Due Diligence

by Grant Sutherland

Vance comes with me to my office for a quick post-mortem on the meeting. We agree that the Meyers’ increased offer has caught Parnells flat-footed, that Quin’s main purpose was to draw us out: they want to know if the Meyers will fight this one right to the bell. ‘And I think Darren wanted that private word with me,’ I say, toying with my desk-calendar. ‘Stephen, do you think you have some idea why Daniel was murdered?’ Or who killed him?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Lyle's’s been questioned by Ryan.’

  Vance absorbs this news. ‘And?’

  ‘And he thinks it was you who pointed Ryan at him. He seemed pretty particular about it.’

  Vance asks what I mean. I tell him about the Langford deal, that Ryan has somehow heard of it.

  ‘Ryan wanted to know if I was the only one who didn’t get along with Daniel,' Vance says. 'Darren came to mind.’

  ‘Why? You think he’s been nursing a grudge for five years?’

  Vance drops his eyes to his notes. ‘Frankly, Raef, if Lyle's got Ryan breathing over his shoulder, that’s Sandersons’ problem, not ours.’

  I take a moment with that. Then I ask Vance why he didn’t tell me this before.

  Embarrassed, he begins to explain that it didn’t seem appropriate to speculate. ‘Daniel’s death.’ His voice trails off. ‘It wasn’t the time.’

  By which he means, I suppose, that he wasn't sure that I was strong enough to listen. And perhaps he was right. He says he’s going down to see our broker, and asks if I’m coming. I shake my head, and gesture vaguely around my desk: work to do.

  7

  * * *

  Alone now, I return my attention to December’s deals in the Franc. December. Within minutes I’m staring blankly at a screen full of numbers. Last December was the worst month of my life. Annie was in hospital. At home, Theresa and I had settled into a bitter trench warfare: long silences, punctuated by accusations and allegations intended to wound. Most, I admit, came from me. Most, but not all, and it’s these other ones that have plagued me for almost three months. The coda to nearly every one of them was the same: ‘Raef, you just weren’t there.’ Sometimes delivered sadly, and sometimes with spite, but always the same: ‘You weren’t there.’And here’s the hard part: after nearly three months of reflection, three months spent turning over and inspecting the years of my marriage, three months of broken sleep and bad dreams, I’ve come to the conclusion that the accusation is just, she is right: for the greater part of my marriage I really was, as Theresa claims, not there.

  Now I scroll through the Shobai deals, the wasteland of numbers. December. Never again another month like December.

  I’ve rehearsed my excuses. That holiday to the States we'd planned, how could I let that interfere with the ICI rights issues? And her sister’s wedding, it overlapped with a big telecoms demerger, what was I meant to do? Another time we were down with her parents, a rare family gathering, when Vance called me back to the office. And other times; too, too many others. Building the bank, I told her. Each incident nothing, but taken together and catalogued, they paint a picture I’m almost too ashamed to see. What in the world did I think I was doing? Building the bank with bricks stolen from my marriage? Never a selfish man in theory: only in practice.

  There’s a knock at the door. Henry puts his head in.

  ‘Got hold of Sandersons’ Chief Dealer,’ he says. ‘You were right, it wasn’t just limit problems. He had orders to pull the plug on us.’

  ‘Orders from whom?’

  ‘From the top. Darren Lyle.’

  I nod, thanking him, and Henry disappears. What the hell is Lyle up to? For the time being I put it out of my mind. Thoughts of Theresa return, but these too I put aside. Just one last time, I promise myself: the weak man’s lament and ever-hopeful refuge. Then I apply myself with new vigour to the deals of December. I put the professional before the personal. One last time.

  8

  * * *

  In the afternoon, Allen Fenwick calls. He’s a journalist on the FT, one of the few in his profession I ever speak to. A minute’s polite chat, then he gets down to the real purpose of the call.

  ‘How much of Parnells have you got?’

  When I tell him, he suggests that the final bid of 180 won’t be enough.

  ‘Who’s running the bid, us or you?’

  ‘Okay, okay. I’m doing an interview with Bainbridge later, I thought you might do one too. Any chance?’

  I rarely give interviews, and right now Gary Leicester would be apoplectic if I didn’t consult with him first. A word in the wrong place and I could inadvertently move the balance of the bid against us. Apart from this, there’s Daniel: Fenwick would be bound to ask about the murder.

  ‘Maybe next time.’

  He groans.

  Haywood’s file on Bainbridge is lying on my desk, I reach over and flip it open. ‘But you might want to ask Bainbridge about some old deals of his. Grab a pen.’ Then I give him the three deals that show off the deplorable Bainbridge technique to best effect. Fenwick will check these deals with other sources, but at least I've pointed him in the right direction.

  ‘Now, bollocks aside,’ he says. ‘Will the Meyers get Parnells, yes or no?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I just spoke with Quin. He says no.’

  ‘Ask a stupid question, Allen.’

  He laughs. ‘We’re getting buried in Sandersons press releases round here.’

  Not surprising. If Leicester’s doing his job, the FT is being bombarded with our press releases too. I’m about to hang up when Fenwick asks, ‘Any comment on this insider trading allegation?’

  Caught by this, I give a grunt of surprise. Then he reads aloud to me a part of Sandersons latest press release: it details the Johnstone cock-up, the slant being that it wasn’t as innocent as we made out; it implies that the Takeover Panel got it wrong, and that we shouldn’t have been allowed to proceed with the bid. Johnstone isn’t mentioned, but my name crops up twice. Fenwick finishes and waits for my comment.

  Guarded now, I tell him that he' will have to speak with Leicester and Partners.

  ‘Raef, if I don’t pick this up someone else around here will, believe me.’

  ‘Off the record, Allen?’

  ‘If that’s the best you can do.’

  It is. I take a deep breath and give him the story, the whole cock-up from beginning to end. ‘That insider trading rubbish is just Sandersons’ spin,’ I conclude. ‘I advise you not to print it.’

  ‘Advice noted.’ Not much, but with Allen the best I’ll get. ‘One more question,’ he says.

  ‘Make it quick.’

  ‘We had the police around here, picking up clippings on your Treasurer, the one who was shot. There’s a rumour they’re chasing a financial angle on the murder. That make sense?’

  ‘I’m not the police.’

  ‘Rumour has it it’s connected with that Shobai thing a while back. The suicide. What do you think?'

  ‘I think you’re fishing.’

  He laughs. I say goodbye and hang up.

  Immediately I call Gary Leicester and fill him on the line Sandersons are pushing about insider trading and me. When I tell him I’ve already spoken with Allen Fenwick, he moans. To pacify him, I agree not to take any more calls from journalists.

  Karen Haldane comes through on the intercom: she’ll be free in ten minutes.

  With ten minutes to kill, I take Daniel’s key from my drawer and go along to his office. Since last week no-one has been in here but the police, and Karen. A sweet acrid smell hangs in the air. In the bin by his desk there’s a pile of screwed up paper, two brown apple cores, and an empty packet of Alka Seltzer. From this office there’s no view of the river; not that Daniel cared, he usually spent most of his working day in the Dealing Room. After opening the blinds, I go and thumb through the folders on his desk. Inspector Ryan and his team did a search last Friday: they said they found nothing of interest, but Ryan asked me to keep the door locked anyway. Now I si
nk into Daniel’s chair. Empty: that’s how it feels in here. I’ve hardly set foot in the place since November, but nothing has changed except for this: it feels empty. Daniel won’t come walking through the door, waving his arms and explaining his great new idea for Treasury. There’ll be no more late-night sessions together, plotting the future of the bank. All that is over now.

  Idly, I open and close the drawers: papers, clips, pens and pencils, the usual desk flotsam. Daniel wasn’t the most tidy person in the world but Ryan’s search has added an extra layer of disorder: loose papers are spilling from their folders and nothing is neatly stacked. The last drawer closed, I lean back and look around. This is it. The sole physical remains of one man’s entire working life: a few framed documents, mementoes of deals long forgotten, hang alone one wall; a cluster of mini national flags sprouts like flowers from a square of rubber foam on the shelf; and on the desk, a photograph of Celia and his two boys. A filing cabinet, a desk and a bin. This, I know, is not the life Daniel would have chosen.

  When we were boys he wanted to fly. At Eton his room was plastered with pictures of jets. But after taking his maths degree up at Cambridge, when he tried out for the Air Force, it turned out his eyesight wasn’t good enough. It was the great disappointment of his life. Then came the two years in my father’s old regiment, a false start, before he joined Carltons. He was a successful banker, and he enjoyed his success, but what could banking ever be to someone who’d once dreamed of jets? After joining us at Carltons, I never heard him mention flying again. Looking around his office now, I think I can feel something of what he still must have felt here: life passing unfulfilled, work a poor second best to a dream. Not an unusual story I suppose, but now, Daniel’s life over, it seems so indescribably sad.

  Concealed beneath the desktop there’s a hidden catch, I reach back there and flick it. A slim hidden drawer slides quietly out. I’d forgotten about this drawer, when Ryan came to do the search I never mentioned it to him. It’s where Daniel kept his personal documents, he showed it to me years ago when he made me an executor of his will. Inside the drawer now, I find half a dozen pages. The first four detail a plan he had for cutting back the number of our dealers; the plan would be wildly unpopular out in the Dealing Room, he’s right to have kept it well hidden. The fifth page is in his own handwriting, jottings of numbers beneath a legal firm’s letterhead. 500 K, five hundred thousand. And 1,000 C. Hundreds? He seems to have been shifting some assets around in his will. Curiosity piqued, I put this aside. The last page is different — yellow paper for some reason — and the first two words stare straight up at me. Odin Investments. My throat contracts. My heart thumps in my chest. Odin. And Ryan was in here., searching. My mouth goes dry.

  When Daniel mentioned the Odin deal to me last month, I warned him to leave it to me. But the conversation, like all my conversations with Daniel since November, was brief. Reading the single page now, I wonder just how much he knew. Does it matter? He certainly didn’t know what I told my father he knew, nor was he about to go public with the little knowledge that he had. I lied to my father. Daniel had somehow stumbled on the Odin deal, and that gave me the germ of an idea. Revenge. I meant to bring the weight of Whitehall and Westminster crashing down on Daniel’s head. But even in my most poisonous dreams I never wanted it like this. I am sure that I didn’t.

  The first four pages I return to the drawer. But I keep the one on Odin, and the other concerning Daniel’s personal affairs. Then I push the drawer in until the catch clicks into place. Cocking my ear, I listen for a sound outside the door. There is none, and I’m satisfied at first, then appalled.

  How is it, I wonder, that I came to this? How is it that I came to be a thief?

  9

  * * *

  Karen Haldane walks between the metal shelves of our back-office filing room, touching boxes. ‘August, August, August . . . September. You want December, yeah?’

  Yes, I tell her, I want the forex paperwork for December.

  At the end of the narrow alley, she turns and comes back along the other side. The shelves rise floor to ceiling, the cardboard boxes filling every inch of shelf- space. Here we keep the paperwork generated by Funds Management and Treasury: dealing-slips, fax confirmations, printouts from the Reuters trading system, queries on payment details, the lot. The quantity produced on a daily basis is staggering, all of it, for a time, stored here as a manual back-up for our computer files. Standing by these groaning shelves, it’s extremely hard to maintain faith in the pundits’ promises of the paperless office.

  Karen indicates one section with a wave of the hand. ‘December,’ she says. The boxes are colour-coded: red for equities, blue for money market, green for foreign exchange. As I pull down the first green box, she asks me with whom we have the problem.

  ‘Shobai,’ I tell her, flipping open the box. And immediately I’m lost again. The files inside are colour-coded too.'

  She crouches beside me. ‘Details?’

  I hadn’t intended to tell her, but I could waste hours tracking the deals through all these boxes and files. So I give her the details of the two deals, the dates and amounts. She glances into the box and shakes her head. Then she stands and points to a green box up on the highest shelf. Reaching, I take the box down.

  ‘Why didn’t Shobai back-office call me?’ she asks.

  My answer is to shrug: who knows?

  Karen opens the box and runs a hand over the spines of the files, muttering. ‘Christ,’ she says.

  ‘Something wrong?’

  She pulls out some files, shuffling them. ‘Not in the right order. I’ll speak to Sandra later.’ Sandra, the back-office girl responsible for manual filing. Right now she has my sympathy. Karen pulls three files from the box. ‘The last week in December,’ she announces. ‘Spot deals in the Franc.’

  She hands me one file, props the second against the box, and keeps the third for herself. She assumes she’s staying, and offhand I can’t think of a good reason to dismiss her. So, back braced against the lower shelves, I open my file. Karen kneels by the box. For several minutes there is nothing but the sound of pages turning.

  Then Karen asks, ‘What did the DTI want?’

  I raise my eyes. She's still busily searching her file, but then she looks up.

  ‘It isn’t a big secret, Raef. The whole office knew within ten minutes of them walking through the door.’

  Great. How long will it be before the whole City gets to hear? I bite the inside of my lip, and then say, ‘They had a few questions about the early Parnells trade.’

  ‘Johnstone’s.’

  When I nod, she suddenly loses interest in her file.

  ‘Didn’t they want to see me?’

  ‘Preliminary enquiries, Karen. I told them our compliance officer's satisfied there’s nothing untoward. Okay?’

  She gives me a searching look. ‘Well what if your compliance officer is having second thoughts,’ she says.

  ‘You said all the personal accounts were clean.’

  ‘They are. I was thinking more generally.’

  ‘For instance?’

  ‘Mannetti,’ she says. ‘He’s an experienced fund manager. He knew damn well Parnells were on the Red List.’

  ‘He’s been away.’

  ‘Yeah, he has. He’s conveniently on holiday, completely out of touch, when it happens.’

  ‘Maybe that’s how it was.’

  ‘Yeah,’ she says. ‘Maybe.’

  Like Hugh Morgan, she's suspicious of every action and motive. It makes her good at her work, but the trait that can grow very wearying. Besides, I know that her nose was put out of joint when Mannetti was promoted onto the Audit Committee only months after he joined us: she had to wait two years for the same mark of trust.

  ‘Anyway, how come the DTI came in on it so quick?’

  Again I shrug. I tell her that if she wants to look more closely at the Johnstone deal, to go ahead. ‘But don’t spend too long over it.’

  A
minute later I come to the end of the file. Nothing. I pick up the third file and start turning over the faxes, dealing-slips and payment details, the nuts and bolts of trade. The truth is I am grasping at straws. Half an hour ago Penfield called from the Bank to discover what progress I’d made; or rather, we had made, he still believes I have the benefit of Hugh’s professional assistance. Penfield wanted to know if we still thought we could get to the bottom of it by Friday. I told him we were certain we could, as big a lie as I’ve told for some time. He reminded me of the consequences of failure then he wished me good luck and rang off. But when he hears about the visit the DTI has paid us - and he will, quite soon - I’ll get another call from him. His tone then won’t be nearly so sanguine. In preparation, I’ve come up here to gather evidence of the progress we are supposedly making.

  My eye stops on the name in my file: Shobai. The next moment Karen hands me the details of a second Shobai deal that she’s found. We look them over: one trade for five million US dollars, the other for six, nothing exceptional, the Dealing Room does hundreds just like them each week. Karen wanders around to the next aisle of shelves. It sounds like she’s pulling down more boxes.

  I open the third file and find the other Shobai deal almost immediately. ‘Don’t worry,’ I call. ‘I’ve got it.’

  Laying all the paperwork side by side, I compare the details. The signature on each dealing-slip is different: no two deals done by the same trader. So much for my one brilliant idea.

  Karen comes back and looks over my shoulder. I ask her if she recognizes the signatures.

  ‘Ahha. And they’ve both got personal accounts. Do you want me to check them again?’

  I tell her that it can’t do any harm.

  Leaning over my shoulder, she points to another signature. It’s on so many pages in the file that I had stopped seeing it. Each one is countersigned by Henry Wardell.

  ‘I’ll check all three,’ she says.

  Henry. Now we really are grasping at straws. I drop the files back into the green box then reshelve it.