The party dispersed into the gardens, while the marquee was cleared and refitted for the evening’s dance. Lord Hatherleigh’s helicopter sat ready on the lawn. George and Kiki spent as much time as they could together. Helen Gradley had got hold of some champagne and the alcohol had knocked her for six. Josephine let her snore peacefully in a deck chair and meanwhile began to enjoy herself. She liked Sarah, her sister Kate, and Zack’s new parents-in-law. She also had a long and enjoyable chat with Arabella Queensferry, Zack’s oldest friend, analysing his past and his future, his strengths and the weaknesses in exhaustive detail.
As often happens, the bride and groom saw relatively little of each other. There were five hundred guests, and each of them wanted to tell Sarah how beautiful her dress was or Zack how lucky he was. The happy couple circulated, repeating the same conversation five hundred times, but (at least in Sarah’s case) enjoying it every time. The weather was fine, the mood was good and the bride glowed.
Matthew, however, was preoccupied. He had recently lost upwards of two hundred and ten thousand pounds and, for all his recent posturing, his prospects of making a million seemed remote. He wandered the happy scene alone, gloomily inspecting the guests.
Beneath a spreading chestnut tree to the side of the main lawn, a crowd of Sarah’s colleagues from Coburg’s laughed and drank. A bunch of equity traders from the sound of it, with the inevitable shop talk. Matthew pulled out his phone and held it to his mouth.
‘Do we have to do this now? I’m in the middle of my brother’s wedding .. . Oh, OK, I see.’ Matthew sauntered closer to the tree. He could hear the conversation of the Coburg’s people loud and clear: office politics and drinking stories. He spoke a little louder.
‘Someone’s bidding for Albion? Seems unlikely ... Oh, I see. Well, they’ve certainly got the money for it ... Yeah, I can see that ... Have they put a number on the table? How much? Jesus, that’s going it some. After the fraud on top of everything ...’ The Coburg’s people weren’t talking as loudly now. Matthew ploughed on.
‘Oh, I see .. . Yes, that does explain it ... Who’d have thought Albion would find a white knight at this stage! What’s our strategy?’
He got up from his bench and walked away, still talking. The Coburg’s people watched him leave, then resumed their conversation. When he was out of earshot, Matthew put his phone away, back in his pocket. It hadn’t been switched on.
The wedding ended as all things must. As darkness fell, and the wedding guests began to yawn and think about the journey home, Zack and Sarah dragged themselves away. They would spend the night in a five-star Buckinghamshire hotel, then fly to Tuscany for a fortnight’s sun, swimming and sightseeing. And, yes, Zack had checked, and there was horse-riding available in the wooded hills nearby.
They made their way to the waiting helicopter. It was decorated with ribbons and a sign in the window read, ‘Just married’. Sarah began to say goodbye to everyone important, until Zack stopped her. They’d be there another hour otherwise. They climbed on board and pulled the door shut.
Zack gave a sign to the pilot, who motioned the crowds to stand well back. Lord and Lady Hatherleigh stood with their arms around each other, watching. Josephine and Helen, George and Matthew were all there. All their other friends, relatives and well-wishers stood in a big circle spreading out into the darkness. The heavy blades began to turn. More waving. The blades swung faster, disappearing into their own movement. The waving reached fever pitch. Sarah blew kisses from the window, Zack’s face darkly visible behind. Then, without appearing to move, the helicopter no longer rested on the ground. It rose steeply, banked and flew off into the night. On the ground, the wedding guests watched and waved, until the taillights were swallowed by the billowing midnight stars.
5
Matthew came in to work on Monday. He was earlier than usual, but couldn’t concentrate and Fiona and Ed teased him for his absent-mindedness. He bantered back, but his mind was elsewhere. When the bond markets opened, his hands turned to his keyboard. There was no price quoted for Albion’s bonds. Time for coffee.
From the deserted garden, Matthew called Belial.
‘I want a price to sell my Albion Leasing bonds. I’ll hold while you get the information.’
Matthew held. Belial seemed to be gone for ever.
Eventually, the familiar obsequious voice came back. ‘Interesting news, my friend. The bonds are up to thirty pence in the pound. There’s a rumour in the market that someone’s foolish enough to make a bid. The equity desk at Coburg’s seems to be behind the rumour and they’ve bumped up all their prices accordingly. Everyone else is following suit, because they assume Coburg’s knows something they don’t.’
‘I want to sell everything.’
‘Sell everything at thirty pence, my friend? Am I right in remembering you’ve only just bought them at forty?’
‘Just sell them.’
‘Very well, my dear chap. We’re here to serve. Curious that your usual good fortune deserted you on this occasion. Or perhaps I should congratulate you that a market rumour is saving you from very much worse trouble.’
‘Just sell them.’
‘Consider it done.’
Belial sold the bonds. Matthew had lost twenty-five percent of his investment in just a few days. He had gone from being worth two hundred and eighty thousand to two hundred and ten thousand. He wasn’t unhappy. He was ecstatic.
The game he played was high risk, but when his luck had turned, he’d salvaged something from the wreckage. That was something to be proud of, something to celebrate. Any fool can make money when times are good. It’s holding on to your shirt in a hurricane which takes skill.
Albion Leasing heard the rumour floating around the market that day. The following morning it published a brief statement, saying that the company was not involved in any talks with potential bidders, nor did it expect to be, given the circumstances. The statement killed the rumour and the bond price slumped back to seven pence in the pound. The talk in the wine bars that week was that Coburg’s had lost a million pounds backing the Albion rumour with its own money. If so, that was hardly Matthew’s problem.
6
Back from honeymoon, a suntanned Zack stood at the walnut podium and looked out over his audience. There were only about twelve people physically present, including the ever-distinguished Dixon Banderman, but cameras and microphones beamed Zack’s presentation to his real audience in Hong Kong, Singapore, Tokyo, Sydney, Seoul, Taipei and Manila. RosEs was a very, very sophisticated tax concept, but it wouldn’t survive the more advanced tax codes of Western Europe or the US. RosEs was strictly for the Far East, where Zack’s kind of tax avoidance is virtually unknown. Some Asian finance ministers were in for a shock.
‘Welcome,’ began Zack. ‘I’d like to introduce you all to a new product which we are formally launching next week. It’s called RosEs . . .’
He ran through his pitch while behind him a projector flashed up slides. The first slide was entitled ‘RosEs - heads you win, tails the taxman loses’. The title was set over a background picture of pale pink roses sprawling over a pretty stone archway: the Rosa Sarah Havercoombe at the entrance to the Ovenden House rose garden. Zack was pleased with the touch. The slide combined two of his favourite ways of making money: RosEs and Sarah Havercoombe. All the slide needed was something to represent Hatherleigh Pacific, and the holy trinity would be complete.
‘RosEs is a fairly complicated idea, and I’d encourage you to keep your clients focused on the central point: namely, you can use RosEs to bet on pretty much any financial market in the Far East. If you win, you win. The taxman doesn’t claim any of your winnings. If you lose, though, you don’t quite lose. The taxman comes to the rescue and makes up for your losses. He doesn’t make up all your loss, of course. You’re still taking a risk. But the odds have shifted in your favour. It’s like playing roulette, where instead of the house taking a cut, the house is paying a subsidy and not a bad subsidy at that. The m
ore you play at this table, the more you can expect to take home.
‘We’ve made a complicated idea as simple as we possibly can. We’ve supplied a totally uniform set of contract documents, so every deal you do with your clients is standardised. If they want anything tailored to their own specific circumstances, then the answer’s no. We’re selling a mass-production car here, not a custom-built vehicle. We’ve also delivered a mountain of marketing material to every office in the Far East. Please use it. We’ve worked very hard to make it simple, understandable and compelling.’
Zack ran on. He explained ‘the idea behind the tax dodge briefly and simply. He wasn’t going to get into the real complexities, as it would put too many people off. After twenty minutes he was done. He used the remote controller to flick the projector on to his final slide. The photo of pale pink roses came up again, along with the ubiquitous slogan ‘Heads you win - tails the taxman loses’. You can’t repeat the key message too often: the golden rule of marketing.
‘Any questions?’
The faces in front of him shook their heads. The people from London office had mostly been involved in developing RosEs into a saleable product, and they already knew the spiel. There were a couple of questions from Korea, where a faulty video link had played havoc with the transmission. Apart from that, the presentation appeared to have gone down well. Finally, as Zack was about to wind up, there was a question from an American salesman based out in Manila.
‘Zack, I just want to be very clear about something here. Your RosEs idea is a sweet way of taking money from the taxman, but you can still lose your shirt with it, right? I mean if you bet heavily on the financial markets and those bets go sour, you lose, don’t you? I know the taxman makes good part of the loss, but you still pay most of it? This isn’t a licence to lose our heads and bet for the sake of it.’
‘That’s right,’ said Zack, a bit less than thrilled to have the point made quite so graphically. ‘If you bet wrong, you still lose. You just don’t lose as much as you would have done otherwise.’
Then Dixon Banderman stood up and walked to the front of the room. He made sure that the videos and microphones were picking him up properly, then addressed the invisible audience.
‘You put your finger on a very important point. We’re all excited about RosEs and we want to make sure all you guys sell it hard. But remember, this firm is a hundred years old and some of our client relationships are a hundred years old too. We don’t want to sell our clients anything which is bad for them, however much cash we make from it in the short term. If you see a client going barmy with this product, then stop selling it to him. There are responsible uses of derivatives and irresponsible uses. We don’t want to be caught selling this stuff irresponsibly, however greedy our clients may wish to be. I hope that’s crystal clear.’
Dixon Banderman gazed into the lens of the camera.
With his piercing blue eyes and silver hair he was the picture of a responsible banker. The audience didn’t reply, but it didn’t need to. Rumour often identified Banderman as a future senior partner of Weinstein Lukes worldwide. If you wanted to get on, you did what he said.
Next to him, Zack soberly nodded his approval. He didn’t mean it, though. He couldn’t give a damn if clients killed themselves with RosEs. The more they bought, the better his chances of making it to partner. The marketing packs were stuffed full of advice on how best to sell RosEs to clients for whom dodging tax was likely to be a novelty. There were diagrams, charts, graphs, examples. Every pack was covered with photos of the lovely pink rose sprawling over the stone archway and the heads-tails slogan was everywhere too. Everything was in full and beautiful Technicolor, with translations into every language you could think of. It was a monument to the art of the graphic designer and the advertising executive.
But in the whole mountain of marketing stuff, there wasn’t a single word about responsible salesmanship. Not a word.
7
The Aspertons did what they had to do. They popped five thousand magazines into five thousand envelopes. They added a covering letter full of heavy-handed regrets for ‘the damaging practices of some firms within the industry’. They listed the terrible things that Gissings had got up to and included the phone number of their own sales hotline. The super-low prices on the Asperton Brilliants and a couple of other furniture ranges were to be held for a few months longer, as a result of an exceptional response from their client base. The letter and the copy of Furniture Today went to every name on the Aspertons’ nationwide database.
The knockout punch was felt by everyone at Gissings. People stopped calling the sales department. Phone calls to clients weren’t answered. Requests to call back were ignored. The shop floor went quiet as machines fell idle and workmen huddled over copied pages of the magazine, spelling out the murderous accusations. This would never have happened in old Tom Gissing’s time.
8
A Weinstein Lukes salesman shifted from foot to foot. He was visiting the group treasurer of a Singaporean multinational, one of his best clients. The treasurer hadn’t yet arrived and the salesman was nervous. He gazed out of the window at the throng of shipping and the stacks of containers waiting to change ships, to move on east or west around the globe. The density of shipping was reminiscent of Hong Kong, but not the port or city around it. Hong Kong is busy, dirty, noisy, tatty; an Asian New York. Singapore is quiet, clean, efficient, authoritarian; an Asian Frankfurt. What the salesman had come to offer his client today was not very Singaporean, and he felt uncomfortable.
The deal he had come to pitch was a new gimmick invented by some tax whizz kid in London and christened RosEs, not a great name for Asian tongues. RosEs looked like an unbeatable way to take money from the government’s pocket, but it was hardly the kind of thing to go down well in Singapore. In Singapore, companies and their government were close. The sort of things you could do in more dissolute countries like England or America would not be acceptable in this island state. Still, the big boys in London were pushing their precious RosEs hard and every salesman in Asia had to pitch it. The salesman hoped the meeting would be short and painless, and enable him to return to normal as soon as possible.
His client walked in. With him were three other gentlemen: the Chief Financial Officer, the Chief Counsel - the company’s top lawyer - and the company President himself. The salesman bowed and nodded effusively. This was a bad sign. They would only have brought this much corporate fire power if they wanted to give him a really major rollocking. He’d blame everything on the London office and try to salvage what he could.
No tea or coffee was offered: another terrible sign. This was Asia, where politeness, even politeness to your enemy, is paramount. The company President took his seat and brusquely gestured everyone else to take theirs. He looked impatient. There were no how-are-yous, none of the normal greetings. This was the last time the salesman was ever going to pitch RosEs to any of his clients. Ever, ever.
The President spoke.
‘So your bank is trying to sell us RosEs?’
The salesman bowed his head, a bow of assent, a bow of submission.
‘We love your RosEs. We want to buy a whole garden full.’
The salesman’s mouth dropped open. The President laughed at his joke and repeated it. ‘We want to grow a garden of RosEs.’
The salesman laughed, a laugh of relief. The President laughed louder. The Chief Financial Officer laughed because the President was laughing, the Chief Counsel laughed because the Chief Financial Officer was laughing, and the Treasurer laughed because everyone else was. The room hooted with laughter.
Autumn 2000
The cultists were wrong. Eight months of the new millennium have come and gone without incident. The world has not expired. The apocalypse has not arrived. Armageddon has stayed at home.
It is 4 September, warm and summery in feel. Women still wear cotton dresses and eat ice-cream in the street, but cooler autumn weather will arrive any day now. Matthew is
confident. Zack is expectant. George is without hope. There are 312 days to go.
1
The famous libel lawyer took his seat. He tweaked his jacket sleeves to make sure that just the right amount of cuff was exposed: a glimmer of white, a twinkle of silver cuff links but no more. He cleared his throat unnecessarily, but loudly, until everyone else in the room was silent. Harry Cunningham, London’s most famous libel solicitor, was satisfied.
He was a big man. Tall and broad, white-haired already at fifty, he dominated almost anywhere. Right here, right now, he hadn’t much competition. He took the business card given him by the man opposite. Cunningham didn’t offer one of his own. He scowled as he looked at the card.
‘Addison, Steele, de Coverley,’ he read. ‘I don’t recall hearing the name before. Have you been long established?’
‘About thirty-five years,’ said Dick Steele, the like able Yorkshire lawyer who had handled the Asperton account for the last fifteen years.
‘Oh, I see,’ said Cunningham. ‘A newish outfit, then. Do you handle a lot of libel business?’
Steele was uncomfortable. Addison, Steele, de Coverley was a decent firm with a good reputation in the county. But the work they did was generally mundane stuff, and the last breath of a libel case they’d had was eight years ago, which had folded long before it came to court.
‘A little bit,’ said Steele. ‘Less than you, of course.’
Cunningham ignored the last part. ‘A little bit?’ he repeated. ‘I’m not sure I remember reading about any of your cases. Curious. I usually have a good head for these things.’
‘None of our cases has got as far as court,’ admitted Steele.
‘Ah!’ said Cunningham. ‘You’ve kept your cases away from the court. Quite right! They say a good libel lawyer is one who avoids the courtroom. You’ve got a good lawyer there, Mr Asperton, Mrs Asperton.’ He winked in tum at the two Aspertons and laughed his famous booming laugh. ‘I’m afraid my own track record isn’t so good. My clients have been in court rather too much recently. Ha, ha! Still, they usually win when they get there. Ha, ha, ha! That’s the important thing, isn’t it?’
The Money Makers Page 39