‘But if he was a client,’ Dave said at once, ‘why was he running to your flat, not here to chambers?’
Trish felt her mouth slackening and clamped it shut. How could she have been so stupid? The miscarriage must have affected her brain as well as her psyche.
‘God knows,’ she said without much of a pause. ‘But there isn’t any other kind of child who’d be coming to find me.’
‘Sure of that, are we?’
‘Quite sure, if you mean what I think you mean. You’re as bad as the police. They spent ages last night trying to get me to tell them the boy must be my son, running away from foster parents or something. But I can assure you, it’s a biological impossibility.’
‘I’m glad to hear it.’
‘So
will
you deal with them for me, Dave?’
‘Of course. You’ve got more than enough to do with the Gurles case. That’s all that matters now, and it matters a lot. Going all right, is it?’
‘Fine, thanks.’
‘I certainly hope so. I told Mr Shelley you could do it, so don’t let me down.’
‘Have I ever?’
‘Not yet,’ Dave said. ‘But there’s always a first time. And this is right out of your field.’
Don’t remind me, Trish thought as she retreated to her dingy room at the back of the building. There, staring at her, were the rows of lever-arch files in which she’d sorted the documents for the case. She had done a good job, she told herself, whatever Dave suggested.
All the papers were there, flagged with different-coloured mini Post-its: red for danger, or bits of evidence that might help the depositors or the DOB directors; green for the facts that showed Nick Gurles in the best possible light; and purple for deep background. She’d drafted all sorts of arguments the others might use against her client and prepared ways to counter them, citing all the relevant case law.
Today she was going to start to index and cross-check every single piece of paper evidence by hand, to make sure that it was all there and all correctly entered into the computer.
The case would turn on whether the judge believed the DOB had deliberately misled their customers in the marketing literature and the terms and conditions of the fund. Trish had been careful never to ask Nick Gurles directly, but he’d voluntarily assured her that there had been no intention to deceive on his part. All his financial modelling had told him that the fund would generate the advertised return, and so there would have been no point trying to pull the wool over anyone’s eyes. Of course, he couldn’t speak for the other defendants.
Trish knew that they would be explaining much the same to their counsel, the only difference being that they’d suggest it was Nick Gurles who might have had some nefarious intent that he’d successfully concealed.
The most difficult part of the preparation for her had been grappling with Nick’s original calculations of the risk/reward ratio that had made him so confident of his MegaPerformance Bond Fund. She hadn’t had to add up anything more complicated than her own VAT returns for years, and she still wasn’t sure she’d completely understood Nick’s sums. She hoped Antony Shelley would be able to absorb the principle on his own and not demand tutorials from her.
Now that she’d got to grips with most of the background and learned something of how the financial world operated, she was no longer surprised that so many of the most successful commercial barristers kept their money in straightforward interest-bearing accounts. She herself had been persuaded by various plausible ‘financial advisers’ to put her spare cash into all sorts of funds and bonds and now bitterly regretted the lot.
The completely legal rip-offs she’d discovered as she’d
done her research, the hidden charges, the churning, the utterly useless investment performance of most of the fund managers she’d trusted with her money made her furious. Some had even pumped up their end-of-year figures by last-minute switches of investment in order to get a higher position in the league tables than their overall performance could possibly justify. Others endlessly set up new savings accounts with particularly good interest rates to entice customers, only to reduce the rates within a few months, trusting that inertia would keep the customers stuck in low-return accounts.
When Trish thought about the premiums she’d poured into her various pension funds, particularly in the years when she’d been earning very little and had had to make real sacrifices to ensure she kept up the payments, she was ready to march through the streets waving placards. She would have earned far more, even taking into account the tax relief, if she’d put the same amount of money into an ordinary building society (always providing that she had monitored its interest rate). The pension companies had waxed rich and fat on what they’d creamed off the top of her investment.
Some of the companies, of course, had been challenged in court for their mistakes, but it was their with-profits savers who would be paying for those, not the individuals who had made the mistakes or the directors responsible for them – or the advisers who’d steered their clients towards the companies. Oh, it made her so angry she could have spat. But there was nothing she could do about it now except make her pensions ‘paid-up’ and put future spare cash into something more flexible and absolutely under her own control. Her fingers curled as she thought of the thousands she’d wasted.
‘Hi, Trish!’
She looked up at the sound of the vigorous masculine voice and saw Robert Anstey, who’d been called to the
Bar a couple of years earlier than she had. He’d been turned down for silk twice now and tended to take out his frustration on anyone within range. She occasionally wondered whether it was Robert’s bitterness that had made her determined not to apply until she was sure she’d succeed.
‘What can I do for you?’
‘Boot’s on the other foot, Trish. Knowing how unused you are to this kind of work, I thought I’d come and offer to be your guide, to stop you plunging into all the elephant traps everyone’s been digging round you. Antony’s an absolute stickler, you know. In his book there’s no such thing as an honest mistake, and he won’t forgive you if you get even the tiniest detail wrong.’
‘How sweet of you,’ she said hypocritcally, ‘but I’m fine.’
‘Are you sure? I know how hard you find arithmetic.’ He laughed. ‘I must say, none of us can quite understand the game he’s playing, putting a mathematical-illiterate on a case like this, but we’re all ready and waiting to mop your tears and soothe your fevered brow when he lays into you. He can be quite terrifying when he gets into Genghis-Khan mode, you know. And manipulative, my God!’
‘He’s the most impressive man I’ve ever met. And I’m finding the whole case fascinating.’
‘Do I detect just the faintest whiff of hero-worship, Trish?’ Robert laughed again, the sound as rich and sickly as
foie gras.
‘Be careful. He eats earnest girls like you for breakfast.’
‘You’re very free with your clichés today, Robert. Have you been reading the tabloids again?’
‘Ooh. Temper, temper. Caught you on the raw, did I, Trish? Well, as a penance, can I get you anything in Pret à Manger? I’m on my way there now.’
‘A quadruple espresso would be great. Thanks.’ She kept the smile on her face for nearly two minutes in case Robert
was playing some kind of Grandmother’s Footsteps and planning to nip back to see whether she was showing any sign of weakness.
When she was sure he’d gone, she let her face relax. The trouble was that she hadn’t a clue what Antony was playing at, either.
He’d never given her any explanation. All that had happened was that he’d erupted into her dark, shabby little room nearly a year ago, high on the adrenaline of a tough day in court. There had been colour in his face for once, and a glitter in his aquamarine eyes. Running his fingers luxuriously through his wild blond hair, he’d told her about Nick Gurles and what had happened to the MegaPerformance Bond Fund and offered her the chance of working with him. She leaped on it like a sea eagle splashing down on a particularly plump fish, and hadn’t thought of the downside until later.
‘Here, Trish.’ Robert Anstey dumped a large cardboard cup of coffee on her desk. She swung round to reach for her handbag. ‘No, no. Have this one on me. My practice has always been a lot more profitable than yours. And you’re going to need your rainy-day fund soon.’
Trish added a soupçon of pity to her polite smile and was pleased to see how angry it made him. He should have known better. She’d had plenty of experience in dealing with patronising men. There were still an extraordinary number of those at the Bar, who considered that their anatomy automatically made them cleverer as well as more deserving than any woman.
Nick Gurles had shown signs of a similar aberration at first. Trish could see him now, about four years younger than she was, but absolutely confident and very smooth in his expensive clothes. He’d sat with one ankle balanced on the other knee, showing off his perfect shoe (beautifully polished under the instep, too) as he explained his creed during their first conference.
‘No financial institution can be a charity, Ms Maguire. Banks are businesses, exactly like the little corner shop that sells you your newspapers and the odd pint of milk when you’ve run out. They have to take in more money than they pay out, in order to cover their overheads – that’s rent, salaries and so on – and make a profit for themselves and for their shareholders. Are you with me?’
‘Oh, I think I can just about keep up. Your problem must come, of course, in that banks – like corner shops – have to provide good enough value to make the customers come back,’ Trish had said in the same tone he’d used, of an adult reading a story to a two year old. She wondered what Antony could have said to the solicitors to make their client assume she was that thick.
‘Quite.’
She’d preferred the much-less smooth way he’d grinned at her then. ‘So what exactly went wrong with this fund of yours?’ she went on.
‘All investments can go down as well as up. That warning was plastered all over the marketing literature, as it always has to be.’
‘Come on, Nick,’ she’d said, showing her teeth. ‘This was a fund that guaranteed a certain percentage, to be paid annually. So what happened?’
‘To put it simply, Trish …’ He broke off to smile matily as he used her Christian name for the first time. ‘To put it simply, we were aiming to make the return for our customers by investing in European junk bonds. I mean, we didn’t issue the bonds ourselves, obviously. Now, junk bonds are always risky, which is why the rewards are so high. But studies have shown that overall the risks are less than the rewards. Are you still with me?’
‘So far.’ She’d smiled sweetly and made a note.
‘Great. The problem comes if too many of the bonds you’ve bought flop, as some always will, and you don’t have enough that are booming.’
‘Yes, I can see that you’d be stuffed in that case.’
‘I couldn’t have put it more clearly myself, though I might have striven for a tad more elegance.’
‘So why the guarantee?’
‘The guarantee referred, as was perfectly clear, to the annual percentage we were going to pay the investors; it had nothing to do with the capital they’d put in. We assumed that would be fine, but we weren’t mad enough to guarantee it, for heaven’s sake. The first hints of the problem came with the tremors in the junk-bond market, which made one of the financial journalists write a rather hysterical piece about our bond issuers, which made rather too many punters withdraw their investment, despite having to pay an early-withdrawal fee for that, which in turn exacerbated the whole problem. You see, once so many of them had taken out their money, the spread of bonds necessarily shrank, which meant that all my calculations of the risk/reward ratio no longer applied.’
‘I can see that might have caused you problems.’
‘Good. Now, had I still been with the DOB, I’d probably have been able to stuff my finger in the dyke and get the whole show back on the road.’
Talk about mixed metaphors, thought Trish.
‘Unfortunately I wasn’t there, and my replacement wasn’t concerned enough to monitor things as I would have done. The directors panicked too soon, took counsel’s opinion on the lack of a guarantee in respect of the capital, and closed the fund to new investors, which was the worst possible thing and ensured that a lot of punters lost money. They resented it and sued. The whole thing has been a complete fiasco. Are you still with me?’
‘Yes. Although I can understand the punters, too. I’ve been looking at all the marketing bumf and I must say I’d have assumed I’d get back what I put in.’
‘Would you? Why?’
‘Because that’s what bank accounts offer.’
‘But, Trish, this
wasn’t
a bank account. Surely you’ve grasped that much by now. It’s the fundamental point. This was an investment – and they go down as well as up, as we correctly stated.’
Thinking about that conversation now, it occurred to Trish for the first time that it could have been her very inexperience of the City that had made her so attractive to Antony. If she could get her mind round everything in the case and reduce it to something she could follow easily, and sympathise with, they’d be well on the way to ensuring that they could convince anyone else. It was a reassuring thought. She hoped it was realistic.
Sipping her pile-drivingly strong coffee, she was glad she’d found a way to sympathise with Nick Gurles. In the past she’d often had to represent unattractive clients, but she’d always tried to find something to like, so that her advocacy would sound warm and therefore be effective. This time she’d found it in the DOB directors’ attitude to Nick.
Their decision to join him to the action still surprised her. He’d been an employee, doing what he was paid to do. As far as she could see, they’d been motivated by a mixture of spite, because his departure had lowered their share price and therefore the value of their own options, and the need for PR damage control. If they lost the action, having someone as well-known as Nick Gurles to share the blame might mean that their shareholders wouldn’t start demanding resignations.