A Week in December (48 page)

In the rear carriage of a westbound District Line train, Hassan al-Rashid was sitting with a packed nylon rucksack on the floor between his feet. He wore a navy blue woollen hat, anorak, jeans and climbing boots with thick socks underneath. He had shaved in order to look less threatening and he held his right hand firmly in his left. What could that hand desire, he thought, that he gripped it so tight?

Now that the end was approaching, now that he had actually put himself on rails towards his destination, he felt calmer. The train would carry him to Waterloo, and then a second train would take him on to Glendale, where the others would be waiting. They'd be excited, he imagined; they'd punch each other on the shoulder, touch flesh and reassure, like rugby men before a game. He was looking forward to seeing his friends. It was a fine thing they were doing: a clean deed in a foul, befuddled world.

He clung to the words of the Koran that promised eternal life to all martyrs for the simple reason that the words of the Hadiths, the collections of traditional wisdom from the Prophet's life, were considerably less comforting. They made no bones at all about the fact that suicide was a sin and that the sinner would be doomed to repeat the act for ever in the afterlife. Hassan tried not to think about the Hadiths.

In order to attract no suspicious glances, he stared straight ahead, though not too fiercely. He tried to look tired without being zonked; unwilling to engage with others but only because that was the way of the city. Above all, he tried to look unconcerned. He was sure his clothes must help: everyday, anonymous, but clean and of decent quality, chosen for their ability to make a curious glance bounce off them. He was Mr Londoner personified, a transient in a private daze whose every pore said, Leave me to my own small world, my virtual life: respect, and don't come near.

The train went so fast. Who was driving this thing? They were already out of Essex and rattling through the old East End - Stepney, Bow, Mile End, once the cockney, now the Muslim, heartland. Hassan breathed in tightly as he thought of the narrow streets above his head with the halal grocers and the market barrows, loan sharks and hijab drapers. Could they form the hard-core base, the foundation, of a second caliphate? Would they be strong enough?

This driver was pitiless. Why such a rush? On, on, now into the financial world at Monument - then Cannon Street and Mansion House where the
kafirs
worked at fever-pitch twelve hours a day, shouting into telephones, hoping by their frantic betting to transfer some coins from one fund to another ... Woe betide every backbiting slanderer who amasses riches and sedulously hoards them, thinking his wealth will render him immortal! By no means! He shall be flung to the Destroying Flame ...

For three years at college, Hassan had changed train on to the Northern Line at Embankment, but a glance at the
A to Z
told him the best stop for Waterloo Bridge was Temple, a pleasant station with flower sellers outside and the river just across the road. Salim had told them not to enter Waterloo by Tube as the mainline stations had too many CCTV cameras.

Ready to walk the final ten minutes of his journey, Hassan passed his Oyster card across the reader, replaced it in his pocket, though he'd have no further use for it, and emerged into the night.

John Veals was not enjoying the Toppings' dinner party. He spent most of the main course sending and receiving text messages from Kieran Duffy, holding his phone beneath the tablecloth. It had always vexed him that the New York and London markets were closed at the Christian weekend. How many traders were bloody Christians anyway?

He was also made edgy by the presence of Magnus Darke. This Darke was not a financial specialist; his column was a general current-affairs commentary with two or three different items and he could quite simply be squared away by being given a second, more reliable, piece of information by Ryman in due course. His article had been pretty well phrased and had done Darke no lasting damage. It still made Veals uneasy, though, to see this man across the table. As he pushed the lamb and ratatouille to the edge of his plate, he felt a dyspeptic unease, and it would last, he knew from experience, until the trade was successfully completed. But why the fuck would Lance Topping invite such a grimy little hack? Was Lance trying to wind him up?

As if this was not enough to spoil his dinner, there was the further irritation of the Russian bimbo. When he first saw her across the room, Veals found he had given an automatic nod of acknowledgment; but no such answering gesture came from the girl. She looked at him as though they'd never met, raising an eyebrow that seemed to question his motives for even looking at her.

It had taken twenty minutes of memory ransacking before Veals suddenly saw that he was searching the wrong disk. This girl was from another world. She wasn't real; she was a screen fantasy, a laptop dancer. Fuck me, he thought. He'd never quite believed that such women lived and breathed and had existence. She was younger than she looked with no clothes on and considerably more three-dimensional. Had she put on weight? he wondered. It rather suited her. It was bad enough that Lance Topping had invited Magnus Darke, bringing worlds of rumour, lies and abstract prices into painful collision with what was tangible; but to have plucked this digitally pixellated tart from cyberspace and animated her to spite him ... He couldn't tear his thoughts from the shape of her slightly-too-large breasts, which were as well known to him as the backs of his own hands.

Veals looked back below the tablecloth to the safety of his phone's illuminated screen.

* * *

Sophie Topping leaned back in her chair and let them all scrap it out. There did seem to be a gratifying roar of conversation. Magnus Darke had given up on Richard Wilbraham and now seemed to be locked in some intimate exchange with Amanda Malpasse. Roger couldn't take his eyes off Olya's cleavage. Farooq al-Rashid, genially exuberant on fizzy water, was making a good fist of being interested by Brenda Dillon's plans for failed comprehensives. R. Tranter was telling a baffled Gillian Foxley about the novels of Walter Allen.

John Veals, she noticed, was surreptitiously looking at his phone beneath the table. Like Roger, he seemed fascinated by Olya, though not necessarily in the same way. Simon Porterfield was hitting on Jennifer Loader, not something Sophie had ever seen attempted before. Perhaps Simon was interested to meet someone who had almost as much money as he did. Not that Jennifer alone could match him, but if you put her income along with her husband Mark's ... They weren't known as the Loadeds for nothing. Mark had offered to fund a new wing for a gallery in the city of his birth, and when they had demurred he said he'd also buy them a starter-collection of paintings to put in it.

It was a funny thing, Sophie thought, how everyone you met these days seemed not just to be wealthy but insanely, ineffably, immeasurably rich. Hundreds of millions of useless pounds slopping out of their accounts and into hedge funds and private-equity companies who could no longer find anything worth buying with it. She used to think Lance was rich on his salary and bonus, a couple of million a year; but now she looked at him and knew for sure that by comparison he was a failure: relatively, they were almost broke. It didn't bother her particularly. They had enough for this lifetime and half a dozen more, and it was good not to lose touch with your constituents, many of whom, she knew for a fact, did their household sums in thousands.

Sophie Topping, born Sally Jackman in Epping forty-two years earlier, had never imagined as a diligent, contented child going to the local primary school that life would turn out so bizarre - in England of all places. Her father had been an RAF wireless operator and her mother a hairdresser; when the old fellow died and his debts were paid off, it turned out he had left his wife PS28,000. Mrs Jackman had a small building society account, no mortgage, the state pension, few expenses, and it was enough. She did the occasional cut and blow-dry for pocket money, about PS50 a week, visiting the houses of friends and neighbours. It all worked out fine. Sally had done well at school and left at seventeen to work as a secretary in the City, where five years later she'd changed her name to Sophie, after meeting Lance, who was struggling in the public relations department of a stuffy bank and trying to get on his party's list of candidates.

Looking down the table at her guests now, Sophie tried to calculate their worth. The Loadeds: countless; hundreds of millions of pounds. The Porterfields: said to be more than a billion. The al-Rashids: tens of millions. Dobbo McPherson: 'north of a hundred million', she'd heard Mark Loader say. Jimmy Samuel, the debt packager and seller-on: likewise, north of a hundred. The Margessons, the teenager-website couple: certainly tens of millions. John and Vanessa Veals: billions in the fund. But apart from Farooq al-Rashid, who'd shifted tons of limes from the groves of Mexico and Iran via the steaming vats of Renfrew down the gullets of the masses and thence into the sewers underground, none of them had engaged with anything that actually existed.

Gabriel Northwood and Clare Darnley, on the other hand: zero. They didn't do their sums in thousands, perhaps not even in hundreds. They were in negative-equity land; and the contrast with the others was this: a billion or bugger all.

The other thing that perplexed Sophie was that, with the exception of the al-Rashids and Spike Borowski, she hadn't deliberately sought out rich people as her guests. All the others, the mills, the multis, the bills and the trills, were people she had met - a simple cross-section - at the school gates over the last ten years in North Park.

Sophie pushed her chair back with a squeal and clapped her hands. It was time to move people round.

III

Adam Northwood was standing alone in a dark corridor of Wakeley.

Alone was not how he felt himself to be, however. Three voices spoke to him loudly: Axia, the Disaster-Maker and the Scissor Girl.

His own voice was audible as he debated with them, though the only person there to hear it was Violet, who kept her vigil by the darkened window of the dining room, looking out over the lawns.

More than six feet tall, handsome once, now run to fat round the belly, stooped and unkempt, Adam saw himself as the leader of Wakeley, its chosen and most senior inhabitant. With his beard and shaggy hair, he might have been a prophet.

On him fell the responsibility of making sure the building did not burn. By touching every third tile in the hallway, he might placate Axia and spare the fire this time; but a failure to count precisely, or a failure to touch would most assuredly signal the end.

With a heavy step, he began his task, the sound of the Scissor Girl so loud in his ears that it was hard to concentrate. And the names she called him ... The things she said ... She imputed to him desires so disgusting he barely understood what she meant ... Where did she get these things from? Not from him, that was for certain, because he'd never even heard of half the things she talked about, let alone told her about them ...

Earlier that day he'd thought for a second about Gabriel, his younger brother. He wondered how he was doing at school and why he never came to visit. Perhaps he was busy on the farm.

Axia's voice was now louder than the Scissor Girl's. 'I destroyed the generations before them and I will destroy you in the same way,' said Axia. 'The fire is your home. Believe me and follow what I say or you will surely burn. I will cut off their heads, I will cut off the tips of their fingers.'

Adam breathed in tightly as the volume rose. It was always hard to concentrate, and sometimes he thought his counting the tiles just infuriated Axia and made him shout more loudly.

He was halfway down the passage, where it widened out into the dining room. The cacophony in his head made it hard to think a thought.

Oh, if only he could go round himself, go round his brain and turn off the noises one by one, then he might concentrate long enough to hold a single thought, pure and soothing to his mind. Then he might stop the Scissor Girl from plucking out his thoughts and broadcasting them so all the people in the day room saw them on the television, even his worst thoughts about women.

Seventy-nine, eighty ... He had almost reached the doorway of the dining room, almost done his duty for the night. But Axia was angry with him. 'I have power over all things and if anyone denies it he is lying and I will make him burn for all time.'

At one end of the corridor was the entrance hall, dark now except for a bar of light that came from under the night porter's door. At the other end, in the bowels of Wakeley, was the closed door of the day room, emptied now for the night, the television having been switched off at 10.30.

In between stood Adam, roaring to keep out the sound of Axia and the Disaster-Maker as they shouted their cataclysmic warnings in his ears; and beside him now, in the silence she had kept for twenty years, was Violet with her bent arm still raised in greeting or farewell as her eyes gazed over the dark and empty lawns.

Moving people round the long table at the Toppings' had been almost too successful, to judge by the liveliness of the conversations that ensued.

Roger Malpasse was shifted so that he was no longer distracted by Olya and no longer within football-chat distance of Spike. The schools inspector had made a special friend of Roger, hovering at his elbow through the evening and diligently replenishing his glass. Roger had promised himself to drink no more than three glasses, but since the level had never dipped below halfway he could technically say he was still on his first. But whatever the exact volume of wine that sat on top of the double-zonker base and half a bottle of champagne before dinner, it filled him with exuberance and geniality.

He now found himself opposite John Veals, whom he knew slightly through old corporate connections from his time in the law.

'Well, John. How much more of these bank problems, do you think?'

Veals looked up from his screen. 'A lot. I think all the American banks are in trouble.'