On the Edge

by Michael Ridpath

  ‘After what happened to Jen?’

  Calder nodded. ‘That. And other things. The place has changed over the last few years. Or I’ve changed. Or something. I realized it wasn’t fun any more. And it wasn’t human.’

  ‘I see.’

  Perumal was silent. Calder sipped his tea. He had done his best to think of Bloomfield Weiss as little as possible in the year since he had resigned. After Jen’s death, the decision to leave had been easy. In that moment his determination to stand up to Carr-Jones had evaporated. He didn’t want to play the game any more. He had briefly considered moving to another investment bank, but they all had their Carr-Jones equivalents. Like it or not, the bad guys were winning in the City.

  He had felt a tremendous sense of relief when he had walked out of the Broadgate office that last time. It had been a clear, sunny day, and he had gone flying that afternoon. And the next day, and the day after that. The following week he had just returned from taking the Pitts out for a tumble through the skies when he fell into conversation with Jerry. They repaired to a local pub, and within an hour they had hatched the scheme of finding a flying school of their own to buy. Three months later and Langthorpe was theirs.

  Perumal glanced at Calder anxiously and then stared deep into his cup. ‘I’d like some advice.’

  ‘OK,’ said Calder. ‘I’ll do what I can. But, as I said, I’m a bit out of things.’ Surely Perumal hadn’t driven all this way for tips on how to climb the greasy pole at Bloomfield Weiss? If he had, he had definitely come to the wrong man.

  ‘I know. It’s because you are a bit out of things that I want to talk to you.’ Perumal swallowed. ‘Do you think there was anything suspicious about Jen’s death?’

  Now Calder’s curiosity was aroused. ‘Suspicious? What do you mean?’

  ‘Just suspicious.’

  ‘You mean, did she really kill herself?’

  Perumal shrugged.

  ‘No, I don’t think there was anything suspicious,’ Calder replied. ‘The police looked into it and decided it was suicide. It was bloody obvious Carr-Jones drove her to it. We all know that. She sent some kind of suicide text message, didn’t she? Why do you ask? What do you think?’

  Perumal took a deep breath. ‘I’m not so sure.’

  ‘That it was suicide? Why not?’

  ‘The timing of Jen’s death was very convenient.’

  ‘For who? Carr-Jones?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘Because it got her sexual harassment suit off his back?’

  ‘Not just that.’

  ‘What, then?’

  Perumal didn’t answer.

  ‘Are you saying Carr-Jones killed her?’ Calder asked, his frustration building.

  Another shrug.

  ‘Have you told the police this?’

  Perumal shook his head.

  ‘Come on, Perumal, this is absurd,’ Calder said. ‘If you think Carr-Jones killed her, you should say so. If you have evidence, you should tell the police.’

  Perumal sighed. ‘It’s not as easy as that.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘If I was sure, then I would know what to do. But I’m not sure. And I don’t have anyone to talk to about it. Which is why I came up here.’

  ‘OK, I understand.’ Calder realized how nervous Perumal was and didn’t want to scare him off. ‘Why was Jen’s death convenient to Carr-Jones?’

  Perumal opened his mouth and then hesitated. ‘If I tell you, will you promise to keep it to yourself?’

  Now it was Calder’s turn to pause. ‘No, Perumal, I won’t. If Carr-Jones did kill Jen, then I can’t keep quiet. And neither should you.’

  ‘I see,’ said Perumal. Suddenly, fear touched his eyes.

  ‘I take it you still work for him?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And you’re scared of him?’

  Perumal refused to meet Calder’s eyes. ‘I’m doing well in the group. I’ve brought in some big deals – massive deals. I’ll get a big bonus this year. I’m a star. Like you were.’

  ‘When you’re talking about people dying, that kind of thing doesn’t matter. You know that, or you wouldn’t be here.’

  Perumal shifted in his chair and turned to watch Paula wiping down the tables.

  ‘Carr-Jones is not immune from the law, you know,’ Calder went on. ‘If he was involved in Jen’s death, the police will arrest him and put him away. Where he belongs.’

  ‘I’m not saying he was involved in Jen’s death,’ Perumal said.

  ‘So what are you saying?’

  ‘I’m saying that there are too many coincidences,’ Perumal began.

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘Well, you see …’ He hesitated. Calder waited, restraining his impatience to tell Perumal to spit it out. ‘The thing is …’ Perumal frowned and glanced at Calder. Then he panicked. He pushed his chair back from the table and scrambled to his feet. ‘I’m sorry, I must be going now.’

  ‘Wait!’

  ‘No, I should never have come here. I thought you were someone I could trust, but I see I can’t expect you to help me.’

  ‘Perumal–’

  ‘Forget I was here. Forget what I said. Please.’ He rushed for the door. Calder followed him and watched him dart for his BMW and head for the airfield exit at speed.

  Martel paced up and down in the hushed lobby of the Hotel Intercontinental in Geneva, eating up the distance from one end to the other in rapid giant strides. He knew he was making the reception staff nervous, but he didn’t care. He had just come from a long session at Chalmet et Cie, the Swiss bank who had introduced him to many of his investors. He had only been waiting for this next meeting for five minutes, but he was already impatient.

  It was hard to focus. Try as he might, he couldn’t get his mind off his conversation with Cheryl the night before. As usual, the Teton Fund’s troubles had kept him awake. He had tossed and turned for hours and then decided to call her. It was three o’clock in the morning in Geneva and nine p.m. in New York. She was staying at their one-bedroom apartment on Central Park West.

  She had taken a while to answer.

  ‘Mon ange, it’s me.’

  ‘Oh.’ She sounded stunned. ‘Oh, yeah. Honey. Gee. It’s pretty late in Switzerland, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes.’ Martel glanced at the numbers on the hotel clock. ‘Three-oh-six. I’m glad I caught you in. What are you doing?’

  ‘Oh, nothing. Just reading in bed.’

  ‘Is that where you are now?’ Martel conjured up the image of his wife waiting for him, alone in the large bed. What was she wearing, he wondered.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, her voice strained.

  Then Martel heard it. Quite distinctly. A cough. A man’s cough.

  ‘What was that?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I heard a cough.’

  ‘It was the TV.’

  That didn’t make sense. Martel strained. There was no background chatter. ‘I can’t hear it now.’

  ‘That’s because I’ve just turned it off.’

  ‘But there isn’t a TV in the bedroom.’

  ‘What is this, Jean-Luc? Have you called me up just to give me a hard time?’

  ‘No. It’s just, I don’t understand.’

  ‘What’s the matter? Don’t you believe me?’ Cheryl was beginning to sound angry. She was daring him to call her a liar, accuse her of having a man in her bedroom.

  ‘No, mon ange. I just thought I heard someone else in there with you.’

  ‘I don’t believe this,’ said Cheryl. ‘I’m going back to my book.’ And she hung up.

  Martel called back, but the phone just rang six times and the answering machine cut in, his own voice asking him whether he wanted to leave a message.

  He didn’t.

  It couldn’t be true, could it? That Cheryl had a man in her apartment, their apartment? The concept of Cheryl cheating on him had never before occurred to Martel. He assumed that if anyone was going to cheat on anyone in his m
arriage, it would be him, and he congratulated himself on the fact that so far he had been strictly faithful.

  Perhaps Cheryl was so unsatisfied with Martel’s sexual performance that she had looked for fulfilment elsewhere? The very thought stung Martel’s pride, stung it deeply. The return to normality in their sex life after the Italian triumph the year before had lasted for only a month. Now he was scared even to try to make love to his wife.

  Was he, Jean-Luc Martel, a cocu? No. No, he just couldn’t accept it.

  When they both got back to Jackson Hole Martel would have it out with her. Force her to tell him the truth.

  Martel paced even faster. Except he wouldn’t. He knew he wouldn’t. Cheryl wouldn’t take kindly to that kind of inquisition. If she wasn’t having an affair, she’d be justifiably furious, and if she was, she might walk out on him. He’d lose her. He hated the thought of that.

  A pile of magazines rested on a coffee table in a corner of the lobby. Martel spotted Fortune among them. He picked it up, curious if the latest edition would include the interview the magazine had done with him a few weeks before.

  It did. There was an article entitled ‘The Man Who Broke the Euro?’ Martel smiled, until he noticed the question mark. What was that doing there?

  He flipped to the page. There was a photograph of him, a good one. He was sitting in his office, leaning back in his chair with his hands behind his head, his tanned, handsome face displaying a mixture of quiet confidence and piercing intelligence. Behind him, through his office window, rose the magisterial Tetons in their white robes. The article was several pages long.

  He speed read it. The first part outlined Martel’s background, his previous triumphs and his thoughts on trading, including some of his more esoteric ideas linking Francis Galton, Charles Darwin and Richard Thaler, what he called ‘The Evolution of the Crowd’. Martel’s hypothesis was that the behaviour of the market was like an organism that evolved and changed according to the principles of natural selection and statistics. The Fortune journalist hadn’t quite understood the subtleties of the theory but Martel was pleased. At last people were listening to him. Then followed a description of the events of the previous spring when Italy had left the euro. So far, so good. Then the tone of the article changed. Other people were interviewed, many of whom he’d never heard of. Two economists said that Martel’s trades had actually had very little to do with Italy’s decision to leave the euro. That in fact the press and politicians had been happy to use Martel as a scapegoat, whereas the real cause had been Italy’s dismal economic performance. Martel’s anger grew.

  There were some quotes from Walter Lesser, the New York hedge-fund manager who had been unimpressed by Martel’s arguments for shorting Italian government bonds. Rather than having the courage to admit that he was wrong, Lesser claimed that Martel had a reputation for taking imprudent risks, that the Teton Fund had nearly gone bust the year before, and that Martel had just been lucky.

  There the article ended.

  Martel was gripped by fury. He tugged at the pages in the magazine trying to pull them out. How dare Lesser? He, Jean-Luc Martel, had used his power and his genius to bring Italy to its knees. Everyone knew that.

  The pages flew out of the magazine with a satisfying rip. One of the hotel staff scurried round the reception desk. ‘May I take that, sir?’ he said. Martel swore at him in French and the clerk scurried away again and picked up a phone.

  Martel’s stomach howled. That pain had come back with a vengeance. Because the Teton Fund was once again taking a big risk, a risk many times greater than that he had taken the year before.

  Fortune might have doubts about Martel’s massive Italian trade, but investors throughout the world had been impressed. The cash had flooded in until the Teton Fund’s assets totalled more than three billion dollars. These investors had high expectations, which Martel felt under pressure to meet. For a year he had been dipping a toe into the water here and there, buying mortgages, Brazilian equities, gold, oil, searching in vain for the next big opportunity. Finally, he had found it.

  Japan.

  For decades, the Japanese stock market had gone nowhere. The economic miracle of the nineteen sixties and seventies was but a distant memory. But Martel had returned from a two-week tour of the Far East convinced that things were about to change. He detected a new confidence among Japanese manufacturers, and he had met a couple of highly placed businessmen and government ministers in Korea and Thailand who had intimated that the Japanese were soon to regain their position as the industrial powerhouse of Asia. So Jean-Luc Martel, The Man Who Broke the Euro, had decided that it was finally time for Japan to have its day in the sun again. He had begun buying Japanese shares. Billions of dollars’ worth of them, using all the tricks in his book to maximize his exposure. This had included some enormous derivative trades Vikram had fixed up with Bloomfield Weiss.

  The sheer weight of his buying had forced the market up for a few weeks. The Teton Fund was showing a nice profit, several hundred million dollars, but Martel had held out for more. He was greedy. He wanted to make the billions his investors expected.

  Then had come the announcement that the biggest bank in Japan had discovered a pile of bad loans. In the following week three other major banks made similar discoveries. The market decided that Japan had not turned the corner after all. So prices slipped and slid, despite Martel’s frantic buying in an attempt to single-handedly shore up Japan’s industrial base. The Teton Fund’s unrealized losses climbed over a billion dollars and were now nearing two. And once again Martel was forced into the agonizing business of passing collateral around between brokers in a desperate attempt to prevent them from shutting him down.

  A hotel manager approached him with two burly porters. At the same time a slight, balding Arab with a thick moustache emerged from the bank of lifts.

  ‘Monsieur –’ began the manager.

  ‘Fuck off,’ muttered Martel in French and strode forward to meet the Arab.

  ‘Monsieur Martel?’ The Arab shook Martel’s proffered hand limply. Martel was surprised by the piercing intelligence of the other man’s large brown eyes. ‘Tarek al-Seesi. I apologize for keeping you waiting.’

  Perumal couldn’t concentrate on the movie on the tiny screen in front of him, some trivial romantic comedy. It was mid-afternoon, and had been for the last several hours. Forty thousand feet beneath him was the Nebraska prairie, stretching four hundred miles on to the Rocky Mountains. The aeroplane would land in Denver in an hour or so, according to the captain. Then a two-hour wait and a smaller plane to Jackson Hole.

  He had never actually visited his biggest client before. Carr-Jones had been nagging him for the last year, and in the end had ordered him to go. The New York office had been trying to steal the account, claiming it was ridiculous to cover someone in Wyoming out of London. Carr-Jones needed to prove that his team was in constant touch with the Teton Fund. That meant going there. It was all Perumal had been able to do to prevent his boss from coming with him. More talk of ‘the Indian mafia’.

  So here he was. Flying into the mouth of the tiger.

  Perumal took a deep breath. Everything was spinning out of control. But it would all be resolved soon, one way or another. And when it was all over, he would be either dead or in jail.

  He wasn’t sure which was worse. If he went to jail, the shame would be impossible for his parents to bear. It would be impossible for him to bear. His mother was fiercely proud of her son. Perumal had earned a handsome bonus the year before and had been able to send seventy thousand dollars home. When he had gone back to Kerala in August his mother’s delight in her son’s achievements had been overwhelming. His wife, Radha, too, had been impressed. Theirs had been an arranged marriage, engineered by Perumal’s mother, and Radha’s family was richer than his. Now it was clear that Perumal’s mother had been correct: her son would be able to look after Radha very well in the coming years.

  His mother liked her comforts, but she
wouldn’t want her son to become a criminal. Neither would his father. A simply pious man, every morning he would do puja, lighting incense and saying prayers before going to work. They would both feel that he had let down his family and betrayed them for all the effort they had put into his education. And they would be right. Almost better if he died.

  And death was a real possibility. He had received the e-mail the week before. Three simple words: Remember Jennifer Tan. The sender’s address was some gobbledygook; the message could have been from someone thousands of miles away or in the next office. Either way, its meaning was clear.

  Calder had been his one hope. Although Perumal didn’t know him well, he knew he was honest and decisive and, most importantly, he was now outside Bloomfield Weiss. But Calder was too honest. As soon as Perumal had begun talking to him, he realized that Calder would insist on going straight to the authorities and blowing the whole thing open. And that was something Perumal wanted to avoid.

  There was no way out.

  He stared hard out of the window and thought he saw the indistinct shape of the Rocky Mountains far in the distance. Somewhere up there to the north-west lay Jackson Hole.

  No, Perumal was not looking forward to this trip.

  16

  Calder slammed the door behind him and set out across the marshes. His cottage was isolated, a mile down the lane from the village of Hanham Staithe and half a mile from the sea. Or a mile and a half at low tide. The house was two hundred years old, constructed with a mixture of flint and ancient brick. It had once been at the end of a row of half a dozen similar buildings but the wind and the moisture and the isolation had worn the others away, so that nothing was left but barely traceable indentations in the pasture behind the house.

  There would be no flying at Langthorpe aerodrome today. The clouds were low and grey, and there was a steady north wind blowing in from the sea. A north wind in Norfolk in January is bitingly cold, but Calder had dressed to withstand it. It meant he should be alone.

  As he marched along the top of a dyke towards the sea, his steps rapid against the wind, he thought yet again about his conversation with Perumal the previous weekend. Each time Perumal’s words and the expression of fear on his face came into Calder’s consciousness he tried to ignore it. He had turned his back on the City and he wanted to keep it turned. The flying school and the airfield absorbed his energies: there was so much to do, so much to worry about, and he and Jerry really did seem to be making progress. He was spending a lot of time in the air, either teaching, or messing around in the Pitts. His aerobatic technique was improving and he thrilled every time he executed a near-perfect manoeuvre.