MBA

by Douglas Board

  Connie had not been inside any of the staff houses before. A semi-circle of glass in the front door at head-height threw the only available light into the narrow hallway. It was stacked with papers and books. At the end was a kitchen and a small toilet under the stairs. A single living/dining space was divisible into two by remarkably out-of-fashion sliding panels. Two bedrooms and a bathroom upstairs, she imagined. Well, if you lived in England, you did not need to imagine, you knew.

  ‘Come in!’ Frank looked pleased to see her. Pleased? More like relieved. ‘I was making myself a cheese sandwich.’

  ‘I’ve eaten. But a cup of tea – green or herbal if you have it?’

  ‘Two green teas coming up. Take a seat in the living room, I’ll be with you in a minute.’

  The furnishing of the living/dining space was eclectic, but less so than Connie would have feared for a 45-year-old bachelor. Bookcases of course, a small bust of Gandhi, a 15-year-old turntable and a stack of records (records!), two armchairs and a handsome circular dining table with four chairs. On the main wall hung an original canvas, a large semi-aquatic expanse of grey and white serving as the backdrop to something limb-like with a trickle of red. Connie felt a twinge. Was it saying something about hidden depths? Frank’s presumably.

  An imitation-silver candelabra of three intertwined fish on the dining table picked up the semi-aquatic motif.

  ‘I’m glad you’ve come round,’ Frank said as he emerged with the cups of tea. ‘I’ve just been fired.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Well, agreed to go. By noon on Thursday. I said yes on condition that the pay-off was in my bank account by noon tomorrow.’ He recounted an icy meeting two hours earlier. Gyro said that he could not overlook another complaint from a group of MBA students about his ethics teaching. ‘I said their marks were low because their ethics were low, or had I missed the point of it all? But the truth is I’ve been a thorn in Gyro’s side for too long. I think this wanker protest nonsense was the last straw.’

  ‘Was that you?’

  ‘No, nor did Gyro have anything he could pin on me. But saying I thought it was quite witty didn’t help.’

  ‘I’m so sorry.’

  ‘Don’t be – though there is one thing you could do for me.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Come here to dinner on Wednesday night. I’d like to have a last supper but just with a couple of friends. I had you and Ben in mind. While most of the faculty here aren’t against me, they’re too much in favour of a quiet life to be for me. Will you?’

  ‘Of course. I mean, we’ll need to ask Ben, but I know how much he respects you.’

  ‘Calling me his star teacher on Saturday was going a bit far. Anyway, now the star’s out, which makes your role as a governor all the more important. You can ask questions. If you want.’

  ‘I want. That’s why I came round.’ She talked about her meeting with Vanish on Saturday. Ben had mentioned some of it to Frank that evening at the Kings Arms, but now Connie pulled no punches. She described the suggestion of the off-the-book loan, as well as the fact that Vanish had no hard evidence. Frank whistled in astonishment. ‘If there is a loan,’ Connie continued, ‘Vanish thought Gyro was counting on raising money in Hong Kong to pay it off – that’s why he’s made so many trips recently. Since Gyro’s back today, I emailed to ask him politely to ask if he was bringing back bags of loot.’

  Frank nodded. ‘To be fair to the bastard, he has done exactly that a number of times, like getting the money for the tower.’

  ‘Here’s his reply this morning.’ Connie put her phone on speaker and they listened to Gyro’s message:

  ‘Good to get your email, Connie. It’s great to be back with everyone so excited about Thursday. How did my trip go? Exhausting. Positive. But you’re Chinese yourself, aren’t you, so you know how it goes. No money for the college right now, but a big pay-off soon.’

  ‘Jam tomorrow, in other words,’ Connie concluded. ‘Which is why I wanted to talk to you. What should I do next? As a governor?’

  Frank was concentrating. ‘Play the message again, will you?’ She did. ‘He may have chosen his words carefully. If it’s an off-the-books loan, and he has come-back money or a pledge to pay it off, that money will have to be off-the-books, too. Like directly from some Chinese big-wig to the bank, bypassing the college. It wouldn’t be money for the college right now, would it?’

  ‘I hadn’t thought of that,’ Connie acknowledged.

  ‘Ben told me that Gyro’s diary – his official college diary – for this trip is just like the other Hong Kong trips: completely blank. That could also make sense if Gyro’s raising money off the books.’ Frank looked up; he had reached a conclusion. ‘I bet the answer will be how Sling is on Thursday. It will be as plain as day if there’s a dirty loan still hanging over his head.’

  In the background Connie was aware of a car pulling up outside. ‘You’re right. But obvious in his body language, not necessarily in any documents. So I’ll invite myself to the meeting. Just turn up unannounced. Ben knows when it is. Gyro will wonder what I’m up to, but I am a governor. Frank, I knew you’d see a way –’

  Two sets of footsteps down the front path were followed by a hammer-blow to the front door. Greg was outside with a police officer in tow. ‘The dean called in the police this morning to do an explosives check on the boathouse,’ said Greg.

  Frank stood guard on the path and pursed his lips. ‘What a surprise, Greg. I’m sure it has everything to do with you. I always thought you were a secret Santa, disguised as a jumped-up shit. So how did the boathouse do?’

  ‘It passed. But we also want to test the house.’ The police officer seemed content to let Greg do the talking.

  ‘This is outrageous,’ Connie protested. ‘Where’s your warrant?’

  ‘The house is college property. Under the terms of Dr Jones’ lease – ’

  Frank pulled Connie back and then waved his arms, holding his hands out. ‘Forget it, forget it. You can come in on two conditions. One is that you test my hands right now. The other is that you are out of here in ten minutes. You make me sick.’

  Greg eyed the offer he had in front of him and took it. While the officer used tweezers to take discs of cotton out of a packet and wipe them on Frank’s outstretched palms, Greg slipped inside, picking the places to be swabbed. Each time the officer popped the swabs into a machine in the car’s boot, which a minute later spewed out some lines of letters and numbers on a roll of paper, like a till-roll in a cash register. Frank and Connie stood still and watched the bizarre performance.

  ‘Your ten minutes are up,’ Frank declared.

  Greg came out of the house wearing an expression as inscrutable as Frank’s. He said something to the officer and turned around. Strips of print-out fluttered on the officer’s clipboard. The house had no basement but Greg had selected cupboards, the attic, the bathroom, the front hallway and some curtains for swabbing.

  ‘You’re clean as a whistle, sir,’ the officer said to Frank. ‘You had your curtains dry-cleaned a few months ago, but there are no explosive markers. Not now; certainly not last week; and probably not in the last three months. We’re sorry we’ve had to bother you, but police work is mostly about eliminating people from our inquiries. Each step brings us nearer to our man.’

  ‘Watching your face almost makes the day worthwhile,’ Frank called out as the unmarked car pulled off with Greg in the passenger seat.

  Connie realised that she was shaking. ‘They thought you were a bomber?’

  Frank took her by the arm. ‘Search me,’ he said. ‘Mind you, they just did.’

  Connie reached for her phone. ‘Ben needs to know what’s happened. He can speak to the dean.’

  Frank shook his head. ‘It won’t do any good – as far as the dean’s concerned, I’m gone; the more gone, the better. Ask Ben to dinner
Wednesday night. Early, say 6.30pm? I’ll be up most of the night packing and Thursday’s a big day.’

  ---

  ‘I’ll check again, but the Prime Minister will be in Africa on Thursday.’ Amelia Henderson spoke as if Africa were up the road from her native Inverness but encryption made her words jagged.

  The day’s results spoke for themselves, Greg thought. Frank would be off-site by noon on Thursday. If Frank had had plans for Thursday he would now have to change them. With luck he would have to communicate, and the bugs to hear that were now in place. But Amelia didn’t like Greg’s tactics. ‘You were impatient, rushing over to his house. Two hours later with a warrant, we could have taken the house apart.’

  ‘I told the officer to tell Frank he was all clear. I mean he was all clear, but I had guessed that was going to be the result from the way he let us go in. So I thought it through, like you keep telling me. Even if a house search found something, we wouldn’t know who he’s working with. A second team could have a second bomb.’

  ‘You’re over-reaching. We haven’t got one team yet. One person isn’t a team.’

  ‘Whereas now Frank thinks he’s in the clear he’ll drop his guard – which is good, because – I’ll admit it – he’s been more careful than I had expected. I was sure we would find traces at the boathouse.’

  ‘No trace cuts two ways. Yes, he’s no amateur lone bomber. It might mean training and sophistication or it might mean he’s a harmless academic with a hobby he doesn’t like people to know about.’

  ‘So we protect against the threat. Because he’s going to be out of the picture on Thursday, if he is a threat he’ll need to talk to his handler urgently. With the bugs in and his guard lowered, we’ll find out who he talks to.’

  Amelia was silent for a moment. ‘OK. It’s not a perfect plan, but it’s not bad. Well done. What matters is if Number Ten suddenly plans to go to Hampton we will be ahead of the game. We’ve got your eyes on the ground already, which is a huge plus and makes us look smart.

  ‘Of course, we can kill a planned visit if we need to, but there’s no need. General terrorist chatter is flat – nothing’s going on as far as our usual suspects are concerned. Thanks to you we’ve spotted one ornery academic who may have something to hide but he’s out of the picture cleanly. Our scoreboard’s looking good. Be patient and it will stay that way.’

  Greg grinned.

  4 SAS Survival Guide, HarperCollins (Collins Gem), Glasgow (1993)

  TUESDAY 19 JUNE (AFTERNOON)

  The black-and-white photographs lining the stairs had Ben craning his head while trying not to fall over. At first glance, there was a sameness about the portraits of Britain’s past Prime Ministers, as if they had been taken by the same photographer around the time of the abdication crisis. Ben was also trying to follow Ed Lens’ receding back. Attempting the two tasks together meant that he walked into the person who was going down.

  In the polls the Prime Minister and First Lord of the Treasury had been going down for some time, but a cheery ‘Good afternoon’ rang out as if Ben was a long-lost voter from his constituency. He had been coached to give an upbeat greeting and grin at a certain point on the stairway whether or not anyone was there. The delayed effect of the grin on his cheek muscles produced the amount of smile which the image wizards desired when the Prime Minister walked out of the front door and into Downing Street six seconds later.

  Ben had seized the opportunity of Dianne’s announcement to get out of the college and out of the path of any lava flow from Gyro about the feminists. In any case, he badly needed to get face-to-face with Lens to check out whether Dianne’s wild rantings had any substance – and if they did, to steer them towards the safe harbour of a Prime Ministerial visit after Thursday. On the drive into London he had concluded that that was the win-win-win solution: the college got its moment of fame; the Pinnacles didn’t get upstaged; and best of all he, Ben, would be out of the picture.

  When Ed had met Ben after the speech eight days ago, he had asked if Bakhtin had been to Number Ten. Oddly, here they now were. Did Ben’s rapid switch of role from Bakhtin to Hampton strike Ed as odd? Not at all.

  ‘Smart move,’ said Ed from the corner of his attic office, ‘given Bakhtin’s key role in this programme. Dianne’s idea, no doubt.’

  Ben fished for safe ground. ‘She’s certainly a smart woman.’

  Most of Ed’s office was taken up by combination-locked filing cabinets in battleship grey. Presumably the locks were equally effective at stopping thieves getting in and skeletons getting out. The floor sported several defensive fortifications constructed out of broadsheet, tabloid and NHS newspapers and some weekly magazines.

  Half-concealed behind one cabinet was a poster of the five cavorting nudes of Matisse’s La Danse, with a coffee-stain in one corner, but otherwise the walls were empty. The agile energy of the figures was reminiscent of Ed’s own wiry physique. Or perhaps it represented an active and public-spirited citizenry, keeping themselves fit to avoid placing gratuitous demands on the National Health Service.

  The sash window looked out into the Downing Street garden, scattered with its plastic tricycle, toys and a sandbox. The window was open but since they were under the eaves, the room was hot. Ed was not much older than Ben but red braces suited him. The sweat marks on his shirt testified to his constant gesticulation, always pointing, correcting or adjusting.

  Bakhtin’s key role in the programme was one of the first things that Ed explained. The headline figure for investment in British business schools was £120m. This was to buy a major upgrade in the skills of NHS managers, to enable them to cope with the new choice-driven, customer-focussed health world. It would mean more and better courses like Connie’s, taken up much more widely by senior clinicians as well as managers within the NHS.

  Overcoming the split between doctors and managers was a top priority. The money would pay for such things as attracting higher calibre, world-class faculty to teach the courses (what Hampton had been doing under Gyro was showing the way). There would also be investment in more specialised course content, such as state-of-the-art interactive business games drawing on advances in decision theory as well as relevant lessons from health economies overseas.

  Naturally, Ed explained, the figure of £120 million included quite a lot of packaging. In the pathfinder phase there would only be £32 million, in tranches of £8 millon each for four business schools; anything after that would depend on the programme’s early results, not to mention general elections, public spending crises or outbreaks of war. For that £32 million, European business schools would compete to be one of the lucky four – or three, since Hampton had taken the lead place.

  They would be less lucky than at first appeared, because each participating school would have to raise half of its £8 millon from its own sources: the government would simply match-fund. Lord Bakhtin had kicked the programme off by agreeing to top up his gift to Hampton from £3 million to £4 millon; he had also agreed to chair a panel of business leaders to front the programme. In other words, he would be the programme’s chief fund-raiser and arm-twister. For that he had got a seat in the House of Lords.

  Ben marvelled at the ratio of bang to buck. In extra cash, Hampton would get £1 million more from Alex and £4 million from the taxpayer. £4 million was all the government would be spending anytime soon, but they would be getting their £120 million headline. The political arithmetic was wonderful.

  And, Ben mused, despite having been Alex’s chief of staff for a year he had not pieced any of this together. Granted, the diary had recorded various meetings at Hampton about the gift. Ben had only gone along to one or two: it had been an intimate personal matter rather than a business one, concerning Alex’s late wife and tricky negotiations about large amounts of personal money. Presumably some of these ‘meetings’ had then become intimate in a different way, with Dianne beginning to spin her spider’s web.<
br />
  Ed was on edge. Ben was not surprised. Looked at from a business perspective, the sketchiness of the thinking behind how spending £120 million would actually improve things for patients was flimsy to the point of non-existence. But the danger preying on Ed’s mind was something else entirely.

  ‘We need to sex the thing up. We’ve chucked billions at the NHS already, but there still isn’t a clear narrative in the public’s mind about the benefits. The dimension we’re missing here is transformational.’ He grabbed a pen off his desk and scribbled the word in small capitals in a miniature notebook which lived in a jacket pocket. Ben saw that the other words written there were MRSA and nano-oncology.

  ‘How does spending this money transform the whole situation? How does it enable Cinderella to go to the ball? That’s what we need to crack. Otherwise no deal, no launch at Hampton.’

  Seeing half a loaf, Ben grabbed it. The overwhelming priority was to unhook this Prime Ministerial circus from the tower opening in two days’ time. ‘I agree. And given just a few extra days beyond Thursday, we could come up with something absolutely transformational.’ Surely? About as surely as he could compose a violin concerto. But even a few days’ grace would get him clear of the scene, and Gyro and Dianne could have the pleasure of sorting out the promise.

  ‘Besides, the Prime Minister’s diary must have been committed for this Thursday months ago.’

  ‘It was.’ Ed flicked between windows on one of his two computer screens. ‘Since last November, this Thursday and Friday have been down for a surprise visit to a British disaster relief operation in sub-Saharan Africa.’

  ‘And is there a disaster?’

  ‘Oh, always. This week, flooding on a major river which may overwhelm the dams. We need enough flooding for the Land Rovers we have donated to look dramatic and useful, but not enough to flush them into the Indian Ocean. We were going to have had helicopters, but they have had to go to Afghanistan,’ he added wistfully. ‘The final call on whether the Prime Minister’s going won’t be made until tomorrow afternoon.’