On the Edge

by Michael Ridpath

  OK, perhaps Jen was being overly sensitive to the kind of abuse regularly doled out to women, and to men for that matter, on a trading floor, but she was basically right. She shouldn’t have to live with it if she didn’t want to. And the way she had been made to suffer for telling the truth was appalling.

  He also didn’t like the way senior people at Bloomfield Weiss had allowed Carr-Jones to get away with it, even encouraged him. He wasn’t surprised at Simon Bibby, the head of Global Fixed Income, who was notorious within the firm as a serial career killer. Several years before, while Calder was working in New York, Bibby had arranged for a young English trader to take the rap for a mammoth six-hundred-million dollar loss that had really been the responsibility of his boss. Now he was trying the same thing again. The spineless Benton Davis was going along with it, as was Linda Stubbes. Calder was disappointed in her; he thought she had more integrity. But the person who really disappointed him was Tarek. When Calder worked for him on the Prop Desk they had become friends and built up a strong mutual trust, cemented through the tribulations of the bond market. He knew Tarek could see what Carr-Jones was up to, yet he hadn’t lifted a finger to help either Jen or him. Too scared of exposing himself politically.

  Well, some battles you had to fight, even if you ran the risk of losing.

  Calder didn’t like losing. Despite Jen’s taunts, he wasn’t going to give up and do the pragmatic thing: get another job. He knew exactly what his father would say. ‘What did I tell you? The City is rotten and you’d be better off out of it.’ Well, maybe he was right, but stuff him. And stuff Nicky as well, who would no doubt agree with him.

  Carr-Jones was not going to win. Calder would make sure of that.

  He turned off the shower. The phone was ringing. He swore to himself, grabbed a towel and padded out to the telephone in his bedroom. The answering machine cut in just as he was about to pick it up.

  It was Jen. The message was hesitant. Confused. She mumbled some incoherent words and then rang off.

  As the drips on his body cooled, Calder considered calling her back. She hadn’t actually asked him to. But when he had last seen her, she seemed in a bad way. And the message was strange. There was something she wanted to tell him, he was sure.

  Sod it. He was in too foul a mood to listen patiently to her woes and try to cheer her up. He’d call her tomorrow.

  ‘Alex Calder? I’m Detective Constable Neville.’

  The woman at the door waving an identity card was blonde, with rosy cheeks and wide innocent eyes. She was wearing a smart leather jacket and trousers. She had a slight northern accent. She didn’t really look like Calder’s idea of a tough policewoman.

  Calder had just returned from an early morning session at the swimming pool, where he had thrashed up and down for an hour. He felt that oddly pleasant combination of fatigue and invigoration that strenuous exercise can induce in the deskbound.

  He frowned. ‘What is it?’ His immediate thought was that Carr-Jones had set him up somehow. Maybe he had framed him in some way for the rape of Tessa Trew.

  The woman looked grim. ‘Can I come in?’

  ‘OK,’ Calder said. As he led her into the living room he resolved not to answer her questions and get a lawyer at the first sign of suspicion on her part.

  The policewoman sat down. ‘I have some bad news,’ she said. ‘It’s about one of your colleagues from work. Jennifer Tan.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘She died last night.’

  ‘No!How?’

  ‘Her body was found in the courtyard of her building. It looks as if she jumped, but we’re still keeping an open mind. She left a note. Or a text message, actually.’

  ‘A text message?’

  ‘Yes. From her mobile phone to her mother.’

  ‘Oh, my God. The poor woman.’ Calder struggled to take in what he had been told. Jen had killed herself. It seemed impossible. Too melodramatic for real life, or at least for office life. Occasionally men died in the RAF, where there were obvious physical risks even in peacetime, but at an investment bank where everyone sat around talking all day? One thought hit Calder straight away. Everything had changed. Everything.

  ‘Was it… quick?’ he said.

  ‘She fell six floors.’

  ‘Oh.’ For a second he thought of the mess that would make. Then he tried to think of something else. ‘I’ve never been there.’

  ‘Do you mind if I ask you some questions?’ the policewoman said kindly, taking out her notebook.

  ‘No. No, not at all.’

  ‘You worked with Miss Tan?’

  Calder flinched at the use of the past tense. With Jen’s death the present had become the past, ramming home his first reaction to the news. The world had changed, or at least his world had.

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  ‘I understand she had had some difficulties at work recently. She was bringing a case against Bloomfield Weiss for sexual harassment, and she had resigned.’

  ‘That’s correct.’

  ‘Can you tell me a bit about it?’

  Calder described the events of the last few weeks as they related to Jen. He tried to make his comments sound objective, but he was sure his anger shone through. The detective made notes.

  ‘How did Jen feel about all this?’ she asked.

  ‘She was upset, naturally.’

  ‘How upset?’

  ‘Extremely. She was very angry – furious. But the last time I saw her she seemed depressed. Listless. Very negative. She talked about how lonely she was, how her parents no longer spoke to her, how she hated London, how hard it would be to find another job. She seemed obsessed with the case against Bloomfield Weiss.’

  ‘Did she talk about taking her own life?’

  ‘No, she didn’t. And I can’t imagine Jen killing herself. At least, not the Jen I used to work with. But on the other hand, she was definitely in a bad way last time I saw her. She called me last night. Left a message on my machine.’

  The detective looked up sharply from her notes. ‘Is it still there?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Can I hear it?’

  ‘Of course.’ Calder went over to the phone and pressed Play. Jen’s voice, the voice of a dead person, echoed round the room. What Calder had thought sounded confused the night before now sounded desperate.

  ‘Did you call her back, Mr Calder?’

  ‘No,’ said Calder, taking a deep breath, realizing that this was something he would have to live with for the rest of his life. ‘No, I didn’t.’

  Calder’s swipe card still opened the turnstile in the lobby of Bloomfield Weiss. He jabbed the button for the lift, and tapped his foot. From the moment the policewoman had left his flat he had known what he had to do. He had followed her out of the door, run down the hill to the main road and hailed a taxi. Only one thought had been in his head as the cab had fought its way through the traffic towards Broadgate.

  The lift deposited him on the second floor. He marched through the swing doors into the trading room. There was an atmosphere of shock in the room, but Calder, normally so attuned to the level of activity around him, didn’t notice it.

  He crossed the floor to the Derivatives Group. Carr-Jones was talking intently to one of his people, Perumal, and so didn’t see Calder approaching. But Perumal saw. His mouth dropped open. Carr-Jones turned.

  Calder timed it just right. He lengthened the last two strides to position his left foot in the perfect spot to gain maximum momentum and swung fast and hard with his right fist. He caught Carr-Jones on the chin, before he even had time to register what was happening. His glasses flew off his nose, he slumped backwards and his knees buckled underneath him. He banged against a chair and slid to the floor.

  Calder glared at his unconscious body for a second, then turned, moving rapidly towards the exit. Hands tried to grab him half-heartedly, but he shook them off.

  ‘Zero!’ He recognized Tarek’s voice and paused.

  Tarek ran
towards him, panting.

  ‘She’s dead, Tarek.’

  ‘I know,’ Tarek said, holding up his hands in a calming gesture. ‘But there’s no need to get angry. Calm down.’

  ‘There’s every need,’ said Calder. ‘That’s something you should have realized a long time ago. There’s every need.’

  ‘Here he comes!’

  It was only six thirty in the morning, but all the employees of Teton Capital Management clustered round Vikram. A space had been cleared around the TV in the trading room, which was tuned to a business cable channel. Coverage had gone live to the Ministry of Finance in Rome. Martel slipped his way to the front of the crowd, his six foot seven inches ensuring that several people behind him couldn’t see. They didn’t complain, but jostled with each other for a better view.

  Massimo Tagliaferi, Italy’s new Prime Minister appeared with Guido Gallotti at his side. Tagliaferi was carrying a prepared statement.

  Martel fidgeted as he waited. It was almost unbearable. He could feel the pride swelling inside him. Over the last few days he had become a changed man. Only a week ago he had felt at the far edge of despair, fighting for his very survival. But now the tide had turned: suddenly everything was going his way. He had even made love to Cheryl.

  Thanks to the benign revaluation of the IGLOO notes, the Teton Fund had just scraped by until the election, juggling cash and bonds between accounts. As expected, there had been no clear winner, but Massimo Tagliaferi’s DNP had joined up with the Northern League, the newly reconstituted Christian Democrats and a couple of minor parties to form a coalition. As leader of the largest party, Tagliaferi became Prime Minister and Gallotti was appointed Minister of Finance. Immediately there had been a clamour from the large countries in the European Union, especially France and Germany, that any attempt by Italy to leave the euro would be illegal, unconstitutional and might result in fines, cancelled subsidies and expulsion. But no one believed the threats, least of all the market. BTPs went into freefall. Martel’s losses dissolved. He didn’t close out his positions. He smelled profit. Huge profit.

  Tagliaferi began reading from his text. Martel understood a little Italian, but a virtually simultaneous translation appeared in subtitles underneath. The room watched in dead silence.

  At first Tagliaferi spoke of Italy’s commitment to Europe, of its long history of trading constructively with its European partners, and of the new government’s determination that this would continue. For a moment Martel was assailed by doubts again. Perhaps Tagliaferi didn’t have the courage to go through with it. Perhaps French and German strong-arming had worked after all. Perhaps the Teton Fund’s profits were once again going to slide into losses. He felt the familiar twist in his stomach. He could scarcely watch.

  Tagliaferi turned the page and looked straight at the cameras, a barely suppressed smile on his face. He spoke and there was uproar. Martel had to wait a couple of seconds for the subtitles to catch up.

  ‘It is in this spirit of friendship and cooperation that the Italian government announces the withdrawal from the euro and the creation of the “new lira” which will be allowed to float freely against international currencies.’

  There it was! The room erupted in cheering. Martel’s back was clapped by a dozen hands. Everyone was hugging each other, congratulating each other. Martel drew himself up to his full height and smiled.

  ‘Look! They’re redenominating the debt!’ Vikram pointed at ‘the screen, where Tagliaferi was continuing to outline how the transition would be accomplished. The redenomination was key. It meant that Italy’s euro debt would be converted into new lire. Which meant that the Teton Fund would be able to buy back all the bonds it had sold in euros in the new currency, which would certainly weaken against the old, generating a sizeable profit. And the IGLOO notes would be worth a fortune.

  The numbers flicked through Martel’s brain. The Teton Fund would make hundreds of millions. No, more than a billion.

  Tagliaferi had finished, and the camera switched to a reporter in Lisbon. The speculation that Portugal, Greece and Ireland would follow Italy in quitting the euro was intensifying by the second.

  Then the screen changed again and Martel saw another reporter standing outside his own office building. It was barely light, yet a pack of journalists had gathered, hoping for that all important first interview.

  ‘Here in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, we still have had no word from Jean-Luc Martel, the secretive hedge-fund manager who has been blamed by many for the financial crisis that caused the Italian government to take this drastic step. From this day on, Jean-Luc Martel will be known as “The Man Who Broke the Euro”.’

  There was another cheer in the trading room.

  Martel grinned broadly. He liked that. He liked that very much. All George Soros had been able to break was the pound.

  ‘What do you think, Vikram? Time to talk to the press?’

  PART TWO

  15

  ‘You’re too high… Steady… Don’t lower the nose… Jesus!’

  The Piper Warrior slammed into the grass runway and reared up into the air again, jarring the two occupants to their bones.

  ‘I have control,’ said Calder as he placed one hand on his own control column and smoothly opened the throttle to full power with the other. He pressed the mike button. ‘Alpha Tango going around.’

  ‘Alpha Tango. Would you like us to remove the trampoline from the runway?’

  ‘No thanks, Angela.’ Calder tried not to smile as he pointed the nose upwards. Angela was the most flirtatious radio operator in the east of England, with the sexiest voice. She didn’t always stick to the rulebook, but she attracted visiting pilots from miles around. She did have a point, though. That was quite probably Ken’s worst landing yet. Ken, Calder’s student, was a fifty-year-old accountant from King’s Lynn with a passion for flying that remained undimmed, despite the many hours he and Calder had spent bouncing around the circuit at Langthorpe aerodrome. Calder wondered whether Ken was actually getting worse with practice. He’d already done twenty-six hours, yet he was nowhere near his first solo. He was cowering in the left-hand seat, looking more like a timid schoolboy who had forgotten his homework than a successful businessman, or a competent pilot.

  ‘I think that will be the last one for today,’ Calder said. ‘Once we’ve checked the landing gear we’ll talk about what went wrong.’

  Ken nodded, relieved that someone else would be responsible for getting the aircraft onto the ground.

  Ken was a challenge, but Calder didn’t want to give up. He had already taken three students all the way through to their private pilot’s licence, and he had enjoyed teaching them. He had bought the airfield nine months earlier in partnership with Jerry Tyrell, an experienced flying instructor from Calder’s old flying club who used to give him the occasional aerobatics lesson. It was situated not too far from his old stomping ground at RAF Marham, on a ridge above the tiny village of Langthorpe, with a beautiful view of the Norfolk coast seven miles away.

  The airfield had come with a flying school, a maintenance hangar, eight aircraft, an enthusiastic band of local pilots and an unending supply of problems. But he and Jerry had enjoyed rolling up their sleeves and sorting them out. Jerry was in his late forties, recently divorced, and fed up with the family undertaker’s business he had been running in a half-hearted way, so had been eager to sell up and move on to a job where he could fly full time. The initial division of labour had been obvious, with Jerry acting as chief flying instructor and Calder providing eighty per cent of the money. Since then Calder had been in the process of building up his own instructor qualifications.

  The whole operation didn’t actually make a profit yet, but Calder was optimistic that it would one day. More importantly, he was loving it.

  He landed the aircraft carefully and taxied to the hangar, where Colin, the maintenance engineer, began to check over the landing gear. Then he and Ken made their way to the wooden hut which was the North Norfol
k Flying School. A slight, dark-faced figure was standing by the door in jeans and a blue coat, watching him approach. Calder checked the car park and saw a BMW M3 he didn’t recognize parked next to his own Maserati.

  It was Perumal Thiagajaran. He was shifting anxiously from foot to foot.

  Calder was not especially pleased to see a reminder of Bloomfield Weiss in the heart of his new world, but he gave a friendly smile and held out his hand. ‘Want to learn to fly?’ he said.

  ‘Actually, no,’ said Perumal, shaking it. ‘Do you have a moment?’

  ‘Go into the café and get a cup of tea,’ Calder said. ‘I’ll be with you when I’ve finished with my student.’

  A quarter of an hour later Calder joined him. The café was run by Paula, a hefty girl who also doubled as a fire officer. Every airfield licensed by the Civil Aviation Authority needed a fire truck, or in Langthorpe’s case a fire Land-Rover, on duty at all times, and one of the many headaches of running the place was making sure that there were always two trained people available to operate it.

  Calder and Perumal had hardly spoken at Bloomfield Weiss. Although Perumal was part of Carr-Jones’s team, Calder had nothing against him personally and he remembered that he was about the only person in the Derivatives Group Jen would still speak to. Calder had him pegged as a harmless geek. ‘So, if you don’t want to learn to fly, what are you doing here?’ he asked.

  ‘Do you still stay in touch with Bloomfield Weiss?’

  ‘No,’ Calder replied. ‘I keep well clear of the place.’

  ‘So you don’t do any work for them? Consultancy or anything?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And do you speak to any of the bosses?’

  ‘No.’ In fact, Calder hadn’t even spoken to his old friend Tarek since he had left. ‘I’m quite pleased to be out of there.’