The Wisdom of Crocodiles

by Paul Hoffman

  ‘Very well. But regret is proper. Natural. But no one dies without such regrets . . . a weak word, I know . . . not at our age. Why would they? We . . . you haven’t lived – not to the age you were supposed to. You have a span, and it isn’t supposed to be this short. You were made to have longer but you’re not going to have longer. So it isn’t any wonder that you feel so dreadful. I’d call that a shock that’d set anybody back. No wonder you feel so bad. But you’re not seeing things straight whatever you say.’ He sighed. ‘If I were in your shoes, wouldn’t I feel the same? We all put off living. Nearly all of us live a kind of half-life. You have this sense that there should be more, something deeper, richer, higher, wider. And you put it off. It’s so stupid but you do it.’ Hendrix put his head in his hands and rubbed his eyes. He looked at Winnicott who seemed to be listening with more desperate attentiveness than he felt this deserved. ‘I’m not saying you aren’t right to regret these things—’

  ‘It’s more than regret.’

  ‘Yes. I understand. But even so. You have to try and see things really fair and square. That doesn’t mean being brutal with yourself. I wish I could say something, well, just better, more helpful.’ He looked at Winnicott and smiled. ‘Try to be fair. You’re a difficult man to know. But this judgement of yours is too harsh.’

  Neither man said anything for several minutes. It was Winnicott who spoke first. ‘You know I used to tell you I didn’t dream much.’

  Hendrix nodded.

  ‘I’ve started dreaming a lot recently. Not very pleasant things. Grim things, really. The worst was the afternoon when they told me I was going to die. About an hour later I just couldn’t keep my eyes open. I didn’t want to because I had a bad feeling that going to sleep was not a good idea, but I just couldn’t stop.’ He waited, reluctant. ‘I was on a small island. Only it wasn’t a small island. It was England. All that was left of it. A terrible catastrophe had befallen the world – a flood. I was the last person alive and there was just this tiny spot left above the water in the whole world. There was a tower on the island but the water had undermined the foundations and it was leaning over and about to fall. But I climbed anyway, though it creaked and waved about as if it might collapse at any minute. And when I got to the top, in the distance I could see wherever I looked – completely surrounding me – the tide. And it was coming towards me from every side and I was going to be drowned at four o’clock that afternoon. And then nothing would be left alive – no animals or plants. For some reason there was nothing alive even in the sea. So I waited full of fear and dread for what it would be like to drown at four o’clock. Then I woke up.’ George eased himself up in the bed, pulling the pillow into the small of his aching back. ‘A few minutes afterwards I thought it was quite amusing. I believe that was when I started to despise myself.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Why did I find it amusing or why did I despise myself for doing so?’ Winnicott laughed. It was a hard sound. ‘When I first woke up I was frightened but then I said to myself. It’s only a dream. About ten minutes later I started to smile. How absurd, how deeply self-important we are. It wasn’t just me dying, it was the whole world. My demise wasn’t just another death among millions every day. My death was an apocalypse. The end of everything. How wonderfully absurd.’ He looked at Hendrix with fury in his eyes, an anger quite unlike anything he had seen there before. ‘But that is how it feels. It feels like everything is going to die. I’m angry, I suppose. I want everything to die. What a monster! I don’t want just my possessions buried with me, I want the whole world.’

  He started to cry. Tears of horror and anger and disappointment. This was not weeping, thought Hendrix, but a kind of terrible overspill. He did not know what to say, only that he felt his inadequacy more strongly than ever. From the start he had just observed Winnicott. He did not understand him and he had not helped him. He had been a witness, not a help. But he did not understand what he was a witness to. And he was supposed to understand. Winnicott let the tears fall.

  ‘You find yourself thinking about that phrase “Life goes on.” And what you feel is, “How dare it go on? How dare it?” ’

  Michael McCarthy had no friendly feelings in his heart for Sally Brett as he pressed the doorbell for the second time. The letter from Winnicott she’d conned him into taking had preyed more and more on his mind as he approached Harrow. He had not been prepared for her attempt to shift responsibility to him for throwing away the letter. That was what she wanted him to do. It was perfectly possible she knew more about what was in it, something that meant trouble. He had thought of steaming it open but decided that knowing its contents might be a bad idea. It was probably entirely straightforward. But Brett’s poisoned-chalice behaviour put him on his guard. He would weigh up things when he talked to Winnicott’s wife and go from there. The door opened and there she was in front of him. He introduced himself.

  ‘Come in.’

  He followed her into the hallway and through to the sitting-room. ‘Would you mind waiting for ten minutes or so? He’s asleep. He’ll wake in a little while.’

  ‘How is he?’

  ‘Up and down,’ she said softly. ‘Sometimes he’s very lucid. He dozes most of the time. He talks in his sleep . . . he seems to be dreaming a great deal.’

  A brief look of pain crossed her face. McCarthy felt shock at what she had said: what did a dying man dream about?

  ‘Do you have a good doctor?’

  She told him that he came twice a day and during the night when it was necessary. He had been very good.

  ‘Is he in much pain?’

  Not much, she told him, more restlessness than anything else.

  ‘You must tell us if there’s any way we can help. We don’t want to intrude but we’re very anxious to do whatever we can.’

  She thanked him, but there was nothing.

  ‘The children?’

  They were with her mother.

  He paused for a moment. ‘I wonder if I could ask your advice.’

  She looked at him, perplexed.

  ‘Should I mention work at all? There are a few things he might be interested to hear but I wouldn’t want to bother him.’

  ‘I don’t see why not.’ She brightened. ‘In fact it would be a good idea . . . normal. No . . . please go ahead.’

  He stopped for a moment, ashamed by how badly he was doing, his clumsy manoeuvring reflecting the awkward, mixed nature of his feelings. Mishandling the letter, if it was a resignation, might involve him in unforeseen complications. There was a lot of money at stake. He wanted her to have it, but he was concerned about what might happen if he were to become implicated in anything that might be misunderstood.

  ‘Does he talk about work much?’

  ‘No.’

  Surely if she knew about the letter she would say something.

  ‘I posted a letter to Sally Brett a few days ago.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘He said it was a matter he should have dealt with several weeks ago.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘I got the impression it wasn’t all that important. I’ll just check on him.’ She stood up and left the room. It was inconceivable that Winnicott wouldn’t have told her he was resigning. But what was all that about doing something he should have done weeks ago? How could he have been so stupid as to take the letter from Brett in the first place?

  It was a quiet place, and with the windows closed few sounds penetrated the house that was itself silent: no washing-machine hum or radio natter. He became acutely aware of the only sound: the slow tick tock of a grandfather clock in the hall. Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock.

  ‘He’s awake now. Come up.’

  He followed her up the stairs. Conscious of her buttocks as she walked ahead of him, he was surprised to note that she had a good figure: a slim waist in proportion to her thighs. On the landing she turned to one side and gestured to a slightly open door. He knocked and entered.

  Winnicott lay propped up on several p
illows and smiling. He was not emaciated. This was recognisably a sick man but he did not seem to be dying. McCarthy had seen him worse than this when he had fainted at work.

  ‘It’s a pleasure to see you, Michael.’

  ‘How are you?’

  ‘Oh . . .’ He grimaced to indicate that things were not so good but in a to-be-expected way.

  ‘Are they any clearer about . . . what it is?’

  ‘No,’ said Winnicott matter of factly. ‘We had a second opinion on the tests I’ve had. They seem to have found some damage, things that have shown up, but otherwise they seem reasonably sure that it’s a non-specific degeneration – not a tumour or anything.’

  ‘So they’ve no specific cause?’

  ‘Not really. There’s a possibility it was started by the blow on the head in the Bank of England.’

  McCarthy became indignant on his behalf. ‘But surely they must have a way of finding out?’

  Winnicott looked at him. ‘Oh yes. The post-mortem.’

  It was not said with resentment or self-pity, and he was certainly not trying to shock. But McCarthy was shocked, nevertheless. Winnicott seemed to realise this and changed the subject.

  ‘How are things at work?’

  McCarthy wondered whether to give him the news, but it was hardly likely to be of much significance now. Winnicott had other things on his mind besides a failing investigation.

  ‘Things aren’t looking too good on the TLC front.’

  ‘Because of the . . . I’m sorry I don’t remember his name . . . the TLC man who killed his wife?’

  ‘Nancarrow.’

  ‘Did they find out why?’

  ‘In a manner of speaking. The police investigating the murder found a sort of diary on his computer. It turns out that what started the whole thing was a sideline he had investing in shares. I say sideline but he was very good at it. He’d made a lot of money dealing until a couple of years ago. That’s when it all went wrong and that’s what led to the fraud and the murder of his wife.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ said Winnicott. ‘I’ve got a few shares myself. They’ve risen in value – by rather a lot as it happens. How could he have lost money?’

  ‘You know about bull and bear markets?’

  His face clouded as he tried to remember. ‘One’s a rising market, the other’s falling. I can’t remember which now.’

  ‘Well, in a rising market, a bull market, you make your money by buying shares then hoping that the value of those shares appreciates. That’s what you’re doing with your shares. But there’s another way of making money when shares are falling in value. You have to have strong nerves and a lot of cash to back them up, but if you do and the markets fall you can make a very large fortune indeed. Nancarrow was convinced that the market was going to crash at the end of 1998. There were good reasons to think so – lots of people thought the time was long overdue for a correction. So when Alan Greenspan at the Fed started talking about investors’ irrational exuberance the writing looked on the wall. Add the Asian crisis and the Russian debt default and it all looked very possible – likely even. Nancarrow borrowed heavily – you need a lot of cash in your account to do this – and I mean heavily, half a million pounds. He was careful to avoid risks. Even if the markets only fell by a small amount he would make money. But if they had crashed as he expected, then he could have made a bundle. At first it all went to plan. The markets fell heavily in October. But then they started to recover.’

  ‘Why didn’t he sell then?’

  ‘Because he thought the recovery was just a blip. He was sure a bigger crash was on the way. He knew it would take nerves to pull it off. But he forgot one of the oldest sayings in the City: bears make money, bulls make money – pigs get slaughtered. The prospect of a huge killing was just in front of him, if only he had the guts to wait out the recovery. A recovery was bound to happen but he was sure it would be short-lived – loads of professionals were saying exactly the same. It made sense to hold on – the slope of hope the traders call it. So he got greedy and he waited. And the market climbed and climbed and kept on climbing and soon he’d lost so much he couldn’t even afford to cut his losses. He had to have enough money to keep trading and desperately wait for another crash. It was entirely possible. Lots of people were still predicting a crash. But he couldn’t borrow any more and he was paying interest on his loans at thirty-odd thousand a month. In the diaries he said that what made him sick was that the interest rate on his loan was falling nearly every month – it couldn’t make much difference to his repayments but it was fuelling the rise in share prices that was bankrupting him.’

  ‘But what did this have to do with TLC?’

  ‘Nancarrow was very thick with a German who worked there, Casper Breitner. He confided in Breitner about his money problems and Breitner saw his opportunity. He’d been mulling over this fraud for years and now he had a desperate colleague with the skills to help him carry it out. He said that the chances of them getting caught were low – which Nancarrow could see was true – and that they could make enough money to repay all his debts and have plenty left over. They would almost certainly have got away with it but for Jane Healey’s persistence. Bad luck, really, from their point of view.’

  ‘But what were they actually up to?’

  ‘Well,’ continued McCarthy, with a sigh, ‘once Nancarrow killed himself most of our hard evidence about who was involved in the rest of the company went down the drain, and by the time we picked up the trail again Breitner, his only real partner as it turned out, had legged it. He turned up a couple of weeks later in Germany.’

  ‘Can’t you extradite him?’

  ‘Unfortunately he’s a German national – the Germans won’t extradite their citizens. So that’s that. Anyway, what they were doing was getting the premiums for huge projects by undercutting their rivals by just enough to seem like a bargain but still be plausible – pretty much in the way that Cornish suggested. But the other senior managers at TLC weren’t involved. Most of the anomalies spotted by Jane Healey were down to incompetence. TLC was easy prey for fraudsters – despite their good reputation in the City, they were a disaster waiting to happen, only it had already happened. Nancarrow and Breitner were using the good name of TLC to get these premiums. The clients thought they were paying the premiums to TLC but the money was actually going into false accounts set up inside the company, which the two of them were controlling with the help of half a dozen junior types who they bribed on a chicken-feed basis to smooth over the paperwork. But without her marking our card, Nancarrow and Breitner would probably have pulled it off. If only he hadn’t killed himself it would have been a very handy little coup for us. And we could do with it. Lafferty at the DTI has called in Sally Brett to see him next week.’

  ‘Do you know why?’

  ‘No, but I can guess. The line they’re taking is that Breitner is thumbing his nose at us from Berlin and someone has to take the rap – Something Must Be Done.’

  ‘But did he escape with any money?’

  ‘Somewhere around twenty million.’ He noticed that Winnicott seemed alarmed. He tried to reassure him. ‘If it hadn’t been for you making the contact with Jane Healey we’d never have got near them. It was just bad luck Nancarrow killing himself before we had a chance to get him to squeal. If he had, everything would have been different. The FS would be the heroes of this rather than the abject losers we’re now held to be.’ He sniffed. ‘It’s last-straw stuff, I’m afraid. I didn’t say anything before because it wasn’t my place. But Sally Brett was finished long before you came. Lafferty was ready to see if you could pull things around, but Sally has been sleeping with the fishes for six months or more – she just didn’t know it.’

  Winnicott grunted as if this had confirmed a long-held belief about the hidden agendas at the FS. But his next question revealed that something else was on his mind.

  ‘Why did he poison his wife?’

  McCarthy grunted in distaste. ‘This
diary . . . it started out with all this bragging about how he was going to make everyone else look stupid when he made all this money and what he was going to buy with it. But I was wrong about one thing when I told you I thought he might have been trying to fake mental illness to get off the charges. By the end he was writing an odd mixture of stuff, most of it about his wife. One minute he was going on about how defenceless she’d be without him and all remorse that she wouldn’t have a penny to live on, and that it was all his fault, the next he was ranting about how she didn’t love him any more or that she’d never loved him and that he was going to kill her to teach her a lesson. Then it would be back to worrying about what was going to happen to her after he’d gone, and that killing her would be the kindest thing he could do to save her from poverty and shame and so on. Having read them twice I’d say his testament pretty much summed him up: greedy, sentimental and paranoid.’

  ‘I wonder why she stayed, given that she knew he was trying to poison her.’

  ‘Presumably she must have hoped he’d get better. Who knows? I suppose she must have loved him after all. People are . . . what’s the word I’m looking for?’

  There was a pause as they both went on their aphasic search.

  ‘Illegible!’ said Winnicott victoriously.

  Half an hour later McCarthy was at the station and waiting for the train to London. It was then that he remembered about the letter. Irritated, he took it out of his pocket and looked at it. On impulse, weary of trying to guess at all the ramifications of knowing or not knowing about what might or might not be there, he opened it. It was not long. The first paragraph consisted of pleasantries; the second got the point:.

  The central reason I am writing to you is that an alarming thought has struck me. Boyd Gribben has placed the new water-cooler for second floor next to my secretary’s desk. The day before I went into hospital, I noticed that there were three members of staff, one of them temporary, talking around the dispenser. It occurs to me that this poses a real security problem. Lucy is often away from her desk and by the nature of things there are many extremely confidential documents flowing between my desk and hers. I think it is extremely important that Boyd finds a less sensitive position as soon as possible.