Meltdown (42 page)

‘We’ll be camping for a year and washing in a bucket. But we could do it.’

Then, one afternoon, just when Jimmy thought his year of bad luck was coming to an end, it got worse again.

A different sword of Damocles, one forged at Scotland Yard and of which Jimmy had been blissfully unaware, landed bang on top of his head.

He was working at Webb Street when he heard a knock at the door. Outside was a small, very neat-looking man of about Jimmy’s age.

‘James Corby?’ the man said.

‘Probably,’ said Jimmy with a smile, ‘it depends who you are.’

‘Your wife told me I might find you here.’

‘Oh . . .’ Something stirred in Jimmy’s memory, a strange familiarity. ‘Do I know you?’ he asked.

‘Slightly,’ Beaumont replied. ‘We once briefly shared a house in Sussex. When we were students.’

‘God! That’s right. It’s you! How are you, mate? Not come looking for your milk, have you? I think it will have gone off.’

Beaumont was pleased. Pleased that Jimmy had remembered him even if he clearly had no idea of the pain he had caused.

‘I’m afraid not, Mr Corby,’ Beaumont said. ‘I’m a policeman now. Detective Inspector Graeme Beaumont. And I’d like to speak to you about your share speculations. In particular the trade you made in Caledonian Granite in the autumn of 2007. You may recall that you disposed of your stock hours before the price collapsed.’

A matter of pride

Jimmy returned home quite late that evening, after Monica had finally got all the children down. The last half-hour or so had been spent dealing with Cressida’s current nightly ritual of re-emerging from her bedroom fifteen times in order to say that she couldn’t sleep and being told to go back to bed again.

‘Well?’ Monica whispered after shushing Jimmy to alert him to the fact that his elder daughter had only just gone down. ‘What was it all about? Why did a policeman want to see you?’

‘You were right,’ Jimmy said, ‘about those Caledonian Granite shares. It was against the law.’

Monica was silent for a moment as the scale of this new disaster sank in.

‘Have they charged you?’

‘Not yet. They showed me evidence of the trade I made the day before Caledonian collapsed. I said I’d made lots of trades in those days. That I couldn’t remember them all. That I must have just got lucky.’

Through all of his previous travails Jimmy’s sunny manner had never quite deserted him. Now, despite his efforts at bravado, the twinkle had finally dulled in his eye.

Monica crossed the room and hugged him. Then she went and put the kettle on.

Jimmy made an effort to pull himself together.

‘Did Rupert call?’ he asked.

‘Yes,’ Monica replied, rather surprised. ‘How did you know that?’

‘Did you tell him I was with the police?’

‘Of course not, it’s none of his business who you’re with. But he sounded very anxious. Said he needed to see you.’

‘I’m not surprised.’

‘Oh my God!’ said Monica. ‘You mean they’re on to him too? He must be worrying that he’ll be next.’

‘No, Mon, not next. First. He’s first. That’s the whole point. It’s him this cop is after. He told me that they’d go easy on me if I was prepared to say where I’d got the information about the Granite shares. That they might not press charges at all.’

‘What did you tell them?’

‘I told them that I couldn’t remember making the deal. That it must just have been a lucky guess.’

Monica made the tea. It was clear she was thinking hard about what to say next, wanting to phrase it right.

‘Jimmy . . .’ she said finally, ‘perhaps you should just tell them the truth.’

He looked at her, genuinely surprised.

‘Monica, I could
never
do that.’

The angry frustration that spread across her face showed that she had known what he’d say.

‘Why not, Jim?’

‘Well, for a start I’d be admitting to having made an insider trade . . .’

‘Which you did. Which they know about anyway. That’s the whole point!’

‘I think maybe he’s bluffing. If he really had me then he could have nicked me and offered to drop the charges, but he didn’t.’

‘What difference does it make? He’ll certainly leave you alone if you tell him about Rupert, so just do it. Rupert got us into this mess.’

‘
I
got us into this mess, Mon. Nobody forced me to try to make an extra fifty grand by picking up the phone.’

‘Rupert must have known when he gave you the information that it was illegal.’

‘I should have known it myself. You did. You pointed it out, remember?’

‘Yes! And you didn’t keep the money! You did the right thing, you shouldn’t have to suffer for this.’

‘That’s not how the law sees it.’

‘Jimmy, you’ve got kids. We’re broke. You can’t ruin us to protect Rupert. He’s a shit. Look what he said about Henry in the papers, saying Jane’s hairdryer was far worse than him milking the public for his pension fund.
And
he tried to cheat Amanda on her settlement. You should turn him in.’

‘Mon,’ Jimmy said firmly, ‘you have to understand I would
never
do that. Rupert’s been my friend for nearly twenty years.’

‘But he isn’t your friend any more, is he!’ Monica shouted, all her pent-up emotion suddenly finding form in anger. ‘And actually I don’t know why he ever was! I really don’t. All those dinners, all those holidays. He was
always
a complete shit. A reactionary, supercilious shit. Why did we put up with him? Sharif’s worth a hundred fucking Ruperts
and
he didn’t walk out on his kids.’

‘Mon, we liked Rupert. Don’t pretend we didn’t. Maybe you don’t like him any more but that’s because everything’s changed. We’re poor and we’ve screwed up and he represents the problem. But when we were rich like him, we liked him.’

‘Well, I don’t like him any more! It was his bloody idea to invest in Webb Street, which is what ruined everything in the first place. You’d never gone into debt like that before. Everything was paid off, then that bastard persuades you to—’

Jimmy banged his hand down on the table. He’d never done that before. Monica’s jaw dropped in surprise.

‘Monica, listen,’ Jimmy said quietly. ‘That inspector left me in an interview room, alone, to sweat for three hours. He was hoping that I’d come out having decided to play ball. But that wasn’t what I ended up thinking.’

‘No?’ Monica asked angrily.

‘No. What I ended up thinking was that me, sitting there in that police station, was a
consequence
. A consequence of something that I had done. Something that
we
had done. We invested in Webb Street because we wanted to make millions of pounds in profit. That’s all. That is the end of the story. Rupert may have suggested the scheme but I did it and I did it because I wanted to be richer. The same reason I took Rupert’s tip on Caledonian Granite. I wanted to get richer. I didn’t need any more money, but I wanted to get richer. I have to face that fact. It’s
my responsibility
.’

‘Your responsibility is your family, your children!’

‘Mon, calm down,’ said Jimmy, ‘you’ll wake them up.’

‘Good! Perhaps they should hear that their dad would rather leave them and go to prison than tell the truth to the police about some complete arsehole who’s royally done him over, just because he used to be at university with him and you both shoved radishes up your bums on graduation night!’

Jimmy couldn’t help but smile at this, but Monica wasn’t smiling. He tried to hug her, but she wasn’t having that either.

‘Mon,’ Jimmy said gently, ‘this isn’t about Rupert. It’s about me. Don’t you see that? About everything I’ve done and where it’s brought me to. For the first time in my life I’m coming to understand that actions have consequences. In fact it seems to me that this whole bloody crisis is based on people thinking they could get rich without there being any consequences. That the rules didn’t apply to them. That personal responsibility was something for other people. That what
really
mattered was what you could get away with. And that was all that mattered. If you could get away with it, it was OK. Nobody followed their conscience, they just followed the profit. It’s time I did follow my conscience. If I can get out of this I promise you I will, but not by trying to pretend that it’s somebody else’s fault other than my own.’

Monica tried to reply, but stopped. Then she tried again, but once more could not frame an adequate response. He’d flummoxed her.

‘God,’ she said eventually, ‘you sound like your bloody dad.’

Jimmy smiled.

‘Is that a good or a bad thing?’

‘Good . . . probably,’ she replied, suddenly resigned and quiet, ‘as long as you don’t buy a cardigan and start collecting trains.’

‘I have to
learn
something from all this,’ Jimmy said, ‘otherwise what’s the point? And what I’ve learned is that if I turn Rupert in to avoid facing the consequences of what I did then I’m a bigger shit than he ever was. I can’t help it, Monica, but that’s the way I am. There isn’t much left that I have to be proud of, but at least I can take responsibility for my own actions. Like I say, I do still have some pride. That’s probably all I have got.’

‘You’ve got us,’ Monica said almost in a whisper.

‘Yes. And I can still look you in the eye. If I had to stand up in court and turn evidence against Rupert to save my own skin, I couldn’t even do that.’

Monica shrugged.

‘Well, I think you’re wrong. Rupert deserves to go down for everything he’s done. They should have put him away for destroying your dad’s bank. You don’t deserve prison. You’re just a bloody idiot.’

‘Even an idiot can learn a lesson.’

There was silence. For perhaps the first time in their whole marriage a distance had developed between them. Once more Jimmy crossed the room and tried to hug her. This time she tried to hug him back, but her heart wasn’t in it.

‘It’ll be all right, Mon,’ Jimmy whispered, ‘just you wait.’

‘How? How will it be all right?’ Monica asked.

‘I’ll make it all right. Just you see if I don’t.’

‘Yes. Because you’re so good at that, aren’t you, Jim.’

She said it with some bitterness, but again Jimmy smiled. She had a point.

‘I’m going to bed,’ Monica said.

But then she remembered that she hadn’t yet checked for notes in Toby’s school bag.

‘Oh God,’ she said.

Sure enough, there it was. What’s more, it was a note that somehow she had managed to miss for two days and which related to the following morning.

Monica wanted to scream. She was exhausted, penniless, about to be made homeless, her husband was being done for insider trading and now she was going to have to construct an Elizabethan ruff out of Sellotape and kitchen paper.

Life went on.

‘Oh God,’ she repeated, starting to look for a pair of scissors. ‘You go to bed.’

‘Can I help? Make him a sword or something?’

‘I think you’ve done enough for today.’

The makeshift costume took her an hour.

After which, while once more on her way to bed, Monica remembered that she hadn’t washed Toby’s sports kit either.

Two phone calls

The following morning Jimmy left for Webb Street before the children had woken up. It was now more urgent than ever to get the renovations done as quickly as possible.

‘I’ve got to get you sorted out,’ he told Monica. ‘The sooner we start living there, the sooner we can claim squatters’ rights. I swear I am not going to leave you and the children in a Bed and Breakfast . . . if I have to go away.’

Then he mounted his bike, slung his bag of tools over the handlebars and headed off. His low point of the previous evening seemed to have passed.

‘It’ll be all right. I promise you I’ll make it all right,’ he shouted over his shoulder and was gone.

Shortly after he’d left, Rupert phoned.

‘Where’s Jimmy, Monica?’ he asked with scarcely a word of greeting.

‘He’s on his way to Webb Street,’ she replied coldly. ‘You remember Webb Street? You told us it was going to make us millions and now your old bank’s got it and we’re about to be evicted from our home because we mortgaged it chasing your stupid scheme.’

Rupert ignored the challenge. He was clearly in no mood to deal with embittered ex-friends.

‘Can you give me his mobile number?’ he asked.

‘No. I’m the only one who has it and we only use it for emergencies. We’re counting the pennies, Rupert, don’t you remember? We only have state benefits to live on, not a state-funded mega pension like you.’

‘This is an emergency,’ Rupert snapped. ‘Give me the number.’

‘No. If you want to talk to him, go to Webb Street. He’s at Number 23.’

‘What did he tell the police, Monica?’

‘He didn’t tell them anything, Rupert,’ Monica said angrily before adding, ‘yet’.

‘What do you fucking mean, “yet”?’

‘I mean that he’s being his usual pig-headed decent self but I’m going to nag him till he sees sense, that’s what. I’ve told him to turn you in. The police have offered to keep him out of jail if he tells them who tipped him off about the Caledonian Granite shares. At the moment he’s not talking, but if I have my way he’s going to get his memory back very soon.’

‘Is that so?’ Rupert’s voice was hard and cold.

‘Yes, it is.’

‘Goodbye, Monica,’ Rupert said and hung up.

Monica put down the phone. She had plenty of shit to handle without bothering to think about another load.

Life, as John Lennon said, is what happens when you’re making other plans.