Authors: Michael Ridpath
Clutching an
A to Z
, I led Ingrid through a maze of small streets just to the north of Harrods to where Tony’s flat should be. I paused under a streetlamp to check the map. I was pretty sure I was in the right place, a narrow one-way mews. I looked around for a street sign. A century ago the houses had been inhabited by horses. Now they were inhabited by humans who probably paid at least a million quid for the privilege.
I saw the sign obscured by a car on the other side of the street. I moved a couple of yards down the road to get a better view. I was in the right place. There was a man in the car who caught my eye for a second and then looked away. I wondered briefly what he was doing sitting in a car in the dark. Waiting for someone, presumably. Then I looked for Tony’s flat, which turned out to be the top floor of one of the mews houses.
We rang the bell. Tony answered.
‘Ah, the deputation,’ he said. ‘Come in. I’m afraid you can’t stay long; I’m meeting some friends for dinner in half an hour.’
We sat on pale leather armchairs in his expensively decorated living room. There was no sign of anyone else in the flat. I suppose I had secretly hoped that I would find Guy there negotiating an arrangement with his father.
Ingrid came straight to the point. ‘We’ve come to ask you to keep Guy on.’
Tony raised his eyebrows. ‘Well, I can try to persuade Guy to stay, but it’s his decision. There’s really nothing I can do about it.’
‘Oh, come on, Tony,’ I said. ‘We all know why Guy is resigning. You won’t let us raise more money to fund Ninetyminutes’ expansion. I was there. I saw it.’
Tony held up his hands. ‘There’s no point in discussing this now. Let’s see what happens tomorrow morning, shall we? We can talk about it then.’
‘No,’ said Ingrid. ‘We talk about it now. You see, if Guy resigns the rest of the team will resign also.’
‘That’s up to you,’ said Tony calmly.
‘But if we all leave, how are you going to run the site?’
‘I’ll hire people.’
‘That won’t work,’ Ingrid pointed out. ‘You need people who are up to speed with the content, the design, the site software. You can’t just get bodies off the street to do it.’
‘Are you trying to blackmail me?’
‘No,’ said Ingrid. ‘I’m just trying to explain what will happen to your two-million-pound investment if Guy resigns tomorrow.’
‘You
are
trying to blackmail me,’ said Tony, a patronizing smile playing on his lips. Then his expression changed: all traces of humour disappeared as he leaned forward,
deadly serious now. He spoke with a low measured urgency that commanded our total attention. ‘Let me tell you something. I don’t respond to threats. No one in my entire working career has threatened me and got away with it. Whatever happens, Ingrid, you won’t have a job tomorrow. Neither will you, David. Now, it’s time for you both to leave.’
I could see Ingrid was furious, but I caught her eye, and we got up to go.
‘Creep,’ muttered Ingrid as we strode down the mews towards Knightsbridge and taxis.
‘Never mind,’ I said. ‘It was worth a try.’
‘Guy was right,’ she said. ‘We never should have taken his money.’
‘No, we shouldn’t. Big mistake.’
My
mistake.
We passed the man in the car at the end of the street. He looked as if he had fallen asleep. With a jerk, he seemed suddenly to wake up and start his car. As we turned the corner, I looked over my shoulder and saw Tony coming out of his mews house.
‘I never liked that man,’ said Ingrid. ‘Ever since we stayed with him in France, I knew he was a scumbag. He gives me the creeps every time I look at him. He thinks he’s a super-suave playboy, but he’s just a dirty old man. He always was. Do you know what I’d like to do to him?’
I never found out what Ingrid would like to do to Tony. Instead I heard the roar of an engine from the mews, and a cry, abruptly cut short.
I glanced at Ingrid and ran.
I rounded the corner and saw a body splayed out at an unnatural angle on the pavement just in front of Tony’s house. As I came closer, it was obvious who it was. I recognized the clothes. I recognized the shape and size. But
when I reached him, I couldn’t recognize his face. His head was a bloody mess.
A second later, Ingrid arrived at my shoulder. She looked down at the body on the pavement and screamed.
Ninetyminutes had lost its chairman.
July 1987, twelve years earlier, Dorset
I began running from the edge of the penalty area just as Guy kicked the ball, aiming for the far post. I leapt at the same time as Phil, the ’keeper. The ball drifted an inch above Phil’s outstretched fingers and struck my head, ricocheting between the posts and into the brambles guarding the ditch behind.
‘Yes! Nice one, David,’ Torsten cried. ‘Five–four. We win!’
I glanced over to Guy, who wore a quiet smile of satisfaction on his face. Guy seemed able to place a football anywhere on the pitch with perfect timing.
I trotted off to retrieve the ball from the brambles, and joined the others picking up items of discarded clothing and ambling back towards the house. It was a lovely evening. During the game, unnoticed by the players, the sky had turned to a deep blue-grey and the small puffs of cloud to inky black. Rooks kicked up a fuss in the copse running along the side of the playing field as we made our way down to Mill House, the converted watermill where forty of us boarded. The sprawling modern campus of Broadhill School itself was still visible a mile and a half over peaceful cow pastures to the east.
Evenings, which until that week had been crammed full of revision for exams, were suddenly free for pick-up games of football. Nearly all the O and A level exams had finished. I had only one maths paper left and thought my brain deserved a rest. In three weeks’ time my life at Broadhill
would be over. The race from thirteen-year-old new boy to eighteen-year-old adult would be finished. At that moment, it seemed like a shame.
I caught up with Torsten and Guy. ‘Nice cross,’ I said.
Guy shrugged. ‘Your head is difficult to miss, Davo.’
We walked three abreast along the short stretch of country lane to the house.
‘I spoke to my dad earlier,’ Torsten said. Torsten Schollenberger was a tall, clean-cut German whose father owned a network of magazine publishing interests throughout Europe. ‘He wants me to work in his office over the summer. In Hamburg.’
‘What? That’s inhuman,’ said Guy. ‘After exams and everything?’
‘I know. And I’m going to college in Florida in September. I deserve a break.’
‘So, you won’t be coming to France?’
‘It doesn’t look like it.’
‘Man, that sucks. Can’t you just tell him to piss off? You’re eighteen. You’re an adult. He can’t make you do what you don’t want to do.’
‘Guy, you’ve met my father. He can do what he damn well likes.’
I walked next to them in silence. My parents were taking the caravan down to Devon again that summer. They were hoping I would come with them. I probably would. The caravan was very cramped, but I actually liked my parents and I liked Devon. I enjoyed striding over the moors with my father. He, too, had offered me a summer job working in his office, a small branch of a building society in a Northamptonshire market town. He would pay me sixty quid a week. I was planning to take it. I needed the money.
None of this, though, did I feel like mentioning to Guy and Torsten.
Broadhill was a unique school. It was one of the most expensive boarding schools in England and had superb facilities. But it also offered scholarships to a large minority of pupils, and not just for academic ability. I had an academic scholarship, but Phil, the goalkeeper, was an accomplished cellist from Swansea. I knew Guy’s father paid full whack, although Guy’s sporting skills at soccer, cricket and tennis could have secured him a sporting scholarship. Torsten probably paid double.
The result was an eclectic mix of boys and girls, from the super-rich to the quite modest, from geniuses to the almost illiterate, from international swimmers to concert pianists. There was also a fair quota of slobs, yobs, idlers and rule-breakers. Alcohol and tobacco were widespread. Other even more forbidden stimulants occasionally circulated. But for some reason, despite the presence of adolescent boys and girls together in one boarding school, there was very little sex.
I could never work out why. I made a few attempts to change this situation myself with very little success. There were, of course, school rules banning it, but it seemed to be the pupils themselves who enforced this celibacy. Eventually I developed a theory that might explain it, a sort of extension of Groucho Marx’s dictum that he didn’t want to belong to any club that would accept him as a member. There was a rigid and well-defined hierarchy of boys and girls in the school. It was beneath the dignity of an individual pupil to be seen with a member of the opposite sex at or below his or her level in the hierarchy. We all had to strive for higher. This meant a great deal of frustration for ninety-nine per cent of the school, and an embarrassment of choice for the lucky one per cent.
And who was at the top of this hierarchy? Well, Torsten was close, but right at the top of this totem pole was, of course, Guy.
He and I shared a room that year. Valentine’s Day is an embarrassment at any school, but it had been particularly humiliating for me that February. I had received one card, from a sad girl with glasses in my maths class who went on to become a top equities analyst at an investment bank. Guy received seventy-three. Most of them were probably from thirteen- and fourteen-year-olds he didn’t know, but even so. He had played the lead in an unofficial production of
Grease
the previous summer, and had made an impression on the female half of the school that had endured until the following February. Tall, dark and unremarkable, I knew I was no competition for Guy, but my ego, not for the first time, was crushed. What really annoyed me was that he didn’t even seem pleased. He took it as his due.
Although I shared a room with Guy, he was very discreet about his love life. I assumed that he had ‘gone all the way’, but he didn’t brag about it. His relationships did seem to form a pattern, though. He would be seen charming a gorgeous girl of sixteen or seventeen, chatting her up, making her laugh for a period of weeks, or even months, and then he would suddenly drop her. Within a couple of days he’d be chasing someone else.
His current interest lay with a girl called Mel Dean, who was also in her last year at school. She wasn’t as classically beautiful as some of his conquests, but I could see what drove him on. She wore tight clothes and a permanent soft pout that suggested availability, yet she had a reputation for chastity. ‘Fit but frigid’ as the schoolboy parlance would have it. For Guy, an irresistible combination.
I stayed up late that night, trying to fight my way through a few more pages of
War and Peace
. I now wonder at how foolish I was to try to read that book in the same term I was taking my A levels, but I had a self-image as an intellectual to protect.
Guy clattered into the room and got himself ready for bed. ‘Come on, Davo, I’m knackered. It’s past eleven. Can I turn the light out?’
‘Oh, all right,’ I said, in mock irritation. But in truth I had been reading the same page for ten minutes, and it was time to put it out of its misery. The book fell with a thud to the floor by my bed and I lay back on my pillow. Guy turned out the light and flopped on to his.
‘Davo?’
‘Yeah?’
‘Do you want to come to my dad’s place this summer?’
At first I didn’t think I had heard right. The idea of Guy inviting me to stay with him and his father in the South of France came as a total surprise, a shock in fact. We liked each other, even respected each other, but I had never counted myself as one of Guy’s friends. Or not that kind of friend. Guy hung around with the likes of Torsten, or Faisal, a Kuwaiti prince, or Troy Barton, son of Jeff Barton, the film star. The kind of people whose families had millions of pounds and several homes scattered around the world. Who met each other in Paris or Marbella. Not the kind who went to Devon in a caravan.
‘Davo?’
‘Oh, sorry.’
‘Well? You’ll like it. He’s got this great place on the cliffs overlooking Cap Ferrat. I haven’t been there myself yet, but I’ve heard it’s amazing. He asked me to bring some friends along with me. Mel’s going, and Ingrid Da Cunha. Why don’t you come?’
Why not? He meant it. I didn’t know where I would get the cash to get there, but I knew I had to go.
‘Are you sure?’
‘Of course I’m sure.’
‘OK, then,’ I said. ‘Thanks. I’ll come.’
I raised the champagne flute to my lips and looked down at the ancient volcanoes of the Massif Central twenty thousand feet below. It turned out I hadn’t needed to find the cash for the plane fare. We had all met at Biggin Hill, an airfield to the south of London, and boarded Guy’s father’s jet. Within minutes we were in the air, heading for Nice.
Mel Dean and Ingrid Da Cunha were in the seats behind me, with Guy opposite them. Mel was wearing tight jeans, a white T-shirt, a denim jacket and a quantity of make-up. A streak of yellow ran through her long dark hair, which wound around the back of her neck and tumbled over her shoulder towards her chest. And what a chest. Her friend Ingrid was wearing baggy trousers and a sweatshirt. I barely knew either of them; Mel had been at the school for five years, but we had never been in the same class and I had scarcely spoken to her in all that time. Ingrid had arrived at Broadhill only the previous autumn, half way through the sixth form.
I said hello. Mel’s lips betrayed the tiniest of twitches in acknowledgement, but Ingrid gave me a wide friendly smile. I left Guy to do the chatting up: judging by the peals of raucous laughter from Ingrid, he was doing it well. I leaned back into my deep blue leather seat. It was the first time I had ever flown. This was the life.
Guy moved up to the seat next to me. ‘You haven’t met my dad before, have you?’