Meltdown (40 page)

‘Of course you are,’ Beaumont agreed. ‘You’ve a new business to run. And a fat pension to spend and no doubt many a hidden offshore portfolio to manage. The ill-gotten fruits of the as yet unproven insider trading, eh?’

‘Look, Inspector, do forgive my French, but why don’t you just fuck off and bother someone else?’

Beaumont got up.

But did not leave. It was time to play his jack.

A good card, but not a great one. It would still require bluff.

‘You know what I’ve found, Lord Bennett?’ Beaumont said after a pause.

‘You’ve found nothing, Inspector. We’ve already established that. And I think I told you to fuck off.’

‘I’ve found,’ Beaumont continued, ‘that the one thing which invariably brings down even the cleverest of criminals . . . is vanity.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes, really.’

Beaumont was speaking in the most easy and conversational of tones. As if he was exchanging opinions with a friend rather than fixing his prey with a steely eye. ‘And the funny thing is that the cleverer the criminal, the more vain he usually becomes.’

‘
Please
, Inspector. Is this really going anywhere?’

‘You’re a clever man, Lord Bennett. And obviously a vain one. Beautiful clothes, lovely PAs, a gorgeous young girlfriend, I believe.’

‘You really do have to fuck off now or I
will
bring a harassment action against you.’

Still Beaumont did not move.

‘So there you are, a vain, pompous man, with all this incredible insider information that you get from your privileged position as a government crony. A position you got for being so
clever
. Insider information which you are only able to use because you are so clever. And it’s frustrating, isn’t it? Because the cleverer you are, the less anybody can know about it. It all has to be so
secret
. Isn’t that frustrating? It must be. Even the money you make has to be hidden. Hidden genius producing hidden profit. Where’s the fun in that?’

Bennett did not answer. Nor did he continue to threaten Beaumont. So far Beaumont had played his hand well.

‘So, like many clever men before you,’ the policeman went on, ‘you occasionally gab a bit. Just so people will know who
da man
is. You’ll be amazed how often it happens. A man goes to every possible length to cover every single clue to his crime and then he boasts about it to his mates or to some girl down at the pub.’

Rupert was not smiling quite so confidently now.

Clearly something in what Beaumont was saying was ringing tiny bells. It had been a long punt but Beaumont could see in Rupert’s eyes that it had made an impression. Beaumont pressed his point home.

‘Like anybody, you want your
mates
to look up to you. You want them to think you’re one hell of a bloke. So maybe you let slip a bit of information, do them a good turn, just for the swank of it. To let them know that you are a clever, clever bloke who can turn knowledge into money.’

Beaumont’s tone was becoming less conversational word by word, more confrontational, more like a man who might be on the right track.

‘Did you ever do that, Lord Bennett?’ he said. ‘Did you ever let some pal in on the info over a pint or a glass of wine? Just assuming that that pal would know that it was sensitive stuff? Just assuming he’d be as careful as you were about how he used it? Maybe you didn’t even think it through that far. Maybe money was coming so easily to you that you came to believe it was your right. Your right and the right of any favoured associate.’

‘I thought we were talking about a clever man, Inspector,’ Rupert replied. ‘Only fools gab to fools.’

Rupert had had time to pull himself together now and to any but the most astute observer he would have looked like a man without a care in world.

But of course Inspector Beaumont
was
the most astute observer, and somewhere deep down behind Rupert’s impeccable sangfroid and arrogant self-assurance Beaumont sensed fear.

‘Not in my experience,’ Beaumont said.

‘Well, Inspector? Your experience doesn’t seem to be getting you anywhere. I suppose if you refuse to get out of my office I shall have to leave you to it as I have a meeting. Help yourself to cigarettes, won’t you, and there’s one or two fine single malts in the cabinet. I used to get given them all the time when I ran the RLB.’

‘When you ruined the RLB.’

Rupert smiled and got up from behind his desk but Beaumont blocked his way, only five foot six to Rupert’s six feet but an intimidating figure nonetheless.

‘All I have to do,’ Beaumont said, staring Rupert directly in the eye, ‘is find one fool. One easy-going guy who never really
got it
in the first place. The original template for the phrase “more money than sense”. Now if I could find a man like that, a man who was a friend of yours, a man with less brains but far, far more charm than you, Rupert. A man everybody liked, including you. Someone you just
wanted to impress
. Someone you couldn’t resist showing off in front of. Now if ever you tipped off a man like that I’ll bet he wasn’t careful what he did with the tip. Which means I’ll be able to find him. In fact . . . he wasn’t. And I have.’

‘Have what?’

‘I
have
found him, Lord Bennett.’

Beaumont paused for a moment to let this sink in.

‘Really?’ Rupert replied and still it took a sharp eye indeed to see that he was rattled.

‘Yes, really. Do you want to know who it is?’

Rupert stayed silent now.

‘He’s an old university friend of yours,’ Beaumont continued. ‘You shared a house with him in Sussex. And in answer to your question, yes, I have finished. For now.’

Teacher training

Jimmy and Monica were beginning, in a tentative sort of way, to make new friendships. They often bumped into Korfa and his dad in the park and Monica had started going into the school each morning to help slow readers in the younger classes. Of course she had to take Cressie and Lillie with her, but the school was so desperate for help that they were happy for her to do so. The class sizes were thirty-plus (as opposed to fifteen to twenty at Abbey Hall), and what with the language difficulties and the presence of some children with behavioural problems, the staff were terribly stretched. Monica had been welcomed with open arms and soon found herself doing four mornings a week as an unpaid teaching assistant. She didn’t mind. Some of the kids were nightmares, but most of them were great, and even the nightmares sometimes revealed themselves not to be nightmares at all, just a bit different.

Monica was pleased to be able to keep an eye on Toby’s progress and, having done so, to stop worrying about him. He was blessed with his father’s good nature and had adjusted well. He’d loved his old school, but not at the end. Being a poor boy in a rich kids’ school had been hard. At Caterham Road a lot of families were poor and no family was rich.

Of course, Monica and Jimmy knew that no kid from Caterham Road Primary had ever made the leap to Oxbridge. There was no hot-housing there and the next step for Toby would be one of the three local comprehensives, one of which was generally considered to be bloody awful. Having said that, they all had sixth forms and lots of kids seemed to get decent qualifications. Many went on to university and Toby’s teacher assured Jimmy that those who did fared very well.

They had, after all, learned to get by early on.

‘If every inner-city state school kid joined the so-called underclass,’ the teacher said, ‘you’d have wall-to-wall hoodies from here to the home counties.’

‘I used to think that was exactly what we did have,’ Monica admitted.

It wasn’t that she and Jimmy enjoyed being poor.

In the majority of ways it was sheer hell. To lie awake at night worrying about the few pounds Toby was required to find for a school museum trip. Or worse, the money needed simply for food.

Jimmy had sometimes thought in his old life that wealth was not all it was cracked up to be. He had occasionally argued, when particularly stressed about a deal, that a vast income brought its own pressures. He now understood that, however hard they might have seemed at the time, those pressures were as a molehill to a mountain compared to the pressure of raising a family on Income Support.

Nonetheless the challenges their new life created continued to bring out unexpected strengths in all of them. They were pulling together as a family as never before. Even Cressida, who at three years old could scarcely have been expected to understand what had happened, seemed to throw less of her diced carrot on the floor these days, perhaps sensing from her mother’s anxious face that each plateful of food was now precious.

‘I really think she understands that we need her to do her bit,’ Monica observed.

‘Bollocks,’ Jimmy replied. ‘I think it’s just that now we don’t bribe her to eat it with biscuits and sweets she’s actually hungry.’

Of necessity they all spent much more time together. There was no money for babysitters and nowhere they could afford to go anyway. There were no more meetings to attend except down at the Social or at the school. No business lunches or dinners. In fact, very little social life left at all.

It wasn’t that the old Sussex gang had completely rejected each other. Not consciously anyway. Perhaps it was just that having met so regularly and for so long as a golden generation, it was simply too painful to come together with most of them in such straitened circumstances.

Jimmy and Monica still saw Lizzie, primarily in an effort to prevent her from breaking down completely, but even those visits were becoming less frequent as Lizzie withdrew further and further within herself. Amanda spent most of her time in the country. Henry and Jane were lying low after the Blondel affair, and they had not seen David and Laura since the Webb Street debacle.

Around this time, however, Jimmy did bump into David again. At the school gate, of all places.

Jimmy was waiting to pick up Toby. He still sometimes felt a little uncomfortable and out of place, although less so than he had at first.

Around him were numerous other parents and carers, older siblings and pre-school tots. Most were poorly dressed, in cheap trainers, tracksuits, leggings and anoraks. Jimmy’s clothes, all bought before his redundancy, were of superb quality but he was always careful not to appear too smart. Toby, like any kid, hated his parents to stand out and Jimmy had no wish to stand out either. One thing he had no need to be embarrassed about was his fake Rolex. Compared to some of the shiny yellow bling that many of the dads wore, it was positively dowdy.

Jimmy looked discreetly about him at the other parents, wondering if he was in fact the poorest person in the whole crowd. All of them were probably in debt, all of them at the limits of whatever credit they had once been afforded. But not in debt to the tune of millions and millions of pounds. Not at the limit of a credit that had once seemed limitless. Jimmy’s debts dwarfed theirs by a thousandfold. Did that make him poorer than them? Jimmy decided that it didn’t, not really. Debt was debt and if you were in it you were screwed.

‘Jimmy?’

He looked up and was surprised to see David standing before him. David with one or two new sartorial touches. White glasses today, a tiny goatee beard, long sideburns and a rakish-looking shoulder bag.

‘David!’

They shared the moment of embarrassment that people who should have been in contact with each other but haven’t been feel when they accidentally meet.

‘I’d been meaning to call . . .’ said Jimmy.

‘Me too,’ David replied.

‘Blimey,’ Jimmy added, ‘what are you doing here then?’

‘What do you mean, what am I doing here? What are you doing here?’

‘This is our school. Toby goes here.’

‘No! Wow. This is my gig.’

‘Gig?’

‘I’m going to be working here. Well, work experience actually, although I think they might find it’s an experience for them too.’

‘Working? In a school?’

‘Yeah, I’m retraining. As a teacher,’ David said with a smile. ‘The government’s set up this fast-track six-month thing for professional people. Reckons schools need people like us and let me tell you, from what I’ve seen, they’re bloody right. Lots of architects and bankers are having a crack at it.’

‘That’s amazing. Well done, Dave. I’m trying to get a job shelf-stacking.’

‘Why don’t you try teaching?’

‘I reckon my skills are a bit specific for that, Dave. Don’t think kids need lessons in how to be an arsehole.’

They both laughed. For a moment it was like old times. A moment which morphed almost immediately into a mutual but unspoken realization that it was not like old times and never would be again.

‘So Toby goes here then?’

‘Yeah. What about yours? Did Tilly join Saskia at St Hilda’s as planned?’ Jimmy asked.

‘Yeah. We can still afford that,’ David said. ‘Laura’s got loads of work actually. The more foreclosures there are, the more lawyers they seem to need.’

‘Right. I think I’m part of that equation myself. Not that I can afford a lawyer, but my bank certainly can.’

There was a moment’s pause. This reminder of the reversal in Jimmy’s fortunes made them both feel uncomfortable.

‘So,’ said Jimmy, ‘if Laura’s still bringing home enough moolah, what are you doing this for?’

‘I can’t sit around all day. It kills you. And I’ve always quite fancied the idea of teaching.’

‘Yeah? Lots of people seem to be saying that these days.’

‘I have to tell you that the real teachers, the ones entering the profession the proper way, absolutely hate us. You know, the ones who’ve done the whole three-year teacher training thing. They think we fucked up our own professions and now we want to fuck up theirs. But what can you do? In a recession it’s every man for himself.’