We enter Sir John’s office and go through the introductions. Skinner is the taller of the two men, clearly the more senior, and when Sir John invites them both to sit it’s Skinner who declines.
‘We won’t keep you,’ he says. Skinner addresses his next remark to me. ‘We’ve been instructed to make enquiries into a certain trade in Parnells.’
He consults a file and reads the details aloud.
The Johnstone deal. But the speed of this response from the DTI is unprecedented. In the normal course of things, the Stock Exchange would take weeks to decide if the transaction warranted a referral to the DTI, and months of preliminary enquiries before the DTI followed it up. But to have sent two of their people in person immediately? Someone, somewhere, has pulled a string.
‘We informed the Takeover Panel ourselves,’ I say. ‘We understood they were satisfied with our explanation.’
Skinner closes his file. ‘The Department’s obliged to satisfy itself on certain questions. Of course we'll keep the recommendations of the Panel in mind.’
‘Who instructed you?’
He raises an eyebrow.
‘You said you were instructed to make inquiries,’ I remind him. ‘Instructed by whom?’
At this, Skinner looks distinctly uncomfortable. It occurs to me that he isn't actually enjoying this sudden departure from routine, that he hasn't had time to properly prepare.
‘We take our instructions from the Department, Mr Carlton,’ he says finally, and his colleague flips open a briefcase. Two pieces of paper are handed to us: the details of the Johnstone deal above a paragraph of incomprehensible Whitehallese.
Leaning across Sir John’s desk, I hit the line to Funds Management and tell Mannetti to come down. While we wait, I try to draw Skinner out, but he responds to my questions in such vague and guarded terms that he might as well be speaking a foreign language. A language from well west of the City. He reminds me, in fact, a little of Charles Aldridge.
Mannetti arrives. He keeps smiling after I’ve introduced him, but I can tell he’s surprised. I hand him the DTI note.
Skinner asks, ‘Do you trade on your own account, Mr Mannetti?’ but Sir John cuts in to explain that Carltons has clear guidelines for employee trading.
‘Mr Mannetti?’ Skinner presses.
‘Do I trade personal?’
Skinner nods. That is his question.
‘Sometimes.’ Mannetti looks from me back to Skinner. ‘Occasionally. Look, I didn’t buy any Parnells if that’s what you're getting at. Not personal.’
Most of our staff hold accounts with Carlton Brothers, it’s an in-house rule that all private trading goes through us. The accounts are open to the scrutiny of our compliance department, so if any Parnells went through Mannetti’s, Karen Haldane would know. Yesterday I asked her to double-check Mannetti's account: she found nothing.
‘We'll need to see the records of your account, Mr Mannetti,’ Skinner says.
‘What is this?’ Mannetti looks disbelieving. ‘You’re investigating me?’
‘A statement for the past six months should do initially.’
‘You gotta be kidding.’
Skinner is clearly unaccustomed to having his demands questioned. ‘I do not kid, Mr Mannetti,’ he says coolly, and he turns aside to his colleague.
Mannetti steps forward and taps Skinner on the chest with one finger. ‘Hey, smartass. Neither do I.’ Daniel used to joke that with a name like Mannetti, and coming from New York, Tony had to be mafia. Now, in the chilling moment of silence that follows, the joke seems very unfunny. The air of threat is apparent to all of us. Skinner looks like a rabbit caught in the headlights of an oncoming truck. Mannetti stares him down then steps past him, leaving without a backward glance.
Skinner doesn’t seem to know where to look at first. Sir John begins to explain that Mannetti’s an American, and gradually the atmosphere slides back into something like normality. Skinner’s colleague asks who else has been involved with the bid.
‘Our head of Corporate Finance. A few in his team. The PR people.’I shrug. ‘Take your pick.’
‘Names?’ Skinner says, recovering.
But I tell him he’s using a sledgehammer to crack a nut. ‘It happened the way we told the Takeover Panel. If someone suggested it didn’t, I’d like to know who he is.’
‘Mr Carlton, do you trade a personal account?’
Beside me, Sir John mutters, ‘This is absurd.’ But I have Skinner’s measure now. He doesn’t want to be here, he hasn’t had time to prepare for a proper inquiry, and finally, and most importantly, these are not his own questions.
Taking my cue from Mannetti, I face Skinner square. ‘I do have a personal account. I use it to invest long-term. Day-trading is a dangerous business, Mr Skinner. People get burnt. You think you’re onto a winner, then you find you’ve backed the wrong horse.’ He tries to hold my gaze, but he's wilting, so I finish, ‘Even very clever men come unstuck. Perhaps you should keep that in mind.’
That look comes back to his eyes. Mr Skinner, our man from the DTI, is caught in the headlights once more. I tell him to feel free to pass my message on to Gerald Wolsey.
6
* * *
Darren Lyle has called a meeting. It’s common practice for the advisers on either side of a takeover to meet during the course of a bid, but most of our overtures to Sandersons have been rebuffed. Now, after the announcement of the final offer, and Vance’s session this morning before the Panel, Lyle has contacted us. Vance set the terms: two o’clock in our conference room.
While I wait for them to arrive I work on the discs, copies of those I gave Hugh. Scrolling through the Shobai-Carltons deals from December, I try to see them as he might. I focus on one deal, and then another. I assemble deals, break them up and reassemble. I search for patterns. I fiddle. After half an hour I’ve got precisely nowhere and I flick off the screen and kick back.
Odin, I think. How did Hugh do that? It worries me that he retrieved the name, but what worries me more is the ease with which the trick was done. If Hugh found it, why not some keen young programmer in our IT department? Too late now, I regret the whole Odin business.
Vance looks in. Our friends from Sandersons are here.
The Sandersons team, Lyle at their centre, is arrayed on one side of the table; Vance, two lawyers, Haywood, Cawley and me, are seated opposite. Each of us has a folder open in front of him: dogs, marking territory The meeting has not gone well. There was the usual speculation before the Sandersons team arrived: Haywood and Cawley almost convinced themselves that the bid was over, that the Sandersons team was coming to convey the Pamells concession of defeat. It hasn’t worked out like that. Jeremy Quin, Vance’s opposite number at Sandersons, has done much of the talking, mainly a recap of what's already happened. Lyle is doodling on a pad.
‘Jeremy,’ I say, interupting at last. ‘You’re telling us the Parnells aren’t conceding. Is that right?’
Quin turns to Lyle who puts down his pen.
‘That’s right,’ Lyle says.
I ask him why he's called the meeting then. What, I say, do we have to discuss?
Lyle stares at the doodles on his pad. ‘The Parnells want some light shed on the Meyers’ intentions.’
Ludicrous. Cawley snorts in surprise. We’re weeks into the bid, the final offer has been lodged, and now the Parnells want to know the Meyers’ intentions?
‘You’re asking us what the Meyer Group wants?’
‘We’d like to clarify the detail.’
‘The Meyer Group wants Parnells,’ Vance says evenly. ‘How much more detail do you need?’
Quin’s face remains a mask. Lyle, however, turns his head, one of those more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger gestures. He couldn’t look more insincere if he tried. He asks why Reuben Myer wasn't at the Takeover Panel hearing this morning.
Vance says, ‘You lost, Darren. Take it like a man.’
Lyle grins straight back. ‘I bet David Meyer really rubb
ed your nose in it.’
I flip my folder shut. I tell Lyle he’s wasting our time.
His answer is to turn to Cawley, the youngest of our team. ‘Be a good lad, go fetch the biscuits.’
Cawley reddens, he doesn't quite know how to take it. This is just Darren Lyle's style. He is often spoken of admiringly as ruthless, but there remains a staunch and significant minority view: scum floats.
To save Cawleys from embarrassment now, I make a joke of it. I pick up a pad and move behind both teams like a waiter, taking orders. Forget the Law of the Jungle, this is the City, and what generally prevails here is the Law of the Nursery. Lyle catches my eye as I go to the door, it seems he wants a private word. When I nod, he follows me out.
It’s not the done thing for a banker to wander around a competitor’s offices alone, so Lyle, plastic security pass clipped to his lapel, stays close. We skirt Corporate Finance where a few of those not working on the Parnells bid are huddled together comparing spreadsheets. They watch us out of sight. In the kitchenette, Lyle perches himself on a stool. I open a cupboard, fossicking for mugs and a tray.
‘Not as easy as you thought,’ he says.
It takes a moment before I realize he means the bid. I really have been on the sidelines too long. ‘Darren, you haven’t got a hope in hell of saving them.’ I set a tray on the bench and count the mugs. Two short. I open another cupboard.
‘How’s David Meyer?’
‘Honestly?’
‘Yeah.’ He smiles with malicious pleasure. ‘Honestly.’
I find the two last cups and place them on the tray. ‘Always pleased with our work.’
He laughs. ‘David Meyer is a wanker.’
Spooning coffee into the filter now, I am only half-listening to his opinions on David Meyer. In the space of the five years since he left us, Lyle has elevated himself from the ranks of the lowly MBAs to the Managing Director’s chair at Sandersons: quite an achievement.
But those at Sandersons who once thought they were his friends now find they were merely temporary allies in the onward march of his career. This isn’t just standard office politics either. Lyle leapfrogged two senior colleagues in spectacular fashion to take the Managing Directorship there. A deal with one of their biggest clients had gone badly wrong, the Serious Fraud Office was called in to investigate, and Lyle’s two colleagues resigned in disgrace. Nobody listened, at the time, to their protestations of innocence. Since then the case has been dropped, and Sandersons are said to have paid the disgraced pair substantial severance cheques. For a while there were rumours of unrest at Sandersons, but Lyle seems to have ridden out the storm. To the victor the spoils of an unscrupulous war.
Lyle concludes a vaguely slanderous story about David Meyer. ‘Anyway, he’s your problem.’
‘He’s my client,’ I correct him.
‘Same difference.’
‘No, he’s my client.’ I turn and point. ‘But he’s still your problem, Darren, or you wouldn’t be here.’
One of the secretaries looks in. Lyle reaches over and shoves the door closed in her face.
‘What do you want, Darren?’
‘What’s on offer?’
‘If you don’t stop buggering us around, what’s on offer is a sudden close to this meeting.’ I fill the sugarbowl and get the cream from the fridge.
He says, ‘Which one of you two pricks pointed the police in my direction?’
Fortunately I have my back to him. I pause. Then I nudge the fridge door shut. Cup with saucer, bowl with jug; I concentrate very hard on the layout of the tray.
‘It must have been you or Vance,’ he says.
‘Me or Vance what?’ I ask turning.
‘One of you told the Inspector on Daniel's murder to come and see me.’
‘Bullshit.’
‘So, it was Vance?’
‘It wasn’t anybody.’
‘Yeah? Then how come this Inspector knew about that run-in I had with Daniel on the Langford bid. That was what, six years ago?’
It was. And as far as I know, Vance and I were the only ones who saw the bitter acrimony that developed between Lyle and Daniel during the bid. Langford was a small insurance and investment house that often dealt through Carltons; but when we were employed by one of the big general insurers to help launch a takeover for Langford, the people at Langford decided not to put any more business our way. Understandable. But with this connection severed, we felt under no obligation to keep up the usual Chinese Wall between our Corporate Finance Department and Treasury. Vance brought Daniel in to help us win the bid, and he proved invaluable. He knew many of the Langford managers, and even two of the board: they were all people he’d dealt with over the years. Vance spent hours with him, sessions that Daniel later told me felt like military debriefings: how did Daniel think Langford would react if we did such-and-such? Who were the main forces on the board? Were there any whispers in the market about them?
And Darren Lyle hated it. He was, and is, one of those corporate bankers who has a keen sense of his own superiority to any other forms of City life. And to find Vance turning to Daniel for advice — Daniel, who Lyle looked upon as a creature from the stinking swamp of Treasury — it hit Lyle where it hurt, in his pride.
Daniel took the brunt of Lyle’s insults for weeks, then finally cracked. It happened in Vance’s office: Vance had called Lyle, Daniel and me in for a meeting; we were in the last stages of the bid, a tense time. Lyle dropped one snide remark too many — a comparison, if I remember rightly, between the intelligence of the average dealer and the average mollusc — and Daniel suddenly flew off the handle. He snapped back at Lyle: Lyle replied in kind. In an instant he and Lyle were shouting at each other, trading venomous insults, while Vance and I looked on amazed. Eventually Vance intervened, laying down the law to them, and there the meeting ended. But both, in Vance’s estimation, had slipped badly. Looking back, the incident was a prelude to the affair which. brought on Lyle’s resignation.
Lyle and Daniel, like Lyle and me, had a history.
‘This Inspector’s making out as if Daniel being dead helps Parnells. As if it’s some great plus for me.’ Darren’s bulldog features crease, and he studies me. ‘I got the feeling someone put that idea in his head.’
‘You’re mistaken.’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘Darren, they're investigating a murder. Apparently they’ve heard you and Daniel didn’t see eye to eye. You’re running the Parnells defence. We’re working to crack it open.'
‘So I had your Treasurer killed. That's the big theory?’ He swears.
I turn back to the tray. If Vance suspects Darren is the murderer, why hasn’t he said one word about it to me? And if he doesn’t suspect Darren, if all he’s trying to do is cause Sandersons some problems, then he’s overstepped the mark. Vance and I have to talk. Now Darren asks me who Daniel’s replacement is.
‘Why?’ I face him again. ‘Someone at Sandersons looking for a job?’
‘You come sniffing around us and it’ll end up in court. Poach just one of my staff...’ He raises a finger in warning.
Stepping past him, I slide the door open.
‘Do me a favour, Darren.’ He gives me a dark look, and I point to the bench. ‘Bring the biscuits.’
The meeting reconvenes and immediately Jeremy Quin makes his pitch: the Meyers can have two seats on the Parnells board if they agree to stop buying.
‘Two?’ Vance says.
'Two,’ Quin repeats.
Vance, very deliberately, makes a note of the offer. Everyone is quiet now: Sandersons’ team watch Vance, while along our side of the table all eyes are on Quin. Grandmaster chess with a billion-pound prize.
‘If we could have some indication of how the Meyer Group might respond,’ Quin says, ‘that would be helpful.’ Vance remains silent. ‘Do you see this as something you can recommend?’
‘Frankly?’ Vance laid down his pen. ‘No.’
Quin nods, unfazed. Li
ke Vance, a past master at this game. Now he suggests Vance might have a different number of Parnell board seats in mind. ‘A number you'd feel comfortable recommending to the Meyers,’ he says.
Vance inclines his head. ‘Twelve.’
Darren swears beneath his breath. Quin raises his eyebrows. There are only twelve seats in total on the current Parnells board.
‘Are you suggesting we double the board?’ Quin asks.
Vance, smiling, says that’s not at all what he had in mind.
Lyle is glowering now, one hand a white- knuckled fist on the table. The others in the Sandersons team look equally unsettled: apparently they’d had some real hope for this gambit. Quin’s expression, however reveals nothing. Vance offers an olive branch.
‘Let’s not close the door shall we? Two seats. We’ll pass the offer on to the Meyers.’ He makes another note, then lifts his eyes. ‘Negotiable?’
Quin exchanges a glance with Lyle, who hesitates before nodding. Then Quin pulls some papers from his folder. ‘And we have several queries about your valuations.’ He invites one of his team, an analyst way down the table, to put Sandersons’ case. The young man does so for the next ten minutes, but this is just smoke, Quin knows we won’t be adjusting our valuations of the Parnells assets now; and certainly not downward. When Cawley begins a brief reply from our team Lyle slaps his hand down on the table.
‘That’s everything, then.’
Cawley bridles, but I nudge his leg beneath the table and he holds his tongue. Vance reaches across to shake Jeremy Quin’s hand.
Then I make the mistake of reaching to offer Lyle my hand. He looks from my hand up to me, and then he stands and walks out. Jeremy Quin releases Vance’s hand and takes mine. He has the good grace to look apologetic. ‘You’ll forgive me,’ he says smiling, ‘if I don’t wish you luck.’
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