Matthew was apoplectic. He was flying to New York to join Madison’s notoriously tough training programme, which started tomorrow. On the first morning, the bank’s president was to give an introductory talk famous for its brevity. ‘Take a good look at the students on either side of you,’ he was reputed to say. ‘Chances are that by the end of the programme, one of those students, or you, will have flunked the course. And there is no second chance, so do your best. And remember: in times to come, your fellow students may be your friends and colleagues. Right now they are also your competitors.’
It wouldn’t be his fault if he were late. Brian McAllister had kept him in over the weekend on some dumb project that needed finishing and this was the last flight to get him there on time. Because he was a trainee, he had to fly economy, a saving which now threatened to tip him off the flight. But Madison wanted results not hard-luck stories, and Matthew looked set to be the first student not even to arrive on the first day.
‘Merde!’
The thought was Matthew’s, but the words came from elsewhere. It was the French girl in the white shirt. Her face was no disappointment at all. Long, dark brown hair fell smoothly from a centre parting, beautifully framing her oval face. She had clear fair skin, a slight pink blush, high cheekbones. She looked like a madonna, travelling light. Though obviously annoyed, she remained entirely composed. She was perfect, thought Matthew, absolutely perfect. Just for a moment the flight was forgotten.
The French girl wasn’t really talking to anyone, just announcing her feelings, but Matthew felt he might as well respond.
‘Unbelievable, isn’t it?’ he said, brilliantly.
‘Terrible. I need to be in New York tonight. I have changed my booking twice already.’
‘Me too. Let’s see if we can get any joy here,’ said Matthew, throwing his weight into the melee ahead.
‘I don’t think you will have any fun there. Not unless you have something which the fifty people ahead of you don’t have. Come.’
She turned and set off rightwards to the serene world of business class. Matthew hesitated a moment, then followed. When he caught up with her a few yards from the check-in counter, she was in tears and her hands twisted round her handkerchief in agitation. He hurried to keep alongside her. At the desk she threw down her passport and her ticket. Between sobs she gasped, ‘We have to go to New York tonight. We have to.’
She then seemed to break down completely, and in an instant had nestled herself inside Matthew’s startled embrace. She was beautiful, beautiful, beautiful. Her body melted into his, seeking protection. He held her. He didn’t mind.
Then, with a further convulsion, she jerked free. Tugging at the ring finger of her left hand, she pulled off two rings and flung them on to the counter. One held a simple sapphire surrounded by a circle of tiny diamonds. The other was a plain gold band.
‘If you are going to ruin our honeymoon, you may as well have these as well!’ she cried.
The rings skittered across the counter. One of them fell into the stewardess’s lap, while the other flew on to the conveyor belt taking luggage to the cargo hall. The stewardess made a cricketer’s leap and snatched the ring up before it was carried away.
The diversion was enough for Matthew to regain his cool. As the stewardess grabbed the ring, he stole a glance at the passport on the counter in front of him. Sophie Clemenceau. As the stewardess resurfaced again, red-faced but holding both rings, Matthew stepped in. Drawing his companion further into his arms, he said, ‘I do apologise. Sophie doesn’t mean that at all. She knows it’s not your fault. She’s just upset.’
‘This is your honeymoon?’ asked the stewardess.
‘That’s right. You’re looking at the brand new Mr and Mrs Matthew Gradley.’ A squeeze below the level of the counter thanked him for the information.
‘Oh, it seems a terrible shame to spend your first night on honeymoon in the airport hotel. It’s not very nice, to be honest.’
‘Well, I suppose we don’t have much of a choice. I’m sure Sophie will be OK after a few days, though she is very superstitious.’
Sophie did a good job pretending that she wouldn’t get over the shock in a few months, let alone a few days. Matthew felt his shirt sticking to his chest where it was soaked from her tears.
‘Just a second. Let me see what I can do. I wouldn’t have wanted my honeymoon to be spoiled by anything like this.’
The stewardess whisked away. Matthew went on petting the sobbing Sophie. It was no torture. He hoped the stewardess would take her time. With her gone, Sophie held herself away from Matthew’s body but she stayed put.
‘Good thinking,’ he whispered into her hair.
‘Good job,’ she responded before getting on with more heavy-duty sobbing.
He stroked and she sobbed for a few minutes more. She was heaven, better than perfect. Matthew, her pretend husband, was virtually ready to marry her for real on the spot. All too soon the stewardess returned, smiling.
‘Luckily we have a couple of seats available in first class. They were booked, but nobody has shown up for them. I’ll book you in right away with the compliments of the airline.’
Within a minute they slipped away, hand in hand down the fast-track passport channel. A happy glance behind told them that the fifty or sixty frantic passengers they’d left screaming and shouting at the check-in desk were still there, still yelling. Matthew turned to Sophie.
‘Do tell me about our wedding. I seem to have forgotten it.’
She laughed. Her teeth were very white.
‘Tsk. Forgotten already? I have a good mind to divorce you.’
‘Better wait till we’re airborne. We wouldn’t want them to change their minds. That was quite a show you put on.’
‘I’ve been able to make myself cry since I was seven. I used it to make sure I never got in trouble for starting a fight, even when I had.’
They parted after passport control, she to the Harrods boutique, he to the newsagent for magazines. But their seats were together, and the armrest between them was already adorned with a bottle of champagne and flowers. Matthew, arriving first, was obliged to describe the happy day in exact detail to the inquisitive cabin crew until Sophie’s arrival rescued him.
They were left alone for a while as they made themselves at home in the luxurious seats. Matthew stretched out his legs and felt with difficulty for the seat a long way ahead of him. The menu promised good things, and a video library exclusively for first class assured him of a good evening’s entertainment. He glanced sideways again at Sophie. She had pulled a navy lambswool jumper out of her bag and had thrown it over her shoulders. She was casual, assured and beautiful. She wore her two rings on her ring finger, but Matthew could see the faint circles of pale skin which betrayed their normal positions. So she wasn’t married.
Matthew urgently wished he was more to her than a casual accomplice in a petty fraud. One of the stewardesses came over again.
‘We don’t have details of your destination address on arrival in New York. We have a complimentary limousine service to take you wherever you’re going to.’ Matthew paused. The gentlemanly thing would be to allow Sophie to give her address. He could get a cab from the airport. He already felt a sense of loss at their approaching parting. He had made up his mind to get to know her as well as he could on the flight over. If she was as great as she seemed, he’d do his utmost to mix pleasure with business during his five-month stay in New York.
Sophie pulled out an address slip. ‘It’s the intersection of Park Avenue and 75th Street. Upper East Side.’
It was the same block as Matthew was going to. The sheet of paper on which the address was printed had a familiar look to it. Hudson House. A small hotel with one very large corporate client. When the stewardess was out of earshot again, Matthew leaned over to Sophie.
‘Are you with Madison by any chance?’ She looked at him sharply.
‘I’m beginning the training programme tomorrow. That’s w
hy I was so keen to make the plane.’
‘Me too. On both counts.’
‘Pleased to meet you.’
They formally shook hands, carefully so none of the cabin staff could see. It was only forty minutes after the moment that her tears had been gluing his shirt to his chest, and about thirty-nine minutes after Matthew had decided to see more of her.
Now he was both relieved and tense. Relieved because he would see her every single day for the next five months. Tense because he remembered the famous speech he was due to hear tomorrow. The beautiful Sophie Clemenceau might become a friend and colleague. If Matthew had his way she would also become his lover. But for five months she was also to be a competitor.
7
George had found a solicitor in Ilkley to draw up the Sale Agreement which would legally transfer Gissings into his name. He had instructed the solicitor to make the document totally one-sided and sent two copies round to Gissing. He assumed he’d have to make some concessions to get the old man’s consent, but one copy of the contract came back by return signed in a shaky hand, ‘Thomas Gissing, Proprietor and Managing Director, 1963-98’. There were no amendments.
Eleven weeks since hearing his father’s will, George owned a company. Its annual turnover was £1.5 million. Excluding the bank loan, its assets were valued in the accounts at around £350,000. So far, George had spent one pound plus a few hundred in solicitor’s fees. He should be feeling good.
He wasn’t. It was now Monday. On Friday, The Gissings Modem Furniture Company was required to repay more than half a million pounds to the bank. Val Bartlett, old Tom Gissing’s secretary and now his, was able to find about fifteen quid in the company’s petty cash tin. There was a float of perhaps five pounds in a decaying vending machine. George’s car would fetch twenty grand second-hand. And that was it.
George made an appointment to see David Ballard, the company’s bank manager.
As luck would have it, Ballard had been Bernard Gradley’s bank manager when Gradley had first opened an account, and they’d done good business together. Both men’s empires expanded. Ballard took over responsibility for all lending to mid-sized companies in Yorkshire and the North West, while Gradley’s business spread across the nation. Despite their different paths, the two men had maintained a respectful friendship. If George needed a favour to get him started, Ballard should be the ideal man to grant it.
Ballard’s office overlooked the old market square in Richmond, a well-to-do market town in North Yorkshire. The room was furnished by Ballard himself, not his employer, and the result was welcoming and warm. Ballard had been offered promotions, but he refused anything which took him away from Yorkshire. His clients loved him and his bosses left him alone. He welcomed George with coffee and biscuits.
‘Well, well, George. It’s a while since I’ve seen you. Very sorry to hear about your father’s death. Very sorry indeed. You must be very cut up, I suppose. How’s poor Helen taking it?’
Ballard munched on the biscuits as he spoke. He was a fat man with greying hair and moustache. He had the no-nonsense mouth of the tough banker and the twinkly eyes of a kind and humorous man. Crumbs from his biscuits lodged inside his moustache.
George shrugged. According to Josie, their mother was in a very bad way indeed, having teetered on the brink of following their father into the night. As it was now ... but Ballard didn’t need to know the real, gloomy story. A brightly-coloured fairy tale would do for him.
‘Mum’s taken it OK to be honest,’ said George. ‘You know, there wasn’t much love lost between Mum and Dad by the end. She’s just pleased that the money’s coming into the family proper after being under lock and key for so long.’
The will was secret, but Ballard knew as well as any one how much Bernard Gradley was worth. If George could con him into believing he was about to inherit millions, then getting him to show a bit of grace with Gissings shouldn’t be so tough.
‘Yes. A few million must dull the edge of pain I suppose. Especially if you couldn’t stand the old bastard - and I speak as a friend of the old bastard, as you know. Still you haven’t come here to talk about that, I guess. Proud proprietor of old Tom Gissing’s shop, eh? Wouldn’t quite guess it. Not from the look of you. Still, stranger things have happened. How can I help?’
‘Well I owe you half a million quid, give or take.’
‘That’s right. But it’s give not take. Five hundred and forty-eight thousand, seven hundred and eighty-two pounds. Due close of business on Friday.’
‘That’s fine, but I wonder if we could sort out an extension. Two or three months perhaps?’
‘An extension? With all that cash from your dad?’ There was a twinkle in Ballard’s eye, but his mouth was unforgiving, and it was the mouth talking.
‘Nothing has yet been released by the estate’s executors,’ said George truthfully. ‘There are death duties, valuation of the business, all the rest of it. Until I get my slice of the pie, I’m as poor as a church mouse. What I want is to defer the loan until I can recapitalise the business, write off the debt, give it a healthy balance sheet once again.’
‘You have a letter from the executors? I might be able to grant a deferral if you had a letter.’
George stuttered for a moment. He could get a letter. It just wouldn’t say what he needed it to say.
‘Er - I guess so. What I don’t know is whether I can get it in time. There’s a whole bunch of executors and the legal palaver seems to take for ever.’
Ballard checked some figures on his desk.
‘The interest payment due on Friday is around six grand. If you get that to us plus another thirty grand as an advance on the next series of interest payments, then I’ll give you a temporary extension. Let’s say three months, shall we?’
George nodded without being able to speak. In his mind’s eye, he’d expected Ballard to nod the whole thing through without a hint of difficulty. As it was, Ballard had hardly helped at all.
Emerging blinking into the market square, George chased a traffic warden from his illegally parked car, pulled out his mobile phone and started to dial. He had five days to find thirty-six grand. If he couldn’t, he would be the shortest lived proprietor The Gissings Modern Furniture Company (Limited) would ever know.
8
Not dead, thank God, but very, very ill.
An ambulance had come quickly. A kind paramedic had been swift to reassure a distraught Josephine that her mother’s pulse was steady, her breathing weak but constant. The journey to hospital was an unremembered rush of sirens and flashing lights. Once there, Helen Gradley was thrust fast and unemotionally on to the processing line of the modem NHS. Her case was serious and, queue-jumping the groaning hordes in casualty, she was placed immediately into intensive care. Through that night and the days that followed, diagnosis and prognosis became clearer.
Helen Gradley had had a stroke, a stoppage of blood to the brain. The consequences were hard to predict, even for a specialist. Some people lost speech, lost coordination, lost memory, then recovered the lot within weeks and months. Others might lose less, but lose it for good. With Helen, whose stroke had been severe, only time would tell.
And Josephine? That first night at the hospital she had sat up all night with her mother. Doctors had come and gone, giving conflicting advice, rushing off at the command of a pager, too busy to do their job. Josie, in her party dress still, held her mother’s hand, whispering encouragement. She remembered the mood she’d been in, climbing the hill towards home: her anger, her passionate demands for her old life back. That was all gone now. Helen Gradley, for so long the shield between her children and their father, the victim of an unfair divorce and a cruel will, lay in bed, helpless as a baby, looking to her daughter for help.
Josephine was just seventeen. She had never expected to earn a living, let alone care for a disabled parent, but she knew her duty. ‘It’s OK, Mum. I’m here,’ she said.
9
It’s a common problem
amongst bankers. You work hard all day. You come home tired as a dog in a heatwave. Then when at last you collapse into bed, you can’t even sleep. Worse still, you do sleep and your dreams are full of the rubbish you’ve spent your day with. Numbers walk past in an endless stupid procession. You’re no longer you. You’re just a cursor flashing in a crowded spreadsheet, roving up and down, sorting out numbers, the last traffic cop left alive in Gridlock City.
It was three o’clock in the morning and Zack threw off the covers. He groaned. Outside there was a distant whistle of traffic from Camden High Street and the sound of a milk float clinking. Zack tried to let the sounds drift in and over the clickety-click of marching numbers.
He put the light on, splashed water on his face, then decided to have a shower. Maybe that would wash the rubbish away. He stood under the jet of water and scrubbed himself with the Boots aromatherapy shower gel which Josephine had given him for his birthday. It was a rather pointed present, bought for less than a tenner - Josie’s way of reminding him that she was struggling to cope. Damn her. She’d quit complaining when Zack saved their father’s fortune single-handedly. When she had a few million quid in her pocket - money which Zack would have put there - she could buy him a decent present. The purple gel (‘Refreshing and Relaxing’) dripped off Zack’s bony figure under the spray. Numbers still chattered, but not as much.
He threw on a dressing gown stolen from the New York Plaza in happier days, and padded into the kitchen. Nothing in the fridge except a yogurt past its sell-by date. He opened it and sniffed it. It smelled OK. What’s the difference between a yoghurt pot and Australia? The yogurt’s got a living culture. Ha, ha. Zack ate the yogurt and stared at the lid. The sell-by date. More numbers. He’d be dreaming about the bar code next. If he scrabbled around in the dustbin he could probably find a till receipt to read.
The Money Makers Page 8