internal emails had the force of Old Testament pronouncements: ‘Wheat futures will go up to one hundred and forty pounds a tonne,’ the emails would say, and wheat obediently went up to one hundred and forty a tonne, the Mountwilliam Commodity Fund piling in with all the others. The world is going to run out of wheat, press stories would scream. We knew - or thought we knew - that Bilbo and others like him fed stories to financial journalists morning, noon and night. Gold and oil: the same dynamic, the same stories. We rarely saw Bilbo these days. He had bought a timeshare in a Gulfstream and used it to fly to hedge fund conferences in Cannes, Rome, San Francisco, Bali. There, more rumours were swapped and more deals were done.
‘UK property prices will show double-digit growth in the medium term,’ said another email proposing the establishment of a fund to buy repossessed properties at auction. Medium term was a phrase that we used a lot: it was longer than short term, and shorter than long term, and no one quite knew how near or far away those horizons actually were. In response to Bilbo’s email, it seemed, UK house prices obediently jumped by ten, twelve, fourteen per cent.
And yet, and yet. While tens, then hundreds, then billions of pounds and dollars flowed ceaselessly through Mountwilliam Partners, darker currents were swirling beneath the surface of the markets we dealt in. There were too many rumours to ignore; too much volatility. One week the share price of a major bank fell by forty per cent as short sellers spread rumours of default in the marketplace, then cashed in as the share price fell. An enormous bank on Wall Street tried, and failed, to organise a refinancing package. Things did not feel right; they felt very far from being right.
I saw Bilbo now and again for more pep talks. My performance was dismal. I knew he would have got rid of me before now, if it hadn’t been for the fact that my departure might unsettle some of the investors I had lured into Styx I and Styx II.
At our last meeting he was almost avuncular, at least to begin with.
‘My dear Eck,’ he said, showing me the monthly sheet recording the investments I had booked, ‘if I weren’t so very, very fond of you, I would sack you on the spot.’
‘Bilbo, people just aren’t feeling that brave at the moment, at least not the people I talk to,’ I explained, not for the first time.
‘Perhaps you are talking to the wrong people? Perhaps you are talking to the wrong people and talking to them in the wrong way?’
There was a silence while I waited for Bilbo to say something further. He was wearing another new suit. Bilbo always wore dark blue suits, cream silk shirts with heavy gold cufflinks adorned with his cat crest, and dark blue ties from Charvet. Nowadays it seemed as if he wore a new suit every week: he always looked so immaculate, the creases in his l rousers so knife-edged, the linen so pristine, that everything down to his shiny shoes looked as if it had just come out of a box and been put on for the first time.
‘Would you be happier back in Teesdale, rounding up sheep on a quad bike?’ Bilbo asked tenderly. ‘I do sometimes feel that dealing with a dozen old ewes might be more suited to your temperament than trying to sell our funds to high-net-worth individuals.’
‘I’ve been asking myself the very same question,’ I admitted. There seemed no point in dissimulation. I sim
ply didn’t have the energy to pretend I enjoyed my job any more.
Bilbo picked up a gold paperknife from his desk. I wondered for a moment what he was thinking about as he turned it to catch the light.
‘Why don’t you take some time off?’ he said, putting it down. ‘Try and get a bit of perspective on things. Go home now and come in again next Monday. Then you can tell me whether you still want this job, and are prepared to put in the effort as the rest of us do, or whether you would prefer the kind of life where you can be tucked up in bed with your cocoa at half past eight. Cocoa’s about all you will be able to afford if you leave us. No one else in the City will want you.’
‘I’m sorry, Bilbo,’ I said. ‘You’re right. I do need to make up my mind.’
‘Being sorry pays no rent,’ said Bilbo, as I got up. He always liked to have the last word.
*
I left the office about midday and, as I had absolutely nothing to do and no plans, I decided to stop at a wine bar and have a glass of white wine. My nerves were jangling after the conversation with Bilbo. I couldn’t tell whether I was furious or relieved that the subject of my dismissal was now out in the open. It didn’t help matters when Nick Davies sat down at my table, just as the waitress arrived with my glass of St Veran.
‘Bring a bottle of whatever he’s drinking, and another glass,’ he told her. Then he turned back to me.
‘Good morning, Eck. Drinking in the middle of the day, now? Have you been fired?’
‘Christ, Nick,’ I said, as soon as my heart had stopped hammering. ‘You gave me a shock. How did you know I was here?’
Nick said, as if it was the most natural thing in the world, ‘Oh, I thought you might have spotted it by now. We’ve been taking an interest in you, and the company you work for, for quite some time.’
The waitress arrived and Nick smiled encouragingly at her while she opened the bottle, and poured some wine for him to taste. It gave me time to regain some of my composure.
‘Why?’ I asked. ‘Why are you taking an interest? And what do you mean by “we”?’
Nick raised his glass in a mock toast.
‘Death to all money launderers,’ he said. ‘I have been seconded to the Serious Organised Crimes Agency. Didn’t I mention that the last time we spoke? Tell me more about Mr Aseeb.’
Once again I felt as if I had been poked sharply in the solar plexus.
‘Aseeb?’ I said stupidly. ‘What do you know about Aseeb?’
‘Quite a lot,’ replied Nick. He wasn’t smiling any more. ‘It’s what you know that interests me. He’s been in our sights for a while now. Imagine my surprise when I saw a surveillance tape with your cheerful face in the middle of it. And that’s happened more than once. The obvious conclusion is that he must be quite a friend of yours.’
For a moment I struggled between my fast-fading loyalty to Bilbo and the conviction, which now seemed to me to have the weight of an established fact, that there was something wrong about Aseeb, and something even more wrong about (lie way Bilbo and Aseeb had used me to ferry encrypted memory sticks between them. It began to dawn on me that there might be a very good reason why Bilbo hadn’t wanted to meet Aseeb himself. Perhaps he suspected, or even knew, that Aseeb might be watched. If I was the one who met Aseeb, then it would be my name, not Bilbo’s, in the frame if Aseeb was up to no good.
If my relationship with Bilbo had been a little warmer, or had lasted a little longer, I might have prevaricated, and tried to buy a little time so that he could explain to me what this was all about. But Bilbo was so obviously ready to discard me that I felt I owed him nothing. My first duty was to myself.
I gave Nick a brief account of my meetings with Aseeb.
‘That’s all I know,’ I said. ‘He’s an investor representing various trading interests in the Middle East who want to acquire a stake in Mountwilliam Partners. Bilbo sees him as a way of strengthening our balance sheet.’
‘Well, the trading interests Aseeb represents are also known as the Taleban,’ Nick told me. He sipped his wine, then pushed the glass away from him and leaned forward with his elbows on the table, gazing intently at me. His words shocked me, yet at the same time they were not all that surprising.
‘Eck, what I’m telling you must go no farther.’
I nodded.
‘Bilbo met Aseeb when he was in Afghanistan, a few years before you got there. At that time our policy was to finance, arm and train the Taleban so that they could kill Russians more effectively and keep the Soviet army tied down. It worked very well. The collapse of the Soviet military effort in Afghanistan was the beginning of the end for the Soviet empire. Bilbo worked side by side with the same sort of people you were sent to kill a few years later. That’s the way it is with our foreign policy. Everyone gets their turn to be shot at.’
Nick topped up my glass. I took a long sip from it to steady my nerves.
‘Aseeb is a money launderer,’ Nick told me. ‘The drugs trade out of Afghanistan is one of the biggest businesses in the world. The opium is harvested in Afghanistan and then processed into morphine base in factories in the disputed border regions. The morphine base is distributed through various networks and refined into heroin either in northern Pakistan, or in Europe. The biggest customer is an organisation based in Calabria in southern Italy that is now bigger than the Mafia. Aseeb spends a lot of time in Calabria and Sicily. He has a home in Palermo. The money the Taleban raise from their pharmaceuticals business is used to keep themselves armed and well equipped. It’s also used to fund some of the al-Qaeda networks in Iraq and in Europe, as a way of making sure Western intelligence services are permanently overstretched.’
‘But why would Bilbo have anything to do with that?’ I asked. Bilbo had never struck me as a nice man, and probably not a good man, but helping to fund terrorist networks seemed a bit extreme, even for him.
‘Bilbo doesn’t care,’ Nick told me. ‘Bilbo is doing exactly what you said he was doing: propping up the balance sheet at Mountwilliam Partners. And from what we hear, it needs propping up. He gets the cash to rebuild his company and stop it going bust. Aseeb will no doubt earn a big dividend on his equity investment. It’s a money-laundering operation as far as Aseeb is concerned. And the fact that Bilbo’s talking to someone like him says to me that Bilbo has his back against the wall.’
I thought about Bilbo’s behaviour over the past few months. It was true: behind his smug exterior, the anxiety was increasingly visible. He lost his temper much more easily: 1 wasn’t the only one who had received a tongue-lashing in recent days.
Nick said, ‘Where that money ends up is of no concern to Bilbo, although he has a damned good idea, I’m sure. He knows what Aseeb is.’
There was a silence. I no longer felt like drinking my wine. Outside it was a sunny day, but I felt cold and shaken.
I wondered why Nick was telling me all this, but it became obvious with his next question.
‘Have they done the deal yet? Would you know?’
‘Bilbo has mentioned it to the team,’ I said, ‘so it must be very close. But he would have told us if it had actually been signed on the dotted line.’
Nick leaned back in his chair.
‘Well, you’d better be careful not to give yourself away. You were never much good at hiding your feelings, Eck.’ ‘Give myself away? You’re not going to ask me to wear a wire or something, are you?’
Nick laughed.
‘God, no.’ He reached into his pocket and pulled out a card with his name and mobile number on it, and gave it to me. ‘Get in touch on this number if anything happens. Meanwhile, I’ll give you some advice, instead.’
‘What?’ I asked, although I thought I knew what it might be before he spoke.
‘Get a new job.’
*
For the last couple of months I had been talking to Harriet about what we should do with the house in Cirencester. A valuer had been instructed and we were ready to put the property on the market. We both
agreed that we needed one more look at the house and its contents before it was sold.
My communications with Harriet were warm enough: she sounded happy and friendly on the phone, and pleased to hear from me. But my instincts told me not to press her to come back to England just yet; if I didn’t know what to do with my life, I wouldn’t be very convincing trying to tell her what to do with hers. I missed her terribly; I could not tell, from her voice or her messages, whether she missed me as much; or whether she missed me at all.
After leaving Nick, I rang Harriet and told her I had been given a few days off, and asked whether she would come over and meet me in Cirencester. I knew Harriet’s professional instincts meant that she hated having an empty house just sitting there, producing no income. We agreed she would come over in the next couple of days. I would collect her from Heathrow and then we would drive down together to meet the estate agent and Mr Gilkes, and get things moving.
I met Harriet at the arrivals gate of Terminal z. She smiled at me and gave me a sisterly kiss as we greeted each other.
‘You look well,’ I told her as we walked towards the shortterm car park.
‘I am well, very well.’
She spoke in a bright, cheerful but distant way, as if nothing had ever happened between us. On the drive down to Cirencester she didn’t tell me how she felt about seeing me again, and I didn’t tell her how I felt either. It was a great social success.
As we turned into the road at the end of which The Laurels stood, and I started to weave the car around the potholes, Harriet said, ‘What’s that white van doing there?’
