The Maggie Bainbridge Box Set

by Rob Wyllie

  'Nowt to do with us.'

  'Aye that's what your brother told us,' Liz said, shooting him a sardonic smile. 'But I expect the CCTV at Oxenholme would have caught any of you Tompkins catching a London train any time over the last few weeks. I know the station manager really well, I'm sure he'd be happy to let me take a look at the footage.'

  'You'd better watch what you're saying,' Wayne sneered. 'And you can look at all the pictures you like, you won't find nothing.'

  And that's where they left it. Discussing the matter on the way back to Kendal, they agreed it was pretty much one hundred percent certain that one of the Tompkins brothers had been behind the harassment of Belinda Milner. As for the Morgan stuff, that seemed a bit less likely, although a former sergeant in the Engineers would certainly have the logistical and technical expertise to pull of such a campaign. So they didn't rule out that he or his brother or even someone else in the family could have driven to London with a van-load of aerosol cans. Jimmy didn't know if it was a possibility, but maybe he could persuade his brother Frank to get an APNR search done on one or two cameras on the M6, and of course Liz could talk to her mate at the station, but he didn't hold out much hope for either of these leads.

  An hour into the journey, they were dawdling down the eastern edge of Thirlmere with the brooding majesty of Helvellyn rising just ahead of them, and it was impossible to talk of anything but the stark beauty of the national park. But then soon she was telling him of her difficult upbringing in Newcastle, how her family had shut her out when in her late teens she had came out, and how finding Ruthie at a time she had all but given up hope of love had saved her. And in that moment Jimmy knew he had found a friend for life, his initial warm feeling for this woman reinforced by every subsequent minute he had spent in her company. Not only that, he was pretty sure she felt the same way about him. Which meant it was probably a good time to return to the subject of her big story. The story that she hoped would make her name, the story that would reveal how Hugo Morgan found out about the problems at the mine. So he asked her if he'd passed the Ruthie test, and she said yes he had, and then he asked if she would now tell him, or at least give him a clue. And she said she would. Pillow talk. Pillow talk, that's all she was prepared to give away and he didn't push it. If he wanted to know more, he would have to figure it out for himself. As they approached the outskirts of Kendal, he reflected once again that Liz Donahue was one of life's good people and it was a privilege to know her.

  Words that he would find himself repeating to Ruthie when he attended the funeral.

  Chapter 16

  Frank had decided to take the tube out to Tower Hill, the nearest station to the HBB offices which were located a couple of streets behind St Katherine's Dock. He could have got one of his deadbeat DCs to drive him, and that would have been a lot quicker and a lot more convenient, but he wanted take a look at the location of Chardonnay's death before he met with Jeremy Hart. It wasn't that he was looking for anything specific, he just wanted to take in the scene and remind himself that she had been a real living person and not just the name on the cover of the case folder. Alighting on the east-bound platform, he made his way along to the end against the flow of the handful of passengers who had disembarked, to the point where departing trains sped off into the darkness. Directly opposite was the spot where Chardonnay had been pushed to her death, the act expertly timed to coincide with a train emerging at over thirty miles an hour on the west-bound line. That evening back in October the station would have been packed with home-bound commuters, and he wondered if anyone would have noticed a beautiful young woman being forced against her will to the end of the platform. Because surely that was what must have happened. Anywhere else, the train would have been slowing and the victim might well have survived. Too much of a chance to take if you wanted a clean kill.

  A few metres along the deserted platform, a Transport for London official emerged from a small glass fronted cubicle and began to approach him, a mildly suspicious expression on her face. Frank shot her a smile, fumbling in an inside pocket for his warrant card.

  'Hi, I'm Detective Inspector Stewart with the Met. I just wondered, do you have any idea how long they keep your CCTV footage?'

  She shrugged. 'Don't know mate. You'd need to ask security. What's this all about?'

  'Nothing really, just wondered. Here, do you remember an incident a few months back, when a young woman fell in front of a train? On the other platform, just over there.'

  'Nah, wasn't here mate. I was at Bank then. But we get quite a lot of them. It's nothing special.'

  Nothing special. A life so easily dismissed by this ignorant woman. But Chardonnay Clarke was something special, someone very special indeed and he wasn't going to rest until he'd found out what happened to her.

  Hart was mid to late thirties, short, overweight and balding, his unprepossessing appearance redeemed in part by an immaculate navy Italian suit and dazzling white shirt. The card he handed Frank read Jeremy R C Hart, Chief Financial Officer. Two middle names, when most people had to make do with one, if they were lucky. And as certain an indicator of class as an old school tie. Posh guy, Jeremy something or other. That was how Terry Clarke had described him and his assessment was accurate, if only to judge by his accent. He was also pretty young to be occupying such an elevated position in a big international bank, and Frank speculated how much of his career success was down to his ability as opposed to his obviously privileged upbringing. Not what you know but who you know.

  HBB's office was open plan and garishly decorated in bright primary colours, looking more like a primary school than a temple of high finance. Hart led him through a maze of desks occupied almost exclusively by twenty-somethings, each with eyes glued to their laptop screens, to an area separated from the rest of the office by a floor-to-ceiling perspex screen. A label stuck to the outside read Silent Space 1.

  'We come here when we need a bit of peace and quiet,' Hart explained. 'Which is quite a lot of the time, because it's generally pretty manic around here. Our main offices are over at Canary Wharf, this is just a bit of overspill capacity we're renting at the moment. We're still trying to work out what the takeover means for us in terms of headcount.'

  'Aye, I think I read something about that. You've been bought by a German bank, haven't you?'

  'Yes, that's right. CommerzialBank Stuttgart.' He didn't sound as if it was a development he much welcomed. Frank was no expert, but takeovers generally had an impact on jobs, or headcount as Hart described it, and like in war, it was the vanquished that lost out. He wondered if this guy's own position might be at risk.

  The only seating provided was a pair of oblong foam blocks arranged facing one another about a metre apart. With no other option on offer, he perched himself uncomfortably on the corner of one.

  'You know why I'm here Jeremy,' he said. 'Chardonnay Clarke.'

  Hart stared at his shoes and gave a deep sigh. 'I know. I still haven't come to terms with what happened. I don't think I ever will.'

  'You were close, I think?' Frank said, trying his best to sound empathetic.

  'Close?' he said, his indignation obvious. 'I loved her. I'd never met anyone like her before. She was special. Very special.'

  And way out of your league too pal, was Frank's immediate reaction, but he didn't say it. Not in so many words at least.

  'I'm sorry to have to ask this question, but do you think she felt the same way about you?'

  He gave Frank a dismissive look. 'Yes, I know what you're thinking, the same as everyone else did. Why would a girl like that fall for someone like me? Well, the fact is we were soul mates and we were blessed to have found each other. We thought the same way about everything. We loved the same books, the same films, the same music. Everything. It was if we had known each other for the whole of our lives. We talked about our future together. It was that serious.'

  'What, do you mean marriage? But she was only what, twenty-three, twenty-four?'

  'What
's that got to do with it? You might find this hard to understand Inspector, but our ages were irrelevant. We were in love.'

  'And yet she took her own life.' Frank left the obvious question hanging in the air, unasked. Why?

  'I know. Something changed towards the end,' he said, his voice betraying the pain he was so plainly feeling. 'I don't know what. And I was too tied up in the Brasenose thing to notice.'

  Frank felt his pulse start to rise as his something's-not-right instinct kicked in. Terry Clarke had been adamant. My girl would never have done herself in. But here was her lover with seemingly no doubts that it could have been anything other than suicide. Which meant he must have known a reason why she had been driven to commit that terrible final act. And the Brasenose thing. What was that all about? He had to ask.

  'Brasenose? That's an Oxford college, isn't it?'

  'Well yes it is, but this is actually Brasenose Investment Trust. It's a financial firm run by a guy called Hugo Morgan. I don't expect you'll have heard of him.'

  But Frank had heard of him, but in what context? It was something that Maggie and Jimmy were working on, he was pretty sure of that. And then he remembered. The billionaire who had dumped his wife as a fiftieth birthday present to himself.

  'Well funnily enough Jeremy I have. My brother's actually met him a couple of times I think.'

  'Really?' Hart seemed mildly interested. 'Is he in finance too?'

  Frank laughed. 'You wouldn't think that if you met him. No, he works around the legal profession, investigating divorces and such like. But sorry, I interrupted you. Carry on, please.'

  'So, you know about the Stuttgart take-over. It was an agreed deal, but that actually can be rather complicated when the target, us in this case, is publicly quoted. Most of our stock was in the hands of just a handful of big institutions and so we had to sound out what sort of offer they might be willing to accept in the event of a take-over. As you can imagine, it's a very delicate operation.'

  Frank had no idea what he was talking about so had no opinion whether it was a delicate operation or not. But he nodded along anyway.

  'Aye, sure, sure, get that.'

  'The last thing you want is an institution at the last minute holding out for a better offer, that could blow the whole deal apart of course. So we'd been working on it for several months, sounding out our investors and eventually settled on a price of around eight pounds fifty pence a share. That was the price that everyone was happy with. Our stockholders were getting a fair return on their investment and it was a price that Stuttgart were willing to pay. So win-win.'

  Frank nodded. 'I'm sensing there's a but.'

  Hart gave a rueful smile. 'Yeah, a big but. So, just three weeks before Stuttgart are due to go public with the offer, our registrar draws to my attention that there's been an unusual volume of trades in the preceding two or three weeks. Someone has been quietly building up a position in our stock to the extent that this entity now controls nearly eleven percent.'

  'And that's this Brasenose outfit?'

  'Well no, not exactly. The company behind it was called Jasmine Holdings, registered in Guernsey. We'd no idea who the owners were at that stage.'

  Frank smiled. 'You'll need to forgive me, high finance isn't my thing. But I guess that spelt trouble in some way?'

  He nodded. 'You could say that all right. It put the bank, and me in particular, in deep shit. With that sort of volume of trades, we were legally obliged to inform the FCA - that's the regulator - and then they started asking awkward questions about whether there had been a leak and if there was a connection between any of the bank's officers and this Jasmine outfit.'

  'Aye, I think I understand how serious that would have been,' Frank said, 'because it would have been insider trading, am I right?'

  'Exactly,' Hart said, 'and not a great career move for a CFO like me, to be caught up in something like that. Naturally my CEO Simon Parkside and all the Stuttgart guys are going mental, accusing everybody in this room, me included, of leaking the deal. It was horribly stressful and I didn't sleep for nearly two weeks.'

  Frank gave a sympathetic smile. 'Aye, it must have been hard for everyone, I can see that. So how did it all play out?'

  'Like a complete nightmare, that's how it played out, if you must know. So not long afterwards, Hugo Morgan goes public and reveals that his Brasenose Trust is the hundred percent owner of the Jasmine shell company. He named it after his youngest daughter apparently. Next he's all over the financial press slagging off the deal, a deal that somehow he knows all the details of. He was giving it his usual activist investor shtick, about how we were ripping off the small shareholders and how he intended to ride to their rescue. Anyway, the long and short of it was that unless the offer was upped to ten pounds a share, he wouldn't sell.'

  Frank looked puzzled. 'Sorry, but I thought you said he only had bought eleven percent. Would that have been enough to stop the deal going through?'

  Hart shook his head. 'Well in theory no, but Morgan knows that as soon as he publicly questions the value of a deal, it doesn't take long for some of the other big institutional shareholders to start questioning their judgement too. And that's exactly what happened here. Herd instincts I think they call it. Next thing you know, everybody is saying that maybe eight pounds fifty is too cheap after all.'

  'But what about the Germans?' Frank said. 'Wasn't there a risk that they would just walk away?'

  Hart gave a rueful smile. 'That's the genius of Morgan. He's got an amazing instinct for the true value of a company. He bet that CommerzialBank would bitch to high heavens but go through with it in the end, and that's exactly how it played out. And we were left looking like idiots for trying to sell the bank on the cheap.'

  'And I'm assuming Morgan did very well out of it?'

  Hart nodded. 'You could say that. He made forty million in the space of a month.'

  'Nice,' Frank said, 'but did you ever find out where the leak came from?'

  Hart shook his head. 'No, we didn't. The FCA compliance team interviewed loads of people in the bank and swarmed all over our emails and phone records, but they didn't get anywhere. And of course Morgan denied there ever was a leak at all. He claimed it was pure coincidence, that he had been building up a position in HBB simply because he had been researching us and decided we were poorly managed and the shares had underperformed for years.'

  Frank nodded. 'Plausible I suppose? Because I think I've already worked out that's how his company operates.'

  'Oh yeah,' Hart replied, his tone sarcastic, 'highly plausible. Except I happen to know it's complete bollocks. You see, I've done my research too.'

  'How do you mean?' Frank said, his eyes narrowing.

  'Five companies in the last three years where Brasenose Trust just happened to have taken an interest just as something big was kicking off. Two take-overs, a big contract loss, and two management screw-ups to be exact. And each time, Morgan made a killing.'

  'So what are you saying? That he does this thing as a matter of course?'

  Hart nodded. 'He calls it activist investment. I call it industrial espionage because that's exactly what it is. I don't know how he does it, but it's not through bloody research, believe me.'

  It wasn't Frank's area of expertise, but questionable though the practice might be from a moral standpoint, he wasn't sure if it was actually illegal. Although what you did with the information you found out, well that might be a different matter. But he wasn't here to pass judgement on Hugo Morgan's business practices.

  'Getting back to Chardonnay, if we can for a moment. Can I ask, how much was the bank paying her? The reason I ask is that her dad thought she was getting seventy-five grand a year, which seems a lot to me.'

  Hart looked perplexed. 'Paying her? She was an intern Inspector, so we weren't paying her anything. We paid a fee to the agency, but that was it.'

  'The agency? That's that Oxbridge outfit isn't it? So would they have been paying her, do you think?'

&nbs
p; 'What, are you kidding?' Hart said, suppressing a laugh. 'The internship business is just one step away from slavery. We all go along with it of course but, no, they definitely wouldn't have been paying her, no way.'

  'And yet she had money, didn't she? I've heard she had a very nice flat in Clapham for instance, and what sort of rent would that command? Fifteen hundred or maybe even two grand a month? That's a lot of money for an intern. For anybody when it comes to it.'

  Hart shrugged. 'I just assumed her dad was paying for it all. He's a London plumber after all. You know what they charge. And anyway, I only went there once. You see, I never... we never slept together.'

  Frank looked at him sharply. Years of experience in the job had given him a well-honed instinct for the truth, or more accurately, for sniffing out untruths, and his instinct said that Jeremy Hart was telling the truth about all of this. Although it did seem a bit surprising they weren't having sex given how much in love they had supposedly been.

  'Why was that sir, if you don't mind me asking?'

  He smiled uncertainly. 'Chardonnay said she wasn't quite ready for that side of our relationship. I was perfectly happy with that of course.' From the waver in his voice, Frank knew that this was a lie. He'd been rejected and he hadn't been happy about it at all. But then who would be when you were so tantalisingly close to having a woman like Chardonnay in your bed? Perhaps Hart had misread the whole thing, and that she saw their relationship in an entirely different light. Perhaps she had decided it had run its course and was trying to pluck up the courage to tell him.

  'You said that something had changed in the relationship towards the end. About the time the Brasenose thing was happening.'

  A cloud of sadness seemed suddenly to envelop him. 'Yes, I don't know what it was. Something was troubling her, but she wouldn't say what it was. I speculated of course. I thought perhaps her parents were pressuring her to break it off, you know, because she was so young and with the age gap and everything.'