Meltdown (27 page)

The celebrated catering woman who had taken the room which Beaumont had thought was his.

The architect whose name sometimes came up when Prince Charles objected to a building.

Henry Baker, the flaxen-haired New Labour golden boy.

And Jimmy Corby. So rich. So successful. A man whose charmed life, although not in the public domain, was known to Beaumont via the old university grapevine.

Of course, Beaumont assured himself, he wasn’t envious of these people. He did not
like
them, particularly Bennett and Corby, but he wasn’t envious of them.

He had not, after all, done so badly in life himself and had no complaints on that score. He had a nice little house which he shared with his partner, a sergeant and another stalwart of the Gay Police Association. He had a number of citations to his credit. He was one of the most respected officers in the Financial Fraud Division.

And now he had a recently ennobled peer of the realm in his sights. A confidant of not one but two prime ministers. Quite a scalp to add to the growing collection of fraudsters, cheats and charlatans who imagined that the law was written for other people and did not apply to them. Until they met Detective Inspector Graeme Beaumont, that is. After which they thought differently.

Lord Rupert Bennett would soon be thinking differently.

Beaumont found his mind drifting back to that cold autumn night in 1991. He’d been a student at Sussex for only two months but he was already heartily sick of the hall of residence in which he’d been placed. The corridor on which he lived was full of hearty, noisy, sporty blokes who didn’t wash up the communal dishes, didn’t respect the fridge rules and from whom one’s milk was not safe.

Therefore, when Beaumont had seen a room in a shared house advertised on the accommodation noticeboard in the Student Union, he had gone round to the address immediately and to his delight had been invited to move straight in.

‘We need the money big time,’ the charming, kind-looking man who had introduced himself as Jimmy Corby had said. Also present at the interview was a pleasant curly-headed man in a shapeless jumper and Bennett in tweeds and brogues, smoking a pipe.

Beaumont had been hugely flattered that such sophisticated second-years would consider living with a nervous young newbie like himself. His personal confidence, which had been somewhat shaken by his experience with the rugger buggers in the hall of residence, grew accordingly.

Beaumont therefore gave notice at his hall. He applied for a half-term’s refund, which was his due, and moved into his new room that week. He built shelves from planks and bricks for his books and hung his Gay Pride poster up on the wall. He put his clearly marked cereal boxes and rice jar in the kitchen and his toothpaste with his name on it in the bathroom. His loo roll he kept in his bedroom and took with him when he visited the lavatory.

Beaumont was very happy. He lived in that house for eight days and was unaware of any problems or tensions. It was true that he had faced strong resistance when he had suggested that he be allowed his own specific sixth of the fridge. But although that particular issue remained unresolved, nothing prepared him for the moment when he returned home from college one evening to be faced by Corby, Bennett, the architect and the bumbling one in the jumper to be told that it wasn’t working out and he would have to leave.

They had of course assured him that he could stay until he found somewhere else (a day or two should be enough, he recalled Bennett suggesting very firmly), but pride and hurt had driven Beaumont from the house that very evening. An evening that was cold and stormy.

After wandering the streets in tears for an hour, he had spent a miserable, lonely night in a small hotel which he certainly could not afford. This was followed by a miserable, lonely entire first year in a grim bedsit, the only accommodation he could find. It cost him twice as much as the hall of residence, which he wished he had never left.

It hadn’t been the worst experience that could befall a first-year student but it had been a painful one for Beaumont. Very painful. To be summarily rejected by such well-integrated students had shaken him badly. He had imagined himself a marked man. A pariah. He worried that word would spread that he was impossible to live with and people would avoid him throughout his three years. He thought people were staring at him in the corridors of the Union building.

Despite his fears, it did not work out quite that badly. Beaumont eventually found his feet and made one or two friends. But it took a long time for him to get his confidence back and he never forgot the loneliness of the night he’d spent crying in the little hotel and the year in that horrible bedsit.

And then quite recently Rupert Bennett had come back into his life.

Rupert Bennett, the man who had advised the Treasury on the Caledonian Granite rescue package. The man Inspector Beaumont had become convinced had made huge personal profits from trading on the information he had gained during that process.

Beaumont had been on Bennett’s trail for months, but it was a labyrinthine trail left by a man who did not wish to be followed. Rupert Bennett had been very careful. He had made his share purchases from overseas accounts and he had laundered the profits through various third parties and tax havens. Try as he might, Detective Inspector Beaumont could not gather together enough concrete evidence to arrest his old housemate for insider trading. So he had instructed his team to look at the actions of his friends. To find out who was in his inner circle and see what, if anything, they had been up to in those heady days when the business of money had passed almost unnoticed beyond the law and into an unregulated, amoral free-for-all.

‘After all,’ Beaumont told his officers, ‘the nature of insider trading is that it depends on the
passing and receiving
of information. It’s just possible that we can get to Bennett via someone he knew. Somebody who was less careful than him. An old university friend, perhaps. A valued and trusted confidant.’

Beaumont sent his people to look for anyone who could be identified as a regular figure at the many social functions which Lord and Lady Bennett had organized. A list had been drawn up which featured a number of names that Beaumont recognized from his past. The team had then looked into the financial records of the people on the list to see if any of them had traded in Caledonian Granite shares at the same time as Bennett had himself.

One name ticked all the boxes.

Jimmy Corby.

It
has
to be private

On New Year’s Eve 2007 the gang had all assembled at Jimmy and Monica’s for dinner, cooked (as Monica was the first to admit) by the brilliant Jessica, without whom Monica would often tell you she
could not do.

It was just as it had always been. The gang had foregathered as they had done so many times in the previous fifteen years, and before that in embryonic form at university. For curries, for movies, for birthdays and for weddings, to celebrate each other’s professional elevation and the arrival of children. The cast had remained the same; only the quality of the food, the wine and the districts of London in which they met had changed.

Except this time something else had changed. The usual ten of them were not
quite
the usual ten, a development that had made those remaining rather uncomfortable. Particularly the women.

One of their number was no longer present. What was more, she had been replaced by a girl of twenty-two.

David and Laura were there as always. David was now a hugely successful architect, the twin prongs of his first Rainbow even now half constructed, poking up into the skies of Europe. His wife Laura was a barrister and mum and founder member of Kid Conscious, a charity which lobbied against smacking. Laura believed passionately that there were no circumstances under which it was ever justified to smack a child. In fact she had started the charity after being forced to sack a nanny for doing just that.

Henry and Jane were there, of course. Slightly grumpy old Henry and bright, intense Jane. Henry had by now won his first junior ministerial post and, having deftly leapt the loyalty divide between Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, was very much a rising star of the new Prime Minister’s administration. He had finally given up on completing his novel.

‘The thing I’ve come to understand,’ he said, ‘is that
Security Blanket
is a film, not a book at all, and I’m going to turn it into a screenplay. During the summer recess.’

Jane by this time had completed four novels and her big news was that she was about to be published.

‘And it’s not
chick lit
either,’ Jane assured everyone. ‘Not one of those books that are nothing but sex, shoes and shopping like you read, Monica. It’s a historical love story set in two periods, the present and the First World War.’

‘Sounds like chick lit to me,’ Rupert remarked, ‘and am I being dense or didn’t they have sex, wear shoes and go shopping in the Great War?’

Lizzie and Robson were all present and correct too. The oldest relationship in the gang and the only one in which both members were original Radishers. Not that Lizzie had actually
shoved
one, of course, on that famous graduation night; she had long since gone to bed. But she was still an original Radisher.

And Rupert was there. Lord Rupert now, of course, posh at last, courtesy of a Labour government.

But no Amanda.

Amanda of Rupert and Amanda was not present.

Instead, in her place sat Beatrice. Very bright, very pretty and doing her
very
,
very
best to chatter her way through a near-impossible situation.

‘I can’t
believe
Rupert’s done this,’ Laura whispered to Monica as they went downstairs together, ostensibly to see how the soup was coming on. ‘It’s such a dreary cliché.’

‘I miss Amanda terribly,’ Monica admitted. ‘Not least because she occasionally put Rupert in his place. Of course I invited her for this evening
first
but she’s decided to go to Scotland with the children, so I had to ask Rupert. But I’ve made it absolutely clear to Jimmy that Radish Club or no stupid Radish Club, Rupert comes second from now on, we’re sticking with Amanda. Rupert buggered off, not her.’

‘I know, and worse, he’s landed us with fucking
Beatrice
.’

‘We should try to be kind.’

‘Why? The little bitch has run off with a married father with two young children. She knew what she was doing.’

‘She’s twenty-two, Laura.
Rupert
knew what he was doing. This situation is entirely Rupert’s responsibility.’

‘It’s so stupid! Couldn’t Rupert have just carried on shagging around a bit?’

‘I know I’d rather Jimmy left me than did that.’

Laura gave Monica a quizzical look.

‘Do you really think that, Mon? I’d say putting up with a couple of mid-life quickies is better than throwing everything away. And if he’d stuck to quickies then Amanda could have had a revenge shag and
we
wouldn’t have been left with sodding Beatrice. One good thing though, Amanda will kill him in the courts. He’ll lose half at least.’

‘I suppose he’d rather have ten million and sleep with a girl of twenty-two than twenty million and sleep with one of forty. It’s so sad.’

At the dinner table Rupert, of course, was riding out the situation with his usual bluff confidence, acting as if nothing had happened. He was almost forcing poor Beatrice into the conversation as if she had instantly become one of the gang and was having the time of her life, when in fact it was clear she would far rather have spent the evening hiding in the loo.

Despite the uncomfortable new dynamic, the conversation progressed along pretty much the same lines as it always did, turning, as so often in the past, from property prices to education. From education it would almost certainly move on to holiday locations (ski lodges – rent or buy?) before finally settling back on to property prices with the cheese. Property prices were the great and unifying subject, affecting them all with equal intensity despite the disparity in the values of their portfolios.

For the time being, however, the gang were stuck firmly on education. The conclusion was always the same. Private (or selective grammar) was the only option. It was a terrible, crying, awful shame, but the state system simply did not currently
offer a viable alternative
.

Only Rupert (and Amanda until recently) viewed this absolute certainty with complete approval. Rupert had nothing but contempt for even the principle of state education for any but the very poorest of the poor. He believed it was simply a fact of life that man was a selfish animal who sought for himself the best in everything, and therefore it was unreasonable to expect him to modify that outlook on a subject as important as the future of his children.

‘And don’t give me that bollocks about how the state should offer the best,’ he thundered. ‘How could it possibly? Is a council house as good as a mansion? Will welfare food stamps get you a table at the Ivy? No. Of course not. The state simply can’t offer the best. It never has done and it never will. I can afford to send my kids to a school with three hundred acres of grounds, two computers a child, a fully equipped theatre and
three
Latin teachers. Am I going to choose the local comprehensive instead? No, I’m fucking well not.’

None of the others felt that the situation was quite as clear-cut as that. Henry and Jane were the most anguished on the subject. As a Labour MP, Henry was theoretically a champion of state schools.

‘I don’t agree at all, Rupert, you Nazi bastard,’ Henry said. ‘There’s a lot more to education than Latin and fully equipped theatres. It’s also about being educated for
life
. For a world into which you must eventually
fit
. In the best of all worlds all children, rich and poor, would be educated in a superb comprehensive system. That’s what we’re working towards in government and that is what we’ll achieve.’