by Dick Francis
The aftermath took half of the evening and was boring in the extreme: police station, hard chairs, polystyrene cups of coffee.
No, I’d never seen the boy before.
Yes, I was sure the boy had been aiming at Calder specifically.
Yes, I was sure he was only a boy. About sixteen, probably.
Yes, I would know him again. Yes, I would help with an Identikit picture.
No. My fingerprints were positively not on the knife. The boy had held onto it until he ran.
Yes, of course they could take my prints, in case.
Calder, wholly mystified, repeated over and over that he had no idea who could want to kill him. He seemed scandalised, indeed, at the very idea. The police persisted: most people knew their murderers, they said, particularly when as seemed possible in this case the prospective killer had been purposefully waiting for his victim. According to Mr Ekaterin the boy had known Calder. That was quite possible, Calder said, because of his television appearances, but Calder had not known him.
Among some of the police there was a muted quality, among others a sort of defiant aggression, but it was only Calder who rather acidly pointed out that if they hadn’t done such a good job of hauling me off, they would now have the boy in custody and wouldn’t need to be looking for him.
‘You could have asked first,’ Calder said, but even I shook my head.
If I had indeed been the aggressor I could have killed the boy while the police were asking the onlookers just who was fighting whom. Act first, ask questions after was a policy full of danger, but getting it the wrong way round could be worse.
Eventually we both left the building, Calder on the way out trying his best with unrehearsed words. ‘Er… Tim… Thanks are in order… If it hadn’t been for you… I don’t know what to say.’
‘Say nothing,’ I said. ‘I did it without thinking. Glad you’re OK.’
I had taken it for granted that everyone else would be long gone, but Dissdale and Bettina had waited for Calder, and Gordon, Judith and Pen for me, all of them standing in a group by some cars and talking to three or four strangers.
‘We know you and Calder both came by train,’ Gordon said, walking towards us, ‘but we decided we’d drive you home.’
‘You’re extraordinarily kind,’ I said.
‘My dear Dissdale…’ Calder said, seeming still at a loss for words. ‘So grateful, really.’
They made a fuss of him; the endangered one, the lion delivered. The strangers round the cars turned out to be gentlemen of the press, to whom Calder Jackson was always news, alive or dead. To my horror they announced themselves, producing notebooks and a camera, and wrote down everything anyone said, except they got nothing from me because all I wanted to do was shut them up.
As well try to stop an avalanche with an outstretched palm. Dissdale and Bettina and Gordon and Judith and Pen did a diabolical job, which was why for a short time afterwards I suffered from public notoriety as the man who had saved Calder Jackson’s life.
No one seemed to speculate about his assailant setting out for a second try.
I looked at my photograph in the papers and wondered if the boy would see it, and know my name.
OCTOBER
Gordon was back at work with his faintly trembling left hand usually out of sight and unnoticeable.
During periods of activity, as on the day at Ascot, he seemed to forget to camouflage, but at other times he had taken to sitting forwards in a hunched way over his desk with his hand anchored down between his thighs. I thought it a pity. I thought the tremor so slight that none of the others would have remarked on it, either aloud or to themselves, but to Gordon it was clearly a burden.
Not that it seemed to have affected his work. He had come back in July with determination, thanked me briskly in the presence of the others for my stop-gapping and taken all major decisions off my desk and back to his.
John asked him, also in the hearing of Alec, Rupert and myself, to make it clear to us that it was he, John, who was the official next-in-line to Gordon, if the need should occur again. He pointed out that he was older and had worked much longer in the bank than I had. Tim, he said, shouldn’t be jumping the queue.
Gordon eyed him blandly and said that if the need arose no doubt the chairman would take every factor into consideration. John made bitter and audible remarks under his breath about favouritism and unfair privilege, and Alec told him ironically to find a merchant bank where there wasn’t a nephew or some such on the force.
‘Be your age,’ he said. ‘Of course they want the next generation to join the family business. Why shouldn’t they? It’s natural.’ But John was unplacated, and didn’t see that his acid grudge against me was wasting a lot of his time. I seemed to be continually in his thoughts. He gave me truly vicious looks across the room and took every opportunity to sneer and denigrate. Messages never got passed on, and clients were given the impression that I was incompetent and only employed out of family charity. Occasionally on the telephone people refused to do business with me, saying they wanted John, and once a caller said straight out, ‘Are you that playboy they’re shoving ahead over better men’s heads?’
John’s gripe was basically understandable: in his place I’d have been cynical myself. Gordon did nothing to curb the escalating hate campaign and Alec found it funny. I thought long and hard about what to do and decided simply to work harder. I’d see it was very difficult for John to make his allegations stick.
His aggression showed in his body, which was roundedly muscular and looked the wrong shape for a city suit. Of moderate height, he wore his wiry brown hair very short so that it bristled above his collar, and his voice was loud, as if he thought volume equated authority: and so it might have done in schoolroom or on barrack square, instead of on a civilised patch of carpet.
He had come into banking via business school with high ambitions and good persuasive skills. I sometimes thought he would have made an excellent export salesman, but that wasn’t the life he wanted. Alec said that John got his kicks from saying ‘I am a merchant banker’ to pretty girls and preening himself in their admiration.
Alec was a wicked fellow, really, and a shooter of perceptive arrows.
There came a day in October when three whirlwind things happened more or less simultaneously. The cartoonist telephoned; What’s Going On Where It Shouldn’t landed with a thud throughout the City; and Uncle Freddie descended on Ekaterin’s for a tour of inspection.
To begin with the three events were unconnected, but by the end of the day, entwined.
I heard the cartoonist’s rapid opening remarks with a sinking heart. ‘I’ve engaged three extra animators and I need five more,’ he said. ‘Ten isn’t nearly enough. I’ve worked out the amount of increased loan needed to pay them all.’
‘Wait,’ I said.
He went right on. ‘I also need more space, of course, but luckily that’s no problem, as there’s an empty warehouse next to this place. I’ve signed a lease for it and told them you’ll be advancing the money, and of course more furniture, more materials…’
‘Stop,’ I said distractedly, ‘You can’t.’
‘What? I can’t what?’ He sounded, of all things, bewildered.
‘You can’t just keep on borrowing. You’ve a limit. You can’t go beyond it. Look for heaven’s sake come over here quickly and we’ll see what can be undone.’
‘But you said,’ his voice said plaintively, ‘that you’d want to finance later expansion. That’s what I’m doing. Expanding.’
I thought wildly that I’d be licking stamps for a living as soon as Henry heard. Dear God…
‘Listen,’ the cartoonist was saying, ‘we all worked like hell and finished one whole film. Twelve minutes long, dubbed with music and sound effects, everything, titles, the lot. And we did some rough-cuts of three others, no music, no frills, but enough… and I’ve sold them.’
‘You’ve what?’
‘Sold them.’ He laughed
with excitement. ‘It’s solid, I promise you. That agent you sent me to, he’s fixed the sale and the contract. All I have to do is sign. It’s a major firm that’s handling them, and I get a big perpetual royalty. World-wide distribution, that’s what they’re talking about, and the BBC are taking them. But we’ve got to make twenty films in a year from now, not seven like I meant. Twenty! And if the public like them, that’s just the start. Oh heck, I can’t believe it. But to do twenty in the time I need a lot more money. Is it all right? I mean… I was so sure…’
‘Yes,’ I said weakly. ‘It’s all right. Bring the contract when you’ve signed it, and new figures, and we’ll work things out.’
‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘Thanks, Tim Ekaterin, God bless your darling bank.’
I put the receiver down feebly and ran a hand over my head and down the back of my neck.
‘Trouble?’ Gordon asked, watching.
‘Well no, not exactly…’ A laugh like the cartoonist’s rose in my throat. ‘I backed a winner. I think perhaps I backed a bloody geyser.’ The laugh broke out aloud. ‘Did you ever do that?’
‘Ah yes,’ Gordon nodded, ‘Of course.’
I told him about the cartoonist and showed him the original set of drawings, which were still stowed in my desk: and when he looked through them, he laughed.
‘Wasn’t that application on my desk,’ he said, wrinkling his forehead in an effort to remember, ‘just before I was away?’
I thought back. ‘Yes, it probably was.’
He nodded. ‘I’d decided to turn it down.’
‘Had you?’
‘Mm. Isn’t he too young, or something?’
‘That sort of talent strikes at birth.’
He gave me a brief assessing look and handed the drawings back. ‘Well,’ he said. ‘Good luck to him.’
The news that Uncle Freddie had been spotted in the building rippled through every department and stiffened a good many slouching backbones. Uncle Freddie was given to growling out devastatingly accurate judgements of people in their hearing, and it was not only I who’d found the bank more peaceful (if perhaps also more complacent) when he retired.
He was known as ‘Mr Fred’ as opposed to ‘Mr Mark’ (grandfather) and ‘Mr Paul’, the founder. No one ever called me ‘Mr Tim’; sign of the changing times. If true to form Uncle Freddie would spend the morning in Investment Management, where he himself had worked all his office life, and after lunch in the boardroom would put at least his head into Corporate Finance, to be civil, and end with a march through Banking. On the way, by some telepathic process of his own, he would learn what moved in the bank’s collective mind; sniff, as he nad put it, the prevailing scent on the wind.
He had already arrived when the copies of What’s Going On hit the fan.
Alec as usual slipped out to the local paper shop at about the time they were delivered there and returned with the six copies which the bank officially sanctioned. No one in the City could afford not to know about What Was Going On on their own doorstep.
Alec shunted around delivering one copy to each floor and keeping ours to himself to read first, a perk he said he deserved.
‘Your uncle,’ he reported on his return, ‘is beating the shit out of poor Ted Lorrimer in Investments for failing to sell Winkler Consolidated when even a squint-eyed baboon could see it was overstretched in its Central American operation, and a neck sticking out asking for the comprehensive chop.’
Gordon chuckled mildly at the verbatim reporting, and Alec sat at his desk and opened the paper. Normal office life continued for perhaps five more minutes before Alec shot to his feet as if he’d been stung.’
‘Jes-us Christ,’ he said.
‘What is it?’
‘Our leaker is at it again.’
‘What?’ Gordon said.
‘You’d better read it.’ He took the paper across to Gordon whose preliminary face of foreboding turned slowly to anger.
‘It’s disgraceful,’ Gordon said. He made as if to pass the paper to me, but John, on his feet, as good as snatched it out of his hand.
‘I should come first,’ he said forcefully, and took the paper over to his own desk, sitting down methodically and spreading the paper open on the flat surface to read. Gordon watched him impassively and I said nothing to provoke. When John at his leisure had finished, showing little reaction but a tightened mouth, it was to Rupert he gave the paper, and Rupert, who read it with small gasps and widening eyes, who brought it eventually to me.
‘It’s bad,’ Gordon said.
‘So I gather.’ I lolled back in my chair and lifted the offending column to eye level. Under a heading of ‘Dinky Dirty Doings’ it said:
It is perhaps not well known to readers that in many a merchant bank two thirds of the annual profits come from interest on loans. Investment and Trust management and Corporate Finance departments are the public faces and glamour machines of these very private banks. Their investments (of other people’s money) in the Stock market and their entrepreneurial role in mergers and takeovers earn the spotlight year by year in the City Pages.
Below stairs, so to speak, lies the tail that wags the dog, the secretive Banking department which quietly lends from its own deep coffers and rakes in vast profits in the shape of interest at rates they can set to suit themselves.
These rates are not necessarily high.
Who in Paul Ekaterin Ltd has been effectively lending to himself small fortunes from these coffers at FIVE per cent? Who in Paul Ekaterin Ltd has set up private companies which are NOT carrying on the business for which the money has ostensibly been lent? Who has not declared that these companies are his?
The man-in-the-street (poor slob) would be delighted to get unlimited cash from Paul Ekaterin Ltd at five per cent so that he could invest it in something else for more.
Don’t Bankers have a fun time?
I looked up from the damaging page and across at Alec, and he was, predictably, grinning.
‘I wonder who’s had his hand in the cookie jar,’ he said.
‘And who caught it there,’ I asked.
‘Wow, yes.’
Gordon said bleakly, ‘This is very serious.’
‘If you believe it,’ I said.
‘But this paper…’ he began.
‘Yeah,’ I interrupted. ‘It had a dig at us before, remember? Way back in May. Remember the flap everyone got into?’
‘I was at home… with ‘flu’.’
‘Oh, yes. Well, the furore went on here for ages and no one came up with any answers. This column today is just as unspecific. So… supposing all it’s designed to do is stir up trouble for the bank? Who’s got it in for us? To what raving nut have we for instance refused a loan?’
Alec was regarding me with exaggerated wonder. ‘Here we have Sherlock Holmes to the rescue,’ he said admiringly. ‘Now we can all go out to lunch.’
Gordon however said thoughtfully, ‘It’s perfectly possible, though, to set up a company and lend it money. All it would take would be paperwork. I could do it myself. So could anyone here, I suppose, up to his authorised ceiling, if he thought he could get away with it.’
John nodded. ‘It’s ridiculous of Tim and Alec to make a joke of this,’ he said importantly. ‘The very reputation of the bank is at stake.’
Gordon frowned, stood up, took the paper off my desk, and went along to see his almost-equal in the room facing St Paul’s. Spreading consternation, I thought; bringing out cold sweats from palpitating banking hearts.
I ran a mental eye over everyone in the whole department who could possibly have had enough power along with the opportunity, from Val Fisher all the way down to myself; and there were twelve, perhaps, who could theoretically have done it.
But… not Rupert, with his sad mind still grieving, because he wouldn’t have had the appetite or energy for fraud.
Not Alec, surely; because I liked him.
Not John: too self-regarding.
Not Val, not Gordon
, unthinkable. Not myself.
That left the people along in the other pasture, and I didn’t know them well enough to judge. Maybe one of them did believe that a strong fiddle on the side was worth the ruin of discovery, but all of us were already generously paid, perhaps for the very reason that temptations would be more likely to be resisted if we weren’t scratching around for the money for the gas.
Gordon didn’t return. The morning limped down to lunch-time, when John bustled off announcing he was seeing a client, and Alec encouraged Rupert to go out with him for a pie and pint. I’d taken to working through lunch because of the quietness, and I was still there alone at two o’clock when Peter, Henry’s assistant, came and asked me to go up to the top floor, because I was wanted.
Uncle Freddie, I thought. Uncle Freddie’s read the rag and will be exploding like a warhead. In some way he’ll make it out to be my fault. With a gusty sigh I left my desk and took the lift to face the old warrior with whom I had never in my life felt easy.
He was waiting in the top floor hallway, talking to Henry. Both of them at six foot three over-topped me by three inches. Life would never have been as ominous, I thought, if Uncle Freddie had been small.
‘Tim,’ Henry said when he saw me, ‘Go along to the small conference room, will you?’
I nodded and made my way to the room next to the boardroom where four or five chairs surrounded a square polished table. A copy of What’s Going On lay there, already dog-eared from many thumbs.
‘Now Tim’, said my uncle, coming into the room behind me, ‘do you know what all this is about?’
I shook my head and said ‘No.’
My uncle growled in his throat and sat down, waving Henry and myself to seats. Henry might be chairman, might indeed in office terms have been Uncle Freddie’s boss, but the white-haired old tyrant still personally owned the leasehold of the building itself and from long habit treated everyone in it as guests.
Henry absently fingered the newspaper. ‘What do you think?’ he said to me. ‘Who… do you think?’
‘It might not be anyone.’