On the Edge

by Michael Ridpath

  Calder parked the banger in the shade of a Chile pine, a monkey-puzzle tree. As a child he had been fascinated by its large pine cones and crazy branches. It was difficult to climb, but at the age of seven he had tried and succeeded. He had risen thirty feet, above the height of the eaves of the house, when he decided to come down. He couldn’t. Too proud to shout for help, he stayed up there for two hours until his distraught mother found him. She called the fire brigade to get him down. His father was furious.

  But Calder wanted to go higher. So he tried again, the following week, this time getting as close to the top as possible. Once again he couldn’t get down. The fire brigade didn’t seem to mind, but the doctor was very angry. He fetched his saw and began to lop off the lower branches. Only then had Calder started to cry.

  But the tree was alive and well, and Calder found he now had no desire to scale it.

  The garden was as tidy as he would expect, scarcely a dead leaf in sight. Snowdrops peeked out from the beds by the front door. Were they the same ones his mother had planted all those years ago, he wondered. Or did his father replenish them every year?

  He went around to the back, eased the loose brick away from the top of the garden wall, and took out the key from its hiding place. He unlocked the back door and passed through into the kitchen. As spotless and tidy as an operating theatre. Although his father had done his best to leave the kitchen and indeed the whole house the same as it had been when his mother died, he had been unable to suppress his desire for order. Calder’s mother, like his sister, liked to live in chaos. Dr Calder had indulged this while she was alive, but in the months after her death, he had tidied up. The place had remained tidy.

  Calder wandered through the house. It was three years since he had been there. Its familiarity was comforting, bringing back a crowd of memories. It would be a shame to sell it.

  Anne was right, there were gaps. The most obvious was in the dining room where the painting of the River Tweed by Francis Cadell used to hang. The other Cadell had hung in the drawing room, but that too had disappeared. The clock on the mantelpiece was gone, as was the bookcase. It must have been sold very recently: the books were still piled up on the floor. Calder opened the sideboard. The silver drawer was nearly empty.

  He moved through to his father’s study and the explanation was lying on his desk: the Racing Post, open to a meeting at York. There were notations on the page, with one horse, Mercator, ringed. There were two form guides on the desk, and an exercise book, filled with his father’s neat handwriting: the doctor disapproved of the traditional GP’s scrawl, believing in accuracy and clarity in all things. Calder had had qualms about going though his father’s papers, but not now. He checked the desk drawers. The top one contained stationery and a collection of ancient pens and pencils. The second held a neat pile of lottery tickets bundled together with an elastic band. The third held bills. Calder riffled through them. On top was a statement from a bookmaker in Selkirk. Seven thousand pounds! That was serious money.

  But it was the second bill that brought him up short. This bookmaker was based in Berwick. One hundred and forty-three thousand pounds.

  Calder slumped into his father’s chair, holding the bill in front of him.

  His father was a gambler. A serious, hard-core, out-of-control gambler. He glanced at the scribbled notes, the form books. He was one of those deluded gamblers who thought they knew how the horses worked, but didn’t. Like all those failed traders who thought they knew what made the bond markets tick, but didn’t.

  Calder considered how a bookmaker could let a family doctor run up bills of over a hundred thousand pounds. He must have believed his father’s credit was good. The doctor must have been a long-standing customer who had paid off his debts over the years. Decades, even. Over time the stakes would have steadily risen until now he was over his head. He had probably made some desperate bets to win everything back. And lost.

  Calder didn’t know how long he sat there, staring. But he heard the sound of the front door slamming, and someone moving through to the kitchen. So his father still came back from the surgery for lunch. Calder kept quiet.

  Five minutes later the doctor himself appeared at the study door, with a sandwich on a plate in one hand and three newspapers under his arm. It took him a second to notice Calder.

  The newspapers slipped to the floor.

  ‘Alex?’

  ‘Hello, Father.’

  The doctor looked at his son, and at the bookie’s statement he was holding in his hand, and his face went white. Then the colour surged back. ‘Alex! What the devil do you think you’re doing breaking into my study and reading through my private papers?’

  ‘Your gambling debts, you mean?’

  ‘Whatever they are, they’re no concern of yours!’

  ‘How long?’ Calder asked, quietly.

  ‘I don’t have to answer any questions from you about my affairs.’

  ‘How long?’ Calder repeated.

  For a moment it looked as if the doctor was going to keep up the bluster, the righteous indignation. But then his shoulders sagged and he slumped into a chair by a bookcase, still holding his plate. He closed his eyes. There was only one explanation, and there was no point in trying to invent another. ‘Since after your mother died.’

  ‘How soon after?’

  ‘Not long.’

  ‘But how did you manage to lose that much?’

  ‘It was just a run of bad luck,’ the doctor said, searching for his son’s eyes, his understanding. ‘You know about bad luck in your line of work.’

  ‘I do,’ Calder said. ‘And you can only lose as much as you risk.’

  ‘It’s not what it seems,’ the doctor said. ‘I’m good at this, you know. I know horses. Most years … many years, I come out ahead. But not last year. I think it was all the rain we had. Or maybe the jockeys are fixing races. Something’s going on.’

  ‘What’s going on is you’ve lost control of your gambling.’

  ‘I’ll win the money back.’

  ‘How? By putting the house on Mercator in the three-thirty?’ Calder’s voice was heavy with sarcasm. ‘No you won’t.’

  ‘I’ll wait for an odds-on banker.’

  The racing slang sounded strange coming out of the mouth of his father. ‘You’ve bet on a few bankers recently, haven’t you, Father? And none of them have come off.’

  ‘Aye.’ Dr Calder nodded.

  ‘How could you …’ Calder suddenly found it difficult to speak, but he had to say it. ‘How could you attack me for what I do when you were doing the same thing all the time?’

  ‘This is just a hobby,’ his father said.

  ‘A hobby! You’re ruining yourself.’

  The old man sat up in his chair and faced his son. ‘I’m sorry, Alex.’

  ‘You can’t just apologize!’ Calder’s voice had been calm and controlled, but now it was rising. ‘It’s not just the money, it’s … I know I didn’t act like it, but I’ve always respected you. Although I pretended never to listen, and I said I disagreed with you, underneath it all I was afraid you were right when you said I was just a gambler, that I was frittering away my life. That’s why I got so angry. But now I find out you’re even worse than me. How could you be such a hypocrite?’

  ‘I knew what the horses were doing to me. I didn’t want the same thing to happen to you. It’s as simple as that.’

  ‘Don’t try to dress this all up as concern for me!’ Calder was shouting now. ‘If you were really so concerned for me, you wouldn’t have lied to me! You wouldn’t have criticized me all these years for doing honestly what you were always doing in secret. What would Mum think? And Anne?’

  ‘Don’t tell Annie.’

  ‘I have to,’ muttered Calder. ‘I’m not hiding this from her.’

  The doctor closed his eyes.

  Calder took a deep breath, fighting to bring his anger under control. ‘I want you to stop,’ he said.

  ‘But how am I going t
o win enough money back to pay that if I stop?’ the doctor asked, pointing at the bill in Calder’s hands.

  Calder shook his head. ‘You still don’t get it, do you? You’ve been doing this for years, and you still think you can win. You can win one race, maybe two. But you can’t beat the bookies in the long run. They have the odds on their side, and they have the information. They want you to win sometimes, because they know the more you win, the more you’ll bet. But it has to stop.’

  ‘Then what about that bill?’

  ‘I’ll pay it,’ Calder said.

  ‘But it’s a hundred and thirty thousand pounds!’

  ‘A hundred and forty-three thousand, actually.’

  ‘Do you have that kind of money?’

  ‘I can afford it,’ Calder said. ‘And I’ll pay the other one. Are there any more?’

  ‘One more,’ said his father. ‘It’s for about ten thousand. In that bottom drawer.’

  Calder opened the drawer and fished it out.

  ‘OK. I’ll pay these now. But I want you to take the house off the market. And I want you to promise me that you won’t gamble again. Not even a lottery ticket.’

  ‘I’m hardly likely to get myself into this kind of trouble again, am I?’

  ‘Yes, you are. I also want you to promise me that you will go to Gamblers Anonymous. I’m sure you can find out where they meet.’

  ‘That’s not necessary.’

  ‘Isn’t it? You’re the doctor. You make the diagnosis.’

  They sat in silence, father and son, only feet apart.

  ‘Father?’

  Dr Calder once again looked his son directly in the eye. ‘All right. I promise I won’t make any more bets. And I will go to Gamblers Anonymous.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Calder. Over the years he had watched one or two of his colleagues succumb to serious gambling addiction, and he had seen how difficult, if not impossible, it was for them to give up. They ended up losing their jobs and often their families as well. He knew his father’s promise was sincerely given. But would it be kept?

  He used to think that his father was the most honest person he knew, but it had turned out he was just as deceitful as everyone else. This new knowledge shocked Calder to the core. The strict moral principles that had seemed like a granite foundation to the world as Calder knew it for as long as he could remember, had turned out to be sandstone. How could his father, whom he had believed to be the wisest and most moral man he knew, have been so weak? As he flew back to Norfolk that afternoon along the north-east coastline of England, he kept asking himself the same question. And he didn’t come up with an answer.

  Martel lurked in his office in Jackson Hole wondering why, for someone who had so much, he felt so miserable. The Japanese stock market had rallied sharply on the last two trading days of January, bailing him out. His losses were still huge, over a billion dollars down from nearly two billion the week before, but the market was finally coming back his way. The lower losses had meant that he had just been able to meet the demands for collateral from his brokers. And much to his relief, even with Perumal gone, the Bloomfield Weiss revaluation of the JUSTICE notes had been generous, several points above the level Vikram’s own model had predicted.

  JUSTICE was an acronym for the Japan US Trust International Capital Equity-linked note. It was a complicated beast, a power reverse dual currency bond with a Nikkei knock-in barrier and bells and whistles. The notes had been bought in dollars but were repayable in either yen or dollars at the investor’s option. The Nikkei index was based on the prices of two hundred and twenty-five of the largest stocks on the Tokyo Stock Exchange. If this index rose above ten thousand, then the investor would receive five times the gain. Under seven thousand and the investor lost five times the difference. At the time the deal was done the market was trading at about eight thousand five hundred. So it was a turbo-charged play on the Japanese stock market.

  Martel had started with a five-hundred-million-dollar investment in these JUSTICE notes. This had grown to two billion, with Bloomfield Weiss once again agreeing to lend the Teton Fund eighty per cent of the price of the notes. At first Bloomfield Weiss had seemed reluctant to do the business, but in the end the sixty million dollars of fees that they would make out of the transaction had persuaded them. Martel and Vikram knew that the fortune the Teton Fund had made out of the IGLOO notes the year before had not been Bloomfield Weiss’s loss. The investment bank would have been careful to lay off all the risk, probably with one of the big reinsurance companies, and they would no doubt do the same with the JUSTICE notes, leaving Bloomfield Weiss with nothing but a hefty fee. And the loan to the Teton Fund to buy the notes, of course.

  But even though the market was looking better, Martel was still miserable. One reason was the Fortune article. Deep down he had always feared being exposed as a fake. It had finally happened. And in this case it seemed so unfair. Perhaps he had been lucky to survive the turmoil of the previous year, just as he had been lucky to survive the recent Japanese market turbulence. But you made your own luck. And it had been a stroke of genius to realize that there was a realistic possibility that Italy would leave the euro. Fortune might suggest that he hadn’t been responsible for what happened, but little did they know that Martel had quietly granted a generous quantity of options in the Teton Fund to Guido Gallotti for his consultancy services. That showed Martel had influence.

  He glanced at the portrait on the wall. It showed himself, in that very room, examining his screens in his moment of triumph. The painting had not turned out as badly as he had feared. The unkempt artist had captured Martel’s rugged good looks, and the intense concentration with which he studied the markets in front of him. At times Martel thought he caught a hint of fear in those brown eyes. He had studied the brushwork minutely at close quarters to see if he could pinpoint exactly which strokes of paint had led to that perception, but he couldn’t identify them. He was probably just imagining it: no one else would notice; certainly no one had made anything other than admiring comments about it. But his intensity was in complete contrast to the innocent confidence of his beautiful wife, a few feet further along the wall.

  And it was Cheryl who was really bugging him. Had there been a man in the New York apartment? Suspicion was growing inside him like a canker. It had only been one cough, lasting all of two seconds, but it was enough. Of course he hadn’t had the courage to confront Cheryl directly. But he had to know.

  The obvious answer was a private investigator. The trouble was, he didn’t know how to find one. He didn’t want to contact the New York-based outfit his firm occasionally used for due diligence. Neither did he want anyone local. There was no one he could trust to ask for a personal recommendation. They might guess why he wanted to contact one, and he couldn’t bear that. And of course he couldn’t ask his secretary to do the research for him. He turned to his computer and opened up a search engine. It took him half an hour, but he finally found a likely looking individual in Denver, after Salt Lake City the nearest major city to Jackson Hole, but still over three hundred miles away. His name was Ray Pohek and he agreed to meet Martel in Jackson Hole in two days’ time. He saw nothing strange in Martel’s suggested rendezvous, a deserted road ten miles out of town.

  As Martel put down the phone there was a knock at his door. It was Andy and Vikram wanting to talk about hiring a new bond trader. Andy needed some support and Vikram had a suggestion. They discussed it for a few minutes, and then Andy returned to his trading desk. Vikram hesitated.

  He seemed to be staring at Martel’s monitor, still showing Pohek’s website. Martel glared at him, and shut down his web browser. ‘Well?’

  Vikram snapped his eyes away from the screen. ‘You saw the Nikkei was up three per cent again today?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Martel. ‘Finally the market is behaving rationally.’

  ‘Should we take the chance to reduce our exposure? I could call Bloomfield Weiss and ask for a bid on some of those JUSTICE notes. No
w Perumal is no longer there, it might be a good idea.’

  ‘They gave us a decent reval, didn’t they?’ said Martel.

  ‘Yes. But who knows where the market will be next month?’

  Martel leaped to his feet in frustration. ‘Who knows? We know. I know.’ Martel beat his own chest. ‘That’s the whole point. That’s why we put ourselves through all this agony. The Nikkei is going to double over the next twelve months and we are going to be long. As long as possible. With all the leverage we’ve got, I’m looking for a two hundred per cent return on capital. Minimum. This is going to be the greatest hedge-fund trade ever. Ever!’

  ‘But if the market drops again –’

  ‘We’ll survive. We always survive.’ Martel shook his head. You’re a smart guy, Vikram, but sometimes I wonder if you’ve got what it takes.’

  Vikram’s cheeks burned and he left the room without a word. Martel knew he’d hurt the man’s pride. Perhaps it was too much for Martel to expect Vikram to share his own ability to see the big picture, but Martel was disappointed, none the less. He liked Vikram. He recognized his own emotional need for a protégé, an apprentice, an heir, and Vikram was the closest any of his people came to filling the role. He knew that Vikram admired him, envied him even. The man wanted to be one of the hedge-fund greats, just like Martel. Martel shook his head.

  He just didn’t have the balls.

  18

  Calder left it to the end of the week before calling DC Neville to check on progress. He telephoned her from his tiny office in the flying school. It took him three tries before he got through. She sounded harried.

  ‘I’m sorry I didn’t get back to you, Mr Calder. Things have been hectic here.’

  ‘Have you turned up anything on Perumal’s disappearance?’

  ‘I’m afraid not. I spoke to Bloomfield Weiss. They think there’s no chance of a connection between the two deaths.’