Usman gradually got angrier and angrier, and as he did so, made steadily less sense. It was clear that he was possessed by a furious sense of the injustice that had been done to his brother, but he was spluttering and going round in circles and his accent kept shifting from his normal educated voice to some version of South London which seemed like a new personality he was trying on specially for the occasion. Ahmed had never seen him so agitated; it was as if he had gone slightly mad.
By way of showing that she appreciated the effort they were making, and also that they had not yet succeeded, Fiona Strauss said,
‘Unfortunately, I say again, the legal position is clear.’
Mrs Kamal gathered a silence around her. Her power of projecting her mood, very often a great burden in family life, became an asset here. She said:
‘Well, this is all very good isn’t it? We are in the country which regards itself as the cradle of liberty. What happens? We are all woken at dawn with a gun stuck in our heads, in a manner which would embarrass a police state. My middle son is dragged off to jail. He is completely innocent of anything and he had never been arrested or charged with anything in his life, not once, not ever, but that doesn’t seem to matter to anyone, and he is held without any information being allowed out, without any contact with the outside world, his signature is forged to claim he is waiving his rights, and that’s it. Shahid would never waive his rights, that is the exact opposite of the kind of boy he is. But never mind. Nobody cares, nobody is willing to do anything, he’s just gone. Why not just bundle him off to Guantanamo and have done with it? That’s what you seem to be saying, Ms Strauss, am I not right?’
‘Mrs Kamal, the legal facts of the case are what they are. In relation to the judicial realities of the matter, my opinions have no status. They have no traction. Merely as a point of fact, you should know that there is not the slightest possibility of Shahid being extradited to Guantanamo Bay.’
This speech made something clear to Mrs Kamal. With her instinct for a weak point, she realised that what the lawyer was seeking was an appeal to her vanity. It wasn’t that she needed to be made to feel important, but that she needed it to be made clear that her clients understood that she was important. Everybody who came into this office was convinced that they had experienced a level of injustice without precedent, and they always thought that their story would do the work of convincing for them – that the story was all it took. So it was as if the story was the most important thing. But for Fiona Strauss, the important thing was herself, and she needed this to be acknowledged before she would take an interest in a case. Then the story could have its due. Mrs Kamal saw this, and acted on what she had seen.
‘But we need you, Ms Strauss. We are lost without you. We have rights on which we cannot act. The door is closed to us. We are excluded from justice. Without your help we don’t even know where to begin to seek it. The legal position may be as clear as you say – I am sure it is as clear as you say – but the moral position is clear also. We know that the fight against such injustices is your whole life. We know that. And all we can do now is ask for your help for us and for Shahid. He is in a dark place. You must help us bring light to him, Ms Strauss, because there’s no one else we can turn to.’
The lawyer separated her arched fingers and briefly, silently, drummed on the desk in front of her. Then she sighed, a sincere sigh, and said, ‘Very well. I will do what I can.’
‘You have no idea what this means to us,’ said Mrs Kamal, seizing her hands. The Kamal family were loud with relieved thanks, with exclamations, with gratitude and approval.
They spent another twenty minutes talking about what to do next. The lawyer promised to make representations to the police, and to explore the possibility of a press conference – exactly the thing the family had wanted all along. The Kamals left happy, except for Usman, who still seemed furious.
In the car on the way home – there had been extended discussions about how to get in to the appointment, and the non-desirability of paying the congestion charge, versus the unthinkability of Mrs Kamal taking the Underground – Rohinka said, ‘Well. That lady lawyer is quite a piece of work.’
Mrs Kamal said, ‘I liked her.’
77
Doctors and lawyers. Lawyers and doctors and men from the insurance company. That, now, was Patrick and Freddy’s life – and because Mickey always came to meetings with them, it was his life too. For the doctors – doctors plural, because they saw several different specialists – they went to surgeries in and around Harley Street. For the lawyers they went to three different sets of offices. The club’s lawyers were in a tall block in the City of London, with a view of other tall City blocks. The fittings were modern, steel and glass and sophisticated coloured plastic. The insurance company’s lawyers were in offices in Mayfair, a Regency building with, again, modern fittings, except in the big conference room where the two sides met, Freddy and Patrick and Mickey and one or two of their lawyers at one end of an oval oak table, which was polished so brightly that the gleam of reflected halogen spotlights made it hard to look at. As for Freddy, his lawyers were in Reading: it was a firm Mickey had briefly worked for and still trusted. The drive out of London to the lawyers’ offices was a relief, even if the only countryside they saw was the fields on either side of the M4.
The whole process felt like a form of torture. It didn’t begin that way – in fact it had begun with a strong sense of optimism-in-the-face-of-hard-times. After the first meeting at the insurance company, Mickey had turned to Patrick and Freddy and had said, ‘Well, that went well.’ He ought to have known better, he thought now, he really ought to have known better. He ought to have known that any case which had so many lawyers and doctors in attendance was a carcass, around which the professionals were clustering to gorge like vultures. But he had allowed himself to believe in the atmosphere of confidence, the sense given that all those present were men of good will whose only interest was in solving the unfortunate problem to the mutual satisfaction of all parties. What had happened to Freddy was tragic, but the system existed to provide a remedy, and only the details were left to be determined.
But what had happened to Freddy? That was the first problem. The doctors didn’t agree. Doctor number one, an orthopaedic surgeon, was a very formal man in his middle fifties with enormous dark-framed glasses who always seemed to be passing judgement on whoever he was speaking to. He had the weirdest body language of anyone Mickey could remember seeing, because he had so little of it: talking or listening, he sat completely immobile. He had done the initial remedial surgery and therefore was the only person actually to have looked not just at Freddy’s knee, but inside it. He was, they were told, the leading specialist in this kind of surgery not just in London or Britain but in Europe; there were, arguably, men his equal or superior in America, but only arguably. He was Mr Anterior Cruciate. His judgement was that Freddy would never play football again; he would never again run or kick a ball with intent. The very best he could hope for was that he might, if he were lucky, walk without a discernible limp.
The second doctor, visited at the insistence of the insurance company, was much nicer. He was a younger, more casual man, handsome and confident and not more than forty, and they saw him on a warm day when he’d taken off his jacket and tie. When they came into his office, he’d been listening to a Bob Dylan CD that he turned off by remote control. He took care to put Freddy at his ease, to smile and say how sorry he was for his trouble. Even his hands, touching and very very carefully manipulating the knee, were gentle. He told them that he had looked extensively at X-rays and at the surgical notes of his distinguished colleague – for whom he had the highest regard – and that in his opinion, Freddy had a 50 per cent chance of being able to play professional sport again. At that point, he gestured to a photograph on the wall behind him of a professional cricket player, a bowler in mid-delivery stride, jumping half a metre in the air, his whole weight – and to Freddy’s eye, he looked a bit fat –
about to land on his left, front, leg. The doctor said that he had used a new technique to operate on the cricketer’s left anterior cruciate ligament, which had been in the same condition as Freddy’s after he broke his leg, and that photo, taken over a year ago, was the result. The cricketer was still playing cricket, and bowling quicker than ever. He did not say that the other doctor was wrong but he made it very clear that he believed he himself was right.
So they had to go and talk to a third doctor, one agreed on by both of the other two – a third opinion which both of them could see as an acceptable second opinion. This involved a train trip to Manchester, Freddy playing Championship Manager on his PSP, Mickey driving everyone within earshot crazy by making calls on his iPhone until the battery ran out, and Patrick looking out the window at this country he knew so little about. The countryside looked so empty, the city- and townscapes so old, so crowded, so thick with history and long habitation, and so impossible to know.
This third surgeon was amiable, crisp, and made it evident that in his own judgement he was the clear first choice to provide the opinion and when time came to do the surgery. He had light-coloured hair and fair skin and seemed to have been freshly scrubbed; he radiated cleanness. He listened briskly, asked questions briskly, and examined Freddy’s knee with a brisk air too, as if he thought Freddy might be malingering. Then after all this briskness he would not give them a verdict then and there, not even a provisional one, not even a hint. He would think about it and write to them in a day or two’s time.
The letter, when it came, agreed with the first surgeon. Freddy in his judgement would never play football again. He said that he was very sorry.
All that was the positive, practical, forward-moving part of the experience. It got worse from there, because it was at this point that the insurance company and the lawyers took over. Mickey couldn’t believe it. He knew perfectly well that if you left the taps running in the bath, and water came through the ceiling of the downstairs flat and trashed it, the insurance company would niggle and carp and look for exclusions and exemptions and generally seek every way they could to weasel out of paying. Everyone knew that, it was a fact of life. Or they would screw you so hard by raising the premiums that you would have been better off not claiming in the first place. No-claims bonuses, no-fault car insurance: all these were giant conspiracies against the public. Everybody knew that. But seeing that this was a young man’s whole life – not just his livelihood (though that as well) but his whole life, the thing which was at the centre of his seventeen-year-old existence – Mickey thought they might have shown a bit of ordinary human decency. He thought they might have had the common humanity to treat the case on its merits and pony up. The insurance was for a rainy day, and Freddy’s knee was that rainy day. It was as rainy as it fucking well got.
Well, you might have thought that, but if you did, you were dead wrong. It had become clear that the insurers had no intention of simply paying up. Every letter was answered with the maximum possible delay, every phone call was bounced around between the various senior executives who were ‘handling’ the case, and every opportunity was taken for pissiness or evasiveness or stalling. They sought to explore the possibility of a legal challenge against the player who had tackled Freddy; that was a whole series of meetings between them and their lawyers and Freddy’s lawyers and the club. They then sought to look into the possibility that Freddy himself had been reckless, that his own behaviour – which meant reaching for the ball after he’d turned and spun and flicked it on – was a piece of contributory recklessness. Then they tried to look into the possibility that the first piece of surgery after the tackle, done by Mr Anterior Cruciate himself, had been botched, and had made things worse, and therefore that it was the surgeon – or rather his insurer – who was legally responsible for paying for the damage to Freddy’s knee. They did anything and everything they could to stall, frustrate, delay, and block any resolution of Freddy’s case. The fact that Freddy’s case wasn’t a case, it was Freddy, his whole life, seemed to weigh on them not at all.
78
Roger was sitting in his office, not thinking about anything much, which these days meant he was half-entertaining a half-fantasy about what it would be like to go off with Matya and live somewhere else, Hungary even, her home town, him the exotic sexy British man who had thrown it all up to go and live with his hot sexy Hungarian, eating goulash and making love all morning . . . or somewhere warm perhaps, yes, that was better, somewhere with palm trees and a hammock, he’d run a little restaurant out of a shack serving nothing but grilled fish, everyone had always said his barbecues were brilliant, yes, that was the one, serving his lovely grilled fish, living in a bungalow near the beach, the shutters open, Matya not wearing anything much except a T-shirt and a bikini and maybe a grass skirt, which was a cliché but what the hell it was his fantasy, and making love all morning, and then a nap in the hammock after the lunchtime rush . . . and then his deputy Mark appeared framed in the doorway of Roger’s office. This was no mean feat, given Roger’s field of view over the rest of the open-plan trading floor, but Mark seemed to pride himself on his ability to creep up on Roger when he wasn’t expecting it. Roger’s attention came back to the day and the place he was actually in: a set of figures needing to be prepared, a Wednesday morning in the City of London, of course raining, every built and living thing in sight a different shade of grey.
Mark tapped the door frame with his knuckle, a gesture he made into a kind of fidget, and asked, ‘Am I disturbing you?’ This was something he always asked at the start of any conversation at work, and its ritual nature was borne out by the fact that he did not wait for an answer and came straight into Roger’s office.
‘The figures,’ said Roger, not meaning to make it sound like a sigh but finding that he had.
‘The figures,’ said Mark, who came round to Roger’s side of the workstation – this was their routine – and laid out a spread of papers. He began to talk and to go through the numbers, which were neither good nor bad, pointing things out with his red marker pen. Roger grunted and let Mark talk through the data. His attention faded in and out and he kept his end of the analysis up with grunting, nodding, and occasionally pointing at some numbers. He was more and more like this at work these days. It wasn’t a desperate need to be somewhere else, or someone else, it was more a mild longing, a gentle absence; he was partly not there, more or less all the time. After Mark had talked and crunched numbers and made points for about twenty minutes, Roger looked at his watch and said, ‘Time for the show.’ The two men collected their papers and left for the conference room. Roger knew that if there were any difficult points at the meeting, he could bounce the questions over to his deputy.
And as for that deputy, and what he was thinking, well . . .
79
Mark, looking over Roger’s shoulder while he himself, as usual, did all the work – Mark whose great preoccupation was, and had been ever since childhood, his feeling that he needed the world to acknowledge him as the heroic main character in his own story – Mark was thinking that he, Mark, had been a naughty boy. In fact those very words would sometimes run through his mind, like a nursery jingle or a pop-music ear worm, a tune you’d got stuck in your mind and couldn’t get rid of. I’ve been a naughty boy, I’ve been a naughty boy . . .
The fright with Jez, when he had nearly been caught at his monitor, had been a real fright. It still wasn’t something Mark liked to think about. Jez might have gone to his boss; might have done anything. And physically, at an animal level, Mark was frightened of Jez. But a strong man with a definite purpose did not over-dwell on such minor setbacks, and all Mark had done was lie low for a month or two and not do any rummaging around other people’s desks or terminals – though, because he was a strong man acting on a plan, he stuck to the plan, and kept on coming in to the office before anyone else. That way there would be no change in his behaviour when he went back to his scheme. This was how you had to think if you wanted
to get things done.
After six weeks, Mark had gone back to work on his plan, and had immediately had a breakthrough. One of his old mates from back-office days now worked in Compliance, the section of the bank which monitored staff’s adherence to the various laws and codes of practice and risk-control models. Dropping in to visit him one day, Mark found him out of the room, having left behind on his desk a Post-it pad covered in numbers. The string of digits was, Mark guessed, the strongly encrypted password to something. Taking a big risk, Mark came round to the terminal and checked the log-in and found that while his colleague had a weekly changing password he also – because those passwords were impossible to remember – kept a file of passwords, to which he now, he found, had the key. It was really as easy as that, if you knew what you were doing. Mark had already found an old account which had once been used to balance trades at the end of the day and which was supposed to be for short-term, twenty-four-hour-only use; but precisely because it hadn’t been used in so long, he was now able to delete it from Compliance’s systems without any discrepancies appearing. So now he could log on to colleagues’ accounts without their knowledge, trade, park the profits (and losses, if there were any, though that was unlikely) in the no-longer-dormant account. The system was supposed to flag anything which seemed statistically anomalous – but he could use his access to Compliance to track any alerts, and sign off on them, before anyone else noticed. He was in business.
The plan was simple. Trade, not on his own account, obviously – he was no thief, thank you very much! – but on the bank’s, until he had made, say, £50 million. Serious money. An amount which didn’t risk the bank but which was irrefutable evidence of his talents. Then, fess up. Tell them what he had done and let them draw the obvious conclusion: that he was a risk-taker with a proven talent for delivering spectacular returns, and there were fifty million reasons for giving him what he wanted – which, in the short term anyway, was Roger’s job.
Capital: A Novel Page 39