East of the City (47 page)

He stood there, breathing in and breathing out. He tilted his head back, working his jaw to ease the muscles in his neck.

She said, ‘Shall I come up with you?’

He shook his head. He came round the desk, still speechless with rage. And trying, quite desperately, to think. When he got to the door, I said, ‘Good luck.’ He stopped a moment, one hand on the door. Then he opened the door and went out.

I bent and picked up one of the lilies and squeezed the white petals between my fingers. It smelt like sugar.

Angela said, ‘What did Crossland offer you?’

‘That’s not how it was, Angela.’

‘Did he offer you my job? Underwriter on the 486 Box. What you wanted?'

‘That’s not why I did it.’

Weakly, she smiled. ‘I’m not pointing the finger.'

‘You lied to me, Angela. The other night.’

She seemed taken by surprise.

‘You didn’t tell me the whole truth,’ I said. ‘You told me half the truth. It was as good as a lie.’ She didn’t try to justify it. I went and picked up the photocopies and looked at them. I thought of my years in the Room. Finally I put them down and faced her. ‘All this,’ I said. ‘I don’t get it. It’s just not you,.’

‘I wish it wasn’t.’ Her voice was sad. Sad and old.

‘Did Allen force you into it?’

She turned her head.

‘Then what? Help me out here, Angela. I mean, I looked up to you. I really did. And you—’ I put my hand on the photocopies — ‘you were pulling this shit.’

She moved uncomfortably in her chair.

‘And then I was in serious trouble, and you lied to me to protect yourself.’

‘To protect Allen,’ she broke in.

‘Whatever.’ I waved a hand. ‘Him and Tyler had me hanging out there, with Fielding trying to nail me, and—’

‘I didn’t know about Tyler.’

Stuffing my hands in my pockets, I went over to the glass wall and looked down to the Room. It was getting busy again, the brokers touting their slips around the boxes, the money going round. I rested my forehead on the glass, tired to death. Was this it, all there was to my life?

‘I really thought I loved him,’ Angela said suddenly, and when I turned, she stared past me. ‘It’s not an excuse, I know that.’

‘Sebastian?’

She nodded, almost to herself. ‘It wasn’t just an aifair. Not to me, anyway.’

‘What was going on with that diamond brooch?'

 ‘It was something Sebastian gave me years ago. A gift.’

We were silent a while, each with our own thoughts. I didn’t quite understand it, but I was sure now that the news about the brooch had taken her right out of the blue.

I said, ‘What about the policies? The leads on the bad business. How did that happen?'

‘Like I told you. Except that after the first time, when I reinsured the whole lead line, Allen noticed. He knew something wasn’t right. I don’t know, maybe he had his suspicions about Sebastian and me already.'

‘What did he do?'

‘He waited.’

I gave Angela a questioning look. When she turned away, I said, ‘Don’t you think I’m owed some kind of explanation, Angela? All I’ve been put through?'

Her head went down. ‘The next time it happened, when I wrote the lead line through WardSure then reinsured the whole lot, Allen went and saw Sebastian. Not a word to me. First I heard of it was months later. Sebastian told me.’

I turned that one over. ‘Allen cut a deal with Sebastian?'

She nodded.

‘He cut a deal with him, while he knew you were having an affair with Sebastian?'

She nodded again.

Genuinely surprised, I muttered, ‘Bastard must have ice in his veins.’

‘You’re missing the point,’ Angela said. ‘I found out from Sebastian,’ she said. ‘Not Allen. Allen never said a word. He went on treating me like a wife.’ She repeated it quietly. ‘Like a wife.’

After all these years, the wound was still raw. This was Allen Mortlake we were talking about, the man who schemed schemes in his sleep.

‘That was his revenge?'

She dropped her head again. And then I realized something else.

‘That brooch Sebastian gave you. Allen knew about that too?’

‘I never wore it. Perhaps Sebastian told him about it,’ she said as if speaking to herself. ‘Maybe he just guessed.’

 It was like panels sliding back, and me getting to finally see what was really behind them. Allen having Bill Tyler plant the brooch in my flat, that wasn’t just to drop me in it. It was also a little tap on his wife’s shoulder. Hey, you think I’ve forgotten? Well here, look at this. And Angela couldn’t have spoken up and saved me without bringing the whole pack of cards down on herself. On herself and Allen and Justine. Her whole family. Lee Chan’s thing about revenge being a dish best served cold, it hadn’t been so wide of the mark. Allen Mortlake was a very twisted man.

But Angela’s thoughts had moved on. ‘I came to my senses about Sebastian pretty soon after that. Allen and I stayed together. I told myself that was best for Justine. Perhaps I thought we could patch things up, that I could make it up to him somehow.’ She took a moment with herself. ‘And it didn’t escape my attention,’ she said, ‘that his business was doing very well. I knew I could do a lot worse than Allen.’

This moment of brutal and self-lacerating honesty was a touch of the old Angela. But after all that had happened, I couldn’t bring myself to cheer.

I said, ‘You went on writing the rotten leads.’

‘Allen asked me to.’

I waited.

‘Okay, Ian. Allen asked me to, and I owed him, and I was too much of a coward not to. As the actress said to the bishop, It only hurts the first time.’

She couldn’t quite hold my gaze. It wasn’t just brutal honesty in her voice now, there was a definite note of shame, even self-disgust. A long time ago she’d made a mistake — with Sebastian, and with that first rotten lead she’d written — and ever since then Allen had made her pay the price. If I hadn’t had my life turned inside-out getting this far, I might have felt sorry for her.

I clicked my briefcase shut. I had one more question. I had to steel myself a moment before asking it, but I knew there’d never be another time.

‘Angela, why was Allen going to give me your job?’

This time she didn’t answer.

Still looking at my briefcase, I said, ‘It wasn’t because you thought I was the best candidate, was it? It wasn’t because you recommended me.’

‘Does it matter, Ian?’

There, if I had the guts to see it, was my answer. Does it matter? I’d worked my balls off for twelve years, I’d played the game, climbed the slippery pole. I’d really believed that what success I’d had was down to me. Does it matter? God. God, what an idiot.

I said, ‘It wasn’t just the regular duties I was meant to take over, was it? I was meant to take over this bullshit.’ I pointed to the photocopies. ‘Angela,’ I said. ‘Jesus Christ. You had me lined up to be Allen and Sebastian’s new patsy.’

‘It wasn’t like that.’

‘How far back? When Allen first took me on?’

‘Ian.’

‘All that crap Sebastian gave me at lunch that time.’ I shook my head. He hadn’t been doing what I’d guessed back then, helping Allen test my integrity. He’d been checking to make sure I’d play ball. That when Angela was gone, and he and Allen wanted a rotten lead dropped into the market, I’d be up for it. But what I’d told him over lunch couldn't have been what he, or Allen, expected or wanted to hear.

Quietly, I said, ‘And whose bright idea was it to lean on my father?’

She faced me squarely. ‘I never knew about that, Ian. Not till it came out in court.’

‘But that’s what happened, isn’t it? Sebastian punted my father into the ground then whispered in his ear that I could help him? If I just did Sebastian a little favour, like writing a rotten lead into the market, then Sebastian would forgive my old man’s debt? Isn’t that what happened?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘After it came up in court, you must have asked Allen. He must have said something.’

Her brow creased, she looked at me oddly.

‘Angela?’

At last she nodded. ‘I didn’t know until then. But surely you, Ian -’

Tears, unexpected tears, suddenly prickled behind my eyes. I pressed my fingertips to my eyelids, held the tears back.

‘Oh my God,’ she said softly. ‘Your father never told you.’

I picked up my briefcase and stood. At that moment I felt like Katy must have felt when she got her hands on that little blue book. I thought my heart was going to burst. My father never told me. Sebastian had screwed him with the idea of getting leverage over me, but Dad hadn’t spoken a word. Sebastian and Allen, the heroes in suits, the guys I once wanted to be, they’d read him all wrong. A mistake that had cost Mum and Dad their lives.

Dad was too proud, too honest, too ashamed, maybe, of the situation he’d punted himself into. A situation I’d always warned him would happen, and when it finally had — and with Sebastian — how the hell could Dad tell me? How the hell could he tell me?

Angela was standing now, one hand resting on the desk for support. She looked grey and old, and I felt no pity for her at all.

‘He didn't tell me,' I said. 'He’d rather have died.’

'W
hat's the big secret?’ Tubs asked me, coming into the kitchen. He helped himself to a sandwich, and between mouthfuls he added, ‘You reckon you bought something?'

‘Katy’s coming over to see it. I thought you might as well too.’

He raised a brow ‘She outa hospital?’

‘She’s here.’

We went through to the lounge. No Katy. But coming from her bathroom was the faint swish of the shower.

Tubs smiled. ‘Sounds like a full recovery.'

I went and banged on her door. ‘Katy!’

‘Five minutes.’

‘Tubs is here. We’re going out. See you downstairs in quarter of an hour.’

There was a muffled answer, I took that for an okay. Then I went and put on my coat, and opened the front door. Tubs stood in the middle of the lounge room stuffing the last of the sandwich into his gob.

‘Going out where?’

For a walk, I told him. I told him he looked like he needed the exercise.

We didn’t walk far, just partway across the paved wasteland, then Tubs found himself a bench by the canal. He lowered himself onto the bench with a sigh. It was four days since my last meeting with the Mortlakes, the big showdown, and Tubs asked me now how that whole business had panned out.

‘Painfully,’ I said, ‘for the Mortlakes. Painfully and quickly.’

Clive Wainwright had phoned me each afternoon to give me the gossip. The Lloyd’s Committee had closed ranks against Allen and Angela. As I’d thought, no-one wanted another scandal in the market. But the call I’d got from Piers Crossland that morning had put the final seal on it.

‘They’re out,’ he’d told me bluntly.

The Mortlake Group had gone ahead with the Crossland merger, but Allen and Angela had been forced to give up their holding in the company. They’d been paid six million pounds, less than half what the Mortlake Group was really worth, and been forced to sign agreements never to return to work at Lloyd’s in any capacity. Justine, apparently, had been made to sign this agreement too.

When I’d explained this to Tubs, he said, ‘They got six million?’

I nodded.

‘You think that’s painful, Ian? They’re fucking villains, those people, they walk away with six million?’

What to say? How could I explain to him what Allen must have felt to be stripped of his company like that? How Angela must have felt, given her family connection with Lloyd’s, to have been elbowed out in disgrace? How could I tell Tubs that the Mortlake family, in their own circles, had taken a fall they’d never recover from? Allen would try to get back up somehow, I knew that, but judging from what Piers Crossland told me, Allen would be wasting his time. A permanent bad smell had settled on the Mortlake family name. Piers Crossland, with the information I’d given him, had sunk the knife into them about as far as it could go. In the London insurance market, the Mortlakes were finished.

But Tubs didn’t understand any of that. What he understood was that a bunch of crooks had walked away from the wreckage with six million pounds.

‘If I tried pullin’ a stroke like that,’ he said, ‘I’d be banged up in gaol in two shakes.’

And what to say to that? What to say to any poor bastard who’d struggled honestly all his life just to keep his head above water? I thought of his mother back there in the two-bedroom semi in Hackney.

‘Tubs,’ I said sitting down beside him. ‘They’re from a different world.’

‘Yeah.’ He stared across the canal. ‘Tell me about it.’ It was more sad than bitter, the way he said it, like he’d resigned himself to that kind of bullshit a very long time ago.

I looked at him. That aggressive edginess he’d had this past little while was gone. He seemed calm now, like he was at the other side of things, as if he’d come through. And seeing him like that, I knew I couldn’t let it rest. I really had to know.

‘Tubs, that blue book of Sebastian’s, when did you tell Katy about it?’

‘At the track,’ he said, eyeing me curiously. ‘What’s the problem? Did you take it down to whatsaname, the son?’

‘Max,’ I said. ‘Yeah. I took it down to Max.'

Tubs half-turned to me.

‘Full payout,’ I said. ‘A hundred and twenty grand.’

Rumour had it that Max Ward was trying to sell WardSure while he still had a company to offload. He needed evidence of Sebastian’s dirty business practices surfacing now like he needed a hole in the head. When I explained that to Tubs, he nodded grimly.

‘What’s he get? Six million too, I ’s’pose.’

‘Almost.’

‘Fuck,’ Tubs said. He muttered something about the national lottery, but I wasn’t going to be distracted.

‘Tubs, when I spoke to Pike, just before the fire, he said—’ I interrupted myself then. There was no point drawing this out. ‘Tubs, I checked with Abes Watson. The night Sebastian’s house burnt down, you weren’t at the Stow. Nev Logan pencilled for Abes that night. You were off sick.'

Tubs shrugged. So what?

‘That’s not what you told me, Tubs. Remember I came back from work the next day, you and Katy were there? I told you what had happened to Sebastian. You banged on about Jigsaw — he trapped like this, he got bumped at the turn — all crap, Tubs. All crap. You never saw him run that night. You weren’t there.’