Angel Touch (11 page)

Duncan did the honourable thing and then sidled towards the door, and we sneaked out into the car park, Duncan leading me over to a battered white Thames van.

‘I thought you hired a minibus for the team,' I asked, genuinely curious.

‘Aye, I do. It'll be back at closing time to pick us up.' That way, the team couldn't leave early. ‘This is Doreen's. She went to her evening class earlier.'

The van may not have looked much, but Duncan was a wizard with engines, and if the van had his Barking garage's seal of approval, then it would shift even if the bodywork got left behind at the lights. Duncan opened the rear doors with what looked suspiciously like a metal toothpick and began to rummage around inside.

‘Doreen still doing panel-beating at night class?'

‘Nah, she's moved on to welding. Here we are.'

He handed me a heavy canvas roll a bit like a cowboy's gunbelt. I unwound it and tried it around my waist. It contained a full arsenal of wire-clippers, screwdrivers, pliers and even a small hammer. There was probably something for removing stones from horses' hooves, if only I knew what it looked like.

It weighed a ton and would probably spoil the line of my chino's, but as camouflage it was perfect.

‘It's magic, Duncan,' I said.

 

 

 

 

 

Camouflage is nine-tenths of success in a sneak attack. If a famous retired general didn't say that, then I'd better write to one. People usually see only what they want to see, so give it to ‘em.

I wasn't too sure what Prior, Keen, Baldwin expected from a freelance heating engineer who could re-route computer lines, but then I reckoned you could get away with most anything in the City if you were confident enough. My uniform for the day was: clean jeans; a denim jacket that almost matched; red trainers; a plain-white T-shirt not advertising anything; and a baseball cap supporting the Chicago White Sox. I packed the tool belt and the plans Salome had provided in a sports bag and added a pair of brown leather gloves in case I was called on to get my hands dirty.

There was no way I could roll up in Armstrong, and nowhere to park him for the day anyway, so I took a bus to St Paul's and walked round to Gresham Street for about 10.00 am, which I thought showed I was keen for an early start.

Sergeant Purvis, that Guardian of the Third Floor, was not impressed.

‘Mr MacLean. Welcome. We were expecting you this morning. First parade is seven-thirty.'

I smiled a big smile on the basis that the best way to upset his sort was to be nice to them.

‘I'm so sorry I missed it, but you see, I have a medical certificate excusing me from working with asbestos, heavy lifting and the hours of daylight prior to 0900.'

I liked the ‘0900' touch, but Purvis wasn't impressed. ‘I was told about you,' he said, but I could tell he wasn't sure what to make of me.

I leaned over his desk.

‘And I've been told you've been briefed by Mr Patterson, so you know this is a delicate matter.'

‘Oh yes. Of course. Mr P put me in the picture.' He was
bluffing, I knew, but he did it well. Years of experience. ‘What do you need ... er ... in terms of ...?'

I held up a hand and shook my head. ‘Nothing, just the run of the place. If anybody asks, I'm measuring up the heating ducts with a view to running computer cables and
phone lines through them. Treat me like a minor nuisance, but take note if anyone asks too many questions about me. Know what I mean?'

He put a finger to the side of his nose and gave me a long, slow wink. Dead subtle.

‘Good. Let's compare notes at lunch-time over a pint. On me.'

‘Okay, son.' He was warming to me.

‘Catch you later.'

 

I spent the next two hours sussing the lay-out of the third floor, which was bigger than I'd expected, and generally getting in people's way. There was a thin pencil torch on Duncan's tool belt, and I unscrewed a few heating grilles and shone it around in the holes, and I thought I looked pretty convincing.

None of the dealers noticed me at all as far as I could gather. Being the only one not wearing a suit, you'd have thought I'd have stuck out a mile, but it seemed that because I
wasn't a Suit, I wasn't there. Some security. I was tempted to come back as a window-cleaner and rip them off a treat.

Trouble was, I didn't know what was valuable, information-wise. The stuff on the screens could have been my way to a quick fortune or could have been a laundry list. I have to admit that the computer revolution had left me way behind. Six-year-old kids could hack into a bank account from their kindergarten play-pen these days, but I'd have had more chance on a Japanese Scrabble board. Maybe I should have brought a six-year-old kid with me, but there's never one around when you need one.

I wasn't having any more luck earwigging the hundreds of conversations going on around me. Most of them were over the phone, but occasionally a dealer would stick the receiver into his neck and yell to a colleague in front of another screen further down the room.

The dialogue went something like: ‘Can you get me a point on seven hundred Barclays, private sale?'

I'd been there over an hour before I realised that they deliberately missed the last three noughts off everything, so ‘seven hundred' was actually seven hundred thousand shares. No wonder they needed computers. I did manage to pick up one or two things, though. I got so that I could tell when the dealers were phoning each other, when they were talking to the ‘institutionals' – the big corporate investors (where they sounded patronising and unwilling to brook any argument with the investment managers) – and when they were talking to private customers who were buying (very polite) and those they were trying to get to sell (ultra grovelling).

As with any office environment where 95 percent of the work is on the phone, there were very few private phone calls. Or maybe the dealers actually did have wives, they just talked to them in numbers. It was not uncommon to see guys on two phones at once, and most of them had colour VDU screens in front of them where they could just touch a square and they'd get through to somebody without dialling. I was very impressed with some of the hardware, which looked state of the art – i.e. better than anything British Telecom had. I wondered if one of their computers could get me off the
Reader's Digest
mailing list.

I found a spot halfway down one side of the dealing room where there was a gap in the desks and a heating vent in the wall under a window. No-one gave me a first glance, let alone a second, as I unscrewed the louvred grille and sat cross-legged in front of the vent, shining my torch and occasionally examining wires with the end of a screwdriver.

I knew that videos of the film
Wall Street
had been the ‘in' present in the City the previous Christmas. I knew because I'd helped ‘import' some of them in advance of the film company's planned release, and one of its side-effects – that there was still a bull market in red braces – was still evident. Some of the dealers even wore ‘Greed is Good' lapel badges, and any three of the suits in the room would probably have been taken in part exchange for a decent motor.

At about noon, while I was under a desk trying to make head or tail of a telephone junction box, I spotted my first suspicious character.

He was wearing a lapel badge too, but his said: ‘Mild Mannered Guardian Readers Against the Bomb.' Yet it wasn't that so much as the John Lennon glasses and the badly cut suit that gave him away. At a guess, and I was rapidly becoming an expert, the suit was made in Bulgaria, or at least somewhere where they worked to a five-year plan. You know the sort: the jacket fits first time but the trousers are cut round a box and the tailors use a picture of Stalin as their model.

From my vantage point, I watched him walk up and down the dealing room three times. He carried a pile of newspapers and seemed to be collecting more as he went round. Then he disappeared into one of the analysts' offices.

It was nearly lunch-time, so I decided to check him out with Purvis on reception. Fortunately, I was discreet; I didn't come right out and ask who the wally was.

‘Oh, that's young Mr Keen,' said the Sergeant. ‘He's a bit of a problem child, but harmless enough. He's not interested in the City. Great disappointment to the senior partner, of course. No, young Morris wants to be a journalist, so he comes in every day and collects all the newspapers. He thinks that if he reads them all regularly, he'll get a job on one eventually.'

I'd met people like that. They were the ones who'd bought Betamax videos and 8-track stereo systems for their Minis.

I asked Purvis if he was ready for a beer, and he said he was and put on his jacket and peaked cap. I had rather hoped he would come in mufti, but he seemed to enjoy looking like a product of a South American junta. On the way down in lift, I tried to tap him about Morris Keen, but he regarded him with pity rather than suspicion. He held a unique position, though, in that he must have been the only young male under 21 that Purvis did not think would benefit from a reintroduction of national service.

‘Oh, yeah, national service. I've read about that,' I said, just to niggle him.

He led me to a pub near the Guildhall and elbowed a space at the bar near a plastic display case of sandwiches; obviously his regular spot, which newcomers strayed onto at their peril. A barman caught his eye, and two pints of bitter appeared, which I was expected to pay for. I didn't mind; I wasn't paying.

‘So, young Mr Keen has the run of the place, does he?'

Hardly the most subtle of openings, but with somebody like Purvis, subtlety came dispensed with a hurled half-brick.

Purvis put half the beer down his face, then drew breath.

‘Don't even think it,' he said, and went back to his beer.

I admitted to myself that young Morris Keen was so bloody inept that he couldn't be the leak, but then again, if I pointed out to Patterson that there was a strange bloke wandering around who could get access to almost anything, it would prove I was doing my job.

Despite my best endeavours and several free pints, Purvis didn't let anything slip over lunch – and I use the word loosely, in its non-food connotation. According to him, security at Pretty Keen Bastards was watertight. He'd stake his reputation on it. Well, that would keep the bookies awake nights, I don't think.

After three pints, he mellowed enough to admit that maybe security wasn't watertight, or rather not as watertight as it had been. After four pints, he confided that he put the fact that he couldn't guarantee security any more down to Prior, Keen, Baldwin's employment of women, blacks, people educated at secondary modern schools (which showed how abreast of the times he was), people with degrees in sociology; so fourth, so fifth. If we'd stayed for another pint, he would have included gypsies and Jews, and I would probably have had to clout him.

As a source of information, Purvis was a dead loss. As a source of lunch, he was even worse, so I bought him a final pint but declined myself and, saying I had something to do, sneaked out of the pub and called in at a sandwich bar I'd seen down the road.

It was nearly 2.30 by this time, and the girls in the sandwich shop were packing up for the weekend. They left me in no doubt that they were doing me a favour as they stumbled around to find two bits of brown bread in which to squash the teaspoon of scrambled egg and the half anchovy I'd reserved just before they threw them out.

I waited, hopping from one foot to the other because I'd had too much beer and nothing to soak it up with. Through the shop window, I could see the street entrance to the PKB building. There are a lot of offices in that building, I told myself. And they all have lots of visitors – visitors in all shapes and sizes – so why should the hairs on the back of my neck stand up as I saw people come and people go?

Because if the leak wasn't
inside,
it must be bleedin' obviously
outside.

I hadn't got the details then, of course, but I had grasped the principle. A few judicious inquiries below stairs in the PKB set-up should confirm it. Case cracked. Sherlock Marlowe-Wimsey strikes again. Ele-fucking-mentary, my dear Poirot.

But at this rate of pay, who wanted the case closed? With luck, I could stretch it out for another week or so. Of course I could.

Take it easy, say nothing yet.

Big mistake.

 

I spent most of the afternoon in the postroom of Pretty Keen, etc.

It wasn't so much an office, more an open space with a table and a franking machine, and was womanned by Gerry, Michelle and Anna, with whom I got on famously, because none of the Suits ever gave them the time of day. That, and my magnetic personality (and the fact that I brought a couple of bottles of Liebfraumilch with me), endeared me to them to the extent that by four o'clock, I knew the ins and outs of every sort of mailing that left PKB.

Gerry explained that all regular mail was enveloped and franked in the postroom, then put into sacks that Purvis collected four times a day for the postman. A menial task that annoyed him intensely. Special circulars and notes to clients were sometimes sent that way, but if they contained anything confidential, they were classed as an ‘S' (for sensitive) mailing. One of the executives would bring the address labels already printed out from the computer in Patterson's office and would stand over the girls while they photocopied and stuffed envelopes.

Michelle told me about the hand deliveries; a rapidly expanding part of their work, as nobody actually trusted the post these days. It was her job to keep a chart of messenger deliveries, who they were authorised by, what time they were collected and which postcode area they were going to. Regular hand deliveries went out every two hours, or rather a messenger looked in every two hours to see if there was any work. For S-rated hand deliveries, Michelle had a number to ring and a bike rider would turn up – ‘Usually within five minutes; they're very good' – to be briefed by the executive authorising the mailing. In all cases, the motorbike messenger service was the same company: Airborne PLC.

Gerry added that it had a ‘funny number' with a lot of digits, and she'd always assumed it must be a radio phone. I made a note of it on the back of a packet of Sweet Afton, saying that it was always a good idea to keep tabs on useful companies like that. I don't know if they believed me, but they'd certainly been worth the investment of the white wine, and that was going on the expenses. All in all, a very helpful bunch of girls and an afternoon well spent.