by Dick Francis
He half smiled. ‘A stirrer?’
‘Mm. Not a single concrete detail. Same as last time.’
‘Last time,’ Henry said, ‘I asked the paper’s editor where he got his information from. Never reveal sources, he said. Useless asking again.’
‘Undisclosed sources,’ Uncle Freddie said, ‘never trust them.’
Henry said, ‘Gordon says you can find out, Tim, how many concerns, if any, are borrowing from us at five per cent. There can’t be many. A few from when interest rates were low. The few who got us in the past to agree to a long-term fixed rate.’ The few, though he didn’t say so, from before his time, before he put an end to such unprofitable straitjackets. ‘If there are more recent ones among them, could you spot them?’
‘I’ll look,’ I said.
We both knew it would take days rather than hours and might produce no results. The fraud, if it existed, could have been going on for a decade. For half a century. Successful frauds tended to go on and on unnoticed, until some one tripped over them by accident. It might almost be easier to find out who had done the tripping, and why he’d told the paper instead of the bank.
‘Anyway,’ Henry said, ‘that isn’t primarily why we asked you up here.’
‘No,’ said my uncle, grunting. ‘Time you were a director.’
I thought: I didn’t hear that right.
‘Er… what?’ I said.
‘A director. A director,’ he said impatiently. ‘Fellow who sits on the board. Never heard of them, I suppose.’
I looked at Henry, who was smiling and nodding.
‘But,’ I said, ‘so soon…’
‘Don’t you want to, then?’ demanded my uncle.
‘Yes, I do.’
‘Good. Don’t let me down. I’ve had my eye on you since you were eight.’
I must have looked as surprised as I felt.
‘You told me then,’ he said, ‘how much you had saved, and how much you would have if you went on saving a pound a month at four per cent compound interest for forty years, by which time you would be very old. I wrote down your figures and worked them out, and you were right.’
‘It’s only a formula,’ I said.
‘Oh sure. You could do it now in a drugged sleep. But at eight? You’d inherited the gift, all right. You were just robbed of the inclination.’ He nodded heavily. ‘Look at your father. My little brother. Got drunk nicely, never a mean thought, but hardly there when the brains were handed out. Look at the way he indulged your mother, letting her gamble like that. Look at the life he gave you. All pleasure, regardless of cost. I despaired of you at times. Thought you’d been ruined. But I knew the gift was there somewhere, might still be dormart, might grow if forced. So there you are, I was right.’
I was pretty well speechless.
‘We all agree,’ Henry said. ‘The whole board was unanimous at our meeting this morning that it’s time another Ekaterin took his proper place.’
I thought of John, and of the intensity of rage my promotion would bring forth.
‘Would you,’ I said slowly, ‘have given me a directorship if my name had been Joe Bloggs?’
Henry levelly said, ‘Probably not this very day. But soon, I promise you, yes. You’re almost thirty-three, after all, and I was on the board here at thirty-four.’
‘Thank you,’ I said.
‘Rest assured,’ Henry said. ‘You’ve earned it.’ He stood up and formally shook hands. ‘Your appointment officially starts as of the first of November, a week today. We will welcome you then to a short meeting in the boardroom, and afterwards to lunch.’
They must both have seen the depth of my pleasure, and they themselves looked satisfied. Hallelujah, I thought, I’ve made it. I’ve got there… I’ve barely started.
Gordon went down with me in the lift, also smiling.
‘They’ve all been dithering about it on and off for months,’ he said. ‘Ever since you took over from me when I was ill, and did OK. Anyway I told them this morning about your news from the cartoonist. Some of them said it was just lucky. I told them you’d now been lucky too often for it to be a coincidence. So there you are.’
‘I can’t thank you…’
‘It’s your own doing.’
‘John will have a fit.’
‘You’ve coped all right so far with his envy.’
‘I don’t like it, though,’ I said.
‘Who would? Silly man, he’s doing his career no good.’
Gordon straightaway told everyone in the office, and John went white and walked rigidly out of the room.
I went diffidently a week later to the induction and to the first lunch with the board, and then in a few days, as one does, I got used to the change of company and to the higher level of information. In the departments one heard about the decisions that had been made: in the dining room one heard the decisions being reached. ‘Our daily board meeting,’ Henry said. ‘So much easier this way when everyone can simply say what they think without anyone taking notes.’
There were usually from ten to fifteen directors at lunch, although at a pinch the elongated oval table could accommodate the full complement of twenty-three. People would vanish at any moment to answer telephone calls, and to deal. Dealing, the buying and selling of stocks, took urgent precedence over food.
The food itself was no great feast, though perfectly presented. ‘Always lamb on Wednesdays,’ Gordon said at the buffet table as he took a couple from a row of trimmed lean cutlets. ‘Some sort of chicken on Tuesdays, beef Wellington most Thursdays. Henry never eats the crust.’ Each day there was a clear soup before and fruit and cheese after. Alcohol if one chose, but most of them didn’t. No one should deal in millions whose brain wanted to sleep, Henry said, drinking Malvern water steadily. Quite a change, all of it, from a rough-hewn sandwich at my desk.
They were all polite about my failure to discover ‘paper’ companies to whom the bank had been lending at five per cent, although Val and Henry, I knew, shared my own view that the report originated from malice and not from fact.
I had spent several days in the extra-wide office at the back of our floor, where the more mechanical parts of the banking operation were carried on. There in the huge expanse (grey carpet, this time) were row upon row of long desks whose tops were packed with telephones, adding machines and above all computers.
From there went out our own interest cheques to the depositors who had lent us money for us to lend to things like ‘Home-made Heaven cakes’ and ‘Water Purification’ plants in Norfolk. Into there came the interest paid to us by cakes and water and cartoonists and ten thousand such. Machines clattered, phone bells rang, people hurried about.
Many of the people working there were girls, and it had often puzzled me why there were so few women among the managers. Gordon said it was because few women wanted to commit their whole lives to making money and John (in the days when he was speaking to me) said with typical contempt that it was because they preferred to spend it. In any case, there were no female managers in Banking, and none at all on the Board.
Despite that, my best helper in the fraud search proved to be a curvy redhead called Patty who had taken the What’s Going On article as a personal affront, as had many of her colleagues.
‘No one could do that under our noses,’ she protested.
‘I’m afraid they could. You know they could. No one could blame any of you for not spotting it.’
‘Well… where do we start?’
‘With all the borrowers paying a fixed rate of five per cent. Or perhaps four per cent, or five point seven five, or six or seven. Who knows if five is right?’
She looked at me frustratedly with wide amber eyes. ‘But we haven’t got them sorted like that.’
Sorted, she meant, on the computer. Each loan transaction would have its own agreement, which in itself could originally range from one single slip of paper to a contract of fifty pages, and each agreement should say at what rate the loan interest was to
be levied, such as two above the current accepted base. There were thousands of such agreements typed onto and stored on computer discs. One could retrieve any one transaction by its identifying number, or alphabetically, or by the dates of commencement, or full term, or by the date when the next interest payment was due, but if you asked the computer who was paying at what per cent you’d get a blank screen and the microchip version of a raspberry.
‘You can’t sort them out by rates,’ she said. ‘The rates go up and down like see-saws.’
‘But there must still be some loans being charged interest at a fixed rate.’
‘Well, yes.’
‘So when you punch in the new interest rate the computer adjusts the interest due on almost all the loans but doesn’t touch those with a fixed rate.’
‘I suppose that’s right.’
‘So somewhere in the computer there must be a code which tells it when not to adjust the rates.’
She smiled sweetly and told me to be patient, and half a day later produced a cheerful-looking computer-programmer to whom the problem was explained.
‘Yeah, there’s a code,’ he said. ‘I put it there myself. What you want, then, is a programme that will print out all the loans which have the code attached. That right?’
We nodded. He worked on paper for half an hour with a much-chewed pencil and then typed rapidly onto the computer, pressing buttons and being pleased with the results.
‘You leave this programme on here,’ he said, ‘then feed in the discs, and you’ll get the results on that line-printer over there. And I’ve written it all out for you tidily in pencil, in case someone switches off your machine. Then just type it all in again, and you’re back in business.’
We thanked him and he went away whistling, the aristocrat among ants.
The line-printer clattered away on and off for hours as we fed through the whole library of discs, and it finally produced a list of about a hundred of the ten-digit numbers used to identify an account.
‘Now,’ Patty said undaunted, ‘do you want a complete print-out of all the original agreements for those loans?’
‘I’m afraid so, yes.’
‘Hang around.’
It took two days even with her help to check through all the resulting paper and by the end I couldn’t spot any companies there that had no known physical existence, though short of actually tramping to all the addresses and making an on-the-spot enquiry, one couldn’t be sure.
Henry, however, was against the expenditure of time. ‘We’ll just be more vigilant,’ he said. ‘Design some more safeguards, more tracking devices. Could you do that, Tim?’
‘I could, with that programmer’s help.’
‘Right. Get on with it. Let us know.’
I wondered aloud to Patty whether someone in her own department, not one of the managers, could set up such a fraud, but once she’d got over her instinctive indignation she shook her head.
‘Who would bother? It would be much simpler – in fact it’s almost dead easy – to feed in a mythical firm who has lent us money, and to whom we are paying interest. Then the computer goes on sending out interest cheques for ever, and all the crook has to do is cash them.’
Henry, however, said we had already taken advice on that one, and the ‘easy’ route had been plugged by systematic checks by the auditors.
The paper-induced rumpus again gradually died down and became undiscussed if not forgotten. Life in our plot went on much as before with Rupert slowly recovering, Alec making jokes and Gordon stuffing his left hand anywhere out of sight. John continued to suffer from his obsession, not speaking to me, not looking at me if he could help it, and apparently telling clients outright that my promotion was a sham.
‘Cosmetic of course,’ Alec reported him of saying on the telephone. ‘Makes the notepaper heading look impressive. Means nothing in real terms, you know. Get through to me, I’ll see you right.’
‘He said all that?’ I asked.
‘Word for word.’ Alec grinned. ‘Go and bop him on the nose.’
I shook my head however and wondered if I should get myself transferred along to the St Paul’s-facing office. I didn’t want to go, but it looked as if John wouldn’t recover his balance unless I did. If I tried to get John himself transferred, would it make things that much worse?
I was gradually aware that Gordon, and behind him Henry, were not going to help, their thought being that I was a big boy now and should be able to resolve it myself. It was a freedom which brought responsibility, as all freedoms do, and I had to consider that for the bank’s sake John needed to be a sensible member of the team.
I thought he should see a psychiatrist. I got Alec to say it to him lightly as a joke, out of my hearing (‘what you need, old pal, is a friendly shrink’), but to John his own anger appeared rational, not a matter for treatment.
I tried saying to him straight, ‘Look, John, I know how you feel. I know you think my promotion isn’t fair. Well, maybe it is, maybe it isn’t, but either way I can’t help it. You’ll be a lot better off if you just face things and forget it. You’re good at your job, we all know it, but you’re doing yourself no favours with all this bellyaching. So shut up, accept that life’s bloody, and let’s lend some money.’
It was a homily that fell on a closed mind, and in the end it was some redecorating which came to the rescue. For a week while painters re-whitened our walls the five of us in the fountain-facing office squeezed into the other one, desks jammed together in every corner,’ phone calls made with palms pressed to ears against the noise and even normally placid tempers itching to snap. Overcrowd the human race, I thought, and you always got a fight. In distance lay peace.
Anyway, I used the time to do some surreptitious persuasion and shuffling, so that when we returned to our own patch both John and Rupert stayed behind. The two oldest men from the St Paul’s office came with Gordon, Alec and myself, and Gordon’s almost-equal obligingly told John that it was great to be working again with a younger team of bright energetic brains.
NOVEMBER
Val Fisher said at lunch one day, ‘I’ve received a fairly odd request.’ (It was a Friday: grilled fish.)
‘Something new?’ Henry asked.
‘Yes. Chap wants to borrow five million pounds to buy a racehorse.’
Everyone at the table laughed except Val himself.
‘I thought I’d toss it at you,’ he said. ‘Kick it around some. See what you think.’
‘What horse?’ Henry said.
‘Something called Sandcastle.’
Henry, Gordon and I all looked at Val with sharpened attention; almost perhaps with eagerness.
‘Mean something to you three, does it?’ he said, turning his head from one to the other of us.
Henry nodded. ‘That day we all went to Ascot. Sandcastle ran there, and won. A stunning performance. Beautiful.’
Gordon said reminiscently, ‘The man whose box we were in saved his whole business on that race. Do you remember Dissdale, Tim?’
‘Certainly do.’
‘I saw him a few weeks ago. On top of the world. God knows how much he won.’
‘Or how much he staked,’ I said.
‘Yes, well,’ Val said. ‘Sandcastle. He won the 2,000 Guineas, as I understand, and the King Edward VII Stakes at Royal Ascot. Also the “Diamond” Stakes in July, and the Champion Stakes at Newmarket last month. This is, I believe, a record second only to winning the Derby or the Arc de Triomphe. He finished fourth, incidentally, in the Derby. He could race next year as a four-year-old, but if he flopped his value would be less than it is at the moment. Our prospective client wants to buy him now and put him to stud.’
The rest of the directors got on with their fillets of sole while listening interestedly with eyes and ears. A stallion made a change, I suppose, from chemicals, electronics and oil.
‘Who is our client?’ Gordon asked. Gordon liked fish. He could eat it right handed with his fork, in no danger of shaking
it off between plate and mouth.
‘A man called Oliver Knowles,’ Val said. ‘He owns a stud farm. He got passed along to me by the horse’s trainer, whom I know slightly because of our wives being distantly related. Oliver Knowles wants to buy, the present owner is willing to sell. All they need is the cash.’ He smiled. ‘Same old story.’
‘What’s your view?’ Henry said.
Val shrugged his well-tailored shoulders. ‘Too soon to have one of any consequence. But I thought, if it interested you at all, we could ask Tim to do a preliminary look-see. He has a background, after all, a lengthy acquaintance, shall we say, with racing.’
There was a murmur of dry amusement round the table.
‘What do you think?’ Henry asked me.
‘I’ll certainly do it if you like.’
Someone down the far end complained that it would be a waste of time and that merchant banks of our stature should not be associated with the Turf.
‘Our own dear Queen,’ someone said ironically, ‘is associated with the Turf. And knows the Stud Book backwards, so they say.’
Henry smiled. ‘I don’t see why we shouldn’t at least look into it.’ He nodded in my direction. ‘Go ahead, Tim. Let us know.’
I spent the next few working days alternately chewing pencils with the computer programmer and joining us to a syndicate with three other banks to lend twelve point four million pounds short term at high interest to an international construction company with a gap in its cash-flow. In between those I telephoned around for information and opinions about Oliver Knowles, in the normal investigative preliminaries to any loan for anything, not only for a hair-raising price for a stallion.
Establishing a covenant, it was called. Only if the covenant was sound would any loan be further considered.
Oliver Knowles, I was told, was a sane, sober man of forty-one with a stud farm in Hertfordshire. There were three stallions standing there with ample provision for visiting mares, and he owned the one hundred and fifty acres outright, having inherited them on his father’s death.
When talking to local bank managers one listened attentively for what they left out, but Oliver Knowles’ bank manager left out not much. Without in the least discussing his client’s affairs in detail he said that occasional fair-sized loans had so far been paid off as scheduled and that Mr Knowles’ business sense could be commended. A rave notice from such a source.