‘Walter?’
‘Walt Harding. He can guide you back, later.’
Jordan hadn’t thought about later; hadn’t thought about anything, not wanting to anticipate anything more than a minute ahead. Now he felt disappointed. He said, ‘I could have found my own way.’ He admitted to himself the hope that he wouldn’t have needed to. At least it took away the uncertainty.
Alyce didn’t reply, rising instead at the re-entry of the butler. He was pushing a flame-heated serving trolley from which, as they sat, he ladled eggs and fish on to plates and topped up both their glasses.
Alyce said, ‘I guess by this time next week you’ll be back in London?’
‘I haven’t thought about it. Let’s get tomorrow over, first.’
‘Wondering why I invited you out here this afternoon?’
‘No,’ lied Jordan.
‘It’s about tomorrow. Like I told you, I’m not as confident as either Bob or Dan. Even if there’s no damages awarded against you, you’ve still got a lot of costs and—’
‘Stop!’ demanded Jordan, loudly. ‘We’ve done this too many times and I’ve told you no too many times. It’s still no. Always will be, so let’s forget it once and for all, OK?’
‘No, it’s not OK!’ she argued. ‘You’re going to be out a lot of money, whatever happens. That’s not fair.’
Jordan swept out his arm, encompassing the house and beyond. ‘So you brought me here to show me you could afford it more than I could!’
‘That’s not fair, either!’
‘Tell me it isn’t true then.’
‘I wanted to talk to you, by ourselves. The court break was convenient. I wasn’t trying to impress you. This is just how it is.’
‘I am impressed,’ finally conceded Jordan. ‘But not enough to take your money. It’s no longer a conversation between us.’ He’d never imagined himself uninterested in anyone else’s money, Jordan further conceded. But there had been a lot of other things – attitude changes – over the last few weeks that he wouldn’t have imagined possible, either.
‘Never again,’Alyce promised. She sniggered. ‘Promise you won’t get mad if I say something else, though?’
‘I’ll try.’
‘You know who you reminded me of, yelling at me like that?’
‘You tell me it’s Alfred and I’ll yell louder,’ he said, joining in the game.
‘It was Alfred. How he used to speak … talk to people … talk to everybody …’ She hesitated at Stephen’s return with a black uniformed woman to clear the table apart from their wine and water glasses. Allowing time for them to get out of hearing, she said, ‘People never worked for us, either in Manhattan or Long Island, beyond a few weeks, because of it.’ She physically shuddered, at the recollection.
‘In the land of the laid-back, why on earth does everyone automatically refer to him as Alfred, never Al!’
Alyce’s laugh this time was more spontaneous. ‘Call Alfred Al! You’ve got to be joking! He was always Alfred and even then only to a very few people.’
‘How the hell did you ever get involved with such a …’ Jordan paused. ‘A man.’
‘Monster would have done,’ she said. ‘You wouldn’t believe how many times and in how many different ways I’ve asked myself that same question. But he’s very good at hiding himself, when he needs to … when it’s necessary. And it was very necessary with me and the family and all that we’d created. It was only when it didn’t work, as he’d intended it to work, that it all started to go wrong. That the punishments started …’
‘You’re losing me,’ complained Jordan. ‘Maybe we shouldn’t even be talking about it, now that it’s virtually over. There’s no point.’
‘You know what I now realize Alfred really felt about me? About me and all the historic bullshit and where we, the Bellamys, are now?’ said Alyce, too engrossed in her own reflections to heed Jordan’s caution. ‘It was resentment. It was right, what Bob suggested in court, although he never brought it out like it truly was. It wasn’t me that Alfred loved. I don’t think it’s possible for him to love anyone, probably not even himself, although I think I said that he did. What Alfred really did love, which Bob challenged him with, was the idea of being the king in an American royal family – a king who could have as many mistresses as he wanted, like kings once did: like some still do, maybe. Marrying me gave him the combined lineage but to make it really work he needed the court and the country to rule. Which didn’t exist. But the Bellamy Foundation existed; the foundation on which I was a working chief executive until he persuaded me to resign, as I told the court. Except that it wasn’t because he considered it ill-fitting for me to be a working woman. He manoeuvred that to vacate the throne for himself. But he miscalculated, as Alfred so often miscalculated. The Bellamy Foundation is a charitable organization, with all the responsibilities that were explained in court. But there’s nothing charitable about the board that runs it. They’re hard-assed professionals who were the first to see Alfred for what he is, long before I did. Getting on to it wasn’t the shoo-in he thought it was going to be. He couldn’t get the necessary board member vote, certainly not when mother, who’s got the controlling vote structure, wouldn’t back him. That’s how the punishments started …’
‘Punishments?’ queried Jordan.
‘I believe that’s what the loans were, Alfred Appleton’s personally imposed financial penalties. And the neglect and the whoring, although I don’t think infecting me as he did was an intended humiliation, because to do that he had to contract it first and not even he would do that.’ Alyce abruptly laughed, although nervously. ‘Jesus, I’ve really run off at the mouth, haven’t I? Turned you into my therapist.’
Jordan laughed with her, anxious to lighten the mood. ‘I had a free afternoon.’
‘I know …’ she started, but then stopped.
‘Know what?’
‘I’m not going to talk about money, I promise. But I know from Bob what a hell of an input you made. I want to thank you and apologize for you getting caught up in it and I promise never again to mention any of that, either.’
‘You think I could have a moment or two to talk?’ asked Jordan, sure he knew what he wanted to say but not at all sure how to say it.
‘Depends what it is,’ qualified Alyce, cautiously.
‘None of what’s happened …’ Jordan started awkwardly, stopping at the sound from the far door of the garden room.
‘Hi!’ greeted Walter Harding, emerging through the foliage.
‘Hi!’said Alyce.
Shit! thought Jordan.
When they came to be delivered Jordan’s initial reaction to the verdicts was that of an anti-climax – despite, even, his total exoneration – because that was how he regarded the conclusion of the previous afternoon at the Bellamy house, anxious at its end to quickly leave a place which, until Harding’s intrusion, he’d hoped desperately not to leave that night. Hopefully not for many nights. So occupied still was he by that disappointment that at the opening of the court proceedings Jordan actually had to force his concentration upon Pullinger’s summation and guidance to the jury, which strictly obeyed Pullinger’s insistence on the priority of its required judgements.
This meant Appleton’s criminal conversation claim against him was the first to be dealt with and totally dismissed. Immediately following the verdict, Pullinger ordered that Appleton should pay three quarters of Jordan’s total costs for initiating such a flagrantly insupportable action, in part for which he held Bartle responsible for providing the inept legal advice. The jury found against Leanne Jefferies but again following Pullinger’s instructions limited the award against her to $50,000 in Alyce’s favour. They also found in Alyce’s favour on her cross petition against Appleton.
After discharging the jury Pullinger declared he had considered a bench order alleging perjury against Appleton but held back from doing so in the event of the man appealing upon the grounds he’d offered the previous day. He defini
tely intended an enquiry into alleged perjury against Mark Chapman and to carry out his already indicated decision to report both venere-alogists to their respective Massachusettes licensing authorities for professional misconduct. On the same grounds he was going to report David Bartle and Peter Wolfson to both the North Carolina and New York State bar associations.
‘In addition to which,’ Pullinger told the two attorneys, whom he’d ordered to stand before him, ‘I shall refuse ever again to have either of you appear before me on any legal matter, which I shall make clear to both bar associations I have nominated. I further order, upon the possibility of both or either of your clients being held in contempt of my court, against making comments or assisting in any way the media, either electronic or print, beyond what this court provides about any of the defendants or claimants in these proceedings. I want your assurance, which will be recorded by the court stenographer, that you fully and completely understand the order I have just issued.’
One by one the two attorneys, Appleton and finally Leanne Jefferies, acknowledged that they understood.
‘This hearing, the most disgraceful ever presented before me, is now closed,’ Pullinger concluded.
Reid’s office was judged both inadequate and inappropriate for the celebration and at a loss for an alternative they went back to the all too familiar hotel where a hurriedly arranged private room was hired and food and drink ordered while Alyce telephoned her mother to relay the news and Jordan returned to his suite to make an earlier-than-usual computer check that there had been no movement upon the existing shortfall enquiries, nor any new challenges. As an afterthought as he was actually leaving his suite, Jordan quickly dialled Lesley Corbin in London, who said she’d never had any doubt of the outcome and whom Jordan didn’t believe.
Jordan was back in his anti-climax depression when he got to the celebration, by which time Walter Harding had arrived and Alyce had passed on the court verdict. Also there were the DDK enquiry team who had never been called upon as well as some support staff from Reid’s office.
Harding approached Jordan the moment he entered the room and said, ‘Didn’t I tell you this was exactly as it would turn out!’
‘You certainly did,’ agreed Jordan. As well as a lot of other I-can-predict bullshit by which he’d become so irritated the previous afternoon that he’d switched off any attention to the man’s constant outpourings.
‘How’s it feel?’ demanded Harding.
‘I’m not sure it’s settled in.’ Jordan wished Alyce would break away form Reid so that he could excuse himself from the hospital administrator.
‘It was obviously nonsense from the beginning,’ insisted the man. ‘I guess you’re now going back to reality and England, where everything and everybody is normal?’
He’d never ever lived in reality, thought Jordan. Always the opposite, the unreality of living – being – somebody else, with somebody else’s name and persona. He said, ‘I’m not sure that’s an apt description, either.’ He saw Alyce had moved away from her lawyer and immediately excused himself to join her.
Alyce said at once, ‘I didn’t realize Pullinger was delaying the media release until tomorrow.’
‘Neither did I.’
‘By which time I shall be back at the house, beyond any camera lens.’
‘Is that what you’re going to do?’
‘There’s no better place to hide.’
‘For how long?’
‘For as long as I choose, although the judge put a pretty effective lid on it becoming a long-running saga, didn’t he?’
‘So what after you come out of retreat?’ pressed Jordan.
She smiled at the expression. ‘Regain my life. I’ve already arranged to get my place back on the board of the Bellamy Foundation.’
‘As well as?’
‘That’s as far as, for the moment,’ said Alyce. ‘There was something you were going to say, just before Walter arrived at the house yesterday?’
‘Maybe later,’ said Jordan. ‘Not now.’
‘Call me.’
Thirty-Two
Jordan tried the moment he got into his Carlyle suite the following morning, before even bothering to unpack after a delayed New York arrival from Raleigh. At the Bellamy North Carolina estate, Stephen – after having established who Jordan was – told him Alyce wasn’t there and that he didn’t know when she would be returning; she hadn’t given a date or a location, although he didn’t think it was Manhattan. Jordan told the butler where he was – even stipulating his suite number – and to pass on a message for Alyce to call if she made contact. And did the same when, despite the butler’s doubt that Alyce was in New York, he got the answering service at her West 84th Street apartment.
During the returning flight Jordan had scoured as many newspapers as were available at Raleigh airport. Both the New York Times and Wall Street Journal’s coverage was relegated to deep into the inside pages, boosted beyond the strictly limited factual release from Pullinger’s court by photographs of both Appleton and Alyce and the inevitable historical background of both families. Jordan was named only once, without either a photograph or an indication, even, of his English nationality. There was nothing in any international edition of any English newspaper collected for him by the hotel’s customer service department. He’d alerted Lesley Corbin during his earlier call from Raleigh and when he telephoned again she confirmed there was no reference either to the case or to him personally in any of that morning’s London editions. Neither had there been on any national British television or radio bulletin or any Internet news source she’d accessed.
‘Why should there have been?’ she asked him, rhetorically. ‘You were found not guilty of any involvement in the case.’
Jordan waited until after he’d unpacked before mounting his daily monitor of the Appleton and Drake computers. There was a further challenge, again from a Manhattan broker, to a shortfall on another of the earliest copper trades he’d raided, and evident growing alarm in the continuing email conversations between the two earlier questioned metal traders at their inability to discover the cause of their individual problems through any of the personal enquiries they had so far conducted. One, Colin Nutbeam, complained of not being able to look any further or differently than he already had and his colleague, George Sutcliffe, agreed that if they didn’t identify the cause of the disparities in the next twenty-four hours there was no alternative but to officially report it to their respective financial supervisors. From the now extensive communications between the originally challenged John Popple and his financial controller there were gaps indicating either personal interviews or internal telephone conversations, culminating the previous day in the latest email from the fiscal manager, not to Popple but to Alfred Appleton, asking for the earliest possible meeting upon his return from Raleigh to discuss an apparently inexplicable financial discrepancy in an onwardly traded pork belly future. In an attempt to trace the error before the requested meeting, the controller intended conducting an audit of every buy and sell contract in which Popple had been involved in the preceding six months. Until the matter was resolved it was suggested that a specific accounting be made of every buy and sell trade in which Popple had engaged.
Jordan unsuccessfully tried Alyce’s number again before leaving the hotel, delaying any more raids upon Appleton and Drake holdings until he had made room in the five bank accounts. Even though the banks were comparatively close to each other it took him almost four hours to move between them, keeping to the same strict routine. He first withdrew all but between $2,000 to $3,000 from each account, carrying the cash to the separate securities divisions, where in the locked seclusion of their individual private rooms he emptied the already well filled safe-deposit boxes into the two briefcases he carried with him.
Both for continued security against the unlikely irony of a street mugging and to necessarily relieve the physical strain of carrying the two now very heavy cases, Jordan hailed a taxi when he emerged from th
e last bank to take him back to the Carlyle hotel. There he re-entered the computers of Appleton and Drake and spent almost a further hour plundering previously untouched accounts, moving a total of $22,000 into the five banks in which he had been earlier that afternoon. There was no new correspondence in any of the Appleton and Drake sites he accessed, including the personal station of Alfred Appleton.
Jordan again got Alyce’s answering service when he tried the Manhattan apartment and Stephen insisted there had been no contact from her since Jordan’s previous call, promising to pass on his message and location the moment there was.
The low table in the suite’s sitting room was substantial, running virtually the entire length of the two couches it divided, but it was still too small to accommodate the money when Jordan tried to tip out the contents of both briefcases, even though he had mostly stipulated $100 notes every time he had made a cash withdrawal. Jordan worked carefully and with practised professionalism, assembling the money in individual, one-thousand-dollar bundles before moving the piles from the table to the floor to make room for what was in the second case. At that moment the haul amounted to $530,0000, which meant that after Pullinger’s reduced costs decision in his judgement that Jordan had more than sufficient to settle his account with Daniel Beckwith, even if the final bill exceeded the attorney’s ballpark figure of $250,000. Jordan managed to fit $10,000 in the suite safe, concealed inside the bedroom closet. Neatly stacked as the money now was it was easy to assemble in envelopes of $10,000 each to transport it all in just one briefcase to the cashier’s office, where he rented three more safe-deposit boxes in addition to the two already in his genuine name.
The Namedropper Page 36
