Sweet Talking Money

by Harry Bingham

  He reviewed the day. Breakfast with Cameron had been a pleasure. There had followed the ride out to Altmeyer’s yacht, the long trawl through the documents, the agonising negotiation. The only brightness there had been the joy of hearing Cameron’s incisive interventions, cutting straight through Altmeyer’s bullshit, destroying his opposition. What a woman! Then the oysters and bread, the secretary labouring to put the contract changes through, Altmeyer’s antics, the boat ride back. Bryn remembered Altmeyer’s white face, Cameron’s seasickness, her body tense but grateful beneath his hands. What was so awful that his stomach clenched and his heart felt weak?

  It had been a good day, a successful day, a day when he’d really enjoyed being with Cameron, and … But his train of thought lurched abruptly to a halt. Cameron, by God, it was something to do with Cameron. His stomach actually lurched at the thought of her. The feeling of dread doubled in intensity. But why? Why this feeling of horror? On the whole, they got on so well these days, he admired her, liked her, he believed she liked him too … And then in the launch coming back tonight, with her body nestling into his, her hair damp beneath his cheek, it had reminded him of the very earliest days with Cecily, back in the days when they were still in love.

  The word brought him up short. In love. Not with Cecily, with Cameron. He was in love with Cameron, head over heels; truly, madly, deeply.

  The sick foreboding fell away with a thump, and in its place came a cold horror, the appalled recognition of calamity. He loved her. He loved her beauty and her strength. He loved her fire, the white heat of her passion, her strong, true heart.

  Just a few yards away, in a room above his head, she was asleep. There had been a time when a tap at her door would have been everything necessary to bring them together. One tiny tap. But he’d fluffed it, had his chance and blown it. She was another man’s now, happy with him, about to move in with him.

  Leaving his beer and the gaggle of tourists, he burst out on to the harbour front. Winds from the west brought angry squalls of rain. He opened himself to the elements, soaking himself, caring for nothing. He loved her and had lost her, loved and lost. Stumbling out on to the beach, he waded into the midnight sea, knee high, waist high, shoulder high, burning with love.

  TWENTY-THREE

  1

  Time passed.

  Summer faded into autumn. Trees dropped their leaves. On the King’s Road, shop windows emptied of sexy little cotton numbers and began to fill with fake furs, leather boots, cashmere scarves. On the river, the first sharp winds sliced upstream, eddying round the barge and boathouse, making people hurry to get back inside. Late autumn became early winter.

  Money poured into the twin companies like a flood after drought. Bryn acquired the dingy offices in the wharf next to the boathouse, and Cameron quickly filled them with research staff, computers and lab equipment costing half a million dollars a throw.

  Meanwhile the clinic raced ahead. Altmeyer used his organisation to run property searches and found leases in Glasgow, Manchester, Birmingham and Paris. The leases were big, expensive ones for major city centre properties, but Bryn was happy to commit. He wanted to expand the clinic fast and far. The Fulham Clinic was already one of the world’s leading centres for the treatment of viral disease, but the satellite clinics would promote the brand ever more widely. In pursuit of Bryn’s aggressive business plan, Rauschenberg stepped down as London medical director and began to spend his whole time in the other cities, getting the new centres off the ground.

  And yet despite the huge surge of acceleration provided by Altmeyer’s money, Corinth remained powerful contenders. On some counts, Cameron was ahead; on other counts it was Corinth. Bryn had completed the patent application for the HIV-related peptide sequence in record time and slammed it into the Patent Office, beating Corinth by just fourteen hours.

  Since then, on two minor viral diseases, Corinth had submitted a patent application well ahead of the clinic. On one other disease, the clinic had beaten Corinth, again by a matter of days, and again only thanks to their ability to intercept enemy communications. Meantime, all the indications remained that Huizinga was as committed as ever to winning the race at all costs.

  ‘It makes sense,’ said Bryn. ‘With his latest slew of acquisitions, Huizinga is getting into a position of more or less unchallenged dominance of the really heavy duty drug market. Everyone else is going all kinder-gentler, except Corinth. For all those doctors who want a pill which will kill either the disease or the patient, Corinth is the only place to shop. And meanwhile they’re inching prices up and up, making a bloody killing in doing so.’

  ‘Bloody killing is right,’ said Cameron. ‘You know, you always sound like you admire him, but in the end Huizinga is just killing people for money.’

  Bryn shrugged. In a way he did admire Huizinga – as a banker it was difficult not to – but that wasn’t an argument he wanted to have. ‘All I’m saying is that an effective immune-supportive technology is a knockout blow. It could cost Corinth a hundred billion dollars. Of course they’re going to chuck money at this problem. They’d be crazy not to.’

  ‘Crazy. Uh-huh. Or ethical. Or caring. It is just possible they might believe it was more important to save lives than make money.’

  Bryn laughed incredulously and shook his head. What would happen to the arms companies if they got all dainty about who bought their bombs? What would happen to the drugs companies if they put their patients’ interests over the need for profit?

  Cameron had always worked hard, but her hours grew longer, her intensity greater. She had moved in with Allen Green, and, when her duties were over at the office, she rushed back to be with him or to get on with her work in peace and quiet. At Cameron’s passionate request, he had withdrawn his job application to Corinth, only to receive a very warm lunch invitation from some of the senior guys at Corinth Respiratory. Over lunch, he was told that they’d been thinking of headhunting Allen anyway. Anytime he changed his mind about working for them, he should give them a call first thing. Allen never told Cameron about the lunch. Why should he? It would only double her paranoia.

  Kati, too, worked harder and became ever more involved with Thierry Doo-dah, while Bryn’s life became increasingly hard-working and lonely. He missed Cameron with a passion, sometimes feeling quite literally dizzy with the sense of loss.

  He did what he could to continue with a sort of life. He worked hard during the week, and at weekends he headed down to the farm, helped his dad out on the land, got shit-faced at the pub with Dai, and watched his father sinking further into a foggy, lethargic stupor. Cameron’s box of pills lay unopened on a kitchen shelf, after Mervyn had stubbornly refused to let a single one enter his mouth. He was growing listless, giving up, surrendering.

  2

  ‘Have you noticed,’ said Meg to Janine, ‘how our Mungo pops out every Thursday lunchtime and comes back looking like the cat sicked him up?’

  ‘Can’t say I have.’

  ‘Every Thursday – I’ve been watching him for weeks.’

  Janine shrugged. ‘It’s a free country.’

  ‘He’s weird,’ said Meg. ‘What do you think, Tallulah?’

  Beside the reception desk, Tallulah scratched at her perch. A pampered bird, she had become fat and flew only when she had to. ‘O-shi,’ she said, ‘uddy ell, matey.’

  ‘Good parrot,’ said Meg, absent-mindedly. ‘You know what? I’m going to follow him.’ And she did.

  3

  Cyberspace is a place where the sun don’t shine, and Mungo was paler than the moon. All the same, perhaps Meg was right and today he was paler still. He hurried up the back streets towards Hammersmith, gigantic trainers squelching and huge trousers ballooning and flapping around him, Meg following fifty yards behind.

  Reaching the Fulham Palace Road, he crossed through a gap in the traffic and continued along the far pavement. He passed a short row of shops, then stopped at the last one, a travel agent, and entered through a graffiti-spattered
grey side-door leading upstairs.

  ‘Gotcha,’ said Meg to herself.

  For a moment, she wondered whether to follow her quarry up the stairs, but, thinking better of it, went into the travel agent and asked an incredibly complicated question about flight connections between New Orleans and Manchester International. The baffled clerk invited her to take a seat, and Meg sat, wishing she’d bought a sandwich, but with a clear view out on to the street. Half an hour passed.

  Then: ‘I think we’ve got something,’ said the travel agent. ‘It was economy you wanted?’

  ‘Economy?’ said Meg. ‘With my mother’s hip?’ But Mungo had emerged from his lair and was standing chalk-faced in the street. ‘Actually, hang on, I need to go.’

  ‘I’ve got an itinerary …’

  But Meg was gone, out on to the street, catching Mungo in a couple of steps.

  ‘Well, well, well, fancy meeting you here!’

  Mungo whirled round unsteadily, and had to catch at the aerosol-adorned doorway for support. ‘Wow, right, Meg.’ He attempted a half-hearted grin, though his cheek muscles barely twitched.

  ‘I’ve watched you, you know. Going up them stairs. You want to tell me what’s going on?’

  ‘Going on? Man! What …? Nothing.’

  ‘You been seeing your dealer? Getting kippered? I don’t care what you do at the weekend, matey, but you better not –’

  ‘No, ’s nuffin’ like that.’ Mungo almost laughed in relief, but his voice was high and brittle. ‘My dealer? Yeah, if only.’

  ‘Well, either you’re telling me, or I’m going up to find out. And either way Bryn’s going to know all about it.’

  ‘No. You don’t want to know. Straight-up, it’s …’ But even as he spoke, his protest faded and something approaching resolution made its way into his face. ‘Wish I was kippered. Look, come in here.’

  He pulled her impulsively through a door to their left: the Oak Tree Café, a greasy spoon. Mungo tumbled into the first empty seat, plastic chairs, formica-topped tables, vinegar and ketchup bottles, a bunch of workmen and a ruined-looking pensioner the only customers. A waitress, perm half grown out and a hair-dye job you could sue over, approached listlessly.

  ‘Two teas,’ said Meg. ‘And I’d kill for a bacon sarny.’

  ‘Him?’ asked the waitress, not even bothering to address Mungo directly.

  ‘Nothing else, thanks, just that.’

  Mungo sat impatiently. The teas came, the sandwich came, Meg added sugar to one and brown sauce to the other, and stuck Mungo’s mug where he could reach it.

  ‘OK then, shoot.’

  He stared at her. ‘I’m stuffed,’ he said, ‘whanged, noodled, walloped, cracked.’

  ‘You’re well busted, matey.’

  ‘I’m a waster. I should of just gone.’

  The way he said ‘gone’, you couldn’t quite be sure if he was talking about leaving or dying. For the first time since trapping him, Meg felt a brief wave of compassion. His submission was so total, he was like a seal pup: you could either club him to death or feel sorry for him.

  ‘Go on,’ she said, her voice still tight, trying to hold fast to the clubbing option.

  He began to talk.

  It was all true. Ages back, right at the start of the clinic, he’d been approached by ‘the Darth Vader, Meg, like a cyberman, only with this unreal face, really gnarly – scary, you know – it literally doesn’t move, like it’s plastic or something.’ This character, called Janssen apparently, had forced Mungo to apply for the job with Bryn.

  ‘Like made me, man, only not that I cared, I mean, right, I’m not a loafer.’

  ‘He made you? How?’

  ‘That’s the shit bit. Jesus, if I tell you, he …’ Mungo attempted to swig his tea, he burned his tongue and upset the mug in putting it down. ‘Oh, shite, shite. I need to get mashed.’

  ‘Not until you tell me.’

  ‘Meg … It’s my sisters. I mean, this guy, freako, knew about my spliffs and my E and stuff, but I didn’t care about that. I mean, he was just another stiff, y’know, world’s full of ’em. But he knew stuff about JoJo, said he’d get her nicked. Even if he didn’t, it’d be back to care. And Dar. She’s only twelve. They’d’ve been split up, and, Christ, she needs JoJo. I mean they’re, like, sisters. Well, I mean, they are sisters. They’re like –’

  Words failed him. Meg put her hand on his arm, the clubbing option temporarily ruled out.

  ‘You’re close. You were trying to protect them. I understand.’ Tears squeezed from Mungo’s eyes, and he batted them away with a grubby hand. ‘That’s not the worst. The worst is he always wanted to know stuff about the company. Lil’ stuff, mostly. Who worked there, what Cameron was working on, was she up or down, y’know. How was the wonga. Where was it comin’ from.’

  ‘And you told him?’ Meg removed her hand, and her voice had tautened once again. She knew perfectly well that Bryn was worried about an internal security leak, and she burned inside with anger – as well as a kind of excitement. The mole. She’d caught the mole.

  ‘Yeah, only no, if you get me. I had to tell him some stuff, obviously. Mostly I kind of mixed things up, so he wouldn’t know what was what. But I couldn’t totally keep him off. I mean, JoJo, she’s a good girl, really, but she takes stuff. I tell her to only take stuff from the big shops, y’know. I mean they nick from us, right? Like them big bags of chocolate peanuts for two quid. Rip-off city, if you ask me.’ He shrugged. ‘But, JoJo, she’s not the type to nick from one of them corner shops, but to be perfectly honest with you, if I was some robo-suit patrolling my esteemed Pik-n-Mix confection’ry selection, I wouldn’t want JoJo in a hundred miles. Freako knows this. I dunno how, but he does. So I did tell him stuff. Stuff I wish I hadn’t.’

  ‘What did you tell him?’

  ‘Second worst thing I said was about banks. He kept wanting to know which banks Bryn was going to. Couldn’t see the harm in saying. I mean, I couldn’t see how freako could do anything about it. What was he gonna do? Walk in to Lloyds Bank – pardon me, Lloyds Tee Yess-Beeee – and say one false move and your black horse thingy gets it. I thought he just wanted to know what was shaking, but –’ Mungo shook his head. He was desperately worried, and all his wittering couldn’t conceal the fact that his face was drawn and white, his hand shaking.

  ‘You bloody well stitched us up!’ cried Meg. ‘We were that close to not getting the money ’cos of you.’ Her lips were thin and pale beneath her lipstick. Blood spots burned angrily, high up, on her cheeks. If Mungo was a seal pup, he’d have done well to prepare himself for the club.

  ‘I know, I know. But that wasn’t the worst. Worst was a real blooper. I was off my chump after a heavy weekend. Boasted that he could stick his banks up his ol’ rectal ejection chute. He was, like, what, what, what? Gave me a bad time, like I mean, a real bad time. Hitting, slapping, shouting.’ Mungo swallowed. ‘I mean my dad was bad, but at least he wasn’t around much. This was the Death Star, man, the prison planet. And all that stuff he said about JoJo, an’ what they’d do to Dar … So I told him about the zillionaire database we’d ripped off from Berger Scholes. How Bryn was going to have enough wonga to swim in. He went ape-shit. Two days later that article came out, in the Herald, you know. And Janssen was all like, he’ll give Bryn a bleedin’ millionaire. I was going to tell you guys, but then Hassie Baby goes on the telly, Bryn is all smiles, an’ old Max Moneybags phones up with a sackload of moolah. So I reckoned everything’s sorted. And, t’be honest, I was too scared. I mean freako would murder me, if I told.’ He paused. ‘Which I have now. Obviously.’

  There was a long pause. There was no one else in the café. From behind the counter, the greasy-haired waitress let out a long hiss of steam from the coffee machine. It sounded like a whistle of the damned. Mungo stared down at his hands and hated himself. Meg breathed in and out, short sharp breaths drawn through her open mouth. She was angry, alarmed, and – somewhere – terribly sorry for the poor kid op
posite her who’d been put under such odious pressure.

  ‘You’re coming back with me, Mungo m’boy,’ she said. ‘Straight in to Bryn, and tell him everything you’ve just told me. Or I’ll tell him.’

  Mungo looked up. ‘I’ll tell him,’ he said hollowly. ‘Introducing Mungo, the ferret in your PJs.’

  ‘Now.’

  Meg dropped some coins on the formica and got up to go. The waitress hurried over suspiciously, waving a bill scribbled out on a bit of war-quality paper. The waitress’s look of distrust didn’t vanish on seeing the coins, she just scooped them up and examined them as though they were certain to be phoneys or foreign. Under her breath, Meg muttered something about hairstyles.

  ‘Wait.’

  Mungo snatched Meg’s arms and clamped her back into her seat. Through her thin Lycra top, she could feel the sudden energy of his grip.

  ‘Get off me,’ she said. ‘I’ll tell him if you won’t.’

  ‘No, wait.’ Mungo let go his hold. ‘Look … there’s something we can do. I mean, if you dare. Get our own back, sort of thing. To be honest, I’ve been praying someone would catch me. Knew it’d be you, actually. Bit of a snooper, I reckon.’

  Mungo poured sugar into his tea, stirred it and slurped. His hand was shaking. He was scared.

  ‘What is it?’ said Meg.

  ‘OK. Plan is I go an’ get Janssen. Get him out of his hole, for maybe an hour. While he’s out, you get in. Should be easy. There’s one of them metal fire thingies out the back. Escape, y’know, fire escape. Weird, when you think about it. Like why would a fire need to escape? Help me, help me, I’m a fire.’ Mungo flung his arms into the air, squawking. It was almost as though the closer he drew to the centre of his terror, the more he felt obliged to cover it in a cloak of babble. ‘Don’t think so. Anyway. His window backs right on to it, second floor. He never locks it. I mean, there’s crap all to steal, unless you know what he’s up to, and if you do … Shite, Meg, promise me you’ll be out of there in an hour. He’s a psycho.’ Mungo thought about it, and with hands still shaking began to make himself a cigarette, at least part of which contained tobacco. ‘Moroccan black. Been saving it. Last cigarettesville.’ He sewed together the Rizla paper with a thread of spit, and began to arrange leaves and resin in a line down the middle. ‘You think they used to spliff up in them war movies, like before the firing squad? All the music’s going da-ra-ra-ra, sad an’ stuff, and all the David Niven types are twiddling their moustaches and saying, “Just tell Bess I love her,” and looking all top-hole-old-bean, but all the time they’re thinking, hey, man, take it easy, wow, love those rifles, for real.’ Mungo finished his spliff and waved it around, David Niven on dope.