‘Nobody’s in this business to make friends, Inspector.’
He looks at me very directly. ‘How did he get on with the Meyers?’ The Meyer brothers? Where do they come into this?
‘They’re Vance’s clients,’ I say.
‘Some takeover, I’m told. The Meyer Group for Parnells?’ Ryan flicks back through his notebook but can’t seem to find what he wants. ‘That’s the biggest piece of business you’re involved with just now, isn’t it?’
‘Probably.’ In fact this bid is the biggest deal the bank has been involved with for almost two years. I rest my forearms on the table. ‘That bid’s in the balance, Inspector. I don’t think the Meyers would appreciate being drawn into this without good reason.’
He glances at his notepad. ‘They’ve been quite cooperative, actually.’
‘You’ve spoken to them?’
‘An hour ago.’
Christ Almighty. I'll have to take Vance over there to reassure them. Soon. And this Ryan, I've read him completely wrong. The heavy moustache and the prop-forward’s build give the impression of lumbering slowness; a false impression, I realize now. Sitting up, I start to pay a good deal more attention.
‘Cast your mind back over the past year, Mr Carlton. Any particular deal went badly wrong? No major dispute Stewart was involved with?’
‘Dozens.’
‘No particular one?’
I shake my head. I ask if he’d like a tea or coffee, but he politely declines. He rises and studies my grandfather’s portrait again. ‘More like you than your father,’ he remarks. Surprised, I ask if he knows my father. Telly,’ he explains. ‘Rather out of my class, Lord Belmont.’ This comment lands like a fly on a still pool of water. I let it drift by. ‘Sir John tells me he might be retiring soon,’ he says, turning. ‘You’ll replace him?’
‘That’s the board’s decision.’
Ryan looks sceptical.
‘It’s likely,’ I concede. He asks what the change would have meant to Daniel. ‘I don’t follow.’
‘Well presumably your own position would become vacant. Could Stewart have expected to replace you?’
‘He would have been considered.’
‘Who else was in the running?’
And then I see what he’s getting at. ‘Are you serious?’
He looks at me, waiting for an answer.
So I hold up three fingers and tick them off one by one. ‘Treasury, Funds Management, Corporate Finance. The head of each department would normally have his hat in the ring.’
‘Not this time?’
I explain that Tony Mannetti, the boss of Fund Management, joined less than a year ago from New York. ‘He wouldn’t even be hoping.’
‘And now Stewart’s dead,’ he says. He lets the implication hang there: the way is now clear for Stephen Vance. ‘Who's likely to take over Stewart’s job?’
‘Me, for the time being.’
‘And when things settle down?’
When things settle down. This seems such an impossibly distant prospect right now that I find myself smiling hopelessly. I tell him that the question of Daniel’s replacement is still open, something to be sorted out later with my father and Sir John. He repockets his notepad, telling me he’s expecting the full autopsy report later in the day.
‘I thought Daniel was shot. No?’
‘Three times, close range. We’ve found two of the bullets, they’re being run through ballistics.’ Ryan pulls at the flesh below his chin. ‘I doubt the autopsy’ll tell us anything, but we live in hope.’ He asks if I can show him to Vance’s office, and I rise and go to the door. ‘You wouldn’t know, would you,’ he says as we proceed down the corridor, ‘if Stewart had any serious private problems?’
‘Not that I know of.’
He nods, unperturbed. ‘If you have any ideas . . .’
‘Sure.’
Back in the privacy of my own office, I sit awhile replaying the interview in my mind. What kind of man is Inspector Ryan? Persistent? Lax? Overworked?
Looking southward over the river, I watch the dark clouds building: there will be rain again later. Persistent. Definitely persistent. I swivel back to my desk. Becky has moved the vase down from the bookcase; already the flowers are wilting. How well, I wonder, has Odin been buried? I blow on the flowers. Ever so gently, they stir.
2
‘I
’m sorry you were dragged into it,’ Vance tells Reuben and David Meyer. ‘If we could have done anything to prevent it, we would have.’
Vance and I agreed on the way over that an upfront apology would be best; it isn’t a situation either of us have dealt with before. Now Reuben, the older brother, looks thoughtful. But David stands and points. ‘Don’t,wait for our thank-yous,’ he says. ‘How do you think it looks, police inspectors here? It's your problem.’
Reuben says something in Yiddish. David reluctantly retakes his seat. The profiles in the press say David is fifty-five, but up close you can see he’s older by a good ten years: journalistic error, I wonder, or vanity?
‘Mr Vance,’ Reuben says evenly. ‘How does this affect the bid?’
‘It doesn’t,’ Vance tells him.
David Meyer mutters. He wants us to know he isn’t happy. Vance told me weeks ago that David was difficult, but this is the first time I’ve seen him in action. Already I feel like throwing something heavy in his direction.
‘If we stick to what we planned,’ Vance continues, ‘there’s no reason for any disruption.’ He nods towards me. ‘Raef’ll be acting as our Treasurer for the duration of the bid.’
I see this catches David by surprise.
‘Yes,’ Reuben says. ‘Good.’
Before David can raise an objection, Vance takes two folders from his briefcase, handing one to each brother. He give them a verbal report on progress to date, and Reuben Meyer listens attentively while David studies the folder.
But I heard all this in the taxi, so now I let my eyes wander. There’s a faded kelim hanging on the wall, and a brass bowl on a stand in the corner. Reuben’s desk is old rather than antique, and the whole place has the feel of a counting house in some Middle Eastern souk. But as far as I’m aware, neither brother has ever ventured much further east than Canary Wharf since the family fled from Poland to London during the War. The decoration is Reuben’s taste, I'd say.
When Vance finishes, David looks up. ‘You still think we must raise the bid?’
As soon as possible, Vance tells him.
‘Monday?’
‘Monday morning if we can. Drive the holding up over forty per cent fast and keep the pressure on.’ The talk moves on to a possible number, the amount the bid should be raised. Not having spent weeks ploughing through the relevant spreadsheets, there isn’t much I can contribute here. Nothing, in fact, so I listen. Vance does most of the talking, David makes frequent interventions, and Reuben stays as silent as me. All four of us desperately want this deal to go through. For the Meyers it will be an emphatic statement that in the premier league of property developers they’ve risen to the top of the table. But for Vance and me the matter is much more urgent. If the Meyers get Parnells the simmering revolt in our Corporate Finance Department will die. But if the Meyer bid fails . . . Listening to Vance now, I squeeze my forehead. It has just occurred to me that the only thing between Carltons and calamity at this moment is Stephen Vance’s silver tongue.
After twenty minutes the talk reaches stalemate. Vance wants them to raise their bid from a 160p cash-equivalent to 180p: the Meyers think 170p is enough.
‘180 if you want to be sure,' Vance says.
Reuben smiles. ‘If we really wanted to be sure we'd bid 200. What we want, Mr Vance is not to waste our money.’
Vance looks suitably chastened. David Meyer turns to me and asks who killed our Treasurer. Before I can collect myself, he goes on: ‘I mean, who had reasons to kill him?’
‘That’s what the police are trying to find out.’
‘I’m not asking the police,’ he says. ‘I’m asking you.’
I feel Vance and Reuben both watching me. ‘I’ve no idea.’
‘Someone just shot him - your Treasurer - and you’ve got no idea?’
‘Has this got something to do with Parnells?’ I say tightly.
‘I don’t know,’ David Meyer replies, folding his arms. ‘Has it?’
Beneath my breath, I count to ten. I explain that the police are pursuing their inquiries, and that in the extremely unlikely event of the murder having even a remote connection to the bid, I’ll let him know.
‘Please do,’ he says, unsmiling. When I rise, there’s a round of perfunctory handshakes. Vance and I are passing out the door when David calls after us. ‘And in the extremely unlikely event that we agree to a raised bid, Mr Carlton, don’t call us, we’ll call you.’ The door closes firmly at our backs.
‘What’s up with him?’
‘He’s been like that from day one.’ Vance steps after me into the taxi and gives the driver Carltons’ address. ‘David Meyer has rudeness like the rest of the world has manners.’ He rests his briefcase on his lap and his tanned hands on the briefcase. His week’s holiday in Mauritius last month must seem an eternity ago. He asks me what I made of the meeting. I tell him I think he's doing fine.
‘Vote of confidence noted,’ Vance says, facing me. ‘Now, what did you really think?’
Even after I’d worked with him for years I could never match Vance’s relentless and absolutely focused attention on the deal. Now it’s like being taken in the grip of a creature whose power I’d long forgotten.
‘They’re not idiots,’ I suggest. ‘They’ll come to the party at 180.’ Vance doesn’t reply. A hollow feeling forms in the pit of my stomach. ‘Stephen?’
‘Let’s hope so,’ he says tapping his case. ‘Why do you think he was asking about Daniel?’
The name hovers between us a moment, a spectral presence in the taxi; the nether- world intruding on the everyday.
‘I don’t know. Just being bloody?’
He flips open his briefcase and digs through the paperwork, handing me two sheets: the current acceptances on the bid, and a copy of a Sandersons’ press release, issued this morning. When a bid for a public company is launched, the clock starts ticking: the bidder has sixty days in which to win control, and if they haven’t succeeded by then they’re obliged by the Takeover Code to withdraw for twelve months before trying again. Right now we're weeks into the Meyer bid and - looking at the sheet - it’s clear that acceptances remain low. As Vance has been telling the Meyer brothers, they’ll have to raise their offer. The second sheet, the Sandersons’ press release, is a masterly piece of innuendo. It manages to call into question the competence and integrity of the Carltons’ analysts who did the numbers on Parnells, and concludes — this must be Lyle’s touch — with condolences on the unexplained death of our Treasurer. The impression it leaves is of a bank gone rotten at the core.
I hand back the sheets. ‘What now?’
‘On Clover?’ Clover, the code name we’re using for the Meyer deal. ‘We wait,’ he says. ‘Nothing more we can do until they decide a new number. Are you sure you shouldn’t be taking some time of?’
'I'm okay.’
Unconvinced, he considers me a moment. ‘I don’t want to sound like a hypocrite, Raef, but I’m sorry about Daniel.’ My throat constricts, and I mumble a few words of thanks. ‘Maybe I wasn’t in Daniel’s fan club,’ he says, ‘but something like that . . . Has that Inspector got any ideas what happened?’
‘Gunshot.’
Vance closes his briefcase. ‘I mean, does he have any idea who did it?’
‘Doesn’t seem to.’
‘No idea why?’
I turn my head, and gaze out at the passing City buildings, things of the world, all strangely diminished this morning. Vance quietly suggests that I take some time off.
‘I don’t need it.’
‘I think you might.’
His simple consideration touches me more than I thought possible. For some unfathomable reason, I ask after his brother, Carl.
Vance looks at me uneasily. ‘He’s still in Canada, lecturing at McGill. Raef,’ he says, ‘you don’t have to come back to the office.’
The City buildings hang over us now, oppressive and grey. ‘When you write,’ I say, ‘send him my regards.’
Vance holds my look a moment longer, then his glance slides politely away.
3
After lunch, Karen Haldane comes into my office and places a folder on my desk. ‘I think we’ve got a problem,’ she says. She is our Chief Compliance Officer, her remit is to ensure both in-house and general market regulations are adhered to by everyone at the bank. An accountant by profession, she also sits on the bank’s audit committee: not a woman to be worried unduly.
Opening the folder, I take out the only page and read. It’s a few lines of Daniel’s almost illegible scrawl.
‘From Daniel’s office,’ she tells me. ‘I needed last week’s numbers, I found this—’ she points to the note ‘—on top of the file.’
‘His office is locked.’
‘I've got a spare key,’ she tells me; and when I look at her, she says, ‘Well, was I meant to ring Scotland Yard?’
I remark that it might be an idea if she stays out of there until Inspector Ryan’s finished.
She isn’t pleased. ‘What about this?’
The note. I manage, at last, to decipher it. And when I do, my heart sinks. I drop the page back into the folder. ‘Bin it.’
‘What?’
‘Karen, it’s just a few numbers and a few question marks.’
She reopens the folder and points. ‘Did you see that? “Speak to Henry’?’ Henry Wardell, presumably, our Chief Dealer. ‘And see these other numbers, they look like losses. See this?’
Like the a man standing on a great precipice, I do not look down.
‘Why did he need to speak to Henry if it wasn’t about the Dealing Room?’ she asks me.
‘No idea.’
‘They could be Dealing Room losses.’
‘We’re a bank, Karen, it happens. But if you want to follow it up, go have a word with Henry.
Becky comes through on the intercom, reminding me that I’m due in Westminster: the Select Committee hearing. I assure her that I’m just leaving. Annoyed now, Karen picks up the folder. I reach over the desk, an open hand extended. ‘Daniel’s spare key?’ I say. 'Just for safe-keeping.'
4
M
y father’s office in Westminster is small and dark. His secretary informs me that he’s already gone down to the Committee Rooms, so I head down there too. Walking the corridors like this reminds me of the times my grandfather brought me here as a child. My boyhood memories of the place are fond ones, but more recently the place has taken on a rather different aspect: a gilded Victorian dream of the Medieval world, a mock-Gothic fantasy that now leaves me cold. A servant of the House opens the Committee Room door to me. The hearing has commenced. Up near the Committee, a bank of camera lights shines fiercely. The rows of seats around the room are nearly all full, but just down the aisle my father has kept a seat free. Slipping in beside him, I ask in a whisper, ‘Lyle said his piece yet?’