A Week in December (10 page)

In New York, Veals had given Marc Bezamain
carte blanche
to do such trades whenever he saw fit. Veals knew that Bezamain had the kosher edge in this area because of his friendship with people in the ratings agencies. If a troubled company's bonds were downgraded, some mutual funds were obliged to shed them for what Bezamain called 'non-economic' reasons: pensioners' representatives could be just too fussy - the bonds hadn't lost any real value.

Bezamain had come into Veals's orbit in New York, via Paris and a
grande ecole
or two, but originally from a poor village near Cahors in south-west France. His parents were smallholders - 'fucking peasants', as Veals put it to him at interview: his aunt worked stuffing grain down the throat of geese in an industrial foie gras plant. But the young man was good. He was very strong on risk limitation; he had a rustic smallholder's caution, and Veals and Godley both privately believed he kept his annual bonus ($8 million this January) in cash beneath the mattress.

To John Veals the staffing of High Level Capital was a matter of frantic delicacy, and the most valuable to him were the consultants. They included two East Europeans, whose utilities he had bled white on behalf of his bank in New York in the course of their post-Communist denationalisations. They had gone from being treasurers and chief financial officers to being politicians: finance ministers for their respective governments. Their days of being 'entertained' by Veals and Godley with the limitless expense account of the bank in New York had given the men a taste for the exotic which they couldn't fund themselves. Veals and Godley had made available a few 'founder shares' in High Level, then hired them as research specialists on 'economic trends'. Their job was to deliver inside information on their respective countries; they were paid a retainer, but also on results that accrued from that information.

In the course of the African debt venture, Veals had addressed himself to the British Embassy, where the commercial attache, a well-spoken young man called Martin Ryman, who was bored with making car-parking arrangements for visiting dignitaries, had been excited by the plans that Veals laid out to him. Ryman showed a commercial acumen and a flexibility that had impressed Veals. He kept an eye on him over the years and, one day, when he sensed that he was bored, offered to double his salary if he would come to High Level as a consultant. Ryman brought to High Level Capital connections in a world that Veals knew he could never penetrate - a place where diplomacy met government and even 'the arts' in a kind of fraternity of the educated. His best introduction had been a former Israeli prime minister, who became an 'undisclosed' consultant and was paid to inform Ryman of any impending action in the Middle East that was likely to affect the price of oil.

Veals made it a condition of employment that all his consultants had an interest in the fund. This kept them honest. It wasn't just 'the Vatican' - Shields DeWitt - who were straight arrows in Veals's experience: most people he had met in his life in finance were essentially law-abiding. For many of them the lack of regulation meant that they didn't need to break the law to make surreal amounts of money. There was also, he'd discovered, a snobbery about being honest: people who believed themselves to be unusually gifted were proud of the fact that they could make millions in a legal way. The distinction between 'legal' and 'ethical' was of no concern to him - or to anyone he'd ever met.

In the mid-1990s, Veals had been impressed by an exchange with a senior director of an asset management company that had emerged from inside a bank, then been so successful that it bought its parent. The new entity was subsequently sold for more than $3 billion to a huge American brokerage, and each of the asset management company original directors personally made PS83 million on the sale.

The happy director gave Veals this information as they strolled round his large estate, where Veals had been trying unsuccessfully to shoot game birds. 'Still,' a momentarily nonplussed Veals countered in a rare excursion into humour, 'after tax, it hardly comes to anything.' The director looked at him in disbelief: 'We didn't pay
tax
.'

The profit had been capital, not income; it had been deferred, rolled over, swallowed by a specially created vehicle and tapped off only when the coast was clear.

'And the glory of it is,' the strolling landowner concluded as he raised his shotgun, 'that it was all quite kosher.'

Eighty-three million tax-free and kosher. Fuck me, thought Veals. Even he was impressed.

III

For her Monday lunch, Jenni Fortune took a plate of vegetarian lasagne with garlic bread and green salad to a corner table in the Depot canteen.

'Orright, Jen?'

She looked up at Liverpool Dave and nodded. Although he was one of the good guys, she didn't want to talk to him. She preferred to spend her lunch break with a book. She had made her own path into literature. Reading hadn't been encouraged at her school, where the teachers had been too concerned with crowd control and the non-discriminatory management of the children to have much time for education as such; it was enough to get them back on the bus without offence.

As a teenager, Jenni liked books that took her into unfamiliar worlds, but didn't differentiate between them. She had read
Jilly Jones Gets Married
and
Almayer's Folly
in the same week; she was drawn in both cases by the title. Joseph Conrad's jungle and hidden treasure appealed to her, and she was intrigued by the way he dealt with the question of sex between different races, which made her think of her own parents; but Conrad's sentences, if she was honest, had really been a stretch.

For dessert, she had a chocolate biscuit and a cup of tea. She could feel Liverpool Dave's eyes fixed on her from the other side of the room, where he was eating his steak pie with chips and peas. She pushed the hair back from her face and sipped the tea beneath the bright strip lights. She should have let him sit with her: it had been unkind. But there was just too much of Dave - too much person, too bulky, too real.

Jenni remembered the first time she had been to see the lawyers, two years ago now. She had been nervous. She wore a navy blue dress, her best coat, black tights and new leather boots, then took the Tube to King's Cross. She went to the station supervisor's office and was led back across the concourse by his assistant through a locked 'Staff Only' door, down a brightly lit corridor full of fire doors and lined with flame-retardant tiles, until she came to a small kitchen that smelled of curry. Here Margaret from Human Resources was waiting with Barry Gaskell from the union.

'Hello, Jenni love,' said Barry. They shook hands. 'Don't half pong in here,' he added.

'Yes,' said Margaret, 'one of the control room assistants on night shift has his meal here. He likes curry.'

Barry Gaskell, a red-faced man in a suit with a small enamelled union badge on the lapel, looked at his watch. 'Now look, what's happening today is we're going to see Mr Northwood, who's our brief. Got that? He'll want to go through a few things with us, make sure he's got it all off pat.'

'Is he a barrister?'

'Yes. Just like Mr Hutton. But he's the junior. He's the powder-monkey who gives Hutton the ammunition for when he gets up on his hind legs in court. Hutton's the big gun.'

'OK,' said Jenni. 'And what about Mr McShane?'

'He's the solicitor, love. He's the middle man. He's in our control room at the moment. We thought it would be a good idea for him to have a look and see how everything works. But I think we'll go and fish him out now, we need to be on our way.'

The four of them made their way to the dark control room, where McShane was receiving a lesson from the duty assistant. In the twilight, a row of screens showed images from CCTV cameras. The control assistant pointed his pen at one of the pictures, which showed the interior of a stalled lift. He spoke into the microphone to a trapped passenger.

'Please don't swear, sir. We're getting help to you as soon as we can. Please, sir, there's no need for that language ...'

Barry Gaskell chuckled. 'It's the raspberry switch, innit?'

'What?' said Margaret from HR.

Gaskell coughed. 'Raspberry ripple. Old-fashioned term for ... disabled. It's really called the "mobility-impaired alarm button", and it has to be set at a height where a wheelchair user can reach it. But what happens is, some bloke with a big arse leans back and sets it off by mistake. But the knob can't be covered up to stop this happening because of the Disability Discrimination Act. All right, Mr McShane, we need to go now, please.'

Jenni took her Oyster card from her bag and made for the ticket gate.

'Oi, Jenni,' said Gaskell. 'This way.' He pointed to the Exit stairs. 'Union business. We're taking a taxi.'

They were met in the foyer of the chambers of Eustace Hutton, QC by Samson, the clerk.

'Mr Hutton is in court, Mr Gaskell. He asked me to give you his regards. The conference, as you know, will be with Mr Northwood, who will be the junior in the case. A specialist in this area. This way, please.'

Jenni followed down a warmly heated corridor over an oatmeal carpet. On the walls were hung prints of old lawyers - cartoons, she thought, caricatures or whatever they were called, from long ago - the time of Joseph Conrad, or even earlier perhaps. The men in them looked frightening, full of words and learning. It was odd, these old pictures in the modern offices: pictures of great men. Were they what today's barrister wanted to become? Perhaps in their wigs and gowns they were already like that - a throwback.

The man inside the office, when they'd been shown in, was modern, though. Jenni smiled momentarily to herself, a little laugh of relief suppressed. He was ever so thin, she thought; his ragged hair was in need of cutting; he wore a dark grey suit and a maroon tie, but it looked all right, not too olde worlde; in fact he looked a bit like one of the available 'ur-maquettes' in Parallax for 'lawyer'.

Jenni looked all round his room while he spoke to them; she didn't take in what he said. There were no photographs, and that was odd. Surely he would want to have pictures of his wife or kids - or if he wasn't married, then of his mum and dad. Jenni herself longed for an office she could make her own, with photos and plants and a proper coffee machine. There were hundreds of books on the shelves, of course: gold titles on scarlet and calfskin with roman numerals - and someone, she supposed, had read and digested every word inside.

One thing was odd about this lawyer, Mr Northwood's, room, Jenni noticed: some of the books seemed not to be law books, but to be novels or stories. There were at least a dozen by Balzac, whom she'd heard of but never read, and then there were some very thin paperbacks which she guessed would be poetry. There was a sandwich bag peeping out of his wastepaper basket under the desk; she could see the rim of a styrofoam coffee cup and a rolled-up newspaper covered in scribbles where he'd been working on the crossword. He was human.

Jenni sat back in the modern chair and folded her hands in her lap. Gabriel Northwood had a low, cultured voice - 'BBC', her mother would have said - suggesting layers of knowledge and unvoiced jokes at her expense.

Barry Gaskell seemed to be taking it all in OK; he was nodding and making notes. McShane, the solicitor, did most of the talking, handing Gabriel some papers and asking Barry for others.

When he wanted to read them, Gabriel put on black-rimmed glasses, which made him look older, Jenni thought. She wondered if he was short-sighted and what a nuisance it must be; she herself had almost perfect vision, her instructor had happily noted.

Where would someone like Mr Northwood live? she wondered. Although she covered so much of London every day, Jenni knew little of the streets above her head. She went up West occasionally, to Piccadilly Circus, Leicester Square; she knew a few of the smaller streets and clubs in Soho from hen nights and birthday parties; but if someone said to her 'St James's Park', she just thought 'shiny floors' - which you'd expect, as it was TfL headquarters. Gloucester Road meant a giant panda head between platforms, and Sloane Square was merely little shops under green arches and the rumour that once, not long ago, there had been a bar on the platform where commuters stopped for beer and cigarettes on their way home. Of its streets and houses she knew nothing.

And Mr Northwood? Marylebone? Hampstead? Or maybe he lived in what they called the 'chambers'. Perhaps the man Samson was like a butler, who took them food upstairs and put them all up in bed at the end of the day, in a dormitory, like in a boarding school ... Jenni found herself having to bite the inside of her lip again.

'We could always arrange for you to have a ride with one of the drivers, if you liked,' said Barry Gaskell. 'To give you a sense of what it's like as the train comes into the station - how little time you have to react to a determined jumper.'

Gabriel looked surprised by the suggestion. He took off his glasses. 'All right,' he said. 'I will. I suppose I ought to go with Ms ... er, Fortune herself.'

Jenni appreciated the pause he put before her surname.

'Would that be all right, Jenni?' said Margaret.

Jenni shrugged. 'Whatever.'

She saw Mr Northwood flinch a little at her surliness, but it was a first defence that was too deeply ingrained to change.

'We'll have a look at the shift rota when we get back to the depot,' said Barry, 'then I'll give you a call with some possible times.'

There were another ten minutes in which Gabriel went through more paperwork, writing in a blue foolscap notebook. His questions were about training and recruitment of drivers as well as the obvious detail about safety precautions. Eventually, he showed them to the door.

He held out his hand to each in turn. Jenni couldn't quite meet the candid, slightly anxious look in Gabriel's brown eyes and kept her own on the floor as she briefly offered, then withdrew, her hand.

In the course of the first trial, Jenni had come to know Gabriel, and also Eustace Hutton, QC, his 'leader' as they called him.