‘What are you doing?’
I look up. Martin, my godson. He’s standing at the door, in his pyjamas, his eyes fixed on the dictaphone. I say his name and he comes and stands by the desk. He asks it again. ‘What are you doing?’
I flick off the dictaphone. Martin, at last, looks at me. I ask after his younger brother.
‘He’s asleep.’
‘Your mother’s in the kitchen.’
He makes no move to go. He is ten years old, but he’s always seemed quieter and wiser than his years. I could make a joke of it, spin him around and send him on his way. But somehow, with Martin, that doesn’t seem appropriate. Feeling rather awkward now, I restart my search beneath his clear-eyed gaze.
‘What are you looking for?’
‘Your mother wants me to find some papers. I won’t be long.’
He comes round the desk and stands beside me. He smells of scented soap, a child’s smell that reminds me of Annie.
‘What do they look like?’
‘The papers?’
He nods.
‘I’m not sure, Martin. There’ll be some signatures on them.’
‘Dad’s signature?’
I glance up to find him regarding me quizzically.
Yes, I tell him. Probably.
Then I close the last drawer, my first cursory pass over the desk complete. Martin steps out of my way as I cross to the cabinet. It has a slatted rolling door which I pull at. Locked. And there were no loose keys in the desk.
Martin says, ‘Are they in there?’
‘I don’t know. Maybe.’
When I turn, he’s climbing onto the desk. He stands and reaches up to a high bookshelf then he fumbles between the books. He finds what he wants, then climbs down and comes and presents me with it: a bright silver key.
The key fits the cabinet. Inside there are three shelves, loose papers on two of them and a heavy folder on the third. The loose papers are just more of what I’ve seen in Daniel’s desk; but opening the folder I see at once that I’ve found what I’m after. Private documents: the first page is Daniel’s birth certificate, and the next is his marriage licence.
‘Is that them?’
I tell Martin yes, that I think so.
He returns the key to its hiding place while I flip quickly through the file. The will is almost certainly here, but I can’t find it immediately.
‘Mum says you might come and see us,’ Martin says, sliding from the desk. ‘Down at school.’
‘If you want me to.’
He considers this, but doesn’t seem to think it warrants an answer.
‘I’ve got to go now, Martin.’
Tucking the folder beneath my arm, I pause to squeeze my godson’s bony shoulder as I pass from the study.
Out in the kitchen, Celia gives the folder a quick glance. She has bacon frying in the pan.
‘I have to go.’
She looks disappointed. What she wants, I know, is to talk about Daniel. And I, most definitely, do not.
‘Well, maybe after you’ve found the will,’ she says.
After I have found it? I’d intended to leave the folder with her now, duty done. But I bite my tongue. Like Martin, she trusts me to help.
‘Bring Theresa,’ she says, glancing over her shoulder. ‘For supper? Maybe next week?’
‘Martin’s up. He saw me in the study.’
She puts two plates in the warmer. ‘He’s a good kid,’ she says.
I hitch the folder beneath my arm again and start to say goodbye, but she breaks in over the top of me. ‘Did you know Daniel and I talked about a divorce?’
My heart sinks. I really don’t want to hear this.
‘You didn’t, did you?’ She sits, and the strange smile on her face starts to tremble. ‘Can you believe it?’
‘Celia—’
‘All those tarts, and I stay with him. Then he turns round and tells me we should start thinking about a divorce.’
Daniel asked her? Have I heard that right?
‘Do you think that was fair? Was that fair, Raef?’
I have heard it right. I ask her, Why?
‘He wouldn’t say.’
‘No reason?’
‘Reasons?’ She opens her hands despairingly. ‘He didn’t want to do this, he didn’t like the way I did that. Pick, pick. All rubbish. He knew it was rubbish too. He just didn’t want to tell me at first.’ Her hands drop to the table with a thump. She swears, something she never does. ‘Christ, what does it matter now?’
A wise man would let it rest here. She needed to tell someone, she has told me, and that should be the end of it. Would be the end of it, if I wanted it to be.
Instead I ask, ‘When was all this?’
‘The end of last year.’ She toys with the salt shaker. ‘He went cold on the idea lately. Funny, you know. By then he’d just about convinced me I’d be better off without him.’
‘And he didn’t say why?’
‘He did, actually.’ She looks at me. ‘He’d got some tart pregnant. He was going to marry her.' Her eyes blaze. ‘God,’ she says. ‘I really hated him sometimes.’
A numbness creeps over me. If Daniel meant to marry Theresa, what else would he have told Celia? But even in December, Theresa never flung this one in my face. Divorce from me and marriage to Daniel? Was that ever in Theresa's mind?
‘Have you mentioned this to Inspector Ryan?’
‘He knows we were thinking of a divorce.’
‘I mean about why Daniel wanted one. Did you tell Ryan that?’
‘No.’
‘It might be best if you don’t. And I wouldn’t tell him about hating Daniel either. Ryan’s got a suspicious mind.’
The light of understanding dawns, Celia’s lips part in surprise.
On the way down the hall I pass the boys’ bedroom. At first I think they are talking together in there, but then I realize it’s a man’s voice. Daniel. I don’t understand at first. Then I do. Martin has taken the dictaphone from the study. Their father is in the room with them now, dictating a memo.
Stepping outside, I suck in mouthfuls of the cold morning air.
2
* * *
There has been a change on the nightdesk. Owen and his offsiders have been replaced, but the Dealing Room looks much as it did last Thursday, the whole place in darkness save this one island of light.
‘Much happening?’
‘Dead as a fucking dodo.’ The trader hands me the deal-sheet.
Twenty years ago our Treasury operations were just a necessary support to Corporate Finance, but nowadays the profits generated here often exceed the fees gathered by Vance and his team. The balance of power between the departments at Carltons remains reasonably equal — the constant wrangling between Vance and Daniel was an unhappy testament to that - but at other City institutions the dealing rooms have gained the upper hand, and the corporate culture has inevitably followed, straight into the gutter.
As I read the deal-sheet, the trader repeats, ‘Dead as a fucking dodo.’
My grandfather would not have taken kindly to this kind of thing. My father, too, regards the Dealing Room’s blunt directness with distaste. But taken in measured doses, I can’t say that it troubles me. Five minutes with Darren Lyle can make me feel grubbier than any amount of time out here. Handing back the sheet, my gaze wanders up to the restaurant. Win has come in early, he’s talking to the cleaner.
‘Henry’s lunch,’ the senior dealer informs me. ‘Big Win’s come in early to get ready. Henry’s birthday today. You didn’t get an invite?’
I smile and move off. Over the years Henry’s birthday lunches have become occasions to avoid. Last year’s ended with Henry being forcibly ejected from Annabel’s at 3 a.m., swinging a half-empty bottle of champagne: the tawdry stuff of City legend.
‘We’ll tell Henry he’s sacked then,’ the nightdesk dealer shouts. As the Dealing Room door swings shut behind me, I hear them laughing.
In my office the mind
-numbing slog through the numbers begins again. Patterns, Hugh said. Anomalies in patterns. But this staring at endless columns of numbers, though I plough doggedly on, I find it harder and harder to pretend that it’s getting me anywhere. Maybe Daniel could have made some headway; maybe Hugh still can. But me?
At last I give up and stare out of the window. Theresa divorcing me for Daniel? And why, after everything else that's happened, is that so very hard for me to accept? And then a figure seems to shimmer in the glass, a gaunt face I haven’t seen for years. Was there a photograph back there in Daniel’s study? Daniel’s mother. She died soon after he married; I think it caught Celia by surprise when Daniel took it so badly. As far as Celia knew they were semi-estranged, all contact between mother and son reduced to the ritual twice-yearly visits Daniel made down to Dorset for Christmas and her birthday. But it would be like Daniel to keep a photograph of her near at hand.
Celia couldn’t have guessed how it was between Daniel and his mother in earlier years, and I doubt that Daniel ever tried to explain. And if he had, what would he have said? That he’d loved his mother? But that was such a small part of his feelings towards her, and after his father’s death - in the years when he became an outer satellite of my family — so much else accrued: resentment and bitterness; hope too, hope disappointed. She was not a good mother to him: in any normal sense, she wasn’t a mother to him at all. My father tells me she was always rather withdrawn. Buttoned up, he says, quite a statement coming from him. But however she was before her husband’s suicide, that event tipped the scales of her life. She turned her back on the world. She sold up their house to pay creditors and retired to the seclusion of a small cottage by the sea. I went down there a few times while Daniel and I were at Eton, visits that I still recall as the worst holidays of my youth.
Nothing in that house was ever quite normal. Some days she insisted on being with Daniel every minute, never letting him out of her reach. He couldn’t even stroll down to the village shop without his mother linking her arm through his, leaning close to him and chattering with a kind of feverish desperation. By the age of fifteen he was already bigger than her, something that seemed to make it so much worse when she treated him like a child, pushing his hair into place or wiping an imaginary streak of grime from his cheek. And then there were other days — stretches of days — when she refused to set foot outside the cottage. At those times she treated Daniel with a kind of listless aloofness, emerging from her room infrequently to take her meals at odd hours, and then disappearing again, leaving us to ourselves. Only we never were by ourselves. Whether we stayed in the cottage or went out, her presence hung over us like a pall. How it must have felt for Daniel I can only imagine. And the last time I went down there I glimpsed something darker.
It was one of her seclusion days; Daniel and I had been in town, we returned to the cottage late. She was waiting up for us.
Where’ve you been?
Town, Daniel said.
Did you ask me?
Daniel looked at me, suddenly nervous, he must have sensed what was coming.
Well did you?
No.
No, she said. No, you didn’t.
But then she seemed to soften; she stepped close to Daniel.
I was worried, darling.
She lifted her hands to his cheeks and touched him.
You must tell me, she said.
And then her fingers closed and she wasn’t touching his cheeks gently any more, but squeezing them hard. There were tears in his eyes.
Promise me.
Yes.
And then she hugged him so tight he had to pull himself free.
Now in my office window the ghostly figures fade into shadows. Daniel, more than most of us, bore scars.
After twenty minutes, Vance drops in to tell me that he’s arranged a meeting with Bainbridge this evening.
I mention Henry's birthday, but Vance already knows. He has told Henry not to get too carried away.
‘What did he say?’
‘He said he wasn’t in the market for advice.’ Vance has that look he used to get when he came to me complaining about Daniel. I remind him that if Henry becomes Treasurer, they will have to work together.
‘He’s got the job?’
‘Nobody’s got the job yet.’
Vance relaxes. He isn't looking forward to the announcement of Daniel’s replacement, I see. For all their disagreements, he had a grudging respect for Daniel’s professional abilities.
‘Right then,’ he says, taking a chair. ‘Other business.’
Parnells isn’t the only deal they're working on in Corporate Finance, just the biggest. Now Vance relates the state of play elsewhere. We’re defending an engineering firm in the Midlands from an unwanted bid: that one’s going well. There are three rights issues in the pipeline, all of them pushing hard to get their paper away before the market turns down: these, too, are on schedule. There’s a management team looking for advice on an MBO, a privatization contract in Bulgaria we’re hoping to win, and a host of smaller deals hovering somewhere between proposal and final signing. Vance confesses he’s lost track of these smaller ideals lately, but he promises to get on top of them again once the Meyers have bagged Parnells. I mention the closing date for acceptances of the Meyers’ final offer: just under two weeks away now. If the Meyers don’t have over half of Parnells by then, the offer lapses; they won’t be permitted to make another bid for Parnells till next February.
Vance squeezes his chin. ‘If we split the Parnells board, the whole pack of cards comes down. And this Ian Parnell looks promising.’
‘Promising for whom?’
‘The Hunt sets off at eleven. Haywood should be on his way down there by now.’
Vance agrees to let me know how it goes. We seem to have reached the end of our conversation, and Vance makes to rise. But then he pauses and drops back into the chair. ‘One other thing,’ he says. ‘Inspector Ryan. How long does he plan to keep calling on us?’
‘Your guess is as good as mine. Why?’
‘Just wondering.’
‘Perhaps Lyle might keep him busy awhile.’ I scroll idly through the latest from Bloomberg. ‘But as long as he thinks he hasn’t got the full picture, Ryan’ll be back.’
Vance gives a grunt of displeasure, and I look up. I try to see what Inspector Ryan sees — a man who didn’t much care for Daniel? a murderer? - but it’s too hard to get past the man I know.
‘Stephen, between you and me, what do you make of Mannetti?’
‘Personally or professionally?’
‘Either. Both.’
He considers. ‘Not entirely my cup of tea. I take it this concerns the balls-up with Pamells.’
Not exactly. What it concerns is any proclivity Mannetti might have for violence, and there’s no way to approach that question except directly; but I hesitate. Hugh warned me that there might be more than one person involved in the fraud. And someone killed Daniel. Vance waits.
‘Something like that.’ I nod to the door. ‘If you see William or Henry out there, I’ll be ready in ten minutes.’
He takes this without batting an eye.
3
* * *
The morning meeting comes as a welcome relief after my second listless trawl through the Shobai numbers. William really has the gift of the gab; he bangs on for five minutes about possible implications following the latest split between the Chancellor and the Bank of England, a subject that bores me at the best of times. Henry makes an occasional intervention, but he seems to be waiting for William, a.k.a. Billy Bullshit, to run out of steam. William finally obliges.
‘Corporate bonds,’ I say, and I point to Henry. ‘You sent a memo to Stephen on the CTL issue.’
‘It was overpriced. We’ve still got a boatload.’ He recites a list of the larger institutions which suddenly lost interest when we set the final price. I jot down the names. Then I ask Henry how much of the CTL paper he thinks he can offload.
&nbs
p; ‘At the issue price? Fuck all. We start sellin’, the price’ll dump.’
‘Okay. Keep Vance informed with what you’re up to, but don’t offload it yet.’ I tap the list. ‘We’ll see if we can't encourage a few takers first.’
William has been rummaging through his folder, now he hands me a chart. He points out the salient features: the outlook for corporate bonds is bleak. When I try to pass the chart to Henry he keeps his arms staunchly folded, so I drop it on my desk and declare the meeting over.
They rise. William departs clutching his folder, but I signal for Henry to stay.
I glance down at the chart. ‘Happy birthday.’ When I lift my eyes, he is grinning. ‘I suppose it’s too late to postpone the lunch party,’ I say, and his grin fades and then disappears.
‘There’s twenty guys comin’,’ he says dismayed. ‘Jesus.’
I hold up my hands. I tell him to forget that I mentioned it.
‘I can't cancel it now.’
‘Henry, forget it. It’s your birthday, your party. The timing's not great, but we’ll get through it.’ I force a thin smile. ‘I didn’t buy you a present.’
‘Put it in my bonus.’
We both laugh, a rare light moment against the week’s dark backdrop. Then I ask who'll be looking after the Dealing Room in his absence.
‘I’ll still be here,' he says. 'Big Win's doing the food, up in the restaurant. I'll still be here.’
Only physically, I think. And anyway, we both know that the lunch party is almost certain to adjourn to the pub.
'Owen can handle things,' he says. 'If there's any major hassle, I'll come straight down.’
Not if I can help it, he won't. A drunken trader can cause serious problems in the Dealing Room, but a drunken chief dealer can cause absolute havoc. Our last chief dealer came in loaded to the gills one night and sold the Kiwi Dollar through the floor. We were still trying to explain ourselves to the Reserve Bank of New Zealand three weeks later. Once Henry leaves for lunch it will be the end of his working day: he knows it, but he doesn’t want to admit it. Pride. After greed and envy, the City’s third deadly sin.
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