The music entered him. It seduced him. For nearly three centuries, it seemed to say, I have wasted away until this day in your life when I found and crowned you. I have only existed to express the meaning of this day.
5Good Luck: Create the Conditions for Success in Life & Business, Jossey-Bass,
San Francisco (2004)
BOOK TWO
THE OPENING
MONDAY 9 JULY (MORNING)
Ben
She’s from Inverness. She’s holding her hands open; the hands say “trust me”. ‘It’s about learning everything we can learn from the worst breach in national security since the Cold War. It’s as simple as that. If you’re frightened, don’t be.’
I’m not frightened but Connie is, a bit. We’ve been to the best lawyer I came across when I worked in Alex’s office and he says the agreements are watertight.
Amelia Henderson says this in her office. It’s an easy five-minute walk from the underground station at Temple. Connie and I came out of the tube to be swept along in the 8.45am crowd of lawyers and legal assistants. But they headed north for the Royal Courts of Justice or the legal hive nearby, while we walked hand-in-hand beside the River Thames to this town house. A summer shower threatened.
Beyond Amelia’s desk I look across the river towards the Oxo Tower, the South Bank and the London Eye. Amelia invites us to settle into comfortable armchairs. A widescreen television is bracketed on the wall between two bookshelf-size speakers; opposite is a plain, government-issue wall clock. Amelia’s desk is clear except for a remote control and an A4 notebook. The pages look to be a 50-50 mixture of virgin and heavily written-in.
A lady called Fatima brings in plunger coffee, a pot of tea and some milk. Felt lining around the door’s edges means closing the door is not a casual job.
‘Sound-proofing,’ Amelia explains. ‘We’ll be sharing classified material with you which we don’t want just anyone to hear. May I?’
‘I’ll have tea, please,’ says Connie.
Amelia pours. ‘Ben?’
She and I both choose coffee.
‘The fact you’re going to be shown classified material is another reason, on top of the assurances you have received, why you’ve got nothing to fear. We’re here to learn together. I’m sure you’ve got some things you’d like to understand better about what happened.’
Connie and I both nod. You could say that again, I’m thinking.
Amelia laughs and opens her notebook. ‘So, any questions before we begin?’
It all happened less than two weeks ago but it seems so much longer. Will our memories be up to it? I’m still holding Connie’s hand. Her nervousness hasn’t abated much. Why not emphasise the safety barriers once again? ‘Our lawyer has taken us through this, but –’ I say as I glance around ‘– I imagine you’re recording this –’
Amelia nods slightly, and immediately I realise that lack of memory is not going to be the problem, but the flood of too much. Until now I hadn’t remembered the tiny nod she gave when we first met, in the security-planning meeting at Hampton. Now I realise she was nodding to Greg. It’s all there and, frankly, unforgettable. I continue, ‘– perhaps for the record?’
I expect Amelia to grasp the point and she does. ‘Good idea. So, you have full immunity from prosecution. The Crown will not penalise you in any way for anything you say during these sessions, or make public any part of it without your agreement.’ Her stance softens. ‘So if it was you who ripped the ear off Tommy’s teddy-bear, or you’ve got some money under a mattress which the taxman doesn’t know about, now’s the time to tell mama. Anything more serious than that and I will definitely have lost my job, but you will be fine.’
We both pass up the opportunity.
‘We need both of you to speak completely freely, or the truth will escape us all – forever. We want you to spark off each other’s memories. If you were being investigated, you would be interviewed separately.
‘You’re free to leave whenever you want. However, you may not make notes, record or disclose what I tell you, or any classified material that I show you. We’re under the Official Secrets Act.’
Connie rallies and we drop hands. ‘How long do you want us for?’
‘I’m pretty sure just the day,’ Amelia replies. ‘But probably a long day. We really appreciate your help.
‘I want to start with the dinner at Frank’s place on the night before the opening. That’s the last time – almost – anyone talked to Frank. His last supper.’ Amelia presses buttons on the remote control, as if keying in a number. A still of Frank’s semi fills the screen with his Toyota 4-wheel drive parked in front. I guess from the digits in the corner of the frame that the picture was taken on 22 June, the day after the opening.
‘I’ll start with some nuts-and-bolts questions, if that’s OK. Thinking about quite specific things like cars and tables quite often jogs other, more important memories back into the mind. So Frank’s car – it was there when you arrived?’
Connie sits up. ‘I arrived about twenty minutes before Ben. Yes, the car was there.’
‘So far as you could see, packed, half-full or empty?’
‘Empty. I remember thinking he was behind with his packing.’
With luck we will find answering Amelia’s questions less stressful than worrying about answering them.
Connie carries on, ‘When I was inside the house I could see things – papers mainly – were in a mess. Frank hadn’t started properly packing at all. He said he was going to stay up all night to do it. He said he didn’t want to serve supper surrounded by bare walls and packing crates.’
I add, ‘Of course, we couldn’t see any packing crates. I guess we assumed they were stacked in a bedroom. In fact, it was thanks to the packing that I mentioned the Prime Minister.’ Connie shoots me a sideways glance but I think the only thing which makes sense is to take Amelia at her word – play things straight.
‘How did the Prime Minister come up?’ Amelia asks.
I explain. ‘Frank kept saying he would be packing all night because he had to be out of the college by noon. Gyro had insisted on that when he fired him on Tuesday.’
Connie interjects, ‘But he only agreed to go if Gyro got the pay-off money into his bank account by Wednesday, and Frank told us they did. He said he wouldn’t put it past the college and the bank to be in cahoots to snatch it back, so he withdrew it as a banker’s draft and sent it to his brother to look after.’
I expect Amelia to ask how much the pay-off is – £50,000 Frank told us – but she doesn’t. She must know that already from his bank records. Anyway, I resume: ‘So I said noon now really is noon, because guess who’s coming to the party? The Prime Minister.’
Amelia leans forward. ‘Frank was surprised? Or he knew already, would you say?’
I say, ‘He seemed as surprised as anything. I’d swear it was genuine.’
Connie agrees. ‘In fact he couldn’t believe it. He kept asking why. When you said you had dreamt up this scheme to double the number of doctors in the NHS, the three of us just laughed and laughed. In fact, do you remember, Frank fell off the settee.’
Connie and I giggle. Good, she’s relaxing.
Amelia changes the line of questioning. ‘What was Frank wearing?’
Connie nods. ‘A Ramones T-shirt – an old one. Scruffy jeans. Bare feet, I think. I noticed because it looked like the same T-shirt he was wearing the day before.’
Amelia gives Connie a friendly we-women-notice-these-things smile before clicking the remote a couple of times. These are stills from different angles of Frank’s living/dining area, much as it had been on the night. However, instead of the large painting there is now dust and an unfaded rectangle of wall, the size of a coffee table. ‘Any particular memories here?’
We point together, ‘The turntable.’ I continue, ‘A Rega. Frank lectured us quite
a bit about it while we pretended to be ignorant digital bunnies. The finest in the world, he said, made in Westcliff-on-Sea in 1979. When Phil Spector worked with the Ramones.’
Connie’s pointing. ‘We talked about that photo on the mantelpiece. He sang at university, and then for a year semi-professionally.’
It’s a black-and-white studio shot of three men in their early twenties, all in slim-line dinner jackets and holding eight-inch cigarette holders. Frank is sitting on a chair the wrong way round and looking straight into the camera. The other two are to either side behind him, one looking forward and up, the other in profile, looking at 90 degrees to the camera. Frank explained it had been a kind of impoverished Three Tenors.
‘Was he maudlin? Had he been drinking before you arrived?’
Connie shakes her head. ‘Not maudlin, just reminiscing. To judge by the bottle, he’d had one glass of champagne before we arrived. He certainly hadn’t had a bottle and a glass.’
‘And he drank how much before you left?’
‘How much did we get through?’ Connie asks.
‘Two bottles,’ I remember. ‘The champagne was whatever was on special offer when he bought it, but with dinner there was the Smith Haut Lafitte. That was an amazing white; he’d kept it for a special occasion. We were having duck but amazing wines stand up to whatever you throw at them. He could have spent a hundred pounds on it easily. We knocked back the two bottles pretty evenly between the three of us.’
Connie snorts. ‘I don’t think so! Put me down for one glass of each – I drove home, remember. Between the two of you, yes, that was pretty even.’
‘So had Frank cooked the duck, or was it a store-bought job?’
‘Very special! Home-cooked Peking duck in my honour.’
‘Very nice. Meaning because you’re Chinese?’
‘Yes, but mainly because I’d become a college governor. Frank was big on me picking up the mantle of awkward question-asker.’
‘What about drugs, either that evening or to your general knowledge? Because of what happened to his body, we’re blind on that side of things.’ Amelia purses her lips at the indelicacy of ‘his body’.
I take that one. ‘No, nothing. I mean, he was getting through roll-ups in his usual way, maybe a bit faster. But only tobacco. No funny trips to the bathroom or mirrors on the coffee table.’
‘So,’ says Amelia. ‘This is the last object I need to ask about.’ The slide shows the painting that had been on Frank’s wall, but it doesn’t capture the texture of the original. In the foreground are two bare feet seen from above, as if hanging off the side of a boat. The texturing of skin, veins, nails and dirt in creams and browns is infinitely fine.
Beneath is the sea painted in shades of grey, layer upon layer, tangible and shadowed. Deep down in one part of the sea there is a white luminescence, varying from pallid to intense. While the water’s ripples make the shape of the luminescence hard to describe, it’s too long and thin to be a reflection of the moon – it’s closer to a slit. A tiny trickle of blood dribbles from one foot into the luminescence.
Connie shakes her head. ‘I know this is important so I’ve thought about it a lot. The painting is how he gets me to come back to his house on Thursday afternoon. But I’m the one who says very early in the dinner, out of the blue really, that I really like the painting. I don’t know why I do, it’s not by anybody I’ve heard of, but something about it just feels like Frank. I felt a twinge the first time I saw it. But there’s no way he knew in advance that I would say that.’
‘The painting felt like Frank then, or feels like him now?’ Amelia wonders.
‘Both. He said the artist called the painting Jaws II, but he hated that. Frank’s far more – I don’t know? enigmatic? – and gentle than the idea of a shark. Before, I think it was as simple as the idea of hidden depths that made me connect the painting with him. Now, I’m thinking Jaws II was a better title than Frank gave credit for. Not a shark’s jaws, more like the jaws of truth, waiting to explode out of the picture and grab you.’
I start to see something I hadn’t seen before. ‘Connie, you said you really liked the painting early in the dinner, but it’s much later that Frank offers it to you. That only comes when you’ve explained you’re going to gate-crash Gyro’s meeting with the bank manager, but will then need to change into your dinner outfit.’
Connie says to me, ‘I was assuming I’d borrow your room.’ She is not sure whether an explanation is required so she turns to Amelia. ‘My MSc class finished on Wednesday and I didn’t have my own room any more.’
I’ve got a point and I’m running with it. ‘That’s when Frank jumps in and says come and change at his house. It’s at the end of dinner; we’re going soon. He’s keen, grabbing the spare house keys out of the bowl and giving them to you. You’re hesitating so he says he’ll leave the painting for you all wrapped up, ready to take away. So you say thank you very much, you’ll come round in the car about three, let yourself in, pick up the painting and change.’ I look up excitedly. ‘He could have given Connie the painting right then, at dinner – instead, he made up this stuff about wrapping it. I mean, it’s not as if the painting needs wrapping because it’s valuable?’ I look at Amelia for confirmation.
‘It’s worth about four hundred pounds. Not a lot, really.’ Amelia sucks on her pen. ‘So by the end of dinner he wants you, Connie, to come by on the next afternoon. Ben’s point is that Frank didn’t have that plan at the beginning of dinner, or he would have said something as soon as you talked about the picture.’
Connie asks Amelia, ‘Will I be able to have the picture?’
‘Of course, I’ll get it delivered next week. We’ve scanned it every which way: it’s got no hidden treasure, I’m afraid. You’re both doing ever so well, if I may say so, but shall we take a short break?’
---
Connie
Ben is getting on much better with all this, I can see. For him, it’s like saddling up for a hunt. The fact that Frank is the object of the hunt doesn’t seem to bother him much. But there’s another reason, I’ve been noticing. Between Ben and Amelia there’s a kind of masters-of-the-universe bonding. She’s very senior, a lot more senior than she gives off, and Ben likes that. Being in charge, in control, foreseeing things, making difficult calls, taking decisions – he thinks that’s what he’s born to do. I don’t. Anyway, that’s what I’m thinking as Amelia kicks off round two.
Amelia’s changed her interview plan (or she says she has). ‘Let’s run with the idea we had when we left off, that something happens during dinner which makes Frank want something he hadn’t thought of at the start – which is getting you, Connie, to come to his house on Thursday afternoon. So think about the subjects that came up during dinner. What mattered to him? More exactly, what does he find out that he didn’t already know – besides the fact that the Prime Minister is coming?’
I know where this is going, but we can’t get there right away. It will be painful enough when we do. Ben doesn’t see any of this. No wonder he’s not stressed.
There’s an obvious safe place to start, so I take it. ‘Frank talked quite a bit about his brother and his brother’s family, didn’t he Ben? That was new to me. He felt very deeply about them.
‘For a few minutes we talk about family. To judge by the photographs in the living room as well as what he said, Frank didn’t have any family of his own – no partner, no children, no step-children. However, he has a brother who has a six-year-old with Down’s syndrome.’
Amelia moves us on. ‘That was sad news to the two of you, but it wasn’t news to Frank. It builds up our picture of him but I don’t see Frank’s mind changing because of it.’
We lapse into silence for a minute. It won’t be long before Ben, the keen 30-year-old, comes up with something.
He does. I can count on him. ‘His academic paper, Connie. You asked him which one
he was proudest of. He kept putting you off but you kept pushing.’
It’s true. So what if I can’t understand academic stuff, this is his life’s work! Of course I pushed. Eventually he disappeared and came back with a 30-page, double-spaced typescript and told us about it. ‘It was a study he did in his twenties, quite soon after he switched from physics. He used a very radical methodology to estimate what pay was really necessary to motivate CEOs. After all, they have so many other motivations – power, celebrity, flattery and so on,’ I recount.
‘And the opportunity to deal with challenges, which are really important,’ Ben cuts in. ‘It’s not all selfish.’
‘Agreed.’ I continue, ‘Anyway, Frank got very excited about the conclusion of his paper. Remember he was early in his career then, and he thought this was going to make his name in management research. His analysis suggested that most large company CEOs don’t need to be paid anything at all; in fact many of them have so much money, they would pay the company to be given the role. However, they have to be seen to be super-heroes worth gigabucks. So Frank concluded that CEO pay should be set by secret auction: the company pays them a fortune but they bid against each other for how much they will give back to the company secretly.’
‘What happened?’ asks Amelia.
Ben takes up the story. ‘No journal would accept his paper. He tried for years. They said his methodology was too fanciful, but what he concluded was they were scared of the answer. He thought business schools had sold out the quest for truth in favour of the quest for business approval.’
‘And money,’ I add.
Amelia leans back in her chair and stares at the ceiling. ‘The problem –’
Ben stands up. His arms are moving vigorously. ‘I know what you’re going to say. The problem is, once again, we’re talking about something which clearly mattered to Frank a lot, and which is news to us. But nothing about it changes during dinner.’
MBA Page 17
