‘For a couple of minutes we had quite a banal conversation, something like me saying “I thought you’re supposed to be gone”, and him replying, “I will be shortly”. After all, finding him had been a shock. But then he got to the point.
‘He had realised during dinner that Ben hadn’t told me the truth about his role at Bakhtin.’ I glance at Ben. ‘That he hadn’t been in a backroom job, instead he’d been running a business – the plastic packaging business that had screwed mine. The exact one. He had thought up the dirty stuff, he had carried out the dirty stuff and he had got his reward – the promotion of his career.’
‘Dirty stuff?’ Amelia asks.
‘You tell her,’ I say to Ben. So he does – the honest version this time. Amelia is hard to read, but I’m guessing she’s not very interested. Presumably her idea of dirty stuff is drugs or arms or human trafficking.
Amelia is puzzled. ‘Why did it matter to Frank? Was he warning you?’
‘I think he hoped the two of us would get together. He thought we were good for each other. But he thought it couldn’t work out if we started with a lie. Frank hated lies.’
Ben is nodding. ‘He was right. I was already slipping into thinking of course I’d tell you, but at the right time. And the only right time was at the beginning.’
‘So you were pretty angry?’
‘Angry? Volcanic.’ I look at Ben. ‘You were going to be toast. Frank did his best to talk me out of it, but I couldn’t get my head round what a bastard you’d been – then and now. The biggest bastard I could imagine, and I had started falling for you.’
‘What did Frank do?’ asks Amelia.
‘He said he’d slip off after I’ve gone. I tell him there are police everywhere. He said, “That’s all right, I feel very safe.” He gives me a kiss.’
Amelia leans forward. ‘And what does the kiss mean, do you think? I mean, what did you think at the time? Did you think it was something like, “See you next week”? ’
I lean back in my chair and close my eyes. ‘I can’t remember. Of course now I know it was “Goodbye”, and I keep thinking I must have known then – but I didn’t. Don’t forget – what I am thinking about is tearing Ben Stillman apart limb by limb.
‘The curtains are drawn so I change downstairs into the clothes I’ve brought for the dinner.’
Amelia looks up from her notebook. ‘So you were still going to the dinner?’
I laugh. ‘It seems so, at that point anyway! Bear in mind I was invited as a governor. But once I found Ben all of that goes right out of the window. So I set off.’
‘Your car was outside Frank’s, though?’
‘Because the battery had gone flat. It had been playing up, but how typical is that? Talk about going at the worst possible time. I thought about calling the rescue service, but then I realised they wouldn’t get in until the next day – the college was locked down for the opening. So I start walking, all dressed up in my silver cheong sam – how crazy is that? Fortunately I had some trainers in the car.’
My story hangs in the air for an age, enough time that I wonder not once but 10 times whether the police checked my car at some point early Friday morning. They had plenty of time before Ben drove me back with a new battery. But it seems they were preoccupied with other things.
Amelia wants to go through again about possible accomplices – surely, surely there were hints, clues, that Frank had people or had been consulting with people somewhere else in the world. His emails have been scanned, decrypted and generally spun-dry without revealing anything, but perhaps, she wonders aloud, he had an email identity and a mobile device for accessing the web which they haven’t found yet … However I can’t help them, because so far as I know, he only needed the one accomplice. Me. In my mind I’m holding my £3.99 earrings tight, like this.
---
Ben
Connie’s holding up so well. I know she’s a strong woman but this is very hard for her. I’ve been working at not looking at her too much, but not looking out of the window too much either; it’s hard to think which might look more suspicious. She doesn’t need me making things harder.
I hadn’t a clue which way she would jump. I’d done my best to explain that she could just let it all out there, after all we were protected.
As I try to look sufficiently but not overly interested, I muse about Frank being so determined to tell Connie about me and Alex. What a risk, and it wasn’t even his business, was it? Part of me is still angry, jumping up and down wanting to know why he couldn’t trust me to tell Connie at an appropriate time.
But I know the answer to that. Anyone putting money on it would have bet on me trying to get away without telling her at all. It’s the truth, even though I don’t like it. And now Frank has hundreds of thousands of fans all over the world (someone set up a page for him on Facebook), because he was more committed to the truth than the rest of us.
To judge by the way Amelia’s focus is now the opening evening itself, Connie’s done the trick.
---
Connie
Oh, Frank – it’s ironic, isn’t it? What I’m doing now, being more than a little economical with la vérité when you made ‘indefatigable for truth’ your middle name. But I think you understand. Or would understand. We’re only human, even you. That’s what I remember seeing in your eyes. You had done your best to stop me going to put an axe into Ben’s scalp and then you said, ‘There’s something else, Connie. I’m so sorry.’ And when you saw my face you added very quickly, ‘Not about Ben.’
You asked me to sit next to you. ‘I didn’t know this last night – I swear to God I didn’t. I never wanted to involve you. But I need your car battery. One of mine has gone flat.’
Mine in the plural, I thought. ‘You’re talking about car batteries, but they’re not for a car.’
You nodded.
‘Are they for a bomb?’
‘Never. Nothing that’s going to do anything bad; only something good that I’ve tried to do all my life. No-one’s even going to bleed.’
You were a bit careless with la vérité yourself there, Mr Shining Paragon. It happens to us all. So there is the longest silence, both of us sitting there, and yet again I’ve got a jump to make – one I had never expected in a million years.
‘Is it that important, Frank? Really?’
‘It’s my life’s work.’
‘I can’t give you the battery. But I’ll leave the car with the bonnet unlocked.’
They are the oddest things, principles, aren’t they?
THURSDAY 21 JUNE (EARLY EVENING)
On each side the gown of silver silk was slit to her hips but Ben did not have much chance to enjoy the view. Connie had found him in his bedroom changing into his dinner jacket. After a 15-minute brisk walk in her trainers she was breathing hard but Ben had no chance of starting the conversation, not if she had anything to do with it.
‘Bakhtin, remind me – what did you call him?’
‘A shitbag – why? Have you bumped into him?’ Ben was trying to tuck the coiled wire of his police ear-piece inside a clean shirt.
‘I may have done. You called him “an unbelievable shitbag”, to be precise. Because when he fired you, he told you a white lie.’ Connie let her words hang in the air. ‘Just a little white lie to spare your feelings.’
‘It was more than that, but Alex is a shitbag through and through. I think we agree on that.’
‘We did. We do. So what has this shitbag done that’s really bad? Really, really terrible? Give me an example.’
‘Connie, I don’t understand.’
‘Yes you do. A simple word: an example. Anything you can remember from all those years you were collecting cars and bonuses and pats on the back from your friend.’
‘Well, what he did to your business.’
‘Hallelujah, a great example! That was evil
, wasn’t it?’
She watched the colour drain from Ben’s face. ‘It wasn’t good.’
‘Come on, try harder than that. I was the head of HR, remember? When that business went to the wall I had to make everyone redundant. Your eleven-year-old who was doing so well at a special school, that’s over now. Your house that you planned to extend for your dad who’s getting frail – forget it. The MBA you’re half-way through – sorry about that.
‘A couple of hundred people suddenly looking and no decent jobs for miles. Bakhtin pulled the trigger but I watched the bullets hit between the eyes. No wonder that speech on selfless leadership made me sick. Of course, you wrote that, didn’t you. But tell me, Ben, what else were your sticky fingers all over?’
‘Whatever Bakhtin’s said to you, he’s just said it to upset you and get at me.’ Ben was looking as sick as Connie had been in Frank’s bathroom earlier, but she saw no need to correct his mistaken impression. In any case, where she had got the truth from did not matter.
‘Do you remember telling me, Mr Backroom Boy, that Bakhtin’s businesses ran themselves? You’re the unbelievable shitbag, and I’m the unbelievable idiot who believed you. You weren’t just cheering from the sidelines or warming up on the substitutes’ bench – you were the manager, team captain and centre forward of Team Shitbag rolled into one. You put the ball into the back of the net, and my business was the net. It wasn’t Bakhtin’s idea, it was yours.’
‘Connie –’
‘Stick your excuses. I’m right, aren’t I?’
‘Yes. But –’
‘So look at you. First you screwed my business and then you screwed me.’ Connie leaned forward and slapped Ben’s face. Hard. ‘What do you get for that – a double bonus?’ She stormed out of the room.
---
Connie walked towards the lake, trying to gather her thoughts. She could see where they had celebrated her birthday on Sunday, and wished she could mouse over the memory and click ‘delete’. Was she sure she wished to delete this memory permanently? Yes! Then she tried to change the memory, editing it to show how Ben had come onto her. Of course it had been the other way around.
Not far away were a couple of police Land Rovers and a large square staked out with orange tape – the landing zone for the Prime Minister’s helicopter, she surmised. Any idea of staying for the opening was mad. Although her anger at herself as much as at Ben was now beginning to plateau, she did not want to be where she would have to see him or Alex Bakhtin.
Moreover, the sight of so many sub-machine guns had enlivened a fear that she might have done something alarming in letting Frank have the car battery which he had unexpectedly – and without explanation – needed. Hampton’s grounds, which he was supposed to have quit by noon, were increasingly crawling with private security hired by the college as well as with police. So Connie could not begin to conceive how Frank could move around.
Presumably he was up to some kind of academic jape, a protest stunt like Monday morning’s masturbatory fist, but orchestrated somehow from his house. Frank was no terrorist, of that Connie was certain, but viscerally she wanted to get out of the place. She was dressed like a hostess in an Asian millionaires’ casino but going back to where her day clothes were, parked outside Frank’s house, was out of the question. She got out her mobile phone and got some numbers for local cab firms.
The firms’ blithe promises soon evaporated. The cabs could not get past the armed checkpoints. So having been kept at a scalding simmer for nearly an hour, in the end Connie arranged for one firm to pick her up at 6.30pm on the far side of the Pynbal’s Ridge checkpoint and take her to catch a train from Alderley. She reckoned she could walk to the checkpoint in an hour and a half. The flow of arriving VIPs watched the glistening of Connie’s sweat compete for attention with her diamond earrings and silver threads as she strode past them without acknowledgement.
Halfway up Pynbal’s Ridge Connie passed a Bentley the colour of burgundy, chauffeur-driven like most of the other arriving cars. This one had two passengers. The Bentley – licence place MST1 – stopped and reversed. The younger of two South Asian males of different ages but the same tailor stepped out and clasped his hands together. ‘The feet of virtue are always calloused.’
Connie hesitated. ‘I’m sorry?’
‘Good evening. His Holiness the Maharishi Swami Tandoori is observing religious silence, but has the pleasure of offering you a lift.’
Connie looked inside. ‘I’m sure that’s very, ah, Maharswishy of him, but I’m going the other way.’
‘Would you care to join His Holiness for dinner?’
‘No offence, but I’ve given up men for Lent. Or whatever it is right now.’
‘Perhaps some spiritual exercises after dinner.’
‘No.’
‘Afterwards, his driver would be pleased to take you wherever you wish.’
‘Another time.’
‘His Holiness believes that we must encounter ourselves in the now, or risk eternal non-being.’
Connie opened the Bentley’s front passenger door. She leant inside. ‘Listen up, Mr Tikka Masala. Have yourself a top evening at the college and raise tons of money. Then you can have two twerps to run around for you instead of one. Just fucking remember to get one who can listen as well as one who can speak.’
Of course the taxi was late to the checkpoint but it came eventually and dropped Connie at Alderley station. ‘Station’ is a term used in Britain to describe an occasional railway timetable and two stone strips connected by a footbridge. The lack of any toilet is a key part of this design. At Alderley, the experience of waiting was fully digitised. An electronic indicator showed that it was 7.05pm and that the next train, which was headed to Slough, would arrive at 7.28.
An old man with a cap and a walking stick occupied the platform’s only bench. Clutching a small Union Jack, he looked as if he had been sitting there since Prince Charles’ and Princess Diana’s wedding, or possibly VE Day. The other sign of life was no more promising – a pub across the car park, named ‘The Railway’. As Connie approached she could see that it offered a warm welcome and cups of hot chocolate for all the refugee apostrophes from the Kings Arms. The day’s special was burger and chip’s with garden pea’s. She ordered a mineral water and found the ladies’ toilet.
Opening the door of this facility temporarily relieved Connie of the desire which had brought her there. With her feet numb from her forced march from the college she composed herself as if she were a Thursday evening regular, down to watch the footy in her silver cheong-sam.
The three young males sprawled around the pub’s pool table were following a long tradition in Western philosophy, classifying all of existence into fundamental dualisms, in this case ‘sweet’ and ‘shite’. Connie told herself that trains had toilets – usually – and checked for phone messages. Any distraction to take away the pressure on her bladder would do, but there weren’t any messages. She left her phone switched on in hope. Sitting was worse than standing, so she walked back to the station platform.
---
Ben was boiling over. How could one man, even if he was as rich as Bakhtin, do him so much damage? If he had to greet this Toad of Toad Hall the chances were he would punch his teeth out. But of course (Ben suddenly realised) Bakhtin was not going to be in the tower, but by the lake greeting the Prime Minister. Still, there would be an opportunity over dinner.
But why did he give a shit about dinner? He was in no mood to smarm his way around a collection of the world’s largest egos, hoping to impress and land a job. Once the opening was done, his job at Hampton was done. Somehow it had not turned out at all as he had expected. As soon as the glass spaceship and vertical phallus was opened he would head back to his bedroom, collect his few belongings, jump in his Audi with LED running lights and get back to breathing the air of normal England.
But before that, there was
an hour more of this. At 5.25pm the early guests, such as Casey Pinnacle, had been up in the tower for 20 minutes but the main flow of arrivals was now beginning. They were mostly in evening dress, some in an interpretation of national costume. Ben’s job was to perform a dance between Dean Gyro and the auditorium. The dance was performed like this:
Sir Alastair Mecklenburgh, chairman of Atlantic Pensions, arrived. Atlantic Pensions (slogan: ‘Don’t spend your golden years on the rocks’) managed more assets not only than most British pension funds but also than the Mafia. As Sir Alastair would remind you, this puts it truly in the premier league. He was 69.
The £145,000 annual honorarium which he drew for one day a week (was it Tuesdays or Wednesdays? – no, Tuesday was golf) helped him make sure that his own golden years were not rocky ones. He arrived with a young woman. A member of the security team checked for lapel pins of an acceptable colour. These were dispensed at the vehicle checkpoint, where IDs were checked against the guest list.
Dean Gyro’s crimson doctoral robes matched the carpet laid over the grass to the foot of the tower. To begin the dance, Ben stood slightly behind Gyro on his left.
‘Alastair! How marvellous of you to come.’ Repetition was beginning to make Gyro sound English.
‘Gyro, very good of you to ask us. My daughter, Clara. Goodness, isn’t it extraordinary!’ At this point an adulatory reference to the tower was obligatory.
‘We’re very proud of it, I must say. But go up. What you see from here is nothing compared with what you’ll see from there. Ben, will you? Alastair, let’s make sure to catch up over drinks. I was fascinated to see that Atlantic’s changed its bond strategy.’
‘Of course.’
Ben led the guests to the glass doughnut where the digital Californian maître d’ intoned, ‘The elevator doors are opening.’
MBA Page 20
