Lost at Sea (16 page)

Suddenly, there is drama. Judge Rivlin calls us all back in. “A very serious matter has arisen that does not concern the defendants,” he says. The jury is temporarily discharged. We file back out into the corridor, bewildered. It turns out that a juror was overheard holding court in a pub, saying how fantastic it was to be on the
Millionaire
trial jury. For a day and a half, the various parties debate whether to start the trial again with a new jury. In the end, Judge Rivlin decides to allow the eleven remaining jurors to continue.

“Well, that,” Charles mutters to himself, “amounted to the square root of fuck-all.”

So this trial, which was all about entertainment, is almost chucked out because one of the jurors found it too entertaining.

When the guilty verdict comes in, after nearly fourteen hours of deliberations over three days, Diana closes her eyes and looks down. Charles holds her hand and kisses her on the cheek. Tecwen doesn’t respond in any way. The only noises in court are tuts—the kind of tuts that mean “It’s all a bit of a shame.”

Charles and Diana have three daughters, two with special needs.

Judge Rivlin has the reputation of being tough when sentencing, but says, “I’m going to put you out of your misery. There’s no way I’m going to deprive these children of their parents.”

The defense barristers stand up to make their mitigation pleas. In the public gallery the defendants’ family members strain to hear what’s being said. We can just make out, “His career in the army is at an end. . . . Their home was provided by the army, so they’ve lost their home. . . . The children are suffering from panic attacks. . . . All three will have to leave their schools. . . .”

The reason why we can only barely hear this is because three pensioners in the public gallery are coughing uncontrollably.

Judge Rivlin says it was all just a shabby schoolboy trick. He says he doesn’t think this crime was about greed, it was about wanting to look good on a TV quiz show. He says the fact that their reputations have been so publicly ruined is appropriate punishment—and I remember what Charles said about how he hates to be thought of as stupid. Judge Rivlin hands out suspended sentences and fines totaling £60,000. On the courthouse steps, the paparazzi cough theatrically when Tecwen and his quiet son, Rhys, walk out.

The scrum is even more dramatic for Charles and Diana. Cameras and tripods and photographers crash to the floor in the violent scuffle to get pictures. “I’ve seen child murderers get more respect than that,” says one journalist. Other journalists and some nearby builders scream with laughter at Charles and Diana and chant, “Cheat! Cheat! Cheat!”

(An Indian diplomat named Vikas Swarup is at home watching the news reports on TV. Suddenly he has an idea for a novel. He will call it
Q & A
. The movie adaptation will be called
Slumdog Millionaire
. Later Swarup will explain his moment of inspiration to the
Guardian
: “If a British army major can be accused of cheating, then an ignorant tiffin boy [urchin] from the world’s biggest slum can definitely be accused of cheating,” he’ll say.)

I phone David Thomas to ask if Diana can give me the answer to my question. He says, “You’ve not fallen off my mental list.” I never hear from him again.

Instead I phone childhood friends to ask if they can remember anything about it. Most of them can. There were two Pollock brothers, they tell me. Bill and Arthur. They were in a family business together, making leather watch straps. There was a big falling-out in the family, and Arthur left the company. Bill became rich, driving around in a fancy car with the personalized number plate APOLLO G. His family were the ones who lived near me, in a big house in Lisvane. They had a son called Julian. Arthur Pollock never really recovered. He was left penniless and in ill health. His children vowed to pull themselves back up and never suffer the indignity their father endured. They would make something of their lives, they promised themselves. So Adrian and Marcus set up an estate agency together, and Diana married an army major. The estate agency failed. In fact, the whole thing failed.

Who Killed Richard Cullen?

(This story was published in the
Guardian
on July 16, 2005, two years before the global financial crash that began with the subprime mortgage crisis of July 2007.)

I
t is a wet February day in a very smoky room in a terraced cottage in Trowbridge, Wiltshire. A portable TV in an alcove plays the news. Everything in here is quite old. No spending spree has taken place in this house. There are wedding and baby and school photographs scattered around. Six children, now all grown up, were raised here. There’s a framed child’s painting in the toilet, a picture of Wendy Cullen. It reads “Supergran.” When I phoned Wendy a week ago she said I was welcome to visit, “Just as long as you don’t mind cigarette smoke. I’m smoking myself to death here.”

The
“Congratulations! You have been pre-approved for a loan”
–type junk mail is still pouring through their letter box. Wendy has just thrown another batch in the bin.

“You know what the post is like,” she says.

“I don’t get all that much credit-card junk mail,” I say. “I get some, I suppose, but not nearly as much as you do.”

“Really?” says Wendy. “I assumed everyone was constantly bombarded.”

“Not me,” I say.

We both shrug as if to say, “That’s a mystery.”

•   •   •

IT WAS A MONTH AGO
today that Wendy’s husband, Richard, committed suicide. It was the end of what had been an ordinary twenty-five-year marriage. They met when Wendy owned a B and B on the other side of Trowbridge. He turned up one day and rented a room. Richard had trained to be an electrical engineer but he ended up as a mechanic.

“He loved repairing people’s cars,” Wendy says. Then she narrows her eyes at my line of questioning and makes me promise that I am not here to write “a slushy horrible mawky love story.”

“I’m really not,” I say. So Wendy continues. Everything was normal until six years ago, when she needed an operation. “I couldn’t face the Royal United Hospital in Bath,” she says, “so I went private. I took out a four-thousand-pound loan.”

She says she remembers a time when it was hard for people like them to get loans, but this was easy. Companies were practically throwing money at them.

“Richard handled all the finances. He said, ‘I can get you one with nought percent interest and after six months we’ll switch you to another one.’”

But then, a few months after the first operation, Wendy was diagnosed with breast cancer and Richard had to take six weeks off to drive her to radiotherapy. The bills needed paying and so, once again, he did that peculiarly modern British thing. He began signing up for credit cards, behaving like a company, thinking he could beat the lenders at their own game by cleverly rolling the debts over from account to account.

There are currently eight million more credit cards in circulation in Britain than there are people: sixty-seven million credit cards, fifty-nine million people.

He signed up with MINT: “Apply for your MINT Card. You’d need a seriously good reason not to. What’s stopping you?”

And Frizzell: “A name you can trust.”

And Barclaycard: “Wake up to a fresh start.”

And Morgan Stanley: “Choose from our Flags of Great Britain range of card designs.”

And American Express: “Go on, treat yourself.”

And so on.

Right now nobody knows how Richard Cullen’s shrewd acumen fell apart.

“He wasn’t a man that talked a great deal,” says Wendy, “and he never, ever discussed finances with me.” But somehow it all spiraled out of control.

Wendy first got the inkling that something was wrong just before Christmas 2004, when the debt-collection departments of various credit-card companies began phoning. Richard called them back out of his wife’s hearing.

“You know how men will walk around with their mobiles,” says Wendy. “He used to go out into the garden.”

She looks over to the garden behind the conservatory extension and says, “He was a very proud man. He must have been going through hell. They were very, very persistent. I don’t think he was even phoning them back in the end.”

Finally, he admitted it to his wife. He said he didn’t seek out all of the twenty-two credit cards he had somehow ended up acquiring between 1998 and 2004. On many occasions they just arrived through the letter box in the form of
“Congratulations! You have been pre-approved . . .”
junk. He said he thought he owed about £30,000. There had been no spending spree, he said, no secret vices. He had just tied himself up in knots, using each card to pay off the interest and the charges on the others. The fog of late-payment fees and so on had somehow crept up and engulfed him. He got a pair of scissors from the kitchen and cut up ten credit cards in front of her.

On January 10, 2005, Richard visited his ex-wife, Jennifer, who later told the police that he seemed “very quiet, like he’d retreated into himself, like his mind was gone.”

She asked him how his weekend was. He replied, “Not very good.”

Then he went missing for two days.

“Nobody knows where he went,” says Wendy.

On the morning of January 12, Wendy’s son Christopher looked in the garage. It was padlocked, so he broke in with a screwdriver. There was an old Vauxhall Nova covered with a sheet.

“I don’t know why,” Christopher later told the police, “but I decided to look under the sheet.”

Richard Cullen had gassed himself in his car. He left his wife a note: “I just can’t take this any more and you’ll be better off without me.”

•   •   •

WHO KILLED RICHARD CULLEN?

For instance: Why did so many credit-card companies choose to swamp the Cullens with junk when they don’t swamp me? How did they even get their address? How can I even begin to find something complicated like that out?

And then I have a brainstorm. I’ll devise an experiment. I’ll create a number of personas. Their surnames will all be Ronson, and they’ll all live at my address, but they’ll have different first names. Each Ronson will be poles apart, personality-wise. Each will have a unique set of hopes, desires, predilections, vices, and spending habits, reflected in the various mailing lists they’ll sign up for—from Porsche down to hard-core pornography. The one thing that’ll unite them is that they won’t be at all interested in credit cards. They will not seek loans or any financial services as they wander around, filling out lifestyle surveys and entering competitions and purchasing things by mail order. Whenever they’re invited to tick a box forbidding whichever company from passing their details to other companies, they’ll neglect to tick the box.

Which, if any, of my personas will end up getting sent credit-card junk mail? Which personality type will be most attractive to the credit-card companies?

I name my personas John, Paul, George, Ringo, Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick, Titch, Willy, Biff, Happy, and Bernard. And I begin.

HAPPY RONSON

Happy is delightfully ethical. He cares about everything all the time. He has a surfeit of caring. He subscribes to the magazines
Going Green
,
Natural Parenting
,
and
Vegetarians International Voice for Animals
.
He shops at Ecozone and donates to PETA—People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.

“Happy! What a lovely name!” says the man in the Body Shop on Oxford Street as Happy fills out a Loyalty Card application form.

“Thank you!” I say.

Happy is happy for the Body Shop to pass his details to whoever they see fit. He doesn’t tick the box.

Happy fills out many lifestyle surveys, like the one published by the International Fund for Animal Welfare that asks which animals he especially cares about. Happy especially cares about dogs, cats, elephants, gorillas, tigers, whales, seals, dolphins, and all other animals in distress from oil spills. So he ticks everything.

Then I get worried that if anyone is really paying attention to Happy’s predilections, they might become wary of his wholesale compassion and suspect him of being an imaginary character, created by a journalist, to trick businesses into inadvertently revealing their data-trafficking practices. So I untick tigers.

PAUL RONSON

I imagine Paul looks like the kind of guy you see in credit-card adverts, the kind of guy you used to see in cigarette adverts—staggeringly handsome and healthy, fooling around in swimming pools on sunny days with equally beautiful friends.

Paul is an entrepreneur, a suave millionaire, the director of Paul Ronson Enterprises. Being a narcissistic aesthete who can’t bear being around ordinary people, he subscribes to
Porsche Design
(“Porsche: The Engineers of Purism”), Priority Pass (“The ultimate privilege for frequent travelers: Escape the crowds to a VIP oasis of calm. Your key to over 450 airport VIP lounges worldwide”), and so on.

GEORGE RONSON

George Ronson is a charming older gentleman. George orders from the
Daily Express
the CD set
Sentimental Journey
: “Take a sentimental journey with these 60 everlasting love songs on 4 fabulous CDs . . . Henry Mancini (‘Moon River’) * Glenn Miller (‘Moonlight Serenade’) * Perry Como (‘Don’t Let the Stars Get in Your Eyes’) . . .”

“If you do not wish to receive offers from other companies carefully selected by us, please tick this box,” reads the tiniest of letters at the bottom of the order form.

I imagine that George’s eyes still have quite the twinkle, but his eyesight isn’t what it once was. He is absentminded and cannot find his glasses, and so he doesn’t notice this infinitesimal print.

For this reason, he doesn’t tick the box.

George has also entered the Specsavers Spectacle Wearer of the Year competition (“Have You Got Specs Appeal? Our first-prize winner will be awarded a fantastic two-week all-inclusive holiday for two in the Maldives. Send a recent color photograph of yourself wearing specs to . . .”).

I am, unlike George, an embittered cynic, ground down by the travails of life, and so I consequently wonder if this whole spectacle-wearing beauty pageant is an excuse for the company to gather our names and addresses for their database, and to sell them on to other databases.

TITCH RONSON

Titch is the least favorite of my personas. He is venal. He is a gullible sex maniac. He thinks about nothing but pornography, his virility, Nazi memorabilia, and extreme martial arts. Today Titch takes up an offer in the
News of the World
: “The original
BLUE PILL
. Something for the weekend, sir?”

In this newspaper advert, a topless woman wearing a policeman’s helmet has a speech bubble that reads, “Allo, Allo, Allo. What have we here—is it a lethal weapon I see before me?” A warning covers her breasts: “
IMPORTANT NOTICE
. Some customers find the 100 mg Blue Pill we supply
TOO EFFECTIVE
. If this happens to you simply reduce usage to half a tablet.”

I assume the Blue Pill is some kind of herbal Viagra. Titch is taken in hook, line and sinker, because he does in fact see his penis as a lethal weapon.

He barely notices a tiny sentence at the bottom of the order form: “If you don’t wish to receive further mailings of exciting offers from us, or associated companies, please tick this box.”

Titch spends his every waking hour seeking depraved gratification and is therefore tantalized by the promise of exciting offers, so he doesn’t tick the box. Then he reads the rest of the
News of the World
and is saddened to discover that Kate Moss has got back together with Peter Doherty.

Titch also subscribes to
Fighters Only
, a magazine dedicated to photographs of frequently blood-splattered boxers, with captions like “Psycho Steve Tetley. Lightweight. Hyper aggressive. He’s called Psycho for a reason!”

There is no end to Titch’s troubles. He’s also, I decide, a hopeless gambling addict, and has signed up to William Hill and the Loopy Lotto free daily Internet draw.

Midway through my experiment I fill in a consumer lifestyle survey on Titch’s behalf, attached to a “Win a Day on a
Playboy
Shoot” competition. (“Get to hang out with girls like this in the flesh! There’ll be naked girls! It’s a once in an adulthood experience!”)

The consumer-lifestyle survey is quite detailed, and so it gives me the opportunity to really flesh out Titch’s character and circumstances:

Is Titch in employment?

No. He is an unemployed, single, thirty-eight-year-old homeowner.

His annual earnings are what?

I tick the “less than £10,000” box.

What are his annual outgoings?

I think for a moment, then tick the “£10,000–£24,000” box. So every year Titch somehow manages to spend approximately £14,000 more than he earns. How frequently does Titch pay off his credit-card balance in full?

Funny question, I think. Titch answers: Rarely.

Then Titch tires of these relentless questions and instead scuttles away to order the PABO Sizzling Adult Mail Order Catalogue from their online sex shop. Titch, who thought he had seen it all, is startled by the voluminous choice on offer by PABO. Many of the items for sale involve pumps and studs and—mysteriously—“tracts” that even the grotesque Titch can’t picture aiding a sexual situation.

I put all the things Titch subscribes to in an old picnic hamper, which I keep on a shelf in my office. Rifling through the contents of this picnic hamper is a disturbing experience. Red blood, pink flesh, green baize. Although I have to say that when I troop around the betting offices looking for loyalty schemes for Titch to add his name to, I always stop to play video roulette. It is terribly moreish.

•   •   •

EVERY MORNING
for three weeks I walk the streets of London in the guise of one or other of my personas. I inevitably spend slightly less time being Titch because I find the prospect of being spotted slouching into sex shops incredibly embarrassing. But by the time three weeks are up, I believe I’ve been fair and signed each Ronson up to a similar number of lists. And then I wait.

It takes three months for the first unsolicited-loan offer to arrive. And then, suddenly, I am bombarded. And which Ronson is inundated more than any other? Which Ronson receives the first and, in fact, all the credit-card junk mail?