What the Nanny Saw

by Fiona Neill

“Who’s going to tell them?” challenged Foy. “The only people who know are the people in this room, and we’ll take the omertà, won’t we?”

  For a brief moment Ali thought she might still be in with a chance. But Bryony’s chin was set in that way that indicated her mind was made up.

  “She doesn’t belong here,” Bryony said.

  “Where will you go?” Jake asked when the taxi arrived to collect Ali.

  “Katya’s,” she whispered. “I’ll give you a call when I get there.” The last noise she heard was the sound of Hector and Alfie crying and Foy trying to soothe them. She didn’t look back.

  • • •

  Instead of phoning Jake, however, Ali called Felix Naylor and told him that she needed to meet with him urgently. Felix started to explain that he was up to his neck covering the Lehman’s crisis. In the background Ali could hear televisions blaring and raised voices. He sounded distracted. He must be at work already, she decided, looking at her watch. It was quarter to nine in the morning.

  “It’s about Bryony,” Ali said. “And Nick. You told me to call if I found out anything significant.”

  “Can’t it wait?” Felix asked, unable to mask his impatience. Ali thought for a moment. She could meet him the following day. But she knew that if she didn’t unburden herself immediately, her resolve might fade. She needed to tell him now, before the hurt and the resentment set in her body and she decided Bryony wasn’t worth saving.

  “I have some information that might help Bryony. I’m not working for the Skinners anymore, and I’m planning to go away.” Ali knew he would come. In the same way that she knew, if she called Jake to ask him the same question, he wouldn’t.

  They met in the café in Bloomsbury. The music was turned off this time in favor of a television loudly reporting that America’s fourth-biggest investment bank, Lehman Brothers, had filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in New York in the early hours of Monday morning.

  They sat companionably beside each other opposite the screen. Occasionally, Felix’s hand drifted toward the television to indicate some new angle on the unfolding drama, and Ali read another breaking news alert. “Merrill Lynch Sold to Bank of America,” “Fed Bails Out AIG.”

  Each time, Felix swore under his breath. When the iconic images of Lehman’s employees carrying cardboard boxes from their offices in Canary Wharf flashed across the screen, a couple of students on the table beside them cheered.

  “Greedy bastards,” one of them said.

  “This is the banking sector’s Nine-Eleven,” Felix told Ali. “It’s financial Armageddon.”

  Felix was so excited that even the tips of his ears burned red. Ali was unsure how to win his attention. So she came up with a headline of her own.

  “I’ve been having a relationship with Jake,” she announced, as she saw the footage of Dick Fuld, the guest of honor at the Christmas party two years earlier, being driven away from the Lehman’s office in New York in the dead of night. For the first time, Felix looked away from the screen. “Bryony has found out.”

  “You’ve been sleeping with Jake?” he asked incredulously, his eyebrows raised in perfect arcs of surprise. Ali nodded.

  “She’s thrown me out.” She waited for a few words of sympathy or a comforting pat on the arm. But none came.

  “Are you going to sell your story?” Felix asked, giving her a deep, penetrating look that Ali imagined he used when trying to gauge whether an interviewee was about to answer a question truthfully.

  “Of course not,” said Ali, affronted. Felix looked relieved. He thought for a moment.

  “Do you want money?” he asked, as though suddenly understanding why she wanted to see him. “I know that Bryony has some in reserve.”

  “I’m not going to do anything to hurt Jake,” said Ali defensively. “Not everyone is motivated by money. You’re not.”

  “Sorry, I just assumed . . .” said Felix.

  “Assume nothing,” said Ali. “Isn’t that what a good journalist does?”

  “What is it you want to tell me?” Felix asked.

  Ali urged him to open his notebook and gave him a pencil from her pocket. It was one that Jake had chewed. She felt the first wave of loss sweep through her body.

  “Write it down so you don’t forget the details.” He smiled at her persistence.

  Ali outlined everything that she had learned from Katya. She spoke slowly and precisely, trying to recall the exact order of their conversation. She explained how Nick Skinner and Ned Wilbraham hatched their insider-trading plan five years ago as a way of making easy pocket money. The first year or so they kept their transactions simple, buying small quantities of shares using information Nick had purloined from Bryony. Nick always provided the information, and Ned always bought the shares through his broker. It was a modus operandi that never seemed to fail.

  “Are you telling me that Nick spied on Bryony to buy shares in deals that she was working on for clients?” Felix asked incredulously. Ali nodded.

  “He looked through documents Bryony brought home. He knew the password to her BlackBerry. Sometimes they bought shares in companies they knew were about to lose value to cover their tracks. The money went into a bank account in Katya’s name. They shared the profits later.”

  “Has Katya told anyone else about this?” Felix asked, chewing the end of Ali’s pencil thoughtfully.

  “She thought she would be implicated because the bank account was in her name,” said Ali. “I’m the only person who knows, apart from Jake.”

  Ali continued. She said that as time went by and no one seemed to notice what they were doing, they became more reckless. When Nick realized that Lehman’s was in trouble, he started raising the stakes, as a way of compensating for the disaster he saw ahead. This must have been when the FSA noticed.

  “Nick wanted to know where Bryony was traveling to and who she was meeting, to try and work out what companies might be involved in takeover deals,” said Ali.

  She told him how Nick and Ned communicated using pay-as-you-go mobile phones, replacing the SIM card every couple of weeks. She explained how Nick described Bryony to Ned as “the golden goose,” because she had information that they could use to buy shares just before companies announced new deals.

  “Do you have any evidence to prove any of this?” Felix asked. His tone was interested, not suspicious.

  Ali started from the beginning. She told him how she had caught Nick using Jake’s computer early one morning, a few months after she started working at Holland Park Crescent, and explained that this was the only computer that the FSA hadn’t seized in the raid because Jake had it in Oxford.

  “Why do you think this is significant?” Felix asked, leaning toward Ali.

  “I think he was using Jake’s computer to look at documents that he sent to himself from Bryony’s BlackBerry,” said Ali. “He had her phone with him, and he knew her password, because I saw him accessing her e-mails when we were in Corfu.”

  Ali put her bag on the table and brought out the leather-bound daybook. She gave it to Felix.

  “This has all the dates in it and details of where Bryony was traveling,” she said, pressing it into Felix’s hands. “I think Nick used this to try and work out what deals she was working on so that he could gauge which shares to buy.”

  She pulled out a matchbox from the bag. “These are SIM cards that were hidden in Nick’s office at home. The FSA didn’t find them because Foy had moved in there. They’ll show that Nick and Ned only communicated with each other. Do you think this might help Bryony clear her name?”

  “I think it might,” said Felix, clasping her hand. “You’ve done a very good thing. You don’t deserve to be treated the way she has treated you.”

  • • •

  Six months later, the FSA’s charges against Nick had
been thrown out on a technicality. Nick’s lawyer managed to prove that in each of the eight charges of insider trading, rumors of takeovers had been published on the Internet, either in online chat rooms or in esoteric online financial bulletins. Since the information was already publicly available, technically it was no longer inside information. Nick was off the hook.

  From the evidence supplied by Ali, Bryony, however, knew that Nick was guilty and that she could never trust him again. Moreover, his actions had jeopardized her business and career. She had gone back to her company after the charges were dropped but had to build up her client base from scratch. It was only after news of their separation that people stopped viewing her with suspicion. No one thought Bryony complicit in her husband’s activities, but many thought she had been careless. Now, of course, as she thought about this in the church, it struck Ali that in trying to save Bryony, she had destroyed their marriage.

  • • •

  Ali looked up again and saw that the twins had stopped in the middle of the aisle and turned toward each other, like a mirror image, their arms dropping to their sides. Everyone watched with rapt attention. From this distance even Ali couldn’t tell them apart. She felt herself step forward. She wanted to go and kiss them, to stroke their hair and reassure them that everything would be fine. But then Jake turned around to persuade them to keep walking, holding out his own hand for them to take. It hovered in the air, and its familiarity was like a blow to Ali’s solar plexus.

  Jake saw her. For a moment, their eyes locked. Ali felt a familiar stab of desire and knew he felt it, too. She was relieved that amid the general chaos of the scandal, no one apart from his immediate family had ever known about their relationship.

  Hector and Alfie took each other by the hand again and continued up the aisle. Jake turned away, chewing his lower lip. The twins went to sit in the pew behind Bryony with a woman Ali assumed was their new nanny. She was in her early forties. Hector sat in the middle, and the woman reached around them with a soft, comforting arm. Ali was pleased to find her reactions toward her replacement were uncomplicated. She was relieved at her warmth and felt no twinge of jealousy.

  Just before the end of the service Ali slipped out, back into the shadows, before anyone noticed she had ever been there.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I am very grateful to my editors, Sarah McGrath in New York and Mari Evans in London, for all their encouragement and enthusiasm, and to the rest of the team at Michael Joseph in the UK and Riverhead in the United States. Heartfelt thanks to my agent, Simon Trewin, and to Ariella Feiner.

  Big debt to Ed Orlebar for putting up with it all. Thanks also to Mark Astaire, Aubrey Simpson-Orlebar, and Rupert Pitt for demystifying the world of finance, and to Tom Jones for his expertise on collateralized debt obligations. Elizabeth Robertson is a font of knowledge on insider trading. Thanks to all the nannies I spoke to, particularly Joanna Clark.

  To gain insight into the collapse of Lehman’s, I read the following excellent and entertaining books: Too Big to Fail by Andrew Ross Sorkin, A Colossal Failure of Common Sense by Larry McDonald, and The Devil’s Casino by Vicky Ward.

  I gathered lots of helpful background from Whoops! by John Lanchester and Fool’s Gold by Gillian Tett.

  As always, thanks to my first readers, Helen Townshend and Henry Tricks, and to Rosa Chavez and Isis Calderon. The following people have given vital encouragement at difficult moments: Becky Crichton-Miller, Charlotte Simpson-Orlebar, Hatty Skeet, and Roland Watson.

  Some of the most helpful and insightful people have asked not to be identified, but you know who you are, and I am very grateful for your time and sharing your stories.