by Megan Goldin
Lucy was electrocuted by a tablet device she was using in the bath. It was connected to a power outlet. It would have been thought an accident if it hadn’t been for two things. For one, Lucy was too smart to sit in the bath with an electronic device plugged into the power, and more importantly, she left a suicide note on her hall table. The authorities determined it was deliberate. Death by suicide.
I found out in the cruellest way possible. I clicked on a link to a breaking news story with the headline ‘Investment Banker Dies as Markets Plunge’. Lucy had died on a day on which the markets had a significant correction. It had nothing to do with her death, but I guess it was the sort of headline that went viral. I clicked on the link and discovered the investment banker in question was Lucy Marshall. It was so undignified and sad. Lucy would have been humiliated at the way her death was splashed across the tabloids with lurid headlines.
Vincent was in London when Lucy died. He flew back that evening, as did I, for a memorial service the firm organised at Trinity Church.
The church was filled with Stanhope staff who’d barely given Lucy the time of day when she was alive. All of a sudden they were publicly mourning her. Maybe they turned up because her death had been so public. Or maybe it was in deference to Vincent, who’d arranged the ceremony.
A poster-sized framed photograph of Lucy stood on the podium along with a large wreath. Lucy’s narrow, intelligent eyes seemed to survey with surprise the sizeable crowd that had gathered. In life, she’d known very few of them. And many of those she had known hadn’t been particularly nice to her.
Several of Lucy’s relatives attended the memorial service too. An aunt, some cousins and her mother, who spent most of the ceremony with her face buried in kleenex.
Vincent spoke eloquently about Lucy’s brilliance, her understated wit and her enormous contribution to a number of successful deals. I noted that Vincent did not mention that those deals earned the firm close to a quarter of a billion dollars. Or that they might not have happened at all if it hadn’t been for Lucy’s work.
When Vincent was done, a human resource manager spoke in soft tones about how everyone at Stanhope was a large, extended family and how they all grieved the loss of one of their own. She offered free counselling assistance to anybody who needed help. In a final address, Thomas Nelson, a member of the executive team, announced that the firm would keep Lucy’s memory alive by helping other talented students achieve their career goals.
‘Because Lucy had a lifetime of achievement before her,’ he said, ‘it’s only fitting that we help other brilliant graduates finish Lucy’s work. That’s why we’re creating a scholarship fund in Lucy’s name.’
He presented Lucy’s mother, Cathy, with a framed certificate announcing the annual Lucy Marshall Scholarship. He also gave her a cheque for Lucy’s funeral expenses.
‘Maybe she’ll be able to have an open coffin funeral now,’ whispered a guy to his friend in the row in front of me.
‘It’s the least that we can do,’ Thomas Nelson said, shaking Cathy’s hand. Cathy looked fragile and numb throughout the ceremony. Vincent held her arm to support her as she rose to shake hands with people filing past to offer their condolences.
‘Lucy was a greatly loved member of our team,’ Jules said, as he took Cathy’s hand and held it between his own. ‘I don’t know how we’ll manage without her.’
‘I really don’t,’ he said, as we walked back to the office. ‘Lucy made us all a lot of money over the years. It’s a shame. A damn shame.’
The police went through the motions of investigating Lucy’s death, including turning her apartment into a crime scene for a few days and dusting for fingerprints. It was half-hearted. After all, Lucy had left a suicide note in her own handwriting. That pretty much wrapped up the investigation before it even began.
The coroner’s report ruled definitively that Lucy’s death was a suicide. A passing reference in the report to Lucy having sedatives in her system noted that the amount was not considered significant, even though her mother Cathy said that Lucy had an aversion to taking medication of any type – not even ibuprofen for her migraines.
With all the evidence pointing towards suicide, nobody imagined for a moment that Lucy was murdered.
The new clue appeared in red letters in the centre of the white screen. Vincent and Sylvie noticed it, Jules and Sam did not. They were splayed out on the floor, panting hard after their scuffle and attending to their wounds. Jules held a handkerchief to his nose to stem the bleeding. Sam was in agony. He’d hit the wall hard with his shoulder and was in so much pain that he couldn’t make a sound.
Let your plans be dark and impenetrable as night, and when you move, fall like a thunderbolt.
The sentence expanded until it almost filled the screen and then contracted until it could barely be seen.
‘Is that supposed to be a clue or an observation?’ asked Sylvie as she watched the sentence expand again.
‘I don’t know,’ said Vincent wearily. ‘I wish this place came with an instruction manual because …’ Vincent stopped talking. They all froze as they felt the elevator make a lumbering shift, like a monster waking up after a long hibernation. Their moods lifted. Their ordeal was ending.
The elevator jolted again. Then it fell into a sudden descent. It was so unexpected that their stomachs dropped as if on a roller-coaster.
At first they didn’t worry when the elevator’s descent gained speed. They assumed it was taking them down to the lobby. It was when their ears popped that they realised the elevator was falling so fast that it was virtually in freefall. They were plummeting to the ground.
Someone screamed, or maybe they all did. Sylvie clutched Sam’s arm in a futile gesture.
‘Oh my fucking God.’ Jules wasn’t sure if he screamed it or thought it. His heart raced. The elevator kept falling faster and faster, still gaining speed.
When it stopped, it was sudden and brutal. It felt as if they were in a speeding car hitting a brick wall. Their bodies were tossed around like bowling pins. They tumbled and lay on the ground in a tangled pile, battered and bruised.
Jules was the first to move. He tentatively stretched his arms and legs one at a time. Nothing felt broken. That was a good sign. His nose was still dripping blood from being punched by Sam, but he didn’t mind that.
He focused on finding his phone. The flashlight had become his lifeline. He found it next to him and turned it on until the screen was illuminated. He’d never seen anything as beautiful as his wallpaper. It was a photograph he’d taken during a ski trip with the beautiful Jana. They’d since broken up, but he enjoyed looking at her, which is why he hadn’t deleted the photo. Jagged cracks now ran down the length of the screen.
‘Are you all ok?’ Jules pointed his phone around the elevator to assess the damage. They weren’t ok. They were lying in contorted heaps on the marble floor, dazed and injured. Vincent was lying face down and not moving at all.
Sylvie sat up slowly. A thin red gash ran vertically down her face. Jules curiously watched a droplet of blood roll down her cheek like a tear. The cut seemed out of place on flawless Sylvie. A human mannequin. It was hard to believe that she bled. She looked shattered and afraid.
Jules moved over to reassure her but she immediately backed away like a wounded animal.
‘You’re hurt,’ he said more bluntly than he’d intended. He was offended by her rejection. He pointed the light at the trickle of blood that ran down her forehead to her mouth. ‘There’s a cut on your temple. It’s bleeding,’ he said callously.
She ran her tongue onto her skin and tasted salt. She scooped her dark blonde hair behind her head, pinning it up as best she could without the benefit of a mirror. Then she ran her finger all the way down the wound to wipe off the trickle of blood. Unsure of what to do with it, she licked the blood off her finger. It left a lingering taste and stained her lips.
Sam lay on the floor in utter agony. His body was broken. He moaned faintly at
the back of his throat like a wounded dog. He was in pain, but alive. Vincent still hadn’t made a sound.
Jules slid over to him. His still body was lying face down. ‘Vincent?’ He said, shaking him roughly. ‘Vincent? Are you ok?’ There was no response.
‘Vincent?’ He shook him by the shoulders. Still no response.
With the delicate touch of a pickpocket, Jules slipped his fingers behind Vincent’s belt and slowly eased out the Glock.
Vincent arranged for the team to meet at a bar after Lucy’s memorial. I suppose it was an Irish wake of sorts. ‘It will give those of us who worked closely with Lucy the chance to reminisce and farewell her together,’ he wrote in the invitation he emailed to the wider team, including junior analysts and support staff.
The cynical side of me suspected that our human resources department was behind the invitation. That it was a page from a playbook on how to deal with an employee’s death. They’d had practice, there had been other deaths in previous years. One trader gassed himself in his garage. Another drove his car into a tree. There was some question as to whether it was deliberate or an accident caused by his exhaustion. He was a graduate who’d worked 100 hours a week for three weeks in a row.
Lucy’s death first truly hit home as I watched her portrait being taken away after the memorial ceremony. That’s when the numbness that had kept the tears at bay dissolved.
When I returned to the office after the memorial, I noticed that Lucy’s desk had been packed up and wiped clean. The only thing left behind was an old calendar with quotes by Sun Tzu, which was pinned to her desk partition.
When I’d asked Lucy why she kept a calendar that was two years out-of-date, she told me Vincent gave it to her as a gift. He’d said that Wall Streeters love to quote Sun Tzu because they think it makes them sound badass, but that Lucy was the only one who’d actually read Sun Tzu’s writings and applied that in her work, which made her a genuine badass.
Remembering that conversation made me want to cry. I stifled my tears while I rushed off to the women’s restroom. I locked myself in a stall and sobbed until thin trails of mascara ran down my cheeks. I had to wash off my makeup before I could go back. I examined my red eyes and gaunt face in the mirror. I looked fragile and heartbroken even after I applied fresh lipstick.
When I returned to my desk, I noticed the Sun Tzu calendar wasn’t hanging by Lucy’s desk anymore. The last of Lucy’s things had been taken away. It felt as if all traces of her had been erased.
I was relieved to get out of the office and into the fresh evening air for a solitary walk to O’Dwyer’s for the drinks Vincent had organised in Lucy’s honour. He’d reserved two long booths at the back of the wood-panelled Irish bar. He ordered plates of finger food and a bottle of whiskey, from which he poured shots for the two dozen or so people who turned up.
‘To Lucy,’ Vincent said when everyone had arrived. We all held up our glasses. ‘She’ll be missed by all of us. May she find the peace that she never found in this world.’
I’d always thought that Lucy had peace in this world. On her terms. That’s why I didn’t understand why she’d committed suicide. It struck me as strange, given what she’d said a few months earlier about the factory foreman’s suicide. That she didn’t understand why anyone would kill themselves. Now it seemed she had found herself in that same place.
‘You look as if you’re away with the fairies, Sara.’ Jules’s face was flushed from drink.
‘I was wondering how Lucy ended up at the firm,’ I lied. ‘She was hardly the stereotypical Stanhope candidate.’
‘It was Vincent, he headhunted her,’ said Jules. ‘He insisted on hiring her even though Lucy didn’t fit in. She ticked none of the boxes except for intelligence, where she was obviously off the charts. Nobody knew why he chose her. Maybe the stress of not belonging took a psychological toll on her?’
Vincent hired Lucy for the simple reason that she was brilliant. He mentored her with a devotion that was markedly unusual for Vincent. He always made time to meet with Lucy no matter how full his schedule. Sylvie once told me that Lucy was Vincent’s vanity project, that he saw himself as her Pygmalion. She sounded jealous.
Jules leaned across to me and whispered in a low voice. ‘Vincent took a risk when he hired Lucy. It paid off, until now. I hear the exec team is upset about the media coverage. There’s a suggestion Lucy offed herself because she was overworked. That sort of publicity won’t be good for Vincent’s career. Up until now he could do no wrong, but I think that’s about to change.’
‘I’m sure the firm knows that hiring Lucy paid off many times over,’ I said. ‘Lucy’s work was very lucrative for the firm.’
He shrugged as if he didn’t agree. ‘They have short memories. All they see now is ugly headlines. It doesn’t reflect well on Vincent.’
I had no doubt that Vincent had known he was taking a risk by hiring Lucy. Lucy did not fit the template of a Stanhope recruit. The staff was their brand and that meant we had to look the part. With over 10 000 applicants a year, the firm could hire candidates who had both intelligence and good looks. Stanhope had the luxury, as one internal recruiter once crudely put it, of having their cake and eating it too.
Lucy, though, had pale skin, since she spent little time outdoors. She wore thick glasses to treat severe myopia. Her hair was cut in an unflattering style that added a decade to her age. She had never worked out in a gym in her life because she didn’t see the point. As the human resources people would say, she was a poor cultural fit.
I observed Jules, Sam and Sylvie, nursing their drinks across the long table. Why was Lucy so afraid of them? She hadn’t wanted them to know we occasionally watched a movie together or spent an evening listening to her extensive record collection. Our friendship seemed so trivial, but Lucy didn’t want them to know. She was intent on playing the brilliant, clumsy, friendless fool.
I remembered what Lucy said about keeping them off balance. ‘Pretend to be weak, so they may grow arrogant,’ she’d told me. She called it a survival mechanism. At the time, I thought she was paranoid. Watching them whisper to one another across the table, I decided that maybe Lucy had been onto something.
‘Did you know that Lucy only needed four hours sleep a night?’ Sam interrupted my thoughts.
‘That’s true,’ said Vincent. ‘I’d often find her still at work in the morning, with the same focus that she’d shown the night before. I’d have to insist she go home to rest.’
He proposed another toast.
‘Lucy was quiet and self-contained, but she had an amazing work ethic and she was easily the best forecaster that I ever worked with.’ He paused. ‘We were lucky to find her. To the greatest number-cruncher in the business.’ He raised his glass and the others joined him.
‘How did you find her, Vincent?’ Sylvie asked. ‘You’ve always refused to say.’
Vincent sighed. ‘I hired her straight out of college. She was still completing the final year of a masters degree in mathematics. I was giving an address to MBA students on job opportunities.’
It was one of those talks that was organised by Stanhope’s publicity department to raise the firm’s profile ahead of recruitment season.
When he took questions after his presentation, Vincent told us that the students asked about starting salaries and training. There was even a question on what sort of hours were expected of graduates. Vincent said that he counted one moderately smart question among them. After the questions died down, a hand went up in the back of the auditorium.
‘Go ahead,’ called out Vincent. ‘This will be the last question, I have to get back to work. The markets never rest.’ A titter of laughter.
‘Are you aware that based on the Nash equilibrium theory, it makes no sense for the Atlantic Mining Company and the Western Metals Conglomerate to merge?’ It sounded like the voice of a teenager. Everyone turned around to glimpse a young girl in jeans and a deep red woollen sweater. She wore glasses and her hair was pushed
back behind her ears, which stuck out slightly. She was in the aisle seat of the back row.
‘I suppose everyone is entitled to an opinion,’ said Vincent. ‘You seem very certain about yours. If you oppose a merger, what do you propose instead?’
‘I don’t propose anything,’ she responded with surprise. ‘I don’t care if the two companies merge or not. However, if they did not merge, but rather Atlantic Mining acquired Western Metals, then according to my calculations the share price would be eighteen per cent higher. That figure would almost double after two years.’ Silence followed. ‘Of course, this is based on the publicly available financial information and on certain assumptions about future metals prices and demand. Maybe there’s other information that I haven’t seen that undermines my theory.’ Her comments were followed by a deep silence and then heads slowly turning back and restless shuffling of papers.
‘Here she goes again,’ someone whispered. There was a ripple of laughter.
‘Perhaps we should talk after this presentation and you can explain to me your thinking,’ Vincent suggested.
When the talk was over, Vincent was inundated by aspiring graduate recruits keen to impress him and make sure he remembered them. Some of them handed him business cards with their contact details. He always tossed them out afterwards; from his experience any college student who handed out business cards was cocky, conceited and a potential liability if ever hired.
Vincent packed up his briefcase and scanned the room for the student who had asked him that last question. It had piqued his interest because Vincent had come to the same conclusion when, weeks earlier, he’d presented the various options to the executive team. The executives chose the merger option despite his advice.
Lucy was standing back from the crowd with a backpack over her left shoulder, reading a book. As Vincent approached, he saw the title in silver type on the book’s spine. It was Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya.
