Sweet Talking Money

by Harry Bingham

  ‘You’re upset?’ she said.

  ‘No … Well, OK, yes, but go for it, Kati. I am pleased for you, it’s just there’s a bit of me which isn’t quite so thrilled. But I’ll get over it. And you’re probably right that it’s time for us to go back to the real world of dates and relationships and all that.’

  ‘Sod the engagement rings, though,’ said Kati.

  ‘Yeah, sod ’em.’

  ‘And sod all deceiving bastards of the opposite sex.’

  ‘Yeah, sod ’em all.’

  ‘For now.’

  ‘For now,’ agreed Bryn.

  Kati appraised her now ex-lover with a warm-hearted gaze. She gave him a big affectionate hug. ‘At least Thierry is a bit more my size,’ she said. ‘I can get my arms round him.’

  Bryn smiled again, but it was still wry, still pained. Whichever way you looked at it, he was on the losing side once again.

  ‘You’ve been a real buddy,’ she said.

  ‘Yeah, you too.’

  She got up to go, walking barefoot down the length of the barge roof, dark-blue cotton falling down to conceal what Bryn would never again lie next to. He felt lonely and under threat. Tallulah looked at him scornfully and flew with slow wingbeats back to the clinic, the world of winners.

  3

  That same afternoon, a second revelation.

  At four o’clock, as the heat was sinking from the day, the door to the boathouse flew open to reveal a tall slim woman dressed in a cool yellow linen suit, the skirt cut well above the knee, and designer-labelled dark glasses. Her complexion was pale, but no longer pallid, thanks to some lightly applied make-up and a day spent slogging round the shops in Meg’s ever-enthusiastic company.

  ‘Wow, Cameron!’ exclaimed Janine, Meg’s recently hired assistant, from the reception desk.

  ‘Hey.’ Cameron nodded briefly, uncomfortable with the inspection.

  ‘Wow … er, Kati’s been looking for you all day. I mean, there’s nothing wrong, just …’ Janine felt the force of Cameron’s discomfort, and her explanation sputtered to a close. ‘I love your hair, by the way. And that suit is to kill for.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Linen?’

  ‘Huh? Oh, yeah, sure.’ Cameron crinkled the fabric between her fingers. ‘I think so, anyway.’

  From the gallery of consulting rooms above the reception area, Dr Rauschenberg and one of his colleagues were discussing one of their patients, when they saw Cameron and broke off.

  ‘New look, Cameron?’ Rauschenberg called down. ‘It really suits you well.’

  Cameron acknowledged the compliment with a quarter-grin, then half-walked, half-ran for the relative shelter of the laboratory. ‘Of course they’re going to look at you,’ Meg had told her. ‘That’s the whole damn point, if you don’t mind me pointing out the bleedin’ obvious. It’ll feel weird for a day or two, then normal, then you’ll be complaining about the number of men you have to fight off. Big purple arse, remember.’

  Meg’s sloganising encouragement was all very well, but this was the first day of Cameron’s experiment with a different kind of womanhood, and she was already half-stunned by the experience. Charging into the sanctuary of her viruses and test-tubes, she dived into a labcoat and threw herself gratefully into her work.

  4

  Janine and Rauschenberg weren’t the only ones to comment on Cameron’s make-over. Bryn and Mungo were locked away in Bryn’s office, but had seen the cool yellow apparition arrive, and, after some hesitation, had identified it as Cameron.

  ‘Wow, man. This is Babe Control to all units. Stand by on full babe alert. Wo-ah, wo-ah, wo-ah!’ Mungo’s sirens sputtered to a halt. ‘I’m going to get a Coke,’ he added.

  Going to get a Coke meant, apparently, that he would march straight into the lab, ask Kati and Cameron if they wanted anything, gawp openly and open mouthed at the new-look Cameron, then go to the vending machine in the reception area and bring himself back a drink.

  ‘Man, she has legs, like, I mean, I knew she had legs, but –’

  ‘For God’s sake, Mungo,’ snapped Bryn, feeling suddenly angry. ‘Have you never seen a woman in a skirt before? She’s old enough to be your mother.’

  ‘Yeah, if she’d got pregnant when she was ten.’

  ‘It’s none of your bloody business, or mine, what she wears. It’s unprofessional to pass that sort of comment. One day you’ll have to learn –’

  ‘I only said she had legs,’ said Mungo patiently, ‘which technically I think you’ll find –’

  ‘We’ve got work to do. Once we’re done, you can go and languish over your Lara Croft pin-ups all you like, but till then …’

  Bryn’s storm of anger trailed away. He knew he was being unreasonable, but didn’t feel calm enough to apologise. Mungo muttered as he turned back to work. ‘Keep your hair on, man. Languish, though, top word. Languish. I’m gonna languish me some chick tonight.’

  But Mungo’s ramblings also died away. The current phase of work was delicate and critical. It was now four thirty, and the day’s fifth furtive attempt had revealed that Listoff’s clearance had been unfrozen.

  ‘Now-ee time go catch-ee sleeper.’

  Mungo typed some instructions into his PC and waited as the modem dialled. A distant modem sent an answering signal. Mungo frowned, then his face cleared and he shook his head, as he nearly always did when considering Berger Scholes security arrangements. More keystrokes brought a slab of program code to the screen, followed by a mass of all-but-unintelligible text.

  ‘Lovely jubbly. Now we jus’ need to find the open-cecily –’

  ‘Sesame.’

  ‘Makes me burp, that. Get all the bits between my teeth. Uh-uh-uh,’ Mungo mimed eating sand, but all the time he was scrutinising the forest of letters. ‘Here’s the database entry request … dialogue box … password: Highbury. Make sense?’

  Bryn nodded, but Mungo’s fingers had already raced away, requesting permission to enter the precious database. ‘Username?’ it queried. Blistoff. ‘Password?’ Highbury. The screen cleared and re-formed. ‘Please select HNWI search, by name, country, industry, net worth or d.o.b.’ The computer was politeness itself, flinging open its most secret doors like eunuchs bidding welcome to their sultan.

  ‘Select all,’ commanded Bryn. ‘Print all.’

  The printer salaamed and obeyed.

  5

  And one final event, that hot and turbulent day.

  ‘It’ll pass,’ said Mervyn Hughes. ‘Probably just a bit of flu, I imagine.’

  Derek Williams, the vet, a long-time family friend and the first port of call for any question of medicine, stood alone with Mervyn in the dim cow barn. Outside, the fiery sun still sat above the ancient ice-age curves of the Brecon Beacons, but inside, the barn was dark enough to require electric lighting at all times. Steel shades focused the light down on to the straw and dung, the swishing tails, the humped black-and-white mottled backs.

  ‘Don’t be daft, man. It hasn’t passed, and it’s not the bloody flu, as well you know … you need to see a doctor, get some tests done and that.’

  ‘Can you do that? Do the tests?’

  ‘No, not even if you were one of your damn cows. You need a doctor.’

  Mervyn Hughes leaned an elbow on the tubular metal fencing that penned the cows in. The fencing had once been blue, but long, long ago, when Mervyn was getting the farm shipshape again after his father’s slow decline and death. What goes around, comes around, and in Mervyn’s current state of health, the farm, once again, was beginning to slide.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Mervyn. ‘I’ve never really held with doctors and that. We’ve all got a time to go.’ He spoke quietly, but quietly is a relative term, and Mervyn’s voice had been trained calling to sheepdogs on the windswept Beacons, and bellowing support on the terraces at Pontypridd and Cardiff. His voice boomed around the barn, causing a couple of the cows to pause from their munching.

  ‘Bugger that,’ said Willia
ms. ‘I’ve never said that about your cows, and I’m not going to say that about you. You’ll see a doctor, if I have to drag you there.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Mervyn, looking along the rows of black-and-white backs, kicking straw into place with his toe, looking anywhere except at Derek Williams. If the light had been brighter, or if any temporary colouring had been able to make its way into the old farmer’s weather-beaten face, you might have noticed the red scorch-marks of deep embarrassment. ‘You know, these days, so many doctors are just out of college, young ladies some of them.’

  Derek Williams laughed. ‘And we don’t want that, now, do we? I’ll make an appointment for you with my own doctor, Ken Hartson. He’s an old dog like us, Mervyn. Old, grey and heading for the knacker’s yard.’

  Mervyn nodded gratefully, a bit too choked to say yes. When he recovered, and his foot was done rearranging straw, he put his hand on Derek Williams’ arm. ‘Just one thing. I’ll go and see your Dr Hartson, but … But I think it would be better if you didn’t say anything to Gwyneth. Not just yet. I don’t want to worry her.’

  ‘No, of course. It’s all probably nothing. She doesn’t need to know.’

  Mervyn’s storm clouds of worry cleared away, and he began nodding his head at the lightness of the arrangements. As they left the barn his voice was restored to its normal thundering pitch, and the conversation turned once again to the hoary old subjects that had been good for the last thirty years, and – God willing – would continue to be for many more to come: the sins of government, news from the sheep and cattle markets, weather, rugby, neighbours, kids.

  SEVENTEEN

  1

  Bryn began to grow obsessive. He stayed on the barge and shut himself in, poring over the mounds of data pilfered from Berger Scholes. Every name was followed by six or eight sheets of detailed discussion. Every name belonged to a millionaire.

  Bryn sorted through them with tireless patience. He didn’t just want any old millionaire. He wanted ones with an entrepreneurial record. He wanted ones with experience of biotech or medical-type investments. He wanted ones who enjoyed bypassing or upsetting the establishment. He wanted those who were sick, or whose wives or children were sick, with illnesses that the clinic could address. Ineligible millionaires dropped like confetti to the floor, but a stack of possibles grew bigger and fatter, until Bryn’s hopeless dream even began to seem like a serious possibility.

  He kept his door double-locked. He sent Meg out for food. He told no one what he was doing.

  2

  First thing in the morning, Meg arrived with the daily shopping.

  ‘Latvian-Lithuanian-Polish today,’ she announced, setting down her bag. ‘The shopkeeper adores me, and I’m going to marry his son.’ She flashed Bryn a photo. ‘He lives in Riga and his name is Tomasz, but I’m allowed to call him Tomek.’

  Bryn prodded morosely inside the bag, which contained some good-smelling sausages, but also far too many jars of pickled cabbage, beetroots, cucumbers and mushrooms. ‘What is all this, Meg? Repulsive Foods of the World Week? Or is this just the pickles category?’

  ‘If you won’t come to the world, then it’s my duty to bring the world to you. At least the world this side of the Talgarth Road.’ She produced some coffee, which Bryn inspected carefully before deciding the quality was acceptable.

  ‘Thanks, Meg. Do I owe you money, or do they pay you to remove this stuff?’

  ‘You should respect the dignity of other cultures,’ said Meg, picking Bryn’s dark moleskin jacket from the arm of his chesterfield, locating his wallet, and helping herself. ‘And I spotted this wicked Jamaican place. All dried cuttlefish and pepper sauces. And I just know the proprietor’s got a son he’s gonna want me to marry. Choices, choices.’ She peered with interest at the floor, where millionaires were stacked, categorised, cross-referenced, and annotated. ‘The Duke of Devonshire? I’ve heard of him.’

  ‘You astonish me.’

  ‘Are these all millionaires?’ she asked curiously.

  Bryn grunted. He hadn’t wanted to say anything, but it was hard to scatter detailed notes on millionaires with significant British assets all over your floor and not have anybody notice. ‘Yep. All millionaires.’

  ‘Like, with notes on them? Eight pages of notes on this one. Blimey.’

  ‘Yes. Meg, I want you to tell absolutely nobody at all that I’ve got this stuff, let alone what I’m doing with it.’

  ‘Making a mess of your floor, you mean?’

  ‘I’m serious. I think that somewhere inside the clinic we may have a Corinth spy.’

  ‘You’re joking,’ said Meg, knowing immediately that he wasn’t.

  ‘Corinth found out about our loan applications within a matter of days.’

  ‘Bloody hell.’ She paused. The question that hung in the air was so obvious, she hardly needed to ask it. ‘Do you have any idea …’

  Bryn shook his head. It wasn’t like he hadn’t spent the last few days racking his brains over it. ‘Anyone in the clinic could have found out who we were writing to. All they’d have had to do was take a peek into our postbag. From now on, the only people I’m willing to rely on are those people who got here before the Kessler story broke. Until then, we were invisible. Afterwards …’ Again he shook his head.

  ‘People who got here before Kessler? That was only you, me, Cammie, and Kati.’

  ‘And Mungo. Five of us. Everybody else I distrust. Everyone.’

  ‘Wow. Even Rauschenberg, even Janine … Anyone?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Meg thought some more, wide-eyed. ‘I’ll keep my eyes open,’ she said, ‘find the villain … And then there’s security. Do you want me to –’

  ‘Taken care of. A security specialist is coming round later. Same firm that did the MI6 building. They’re putting in CCTV, intruder alarms, additional locks, sealed safe for documents, palm-reading devices on my office door and the whole research area. They’ll also overhaul our waste disposal arrangements.’

  ‘Bleeding hell. How much does that lot come in at?’

  ‘Don’t ask, don’t even ask.’ Bryn’s eyes drifted back to his millionaires, and his thoughts drifted back to the thought of safe money, quiet money, money beyond the reach of Corinth Laboratories. Meg slipped away, excited and a little scared, listening to the door lock and double-lock behind her.

  3

  Time passed. Bryn drank some coffee and even got hungry enough to eat some of the food Meg had brought. He hadn’t wanted visitors, but there was a light tread on the jetty, a spring on to the deck and a rap at his door.

  ‘Who is it?’

  ‘Me,’ said Cameron.

  Bryn unlocked the door. Cameron, casually dressed in stretch tan capri pants and a sleeveless blue top, ducked her head to enter the barge. She had a newspaper folded under her arm.

  ‘Hi,’ she said.

  ‘Hi.’

  Already, just a few days into her make-over, Cameron was more confident, less self-conscious, less keen to shrink away from view, and Bryn welcomed her with a flash of irritation. Of course Cameron had the right to wear whatever she wanted, but it bugged him that she should let herself be distracted when really her whole attention should be on racing Corinth. She moved a still-warm pot of espresso from the arm of the chesterfield and sat there, swinging a leg. Bryn was too irritated to notice, but for all her relaxed posture her face was taut and grim.

  ‘Millionaires, huh?’ she said.

  Bryn nodded.

  ‘You still think we need the money? Rauschenberg was just telling me he’s about to hire his fourteenth doctor. Patient flow is massive. I’ve just hired my third assistant, in addition to Kati, that is. Rick Somebody. Beard. Good PhD from Cambridge. Your Cambridge, I mean. England.’

  Bryn’s irritation surged again – for no well-explained reason – and he mentally stamped it out, forcing himself to answer civilly. ‘Corinth is racing us. They’ve stuck Anita Morris into a high-tech lab with everything she could ask for
, and resources we can only dream of. Meanwhile they’ve blocked our route to the banks, and we daren’t risk venture capital. You tell me. Who’s going to win? Our shoestring little operation here, or Corinth? You think Rick the Beard is going to swing it for us?’

  Cameron nodded sombrely. ‘You’re right. We need more staff, more resources, a whole bunch more.’ Her admission came in a low tone, and Bryn guessed that it was the first time she’d admitted the fact to herself. ‘So how come millionaires?’ she added after a pause. ‘Why are they any better for us?’

  ‘OK. Point one, unlike venture capitalists, millionaires aren’t forced to sell. If they like a company, they can just carry on holding.’

  ‘Fair enough.’

  ‘Point two. If Corinth can bully the banks into refusing to lend, they can probably bully or bribe the venture capital houses. I doubt if it’s the same with millionaires. They’re a bloody-minded lot, the rich.’

  Cameron nodded. ‘I guess.’

  ‘Point three, and the most important: Corinth won’t be expecting us to do this. They’ll have no way of guessing who we’re approaching. No way of getting to them first.’

  ‘They’re not expecting it, huh?’ Cameron unfolded her newspaper, her face grim but also inscrutable. ‘I only hope you’re right. This is today’s Herald. I thought you should see.’

  She passed the paper to Bryn, who spread it on the trunk at the page indicated by Cameron, and began to read.

  ‘KESSLER CLINIC CAN’T EVEN RECOGNISE A HANGOVER,’ gloated the headline. ‘Special Reporter Luke Hancock put the super-fashionable Fulham Clinic to the test with the simplest of medical problems. Recognise a hangover? We doubt they could recognise their own feet.’

  The paper had printed a table showing the clinic’s exhaustive analysis of Hancock’s immunological deficiencies, captioned, ‘My GP just laughed when I told him’. There was plenty more of the same. ‘The Fulham Clinic came to prominence earlier this year when it achieved a so-called miracle cure on ailing pop-goddess Cheryl Kessler. Since then the clinic has attracted sick yuppies like ants to a yoghurt pot. But does it really do anything, except extract large cheques painlessly? I went along to test it. Apart from a crashing hangover, there was nothing wrong with me. Any competent doctor would have laughed me out of the surgery, but that kind of approach wouldn’t suit the moneyed hypochondriacs who crowd the clinic. Instead, I was made to fill out a six-page questionnaire, give blood and urine samples, and have a consultation with not one but two doctors, including the clinic’s American director of research, Dr Cameron Wilde. And the upshot? They diagnosed Impaired Immune Status and recommended a crash course of intravenous shots plus – I kid you not – a course of counselling.