by Fiona Neill
“She looks familiar,” rasped Foy, in a voice as throaty as the doorbell.
“Do you recognize her?” asked Jake hopefully.
“I don’t recognize her, but she looks familiar,” Foy muttered. “That’s the best I can do.”
“Maybe it’s one of Izzy’s friends?” suggested Ali, pulling away from Jake.
“Who would dare to arrive unannounced here?” Foy asked. “It’s like one of those houses with the mark of the plague on the door.”
“Some of Izzy’s friends are stupid enough,” said Jake, hoping to get a rise out of his sister.
“Fuck off, Jake,” shouted Izzy without looking up from her book at the other end of the room. No one admonished her. She had become so withdrawn that any response was gratifying. A couple of weeks after the photo of Jake had appeared, she had been photographed leaving one of those Kensington nightclubs favored by public-school types, wearing a tiny silver minidress and draped over the shoulder of a male friend who, it transpired, was the son of a hedge-fund manager who had been shorting Lehman’s shares. “Consorting with the Enemy,” screamed the headlines. It was the only time since he had disappeared that Nick had contacted Ali. He sent a text from a phone number that she didn’t recognize, saying simply, “Protect them.” She didn’t tell anyone, and quickly deleted the message.
“I’ve got it,” said Foy excitedly. He stepped abruptly backward and bumped into the arm of a chair. Ali darted forward to catch him in the small of his back. He felt frail and bony as she gently pushed him upright. “It’s that nanny who slept with Cupcake’s husband.”
Ali looked out the window, tracing Foy’s finger to the top doorstep. But she knew it was Katya even before she saw the long legs and the lean, gymnastic body. Katya stood by the intercom, head bowed, shoulders slouched, trying to make herself as insignificant as possible.
“Ali, are you there?” Katya called through the letterbox. “Please let me in.” Sensing a story in their midst, the photographers on the other side of the road stirred and idly began attaching lenses to their cameras. Someone asked Katya about her relationship with the Skinners.
“How do you know them?” a voice shouted. Katya ignored them.
“Do you know where Nick Skinner is?” someone shouted. “Has he tried to contact you?”
Foy leaned back against Ali. She didn’t resist. He needed the ballast, and his closeness was comforting. The sleeve of his jacket tickled her nose. It smelled musty. His breath was short and uneven. Tita really should take him to the doctor, thought Ali. But Tita was too busy worrying about her daughter and her grandchildren to bother with her husband. Uxorial detachment was the price of infidelity. He breathed out and Ali could smell stale alcohol from the night before on his breath. She caught Jake’s eye.
“Have you met Nick Skinner?” someone shouted at Katya from the huddle on the other side of the road.
“Shall I let her in?” Ali asked.
“Why not?” asked Jake.
• • •
“Where have you been?” Ali asked Katya gently. They sat together on the sofa in the drawing room. Leicester was asleep between them, snoring contentedly. Katya stroked him, and he growled in his sleep. She pulled her hand away.
“He’s the most misanthropic dog I’ve ever met,” said Ali, pleased to have space between her and Katya so that she could escape the smell of cheap perfume. Katya frowned in confusion.
“He hates people,” explained Ali. “So don’t be offended.”
“I saw this in the paper,” said Katya, pulling her leather wallet from her handbag. This time, instead of the fifty-dollar bills, she pulled out a neatly folded copy of the photograph that Ali had taken for Foy’s olive oil label and pressed it into Ali’s hand. Someone had circled Ali’s name in pencil at the top of the photo. Katya pulled out a packet of cigarettes and offered one to Jake and Izzy.
“You can’t smoke in here,” said Foy, sounding alarmed. He peered around the side of the armchair to underline his disapproval. “It’s bad enough that you’re wearing shoes. I’m the only person allowed to wear shoes in this room.” His petulant tone made Katya laugh.
“If you saw the state of my feet, you’d want me to keep them on,” said Katya, fiddling with rows of bangles on her left wrist.
“I thought you’d gone back to Ukraine,” Ali questioned her.
“I got another job in London,” said Katya.
“As a nanny?” Ali asked.
“In a bar.” Katya shrugged. She paused for a moment. “They play music. It’s called Whispers.”
“Is it fun?” Ali asked.
“I can’t believe you’re still here,” said Katya, her voice lowered, “when this is all about to come tumbling down around you. Everyone says the same thing. Why don’t you get out while you can? Go and finish your degree. You were always the one with all the plans. What are you doing here with these people? They are bad news.”
Alfie and Hector burst into the room and ran over to Ali. They landed upon her body with such force that she was pushed back on to the sofa. They giggled and pulled at her, their voices muffled as they each buried their faces into her armpit. They breathed in her smell and she stroked them on the back with small circular movements until they gradually calmed.
“These are my two reasons.” Ali smiled.
“We missed you,” they said, turning in her arms to face the rest of the room.
“I’ve been here all the time,” said Ali. “Do you remember Katya?”
“Where’s Thomas?” Alfie asked, immediately making the association.
“He’s at home with his parents,” said Katya in an even tone.
The door handle turned, and Bryony came into the room.
“What’s she doing here?” Bryony asked, pointing at Katya. The way Bryony nervously darted across the room toward them reminded Ali of an animal that couldn’t decide whether it was in flight or fight mode. “Don’t you understand the authorities are looking for even the most tenuous evidence to connect Nick and Ned? You need to leave.”
“I’m sorry,” Katya apologized, getting up from the sofa. “I wanted to see Ali.”
“They’ll start digging for information about you,” said Bryony, pointing at the window. “Anyone who comes here is of interest. And given your history, I would have thought you’d want to keep a low profile at the moment.”
“Calm down, Mum,” said Jake. “They’ll hear you outside.”
“I’ll go right now,” said Katya. She pressed a piece of paper into Ali’s hands. “The address where I work,” she whispered.
“Why haven’t you got the television on?” Bryony demanded. She waved the controls at Foy and Jake. “They’ve got a new angle. Felix called to warn me. I think they’re going to call someone else in for questioning.” Katya called out good-bye to them all, but only Ali responded.
“What’s going on?” rasped Foy in confusion. He pushed down his hands on the arms of the chair to lift himself out for the second time in less than half an hour. His hands were so withered that you could see the tendons stretching beneath the loose skin. Foy closed his eyes and bit down on his lower lip to focus all his strength into his enfeebled biceps. His upper body shook with the effort as he lifted his body above the seat of the chair. For a moment he was suspended, trembling in the air, like a heavy object on the end of a crane. Then his arms collapsed and he fell down into the cushion again. No one said anything.
“I’ll let myself out,” said Katya, as Sky News came on. Foy craned his neck round the side of the armchair to watch. He wasn’t going to make another attempt to get up on his own, but Bryony, Jake, Ali, and Izzy stood too close to the screen for him to see. A business reporter stood outside the Lehman’s building in New York. The bank had just announced third-quarter losses of $3.9 billion. Shares were trading at just $7 a piece and
it looked as though a last-ditch deal with Korea to buy the bank had fallen through. The female reporter’s eyebrows arched as though she was wincing.
“What does it all mean?” Jake asked Bryony.
“It means, short of a miracle, Lehman’s is going to the wall,” she said. “Which means your father has lost a fortune in stock options.”
As they struggled to absorb this information, the report switched to the Lehman’s building in Canary Wharf, “the center of a major insider-dealing ring.”
“God, they’re making it sound as though these two events are connected,” said Bryony.
“We went there,” shouted Hector and Alfie excitedly.
A picture of Nick fleetingly appeared on the screen.
“Daddy, Daddy,” the twins shouted at the television. Hector started crying as though it had suddenly dawned on him that his father was someone he could now find only on the pages of newspapers and on television screens. It was a close-up of Nick wearing black tie at the Mansion House dinner. Ali recognized it from the photo that used to sit on the table beside the drawing room door. She looked over to the table. The photo had disappeared.
Ali glanced over at Foy and saw a small tear of self-pity roll down the side of his cheek. Jake saw, too, and went over to his grandfather and put a hand on his shoulder while turning toward the television screen in the corner of the room.
“Fugitive Banker May Have Another Accomplice,” the headline flashed.
“He’s not a fugitive,” Bryony shouted at the television screen. “He’s given a statement and gone to ground to get you bastards off his back.”
“Do you know where he is, Mum?” Jake asked.
“He’s safe and well. That’s all you need to know,” snapped Bryony without looking away from the screen.
Bryony turned up the volume so loud that the twins stuck their fingers in their ears and started chanting.
“Make them be quiet, Ali,” Bryony pleaded.
“Shut up,” Foy shouted unhelpfully.
Ali went and sat back down with them on the sofa. She picked up Hector and sat him on her knee.
“Why can’t we go and play at someone’s house?” he sobbed into her shoulder. “It’s so boring being here all the time.”
“No one wants us,” said Alfie, kneeling beside Ali to pat his brother on the back.
“Why not?” asked Hector in between sobs.
“They liked us rich, but now we’re poor,” explained Alfie, “and they think it could be infectious.”
“Only Ali wants to play with us,” said Hector. “Don’t leave us, Ali.” He clung onto her, limpetlike.
Jake came over and joined them. He picked up Alfie and put him on his knee. Alfie and Hector held on to each other. They sat in silence as the report about Nick began in earnest. There were rumors that disgraced City bankers Nick Skinner and Ned Wilbraham may not have been acting alone when they bought shares in stock-market-listed companies that were about to be bought or sold. The reporter gave a brief explanation of how insider trading worked. “Insider dealing carries a maximum sentence of seven years in prison.”
He turned again to the charges leveled against Nick. Ali and Jake leaned forward toward the television. Nick was accused of making a series of transactions over a period of three years, using information believed to have come from the same source.
“It is believed that the FSA has made significant inroads into identifying where Skinner was getting his information,” said the reporter in an annoying tone that indicated he knew full well who fell under suspicion, but was unable to reveal their identity because it might prejudice the investigation.
“I’m going to ask Felix if he knows who it is,” said Bryony, tapping a message into her BlackBerry.
“Careful, they’ll be monitoring your messages, Bryony,” Foy pointed out.
“I know what I’m doing,” said Bryony. Her phone rang immediately. She listened without saying anything for a minute and then put down the phone and slumped onto the sofa. She lay there for a moment, staring up at the chandelier.
“What did Felix say, Mum?” asked Jake.
“He said that they think it is me,” said Bryony simply. “They think that I am the person who fed Dad information. I am their main suspect.”
For the second time that day, the front doorbell rang. Bryony went to answer it. Ali knew before she opened the door that it would be the police with a warrant for Bryony’s arrest.
24
September 2008
There was awful symmetry that when Bryony called Foy, Ali, Jake, and Izzy into the drawing room later that day to reveal that the accusations of insider trading against Nick all involved her clients, CNBC flashed the news that Lehman’s stock was trading at $3.71 a share, its lowest level ever. Less than a year ago it was worth $86.18 a share. The boats are all sinking at once, thought Ali, remembering Nick’s comment in Corfu.
“I don’t understand. What does it all mean?” asked Foy in confusion, glancing from Bryony to the television screen and then back again. He was in the middle of eating lunch, a ham-and-mustard sandwich, hastily prepared by Ali. There were crumbs stuck to the mustard around his mouth, crumbs in the trench where his sweater wrinkled over his stomach, and crumbs all over the floor. Leicester sat openmouthed at his feet, hoping for a piece of ham to drop. Foy’s grip on the sandwich was so feeble it was a race to eat it before it disintegrated. But at least he could manage unaided. He could no longer guide a fork to his mouth without asking Ali for help.
“It means that the FSA thinks that I was passing on information about deals involving my clients to Nick,” said Bryony, her voice shaky. “They assume I’m the deep throat.”
“Nick used information about your clients to buy shares?” Foy confirmed.
Bryony nodded her head.
“It’s too much coincidence for him to be innocent,” she told them.
On the television screen Lehman’s shares fell again, as if there was some magical connection between Bryony’s loss of faith in her husband and the world’s loss of faith in the banking system.
Bryony was paler than ever, and Ali noticed that her hands shook in her lap. She half considered walking to the stiff, upright chair where Bryony was perched to steady those hands in the way Bryony had steadied hers the first time she had driven the car to school almost two years ago to the day. It remained one of the most intimate moments they had shared.
But she suspected Bryony was too proud for sympathy. And it would have meant moving away from Jake. Being physically apart from him increasingly felt like more loss than she could bear. For the first time, the previous night, Ali and Jake had a conversation where they dared to imagine a future for themselves outside the confines of 97 Holland Park Crescent. Jake suggested Ali should see if she could transfer to Oxford and do her final year at university with him. They could live together. She could meet his friends. They could rent a cottage in the countryside. It sounded like a song by an indie band, thought Ali, enjoying the daydream.
They had lain naked on the bed beside each other, holding hands, having just had sex for the third time that night, imagining themselves shopping in Sainsbury’s, sitting in a Cotswold pub drinking cider, painting the walls of their bedroom. It was a bittersweet image. Because Ali understood, even if Jake didn’t, that the moment their relationship came out of the shadows it was probably doomed.
“I can’t believe he’s done this to me.” Bryony’s voice was almost a whisper.
“Maybe the FSA is trying to exert maximum psychological pressure by getting to you, to make Dad cave in and admit to something he hasn’t done?” Jake suggested. If nothing else gave them away to Bryony, it would be Jake’s optimism in the face of the disaster that had befallen his family. He had the drunken happiness of someone in the early stages of a love affair. Even Izzy now t
urned to him and told him to “get real.”
Jake’s arm was resting across the back of the sofa, and he casually stroked the back of Ali’s neck, letting his finger come to rest on her shoulder. Ali shifted away, worried that someone might notice. She glanced round the room and saw Foy was focused on his sandwich, Izzy was shredding the skin around her fingernails until they bled, and Bryony was staring at her hands, flummoxed at her inability to control them.
“Over the past five years I’ve worked on six big deals for clients, and in every case Ned Wilbraham bought shares in those companies. The FSA says that all the information came from your father,” said Bryony quietly.
“How do they know?” asked Izzy.
“I don’t think they have any evidence, but I think they’re probably right,” said Bryony. “He had a bank account where money was transferred to him from Ned every couple of months.”
“Dad hardly even knows Ned Wilbraham,” said Jake.
“Or likes him,” observed Izzy.
“And Mum hates his wife,” said Jake.
“I kept trying to tell them that we have nothing to do with the Wilbrahams. They showed me a photograph of Nick and Ned together in Corfu and another of the three of us at school sports day. They wanted me to admit that we were part of a crime syndicate. It would be laughable if it wasn’t so serious.”
“Maybe there’s a simple explanation?” suggested Foy.
“As far as the FSA is concerned, it’s very straightforward: I passed Nick information about the deals I was working on, he passed it on to Ned Wilbraham, who bought the shares, and then they split the profits when they were sold,” explained Bryony. “It’s very neat.”