On the Edge

by Michael Ridpath

  Calder slumped back in his chair, studying Jerry. He was no dummy, which was one of the many reasons why he was such a good man to have as a partner.

  Jerry’s eyes narrowed. ‘You know what’s behind this, don’t you, Alex?’

  Calder nodded.

  ‘Does it have something to do with your trips to London?’

  Calder nodded again. ‘Tell me.’

  So Calder told him. Everything. Jerry listened, taking it all in.

  ‘This Carr-Jones guy is a total bastard,’ he said when Calder had finished.

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Do you think he’d really pay two million quid to keep you quiet?’

  Calder sighed. ‘Anyone else, and I’d call his bluff. But Carr-Jones? I don’t know whether it’s his own money or someone else’s, but I do know that if he makes a threat, he goes through with it.’

  ‘So what are you going to do?’

  Calder looked at his partner. ‘This confirms Carr-Jones is hiding something. Something very big. If it was up to me, I’d still want to find out what. Two people have died.’

  ‘But what about the airfield?’

  Calder closed his eyes. Carr-Jones had foreseen this. It was all very well for Calder to risk his investment in the flying school. But he couldn’t risk his partner’s. At least, not without his consent.

  ‘I’d like to carry on asking questions, Jerry.’

  ‘Alex! I could lose everything here.’

  ‘I know. But I’m more sure than ever that Carr-Jones is deeply involved in something very messy. I hate to run away from it. Let me go after him. If I can nail him he won’t be able to go through with the purchase. We’ll keep the airfield, he’ll go to jail.’

  ‘And if you fail?’

  Calder shrugged. ‘We lose.’ He leaned forward. ‘Look, I know this is an unfair thing to ask you, but unless we take the risk he’ll get away with it. And that’s something I couldn’t live with.’

  ‘Whereas I could?’

  ‘Until today you’d never heard of him.’

  ‘You like taking risks, don’t you?’ Jerry stood up and looked out over the airfield towards the North Sea. ‘I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for you,’ he said. ‘I’d still be in the front seat of a hearse crawling around crematoriums at five miles an hour. I could never have bought this place by myself, or kept it going.’

  ‘I needed you too,’ Calder said.

  ‘Sod it,’ Jerry said. ‘Nail the bastard.’

  22

  Calder drove down to London late that afternoon. It was seven thirty by the time he reached Highgate, but he decided to try Sandy Waterhouse’s office anyway. He knew lawyers habitually worked late, and he might be lucky.

  She answered the phone. He introduced himself as a friend of Jen’s who was in London for a couple of days and wanted to ask her a few questions about how Jen had died. After some prevarication, she suggested he meet her at her office at nine o’clock.

  Calder arrived at the small marble lobby of the building that housed Trelawney Stewart, an American law firm he had vaguely heard of, at nine on the dot. He idly wondered about Sandy Waterhouse. She’d had a pleasant, quiet voice on the phone, with a soft American accent. She had sounded happy to meet him. Which was why he was a little surprised that she hadn’t shown up by nine fifteen. Or nine thirty.

  He took the opportunity to call Nils and find out how he was getting on. Nils was at home, watching a football match on TV – Chelsea, from what Calder could hear in the background. Nils had managed to speak to Derek Grayling, who said everything in the Derivatives Group was going brilliantly. It would be another record year. They kept finding new ways of ripping off their customers and the customers kept on coming back for more. Especially the Teton Fund, which was now the group’s biggest account. But Jen had nothing to do with them, according to Grayling, and neither had Carr-Jones: Perumal handled them alone. Nor had Nils been able to find out any dirt on Tessa’s departure. It was the old story – she left a top investment bank for a promotion and a guaranteed bonus at a lesser institution, in this case a bank in Stockholm. Calder thanked Nils and asked him to keep looking, although Nils wasn’t optimistic about finding anything new.

  As he slipped his phone back in his pocket, Calder was disappointed. If there was something going on in the Derivatives Group, and Calder was sure there was, it was too well hidden for Nils to find. It also seemed that Tarek was wrong in his suspicions about Tessa and Carr-Jones falling out.

  It was nine fifty-five, and he had decided to call it quits at ten o’clock, when the lift opened and a tall, slim woman with short wispy blonde hair stepped out, looking around her. She smiled apologetically when she saw him.

  ‘Alex? I’m sorry I’m so late. You shouldn’t have waited for me.’

  ‘That’s OK,’ Calder said. Working late?’

  ‘I wish. This is about your average day, these days. I’m sorry, I thought I could get away earlier, but I was waiting for some comments back from Chicago. But you don’t want to hear all about that.’

  Would you like a glass of wine or something?’ Calder asked.

  ‘Sure. There’s a place around the corner. Come on, I’ll show you.’

  The place around the corner was small and almost empty. Calder bought two glasses of white wine. As he carried them back, he was struck by how attractive Sandy was. She was probably in her late twenties, with high cheekbones, clear blue eyes and a kind of poise that seemed completely unconscious, and all the more striking for it.

  ‘I seem to remember Jen mentioning that you worked hard,’ Calder said.

  ‘All the time,’ Sandy replied. ‘I thought it was bad in New York, but it’s even worse here. Still it’s nearly over.’

  ‘Are you going back soon?’

  ‘I finish here next week, provided the deal I’m working on closes. Then a couple of weeks’ vacation and I’m back to the grindstone in New York. I’ve done my two years.’

  Calder felt a mild sense of disappointment. Silly, really.

  ‘Jen was pretty good about it,’ Sandy went on. ‘I don’t know how many times I must have stood her up. In fact, I was supposed to see her the night she …’ Her voice trailed off.

  ‘The night she died?’

  ‘Yes. But Jen was understanding. Very understanding. I think we had the two worst jobs in London and it was kind of nice to trade moans.’ Sandy’s hair had fallen over her eyes, and she made no attempt to push it away.

  ‘How did you know each other?’

  ‘We went to high school together. In one of the ‘burbs outside New York. We were in the same class, but we weren’t exactly close. Then a classmate suggested I look her up when I was transferred to London. Jen became my only friend here. Outside of Trelawney Stewart, that is. We get to spend a lot of time with each other at that place.’

  ‘She didn’t have many friends in London, did she?’

  ‘No. And she didn’t understand why. I think Jen was quite a sociable person, or used to be. But that all changed when she came here. I don’t know if it was the unfriendly people or her awful boss.’

  ‘Justin Carr-Jones?’

  ‘That’s it. He crushed her confidence. I kept telling her that she should believe in herself. She was smart, bright, a fun person to be with. Sometimes I thought she was listening. But then work would get her down again. If I’d only shown up that night, maybe she wouldn’t have … well, you know.’

  ‘I’m not sure she did kill herself,’ Calder said, quietly.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘What do you think I mean?’

  Sandy sighed. ‘I don’t know. At the time I didn’t believe she had, either, but the police investigated, there was an inquest and I guess I’ve just accepted the result.’

  ‘Why didn’t you think it was suicide?’

  ‘I saw her. The weekend before she died. We went to a movie on Sunday afternoon. I do get the occasional Sunday off. She was pretty bitter, about Justin what’s-his-n
ame. She had some scheme for revenge, some way to really hurt him. She couldn’t wait to get on to it. So I guess she didn’t seem to me to be someone with no hope left.’

  Calder’s interest quickened. ‘Do you know what this scheme for revenge was all about?’

  ‘No. She didn’t really tell me. It had something to do with that hedge-fund guy – you know, Frenchman. “The Man Who Broke the Euro”.’

  ‘Martel? Jean-Luc Martel?’

  ‘Yeah. That’s right.’

  ‘Did she say what it had to do with him?’

  ‘No. Not that I can remember.’

  So Jen had a plan to hurt Carr-Jones? Calder recalled the last time he had seen her, in that bar in Chelsea, when he had remarked that it was a shame that they didn’t have a lever to use against him. At the time he had thought his comment had sparked something. She had denied it, but what if his instinct had been correct? If she had found some way of putting pressure on Carr-Jones in the same way Carr-Jones had put pressure on Calder and Jen? Then her death could well have been ‘convenient’ for Carr-Jones, as Perumal had claimed.

  But what pressure? Something connected with Jean-Luc Martel, Perumal’s client. Except Nils had just told him that Jen had had nothing to do with the Teton Fund when she was working in the Derivatives Group.

  Sandy interrupted his musing. ‘I told the police all this. And they still seemed pretty certain it was suicide, didn’t they? And the coroner.’

  ‘That’s right. And of course there was that text message to her mother. “Sorry Mum”.’

  ‘Imagine receiving a message like that,’ said Sandy. ‘When you’re thousands of miles away. It must have been horrible for her mother.’

  ‘It was. The policewoman I spoke to answered Jen’s mobile. A straightforward note on a scrap of paper would have been kinder. What is it? What’s the matter?’

  Sandy was staring directly at him, her mouth half open. ‘Mom,’ she said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘“Sorry Mom”. Jen would have said “Sorry Mom”. Mum is English. And believe me, Jen was an American.’ She frowned. ‘If it was her who sent the message.’

  Calder stared back, the implications of what Sandy was saying flooding into his brain. ‘You mean if someone hit her over the head and pushed her out of the window, then that person might have texted a suicide message? Easier than forging a handwritten note.’

  ‘They could have gotten her mother’s number from the list in the phone.’

  ‘Bloody hell,’ said Calder. ‘But perhaps the message did say “Mom”, after all? Maybe I just misheard it.’

  ‘No, it was “Mum”. That’s what they told me too. I remember thinking it odd at the time. But I didn’t say anything, it didn’t seem important.’

  ‘Well, if that’s correct, it proves that verdict was wrong,’ Calder said. ‘I’ll call the police tomorrow to check it out.’

  ‘Let me know what they say.’ Sandy gave Calder a long appraising look. He found it uncomfortable, but also strangely thrilling. This woman was getting to him. ‘I was trying to remember Jen talking about an Alex,’ she said. She smiled. ‘You weren’t a secret boyfriend, were you?’

  ‘I’m afraid not. We used to work together. You could say I was her boss, after Carr-Jones. She might have called me “Zero”?’

  The smile disappeared instantly, to be replaced by a look of disappointment mixed with distaste. ‘Oh, yeah. She did talk about you.’

  Calder was shocked by the change in tone. Partly because he had been enjoying Sandy’s receptive mood, but mostly because of what it said about Jen’s opinion of him.

  ‘She can’t have thought I was as bad as Carr-Jones, surely?’

  ‘Not quite,’ Sandy said. ‘But you hurt her almost as much.’

  ‘We got on well,’ Calder protested. ‘She said she was enjoying work for the first time in London.’

  ‘Whatever.’

  ‘Tell me what she said,’ Calder persisted.

  ‘She’s gone now,’ Sandy said. All traces of friendliness had disappeared. ‘It’s not worth dwelling on.’

  But Calder wouldn’t let it go. ‘I don’t understand. You said I hurt her. I thought we had a good relationship. I thought she liked me.’

  ‘Oh, she thought you were wonderful,’ Sandy said. ‘Nice guy, good at your job, said encouraging things to her, let her have some responsibility. She thought you had just turned the world the right way round for her. And then that creep accused her of sleeping with you, and you dumped her in it.’

  ‘Dumped her in it?’

  ‘That’s what she said,’ Sandy’s voice was bitter now. ‘When she wanted to complain, you tried to stop her. When she wanted to take them to a Tribunal, you tried to talk her out of it. As soon as one of the boys was threatened, you all closed ranks against her. She thought she could rely on you and you let her down.’

  ‘That’s not true!’

  ‘Whatever.’

  ‘I was prepared to give a statement to the Tribunal.’

  ‘Oh, big deal. You were prepared to say what happened. That must have taken real bravery. You didn’t support her, though, did you? You didn’t stand by her. You didn’t resign yourself. You just let her carry the can.’

  ‘That’s not true. I did resign.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘After she killed herself,’ Calder said quietly. ‘Or was killed.’

  Sandy gave him an I-told-you-so look. ‘Is that why you want to prove she didn’t commit suicide? So you don’t have to feel so bad about it?’

  ‘That’s not fair.’

  ‘Either way, she’s dead.’ Calder started to object, but Sandy cut him off. ‘Hey. It’s not me you have to convince. The person you have to convince isn’t here.’ Sandy took a large gulp of her wine. ‘I’m sorry. I guess I’m still kind of angry about it.’

  Calder was kind of angry about it, too. He wanted to prove to this woman that she was wrong, but he knew some of what she said was right.

  She drained her glass. ‘Can I go now?’

  ‘Of course,’ said Calder, but he was disappointed that his meeting with her had somehow gone so badly awry. ‘Shall I help you find a cab?’

  ‘I can do that myself, thanks,’ she said, and gathered together her coat and bag.

  Calder watched her get ready to leave. He couldn’t let her go, just like that. ‘Sandy,’ he said.

  She paused.

  ‘Take this, and give me a ring if you think of anything else.’ He handed her his card, which she took after a moment’s hesitation. ‘I know we’ve only just met, but I want you to believe me. What happened to Jen was wrong. I don’t know exactly what it was that happened, but I do want to make sure whoever was responsible doesn’t get away with it.’

  Sandy looked at him coolly. ‘Guilt,’ she said. ‘That’s all it is. Guilt. We’ve all got it. We let her down, Alex, or Zero or whatever your name is. And there’s nothing we can do to change that fact.’

  Calder looked down upon the distinguished columns of one of the more venerable gentlemen’s clubs on the other side of the street below. He was standing in a second-floor meeting room of Bloomfield Weiss’s small but plush office in St James’s. The chances of any of the club members dealing with Bloomfield Weiss were nil, but someone ten years ago had decided that this was the right location to establish a private-banking operation in London.

  Bloomfield Weiss’s international private-banking business was headquartered in Zurich and had offices in the major ‘offshore’ locations: Luxemburg, Jersey, Monte Carlo, Bermuda, Nassau and Miami, the gateway to Latin American money. Calder had only a vague idea of who their clients were: people who were too rich to share the same bank as the man in the street, the international money-nomads of no fixed abode who earned income in many jurisdictions and paid taxes in none, buyers of all kinds of esoteric products dreamed up and distributed by Bloomfield Weiss. Including hedge funds. Time to find out a little more about Jean-Luc Martel and his mysterious Teton Fund.


  He had phoned DC Neville earlier that morning. It had only taken a little coaxing to get her to double-check the spelling of ‘Mum’. It was with a ‘u’ not an ‘o’. The policewoman had listened with interest as he had outlined the theory that Jen could not possibly have sent the text message to her mother spelled as it was. But when he urged her to reopen her investigation she was implacable. She’d make a note on file, but there wasn’t enough evidence yet to take any further action. Jen had been in England a year, it was quite possible that the English usage was rubbing off on her.

  Calder took a tiny bit of consolation from DC Neville’s use of the word ‘yet’. She was listening. In fact, Calder felt she was half-persuaded. From his earlier conversations with her he suspected the problem was convincing her to talk to her more sceptical boss.

  ‘Alex! How are you?’

  Calder turned to meet a tall, vigorous man with thinning blond hair brushed back and an immaculate double-breasted suit.

  ‘I’m fine, Freddie.’

  ‘It’s very good to see you,’ said Freddie Langhauser, pouring coffee from a pot on a sideboard into two cups. ‘You were lucky to catch me here. I just got in from Zurich this morning, and I’m off to New York tomorrow.’

  ‘Thanks for squeezing me in.’

  Langhauser and Calder had, been on the same Bloomfield Weiss training programme when they were both starting out in investment banking. They had not been close then, but the programme built up a level of camaraderie that survived the ups and downs of a career at Bloomfield Weiss. It was a kind of shared loyalty, a network of colleagues, friends even, who had suffered together and played together. Calder had phoned Langhauser the day before on the off-chance that he would be in town. If someone called you from your training programme asking for a favour, you at least listened.

  ‘What is it, seven years now?’ Freddie asked.

  ‘More like eight.’

  ‘Is it really? I hear you’ve jumped ship?’

  ‘Last year. And I can report there is life after Bloomfield Weiss.’

  ‘That is certainly good to know.’ Freddie accompanied this comment with a combined bray and snort. Calder suddenly remembered how irritating this laugh was, and how it used to emerge at seemingly random moments.