Chapter 3
After landing at Heathrow, he cleared customs at seven in the morning. The sun hadn’t risen, it was cold and the airport was starting its working day. The moment he’d stepped off the plane, he’d felt the damp winter air and was already missing Houston.
He decided to take the Underground. Scores of tourists and backpackers were getting on the train so he was forced to sit in a smoking carriage. Inside, it resembled a huge ashtray, with cigarette butts strewn all over the floor. A thin cloud of smoke hung lazily in the air. Everyone had lit up cigarettes and were buried in their newspapers. By the time he’d reached Piccadilly Circus, he’d absorbed the smoke of ten cigarettes.
Whether it was his father’s influence or the years he’d spent at boarding school, Robert Ashby was his own man. He ignored trends and looked beyond political and class divisions. He wasn’t arrogant and full of himself but there were many who thought that he was. If anything, he had a curt, business-like attitude which didn’t suffer fools gladly. He could fit in with most people and wasn’t judgmental. He’d always had short back and sides, worn glasses, enjoyed studying maths at school and liked to play the piano when the mood suited him.
At university, his research in applied mathematics had prompted an offer of a lecture post. He’d turned it down as his real interests lay in the corporate world.
Gambling in his undergraduate years had been part of his study on randomness, frequency and statistical probability. (They were also intertwined with risk.) He hadn’t gambled, as most people do, to win a lot of money. His family was already wealthy.
To him, chance and risk were infinite variables. They were a test of intellect against hundreds of contingencies. In certain card games, enhanced recall could affect frequency and randomness so he’d trained his memory to an unusual degree. He could count the order of five decks of cards, shuffled and dealt over a two hour period and know which cards were still to be dealt and those which were against him. Thus, every time he placed a bet, he experimented with his ideas on probability.
In his student years, he’d gone to casinos, racecourses and gambling dens across South-East England. The proprietors grew to recognise him and as the frequency and amount of his wins increased, they singled him out as a sharper. Whenever he entered a casino, the croupiers would alert their manager who would keep an eye on him. Eventually, all of them blacklisted him and at the racecourses, the bookies refused his bets.
His success proved to him that with sufficient data, randomness could be reduced. Chance or luck might be predicted. Ultimately, this meant that casinos, racecourses and lotteries would shut down : the frequency of winning combinations would bankrupt them. As far as Ashby’s predictions were concerned, no-one believed that they were anything but co-incidental, rather than the outcome of a defined process.
Although he could have grown moderately wealthy as a professional gambler, money didn’t matter to him : acquiring it had never been his objective. As a way of testing probability, it had served its purpose. Instead, he concentrated on his first interest which was the family business.
As he’d grown up, he’d watched his father work. From this, he’d developed an understanding of chance or risk and then tried to rationalise them mathematically. It should be possible to tame the unknown, using numbers.
While insurance isn’t gambling, both share similarities. All insurers and gaming institutions have to pay out. The successful ones avoid paying too much as it could wipe out their business. Bookies modulate their odds, higher or lower. Insurers price their cover, expensively or cheaply. Bookies lay off most of a large bet to other bookies. Insurers transfer part of their risk to reinsurers.
While at school, Ashby had spent the holidays in “the Cube”, the open plan, trading floor at the Risk Exchange watching underwriters work and at his father’s company, seeing how it operated and what everyone did. In Houston, he’d learned about as much as there was to learn and had been ready to join his father, work beside him and eventually take over from him at some point in the future.
Risk business wasn’t difficult to understand. Often, it seemed too easy. The trick was to price it correctly. Where the likelihood of an accident or an earthquake occurring was very high, the market took over : premiums would be ruinous or the cover unavailable. Some underwriters needed the premium income and ignored the warning signs.
He always carried three things : a small, pocket notepad of loose sheafs in a leather wallet for making rough calculations ; a pocket calculator of the latest design for advanced calculus ; and a synthetic marker-pen which could be used for writing on glass or a wall and be rubbed off again. One or two of these were often used by him for plotting rough calculations on timing, frequency or probability. This irritated some people, particularly brokers who were unable to dispute what the numbers revealed.
As a doctor might observe patterns of symptoms in a patient, Ashby used an eighteenth century mathematical theorem to measure probability. He would group the relevant categories of data to arrive at a rough estimate of likelihood. Knowledge of past events was combined with new observations to infer the probability of an outcome.
Most of the time, his analyses were correct and he had an ability on occasion to make accurate predictions or to describe what would happen. Some people thought that he was a savant, a comparison which amused him ; others were cynical that mathematics could be used in this way ; still others thought that it was the arrogance of the ivory tower.
He was now twenty seven, on the tallish side at over six feet two, well built and always in a suit or jacket. He followed Polonius’ advice in Hamlet and wore classic tailoring – Savile Row, Gieves & Hawkes. Not extravagant but still expensive. Unlike some at the Exchange whose clothes announced them, he had the look of serious money. Playing rugby had given him a few scars but his manner was direct and sometimes intense. Despite that, the girls in Houston were attracted to him and thought he was an English gentleman. One or two had fallen for his accent. They seemed more relaxed and less conceited than the English girls who found him to be dull and old-fashioned. That he calculated risk and was a mathematician was distinctly unglamorous yet here he was, back where he’d started two years earlier, except that, now he was on his own.
It didn’t help too that he suffered from mild epilepsy which had started in his pre-teens with petit mal episodes, sometimes at school. None of the doctors could pinpoint the cause but had prescribed pills to be taken three times a day. It was some American wonder-drug which he later discovered had also been taken by President Nixon during the Watergate scandal in the seventies. Unfortunately for Nixon, he’d unwittingly combined it with a large intake of alcohol which had worsened his erratic behaviour. For Ashby, taking pills throughout the day was a chore. Once or twice, when he’d been busy, he’d forgotten to take them and had gone out like a light. Once, it had happened in a business meeting. And like Nixon, he had to be careful with the booze. He’d found that taking the pills and drinking to excess, didn’t mix at all well.
When he reached his hotel, he just had time to dump his bags, stand under a shower for ten minutes and then take another cab to Fenchurch St and his father’s office at Plantation which was on the twelfth floor of a drab, grey tower block.
It seemed they were all expecting him, right down to the postboy and after his father’s secretary met him and murmured her condolences, she led him through the open plan office to the boardroom.
On the way, he saw several people he’d worked with in the past. All of them looked busy. Around them was a haze of cigarette smoke. At the time, he thought they were upset about his father’s death but unknown to him, they were worried about their jobs. When the person who runs the company is no longer around, there are bound to be changes before long.
“Can I get you a tea or coffee, Robert ?”
Usually, he hated formalities and wanted to get straight on with whatever he was there for (meetings bored him). On this occasion, he felt shattered and h
is mind was elsewhere. Although he just wanted to find somewhere to lie down and go to sleep, he had to stay awake for some sort of sideshow about his father having passed away, handing over personal effects to be kept by the family, expressions of bereavement, terribly sorry and so on.
“Actually, I didn’t get any sleep at all on the flight over – black coffee is what I could really do with – a pot of it – and do you know why I’m supposed to be here, Tara ? Have they said why they want to see me ?”
The question was left unanswered. She knew as much as he did. Or she’d been ordered not to let on before someone else had spoken to him.
For half an hour, he stared out across Tower Hill while drinking his coffee. He imagined the scene of Lord Lovat’s execution and how the spectators’ stand had collapsed before Lovat laid his head on the block. An appropriate thought. Would he be laying his head on the block ? Then Tara returned and took him to the boardroom where the directors of the company were waiting for him.
Plantation A Legal Thriller Page 3