Unnatural Justice (Oz Blackstone Mysteries)

by Quintin Jardine

  Mathew’s Tale was in its early weeks of shooting and was going well; I loved my part, finding that I could associate with him better than with any character I’d ever played, better even than Andy Martin in the Skinner movies. Make-up was a bit of a bugger, since ‘Mathew’ had a war wound, a sword-cut across his face sustained when fighting against Napoleon, and that had to be put on every morning. It was worth putting up with that, though, for the sheer pleasure of working on the project, and the great luxury for a film actor on location of being able to commute from home.

  When Susie broke the news of her coup, my first reaction was to take a small huff that I hadn’t been consulted. That cut no ice; my wife told me firmly that this was a decision for her alone, without being coloured by anyone’s personal prejudices. Gerry Meek’s first reaction was nervousness; our new chairman had been backed in his own business by a very high-powered finance director and he was worried that he might try to introduce him. Gillian Harvey wasn’t worried at all; on the contrary, she was both astonished that Susie had pulled it off, and dead chuffed by the personal cachet that serving on a board chaired by Fisher would bring her within the bank.

  The appointment was formalised there and then. On the following Saturday morning, at another board meeting, I had my first experience of Sir Graeme Fisher’s famous plain speaking.

  Our new chairman was a slightly built man in his late sixties, totally bald and with piercing blue eyes. At first sight, it occurred to me that he would have made a perfect James Bond villain. This was confirmed when he spoke. ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ he began, in an unreconstructed Lanarkshire accent, ‘I want to make one thing clear from the outset. I’m not here as a figurehead. I’ve agreed to chair this business because I believe that it has potential and can go on to achieve a mass not far short of the company with which I’ve been associated until now. I hope I don’t need to tell you that it’s my job as chairman to represent the interests of all the shareholders and to ensure that they achieve maximum value for their investment in this business.’ He looked at Susie through those unblinking blue eyes. ‘That means, Miss Gantry, that I don’t give a damn about the size of your shareholding, and that I will not allow you to pursue policies which I believe may be holding the company back. This is a publicly quoted company, and I will not let it play by private company rules.’

  This was too much for me. ‘Excuse me, Sir Graeme,’ I interrupted, ‘but I was under the impression that last week we appointed you as chairman, not managing director.’

  He didn’t even look in my direction. ‘I’ll come to you in a minute, Mr Blackstone.’ I wanted very much to reach across and twist his head round to face me . . . and then maybe twist it a bit further than that . . . but for Susie’s sake I sat there like a scolded schoolboy.

  ‘You may not like what I’m saying to you, Miss Gantry. You may even think you’ve made a terrible mistake and be tempted to correct it at once. If that is the case, of course I’ll go at once. However, I don’t need to tell you how that would be viewed by the business community, especially after the publicity which greeted my appointment. Now, do we understand each other?’

  Susie drew in a deep breath; I feared that when she exhaled it would burn off his eyebrows, leaving him totally hairless. But it didn’t. Instead, she nodded. ‘I understand you, as long as you understand that I am indeed managing director, as my husband pointed out, and that the day-to-day running of the business will remain mine.’ She paused, and gave him a sweet smile. ‘And as long as you understand that if you ever threaten me again, implicitly as you did just now, or explicitly, I will blow you out one second later.’

  For the first time, Graeme Fisher blinked, then he too smiled. ‘Agreed.’

  Then he turned to me and the smile was gone. ‘Mr Blackstone, you’re a shareholder as well as a director, I understand.’

  ‘True,’ I said, coldly. I had decided that I did not like the man, and I wasn’t about to disguise the fact. ‘An unpaid director,’ I added.

  ‘There’s no virtue in that,’ he retorted. ‘If you’re contributing, you should be rewarded. Now let me ask you something: if a situation arose where your wife and I had a disagreement, and let’s say, her position threatened your interests as a shareholder, who would you support?’

  ‘Her.’

  ‘So you’re saying that your first duty as a director is loyalty to your wife?’

  ‘I’m saying that I know my wife, and her abilities, better than anyone on this planet. I don’t know you; I only know what you’ve achieved in another business. If it was a matter of choosing between your judgement and Susie’s, then based on experience, I’d back hers.’

  ‘Mmm,’ the old knight muttered, ‘commendable, maybe, but still not exactly objective. Mr Blackstone, I’ll be as direct as I can be. Other than support for your wife, I can’t see a single quality that you bring to this table. I’ve looked at your CV and I can’t find a thing on it that qualifies you to be a director of a listed company. Son, this might have been a family business once, but it’s gone beyond that; it did as soon as it offered shares for public subscription. I have an instinctive dislike of husband and wife teams in this situation; I don’t like pillow talk, or any other discussions between directors to which the rest of the board aren’t privy. So, what I’m saying is that I’d feel a lot more comfortable chairing this board if you weren’t a member.’

  ‘You’re asking me to resign?’

  ‘I am indeed.’

  ‘And if he doesn’t?’ said Susie, heavily.

  Fisher looked at her and gave her another flicker of a smile. ‘Don’t worry, Miss Gantry, there was no implied threat there. If he doesn’t I’ll chair it uncomfortably, although I will ask you both not to discuss agenda matters outside the properly constituted forum for such discussions. That is, round this table. Fair, I think.’

  ‘Fair,’ my wife conceded.

  I reached an instant decision. ‘It’s okay, Chairman,’ I told him. ‘You won’t need to bring your haemorrhoid cushion to meetings. I’ll resign, on one condition; that you don’t seek to replace me with a nominee of yours, or with anyone else who is not acceptable to Susie.’

  ‘I wouldn’t dream of doing such a thing.’

  ‘Fine,’ I said, although I didn’t quite believe him, and stood up. ‘See you in the car,’ I said to Susie, who was frowning up at me, seriously.

  ‘What the hell did you do that for?’ she demanded, when she joined me forty-five minutes later.

  ‘It seemed like a good idea at the time. Maybe I can’t support you as a director, but I sure as hell can as a husband. Besides, no way am I going to let that guy tell us what we can and can’t discuss in our own bedroom.’

  She grinned at me. ‘You’re not as dumb as my chairman thinks, are you?’

  Chapter 21

  As the weeks went by I began to think that maybe Sir Graeme Fisher wasn’t as smart as he thought, either. Susie gave me blow-by-blow accounts of her meetings with him, and of the board meetings to which I’d given up access. The overall impression that I formed of the guy was that he was efficient, but maybe, just maybe . . . listen to me, criticising a guy who’s made a billion from scratch . . . not quite as comfortable in the construction industry as he had been in the world of insurance and finance. All the initiatives still seemed to be coming from Susie, but, that said, we both had to concede that with him in the chair, the share price hit an all-time high, around one sixty-five a share, and stayed there.

  As Gerry Meek had feared, he did secure the appointment of another accountant to the board, but only on a non-executive basis, and only after Susie had given her approval and her vote. The nominee, Philip Culshaw, had been, until his retirement, Scottish managing partner of one of the big three accountancy firms. Since then he had been collecting directorships and playing golf. By a coincidence he did the latter at my new club, and I had met him there, having drawn him in a Sunday medal. When Fisher offered him a directorship of the Gantry Group . . . without c
onsulting the board first, incidentally . . . he had been shrewd enough to call me before accepting, to ask how Susie would view it.

  ‘As long as you’re not in Fisher’s pocket, Phil,’ I told him, ‘she’ll welcome you.’

  Culshaw’s appointment turned out to be the best move Fisher made. Far from being a Trojan horse, introduced by the chairman as a first step to axing Gerry Meek, he had been nothing but supportive of the finance director. His presence, even more than Fisher’s, seemed to add to the bank’s confidence in the business, so much so that for the first time since her appointment, Gillian Harvey missed a board meeting to take a holiday.

  There were other benefits too. Where Graeme Fisher has contacts at the very top of British industry, and in Government too, Phil Culshaw is a mover and shaker who operates and has contacts at all levels. I didn’t appreciate this, though, until one Saturday on the golf course . . . that was all I had available by that time. The extended location work on Mathew’s Tale was coming to an end, finally, and we were approaching the point where the team would transfer to a sound stage in the south of England. I hadn’t expected to play at all, but he had called me a couple of days before, to invite me to share his tee time at Loch Lomond.

  We were approaching the turn and I was two down; Phil’s a consistently tidy twelve-handicapper, and my lack of recent practice, even on my small private course, was showing as I struggled to play to single figures. On the ninth green he applauded silently as I rolled in an eight-footer for a half, then fell into step beside me as we headed for our buggy and the tenth tee.

  ‘Have you been hearing any whispers, Oz?’ he asked me.

  I looked at him, puzzled. ‘What? Like voices in my head, you mean? I can’t say that I have.’

  ‘I’ll bet you have,’ he chuckled. ‘You’re a deep one, Mr Blackstone.’ I let that pass. ‘No, what I meant was have you heard any rumours about the business?’

  I thought about it as we rolled along towards the tee; the course was busy and there were two games waiting in front of us. ‘No,’ I told him, as we took our place in the queue. ‘I can’t say that I have. But I wouldn’t expect to, Phil. I don’t move among the chatterers any more; at least I don’t at the moment, with this movie I’m on. Why? What have you heard?’

  ‘Nothing specific,’ he said, quietly. ‘Nothing I can put my finger on. But there’s something up.’

  ‘What makes you think that? It can’t be pub talk. I don’t see the affairs of the Gantry Group being common conversation pieces in the Horseshoe Bar.’

  ‘No, it’s not that.’ He hesitated. ‘The thing is, Oz, my old firm has acted for people in the past who’ve been a bit schizoid in business terms. By that I mean their core companies have been solid and entirely above board, but there’s been other stuff behind them.’

  ‘That sounds familiar,’ I told him. ‘You could have been talking about the Gantry Group, in the old days.’

  ‘You get my drift. Well, a few days ago, a whisper floated back to me from one of my former partners that the subject of the company had come up in casual conversation with one of these gentlemen. Nothing specific was said, but my former colleague was left with the impression that his client knew something.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because the man said, casually, that he wouldn’t be buying any shares in it any time soon.’

  With a struggle, I began to paint a mental picture of what he was saying to me. ‘You mean that the Group may be a target for gangsters?’

  ‘That’s an implication that could be put on it.’

  ‘Well it’s one that won’t wash. You’re a director, man. You must know that we’ve never been asked for protection in connection with any of our jobs. We’ve never been approached by phoney security firms offering their services, or else. When Susie took over she cut off all the dirty bits of the group. It’s pristine.’

  ‘I can see that from inside,’ he admitted. ‘But wasn’t there an incident, not long before I joined the board? Something involving a small fire in the office.’

  ‘So what?’ I frowned at him, looking more than a bit defensive, I suspected.

  ‘So, the word was that it might not have been accidental.’

  ‘But it was. Read the Herald if you don’t believe me.’

  ‘Since when did one believe everything one reads in the press? The suggestion’s been made that it wasn’t, and isn’t it true that there were anonymous calls to the press and the police alleging as much?’

  ‘A stupid staff member.’

  ‘That won’t wash with me, my young friend. Nobody was sacked after it, or disciplined in any way.’

  ‘Nobody was traced.’

  ‘Did anybody ever try?’ he asked, dryly.

  ‘Leave that aside, though, Phil. There have been no incidents since that one.’

  ‘None that you know of.’

  ‘But I would, and so would you.’

  ‘Maybe yes, maybe no.’ He glanced across, we were next up on the tee. ‘My concern is this, Oz. If anybody wanted to have a go at the group, mount a hostile takeover, say, they’d have little or no chance given the share price. The underwriters wouldn’t support a bid much above the existing levels and the board would be quite justified in recommending rejection. But if the share price was to be seriously undermined . . .’

  I got his drift. Actually I’d had it for a while; I’d simply wanted to make him spell it out. ‘And who the hell would do that?’

  ‘The Torrent Group has been credited recently with an interest in acquiring Gantry.’

  ‘Come on, Phil. I know Nat Morgan. She’s an aggressive character and I don’t like her much, but you will not make me believe for one second that she’d conspire with criminals to undermine the share price of a public company.’

  Culshaw tapped his big hooked nose. ‘You’re assuming something there, my friend.’

  ‘And that is?’ I asked patiently.

  ‘That Ms Morgan is the only player in Torrent, and that she makes all of her own decisions.’

  ‘You mean she isn’t? I’ve had a check done on her. I know who’s on her board, I know who all her major financial backers are. She’s the boss, Phil.’

  He laughed. ‘You, of all people, can’t be that naïve. You don’t have to be a director, or a major shareholder in a business, to have a fundamental influence on the way it’s run. Oz, you’re walking proof of that.’

  As I took in what he was saying, a name seemed to burn itself into my forehead. It didn’t help. If anything it made me more confused than ever. Why the hell would Ewan Capperauld want to undermine the Gantry Group?

  I didn’t have time to dwell on it, though. ‘Come on,’ said Culshaw. ‘The tee’s clear at last.’

  Chapter 22

  He’s a cunning sod, is our Phil. I knew damn well that he’d raised the subject of hints and rumours surrounding the Gantry Group in the middle of our round as a bit of added insurance . . . as if being two up at the turn wasn’t enough. He could just as easily have waited until we were back in the club-house before bringing it up.

  As it happened, it backfired on him. Instead of destroying my confidence it helped me focus. I saw the golf ball as an enemy, and I knocked hell out of it for the rest of the round. I was two up myself after fifteen and closed out the match with a tap-in par on the seventeenth.

  Back in the bar, we let the subject of Natalie Morgan and her possible ambitions lie. I didn’t forget Phil’s warning, though; on my second pint, I brought it up. ‘All that stuff we were talking about on the course: I take it you’re going to tell Fisher.’

  ‘That’ll be a bit difficult,’ he replied. ‘My information came through a professional source, so no way can I let it be minuted. Telling you about it seemed like the best thing to do; you seem like the sort of guy who might do some digging, rather than just waiting for it to happen.’

  ‘Noted,’ I said. ‘Now, there’s something I’ve got to ask you, behind the mighty chairman’s back. I’ve told Susie that sh
e is going to take maternity leave, and damn soon, just like any other working mother. When Janet was born, Gerry Meek deputised for her, but this time there are too many financial balls in the air for him to combine her job with his own. So we were wondering . . . would you fancy being acting managing director? It wouldn’t be for long, mind.’

  When Susie and I had discussed an approach to Culshaw she’d been sure he’d turn us down; his golf meant a lot to him. For once she was wrong.

  ‘I’ll do it,’ he said, with barely a second’s thought. ‘If anyone is playing silly buggers, they may be counting on a vacuum at the top. I take it Susie will raise that at next week’s board.’

  ‘Yes. She’ll present it as her appointment. She thinks Fisher fancied the job himself, but no way is she going to let him take any executive decisions.’

  The shit had hit the fan, though, long before the board gathered seven days later.

  Only a day after Culshaw and I had our chat, Susie and I were at home, watching that silly Monarch of the Glen thing (she likes it), when the phone rang. I don’t like it, so I answered.

  ‘Oz Blackstone?’ asked a voice at the other end. It was a journalist; I could tell by the very tone of the woman’s voice. ‘Which member of our cast has done what, to whom, and with what?’ Those were my first weary thoughts as I said, ‘Yes,’ in a tone of my own that was meant to convey in a single affirmative just how pissed off I was at having my Sunday evening interrupted.

  ‘It’s Jenny Pollock here, from the Daily Record. It’s your wife I’d like to speak to actually.’

  I switched into protective mode in an instant. ‘Not a chance. Susie’s tired, she’s fairly pregnant and on top of that she’s watching telly. I’m not putting my life at risk by telling her the Record wants her.’