The Hopeless Life of Charlie Summers

by Paul Torday

  Sixteen

  The morning after my disturbing phone conversation with Nick, I went to the local newsagents and bought an armful of papers. I thought I should have a good look at the job advertisements. I had spent most of the previous day trying to decide what to do with myself and coming up with no answers at all. I thought perhaps I had better stay in London for a while and at least try to get another job. Once I gave up and went back North, I knew I would never return to the capital. On the other hand it was unsettling to consider that somewhere out there might be a group that felt its collective chances of entering Paradise would be greatly enhanced if they did something unpleasant to me. Ridiculous as it seemed that anyone would bother after all this time, I couldn’t quite dismiss the idea. My professional experience told me that the chances of any jihadi wasting his time and energy coming after me were very slight: nevertheless, I felt jumpy.

  I spread the newspapers out on the kitchen table and began to turn the pages of the Daily Mail. A picture on page three caught my eye. It was a photograph, an old army mugshot: the head and shoulders of me, inset against the background of a rocky valley that could have been anywhere. The clue was in the headline: ‘The Butcher of Gholam Khot’.

  It continued:

  In November 2000 Major Hector ‘Eck’ Chetwode-Talbot guided a strike force of American gunships in an action that led to the deaths of eight innocent farmers in eastern Afghanistan.

  Major Chetwode-Talbot was leading a team dedicated to rooting out al-Qaeda operatives and punishing their Taleban allies for giving them safe harbour. At that time no state of war existed between the United Kingdom and Afghanistan and no British troops had any legal right to operate in that country, let alone call in air strikes against its civilian population.

  Military sources, who have asked not to be named, have provided the Mail with evidence of this incident, including a copy of a report by Major Chetwode-Talbot made on his return to base in Oman.

  Major Chetwode-Talbot is currently employed as a salesman for a firm of stockbrokers in the City.

  The Mail would like the Ministry of Defence to answer the following questions:

  WHY were British troops allowed to enter another sovereign state illegally when no state of war existed?

  WHY was a group of innocent Afghan farmers targeted for destruction by American planes?

  WHY has Major Chetwode-Talbot never had to face an official inquiry or court martial?

  I clutched the paper in my hands and stared at it. I felt dazed and sick; for a moment I thought that I might even throw up.

  I rang Nick and got his voicemail. It was noon before he rang me back.

  ‘Yes, I saw it,’ he said. ‘The same story is in all the other nationals and made it on to Sky News and BBC breakfast TV this morning. I was worried this might happen. Someone’s leaked these details to the press. I’m afraid things are going to be difficult for you for a while. It looks like a piece of carefully orchestrated spin. The Internet sites flash up messages about your forthcoming punishment and the papers are fed the story of Gholam Khot to stoke the fires.’

  ‘So what do I do now?’ I asked him.

  ‘Get over it,’ he said. ‘The story in the papers will be denied by someone in the MoD or, at any rate, defused. It’s not in anyone’s interest for this to run too far. The big question is: who put it there and why now after all this time? The events happened six or seven years ago. Some of our press may push the boundaries at times but they don’t, so far as I know, willingly allow themselves to be used as propaganda tools by al-Qaeda or anyone else of that sort.’

  I struggled to get my thoughts and feelings under control. The newspaper story was bad; very bad. But in a year’s time, would anyone care? Did anyone really care now? I was one of the good guys and the dead Pashtun might - whatever the papers said - have been on the other side. All I had to do was stay tight lipped whenever the press rang me for a quote or comment, as they surely would.

  ‘Do you think someone will come after me?’ I said.

  ‘I think you’ve seriously annoyed a few people, including Aseeb. He was trying to find a way to bring money into the UK and we were trying to see how he would do it. You joined up the dots for us. Aseeb is a key figure in the Taleban drugs trade, shipping drugs west, and cash and munitions east. Behind most religious or political insurgencies you’ll find a very sound business network for selling Class A drugs. This lot are no different. Laundering money through Bilbo was just one of several operations Aseeb was involved in. Unfortunately we can’t get to him at present. We don’t know where he is. He’s not in Dubai.’

  ‘Bilbo started this,’ I said. ‘What are you going to do about him?’

  ‘He’s skipped,’ Nick replied.

  ‘What do you mean, skipped?’

  ‘We went to his house in Kensington Gate first thing this morning. His butler was there, no one else. “Mr and Mrs Mountwilliam have gone on holiday, sir. Can’t say where, sir. No, sir, I don’t know when they will be back.” He was a big help.’

  Bilbo and Vanessa Mountwilliam had driven to Ascot very early that morning and taken their two daughters out of school. The school had been told some story about a family bereavement. Then the whole Mountwilliam clan had driven to Heathrow, and had left the country while I was still making breakfast. They had a flight booked to Paris. After that, their destination was unclear. So far, Nick had not traced anyone by the name of Mountwilliam registered on any outbound flights from Charles de Gaulle airport that day.

  ‘It may take us a while to find out where they’ve gone,’ said Nick. ‘They could have had a car waiting at the airport. They could have booked a flight under another name - unlikely but possible.’

  ‘Doesn’t the office know where he is?’ I asked.

  ‘I’m glad you asked about the office,’ said Nick. ‘We went there too, around seven thirty this morning. It was still locked up.’

  ‘That surprises me,’ I said. ‘There’s usually someone in by that time.’

  ‘We had a warrant,’ said Nick. ‘So we waited in our cars to see what would happen. After a while your former colleagues started to turn up, found the door locked, and stood about in the street, talking into their mobiles. Later, someone with a key arrived - Mr McNisbet, he was called. We produced our ID and warrant and all trooped inside.’

  Nick paused.

  ‘What do you think we found?’ he asked.

  ‘How should I know?’

  ‘Nothing,’ said Nick. ‘We found absolutely nothing. None of the computers worked. None of the servers worked. Someone had been in and cleaned all the files from the hard drives. The back-ups had been taken from the office safe. We know that other back-ups were kept in a safe at Bilbo’s house in Kensington Gate. Your IT guy gave them to Bilbo every night. We’ve sent someone to look for them but I don’t suppose he’ll find anything. It seems like quite a thorough job. There would have been some interesting names on the client list, I’m sure, but we’ll have to see if our specialists can retrieve anything. Whoever did the clean-up was very professional. Too professional - it could almost have been one of our lot.’

  ‘It can’t have been Bilbo,’ I said. ‘He barely knew how to switch on a computer.’

  ‘Maybe not,’ agreed Nick, ‘but Bilbo arranged to have it done.’

  The implications of what Nick had just told me sank in.

  ‘Wait a minute,’ I said. ‘All the servers are down? All the memory gone?’

  ‘That’s what it looks like,’ agreed Nick.

  ‘Then how will the firm keep going?’ I asked. ‘All the trades will have been recorded there; all the client histories; everything. The hard-copy records are always hours, if not days, out of date. What a mess!’

  Suddenly, not being employed by Mountwilliam Partners seemed a very sensible decision; even if it had been Bilbo’s, not mine. All the same, I felt for Doug and the other people I worked for.

  ‘Don’t worry too much,’ said Nick. ‘Mountwilliam Partn
ers is insolvent anyway. It received margin calls last week. The banks and brokers wanted their money back. Didn’t you know? By last night, it was on a deadline from its main funding bank. The Financial Services Agency rang and told us this morning. Obviously they knew of our interest, or, at least, one of the senior staff did. We know that Bilbo told Alan McNisbet late the previous night, but we gather that even he was only told there was a bit of pressure from your prime broker. He took some of the calls that afternoon, so Bilbo had to tell him something, I suppose. If Bilbo hadn’t closed down Mountwilliam Partners’ operations in his own special way, someone else would have done it for him.’

  I was silent for a moment, trying to work out the implications of what I’d just heard.

  ‘But they will owe hundreds of millions, maybe billions,’ I said. ‘If they have to unwind all their positions at once they will lose a fortune.’

  ‘Yes,’ agreed Nick. ‘The banks will put in an administrator to sort it out. That will take a while, since your ex-boss has done his best to destroy all the records. Then the administrators will take their cut. Insolvency practitioners don’t work for nothing. There won’t be anything left for the punters, I’m afraid. I’d be surprised if there was enough left to pay the milk bill.’

  I listened to this in horror. Henry Newark and the dozens of other friends and acquaintances I had introduced to Mountwilliam Partners would lose every penny they had invested, and all because I had talked them into putting their money into the firm. Good old Eck, he may be thick, but he’s straight: if he says it is all right, you can take his word for it.

  Except that Mountwilliam Partners had lost all the money.

  ‘What do I do now?’ I asked Nick.

  ‘One way or another, it seems like quite a good time for you to leave town.’

  I knew he was right. If I stayed here God knows who might come calling on me: journalists from the national press; TV cameras doorstepping me; perhaps even more troublesome visitors. There was no longer any reason to stay in London, and plenty of reasons to leave it.

  ‘Where will you go?’ asked Nick, after a moment’s silence in which I tried to think about what would be best.

  ‘I’ll go back home.’

  ‘Oh yes, I forgot - you’ve got a farmhouse somewhere near Darlington, haven’t you. That sounds like a good idea.’ Then he added, ‘Pity you ever got involved with that lot, Eck. It wasn’t really you, was it?’

  ‘It was the money,’ I said sadly. ‘The money was too good to turn down.’

  Nick was right. I had never been cut out for the job I did at Mountwilliam Partners. I had never understood the products I sold, nor did I understand how we appeared to make so much money. As it turned out, the money had probably never really been there: every trade was rolled over to fund the next one, everything was always in the future. We had disregarded the most basic equation in investment: high reward means high risk. As for me, my stock-in-trade had been my friendship with people like Henry; the clients had trusted me because they assumed I knew what I was doing, and that the funds were as safe as I had told them. They weren’t safe. The punters had listened while I talked about straddles, and box trades, and swaptions, and short selling, and long selling. They liked the sound of all those mysterious terms: it was more exciting than the things other stockbrokers talked about, and seemed to be much more profitable.

  But I hadn’t a clue. I barely understood the terms myself. I had read about three textbooks and studied other people’s lecture notes and crammed what fragments of knowledge I could into my head in order to pass a couple of exams. After that, I just did what Bilbo said; if he told me the sky was pink, then for me pink was the only colour that the sky had ever been.

  You couldn’t argue with the results: that’s what Bilbo had told me, and that was the message I repeated. If the market was the house, then Mountwilliam Partners always beat the house.

  I had been a fool; had I also been a knave? I looked into my heart, and when I did so, I wished I hadn’t. How honest had I really been? Hadn’t some corner of me known, or at least suspected, that this world of exponential returns was, in the end, an illusion? Hadn’t it been the case that I was simply not prepared to be the man who stood up and said: hold on, how does this work again? How come we’re so much cleverer than the rest of the world?

  I had never questioned the wealth that flowed around me and through me over those last few years. Now I had probably bankrupted Henry Newark, one of my oldest and closest friends, by selling him a story about a fund which - it turned out - bought sub-prime debt in the Midwest of the United

  States. How on earth could I have done that? How could I ever look Henry in the eye again - or any of the others?

  What, in the end, was the difference between me and someone selling Japanese dog food or revolting Dutch wine? There wasn’t one, except no one really went bust buying things from Charlie Summers. I remembered what I had said to Nick.

  It was the money: the money had been too good to turn down.

  Seventeen

  And so I went home, back to Pike’s Garth Hall. I packed a suitcase with a few clothes; the rest of my possessions - the furniture and pictures I had inherited - were all at Pikes Garth. Then I drove north.

  When I arrived and climbed out of my car, I thought as I stood and surveyed the wide dark skies, and the moorland and pasture of Upper Teesdale, that perhaps being here might wash away all my troubles. As I looked up the valley, glimmers of late afternoon sunshine broke through the clouds, lighting up corners of fields here and there so that the grass looked as fresh as if it were spring. Sam and Mary Pierce’s cottage was a hundred yards farther down the hill, and there were one or two neighbouring farms not far beyond.

  There was a peaceful, almost empty feeling to the valley. I fell in love with it again every time I saw it after coming back from London. I wondered, for a moment, how soon it might be before the outside world intruded. I didn’t really believe anyone would take notice of those websites. They were just part of a long game being played out to win over the hearts and minds of disaffected young Muslims the world over, and no doubt their creators would already be busy with the next propaganda campaign. But even if I was physically distant here, I could still be reached by phone or post. I dreaded answering the phone.

  *

  The collapse of Mountwilliam Partners barely made it to the front pages of the business news. The main television channels didn’t bother to cover it: the story was too technical, not easily compressed into a sound bite capable of being understood by a vast audience of viewers munching their morning cornflakes or sipping their glass of wine in the evening. Besides, there was enough in the news to worry about already: a bank run; obesity; the correct way to throw out your rubbish; whether antidepressants made you more or less depressed; was the heavy rainfall of recent weeks a tipping point in climate change; was buy-to-let still a good idea? There was always enough to agonise over from a safe distance: were the prisons too full, and should we let offenders out early? Did too much coffee give you Alzheimer’s, or prevent it? Why couldn’t we remember which of these views was the latest theory?

  The viewers and readers munched their cornflakes or drank their wine, and shook their collective heads in disbelief at the general state of things. Around them, at first almost unnoticed, parts of the financial world began to fracture. There were warnings of more bank runs and bank closures in England, France and the United States. Other creakings and groanings from the engine room alarmed the more discerning financial commentators, but the world as a whole did not concern itself too much with the news that one hedge fund had collapsed.

  A number of people, however, had particular reasons for noticing that Mountwilliam Partners had disappeared off the map.

  The first couple of times that Henry Newark called me on my mobile, I couldn’t bring myself to answer it. I saw his caller ID appear on the screen and couldn’t face speaking to him. I simply did not know what I could say to Henry that would be of
the slightest use. On the third occasion that he rang, I was sitting at a low wooden table outside my house, looking beyond the stone dyke that formed the boundary of the garden, to a small patchwork of pastures, beyond which the heather-clad hills were beginning to emerge from the morning mist. It was going to be a glorious summer’s day. Today and every other day, I had absolutely nothing to do except to sit here, and drink coffee. The mobile was lying on the table next to my coffee cup and it started ringing at me. So I answered it. I couldn’t put this off for ever.

  ‘Eck?’ asked Henry. ‘Is that you?’

  ‘Henry,’ I said, with false cheerfulness. ‘How are you?’ ‘How do you think I am?’ asked Henry. ‘I’ve been trying to get hold of you for days. Your office appears to have closed. You can’t be at your flat because I must have tried that number a dozen times. You don’t answer the phone at Pikes Garth. Are you on holiday?’

  ‘No, I’m not on holiday,’ I said. ‘I’m unemployed.’

  ‘So what’s the story?’ asked Henry. ‘I can’t get any sense out of anyone I talk to in London. There’s a stupid rumour going around that Mountwilliam Partners has closed its doors . . . What do you mean, you’re unemployed? Are you joking? I’m not really in the mood for jokes. I’m worried sick, Eck, and I was hoping you could put my mind at rest.’

  I tried to arrange my thoughts. What could I tell Henry that would ease his mind? The shape of the hills was sharper now as the atmosphere heated up and cleared. Soon, one would have the impression of being able to see for ever, across the green and unspoiled world of the Pennine dales. ‘Mountwilliam Partners has gone bust,’ I said at last. ‘I don’t know any of the details, but it appears that some of its trades went badly. There’s been a lot of negative talk about the company in the market over the last few weeks. Then the company tried to refinance itself, and couldn’t get the funding.’

  I had been home for just a few days, but already life in London was becoming a distant memory and the world of Mountwilliam Partners seemed increasingly remote. Somewhere, out in the wider world, Bilbo was no doubt sunning himself on a beach, and waiting for it all to calm down. I, too, was a fugitive. Old Sam Pierce had cut the rough grass patch that passed for a lawn in honour of my return to Pikes Garth; otherwise my arrival here appeared to have gone unnoticed.