The Deal (11 page)

“You’re going to make me wait for six weeks, aren’t you?”

She turned and started to walk towards Holborn, striding out and using the wide pavements so she could move faster. As she passed Gray’s Inn Road the tears of frustration she had been holding back began to trickle down her face.

Chapter Four

“What are the bloody terms?”

Gavin’s words hung in the air, his question, as yet, unanswered.

Oliver had decided that the late morning meeting at Harriman Agnew gave him an opportunity to assert his authority.

“And why did I have to read this crap?” Gavin continued. He threw Sara’s report into the centre of the conference room table.

“Why’s she here anyway?” he continued. “Andrew announces that we have a new head of research and this skinny teenager turns up. It’s a joke.” He snatched the jug of water and poured a glass for himself. “What do you say, Dunc? Is it a bloody farce or what??”

Oliver groaned inwardly. He had spent an hour with Gavin and Duncan over breakfast, discussing business in general and conditions in their market sector. They had agreed that the coalition government was struggling to stimulate the British economy. Gavin had summarised the problems faced by the Eurozone, as Germany and France tried to sort out the difficulties being faced by Greece, which were now spreading to Spain and Italy. Duncan was more interested in the United States, where President Obama was continuing to face difficulties in getting the Tea Party-dominated Republicans to agree a debt reduction programme with the Democrats. They discussed what a borrowing requirement of eight trillion dollars really meant.

“A lot of fucking green-backs,” laughed Gavin.

Oliver told them about an email he’d received from his father overnight. He was worried about China. Gavin surprised the other two by displaying considerable knowledge about China’s investment policies and their recent support for Spanish bonds.

“I know you think I’m an East End London boy,” he said, “but I have to know what our clients want to talk about. Their average profile is male, aged over fifty, retired or on their way, wealthy and reading
The Daily Telegraph
every morning.” He drank his coffee and munched a bacon sandwich. “That’s what they read about and they expect us to tell them what’s going on. It’s not easy for the lads. Duncan and I have to lead. Ian is a good head of sales but you have little idea how hard we work. Before the recession we could sell shares totalling one hundred thousand pounds in a day. Now it’s very tough. Dunc, what was our best last week?”

“Monday. Ten thousand.”

“Do you understand, Oliver? Bring in all the fucking deals you want. It’s us who have to sell the shares.”

Oliver had left the breakfast gathering feeling that he had made some progress in building team morale. However, as soon as Gavin found himself in an open conference he reverted to type.

“Hey, skinny. Why should my salesmen read your fucking report?”

“My name is Sara and as far as I’m concerned you can...”

“Gavin,” interrupted Abbi, “Sara just did what Andrew asked her to do...”

She was stopped in mid-sentence.

“I’ll answer for myself, Abbi,” Sara snapped, turning to face Gavin, “but not to you, you bald-headed lout!”

Oliver tried to bring some order to the proceedings but the damage was done.

Tabitha Harriman was snatched on Tuesday 14 June at around four o’clock.

The 999 call was made about this time and was answered in the central operations room. It reached Ealing police station a few minutes later. Detective Chief Inspector Sarah Rudd was already aware of a major incident taking place at the western end of Ealing Broadway, where it becomes the Uxbridge Road.

At 4.50pm she was told that a frantic mother was demanding to see her. She was being continually briefed on the situation.

An hour earlier at 3.50pm, on a normal Tuesday afternoon, the nearside tyre of a tanker carrying inflammable chemicals had burst. The vehicle had slewed sideways into a car which was attempting to exit a car-park into the Broadway. A second driver had lost control and ploughed into the back of the lorry. In the car-park another driver was using her mobile phone and had reacted three seconds too late. Her state-of-the-art Range Rover had crashed into the back of the first car, which was crushed further into the lorry. At this point a member of the public, standing on the opposite side of the street, had spotted that liquid was leaking onto the Uxbridge Road.

The calls from the public flooded into the operations room and the police quickly launched their well-practised disaster procedures. Five fire engines arrived at the site of the accident. The second policeman on the scene was experienced in the Hazchem Emergency Response Service (HERS).

He searched for the identification decal. The information disc provided the HERS telephone number. Within minutes he was speaking to the trained chemists at the National Chemical Emergency Centre. In line with the Emergency Response Protocol it was agreed that this was a level 2 situation. With the agreement of the owners of the truck, specialists were on their way to advise on the clean-up procedures.

The officers were told that the chemicals were highly toxic and that the area must be evacuated. The ambulance services were dealing with a seriously injured tanker driver who hadn’t been wearing his safety harness in his cab. The driver of the first car was already dead. The fire brigade team, using breathing apparatus, were struggling to extract the driver of the vehicle that had crashed into the back of the tanker. A local doctor had already given a pain-killing injection. The woman in the Range Rover was again on her mobile and arguing with her husband. She noticed the policeman approaching her vehicle and rang off. The medical services had already sent five people with breathing difficulties two miles west towards Southall to Ealing Hospital.

Heathrow Airport was put on an alert warning. The District tube line service was suspended at Acton Town and Ealing Common station was closed. The railway police decided to halt all trains on the Paddington to Bristol/Cardiff lines for a precautionary period. The M4 and M40 motorways were quickly affected as the side roads became gridlocked and the motorway junctions were blocked. The Uxbridge Road was closed for many hours. By four-thirty the driver of the tanker was on his way to hospital and his vehicle was being covered with foam. At Ealing police station, Superintendent Daniel Obuma was in charge of operations. He had notified his boss, Chief Superintendent Avril Gardner, who was being driven back to Ealing by the Metropolitan traffic police from a conference in Westminster.

At the beginning of all this, a call was received by the police from a local shopkeeper, from a phone located on the opposite side of Ealing Broadway. He reported that he had seen a young child being forced into a car.

Amanda sat on the balcony of her flat and looked out over St. John’s Wood. The bright afternoon sunshine was reflecting on the buildings. She was thinking about Oliver, re-living the Saturday picnic and their passion on the river bank.

She so enjoyed his company. He was quiet, yet entertaining – and so slim and fit. She had watched how he approached his sessions in the gym. She was competitive, but he attacked the challenges posed by the various pieces of equipment with a demonstrable will to win.

Looks and personality. It was an irresistible combination. She wanted him now more than ever. She remembered his hand inside her clothes and wanted again to feel his fingers on her. She remembered the taste of his mouth.

She wanted to tell him why she had had no choice on the Saturday afternoon but to stop his hand going any further. She had realised that if he had carried on, she would not have been able to control herself. At that moment, and more than at any time with any man she had ever been with, she had wanted – and believed in – her personal completeness. She was with the person she was beginning to believe might be her life partner. The moment had been perfect: her body was screaming out for him.

“Damn the deal,” she said to herself. She knew he would raise the money. Why wait six weeks? She bitterly regretted her initial approach. At the time she understood her own motivation in wanting the fund-raising to come before any romantic relationship. She was still thinking about Zach and it had never occurred to her that she would feel such a strong attraction for another man so soon. But she had and it was happening all too quickly.

She wondered if she would be letting Alistair down if she released Oliver from her terms. Perhaps it might send the wrong message. Was this the selfish streak – which previous boyfriends had delighted in pointing out to her – rearing its head? Could it, perhaps, affect the raising of the two million pounds?

This was the Amanda no other person ever knew. The confident, determined businesswoman – who somehow never managed to completely get her life together, in the way she wanted, when it came to her personal relationships. She had thought she might be on her way with Zach.

She also knew she had to accept her other demon. Why had she not removed Oliver’s hand, kissed him and whispered in his ear, “Oliver. I’m falling for you and want to be with you. But we’ve agreed a way forward and you know we have to keep to it.”

And he might have accepted that, despite his arousal. But, somehow, Amanda simply could not speak those words. She had written to Zach rather than talk to him. She had run away before and now she was running away again. What made matters worse was that she did not even know why she was running or where she was going.

She’d decided to allow things to settle down but, even so, she felt a need to make contact with him. She thought through several options and then remembered their conversation about a silly piece of music where he was searching for the composer and the title. She spent the next hour at her computer googling “Russian composers”. Surprised at how many there were, she decided to find a name which she recognised. Finally she sent a text message:

“Oliver. It could be Tchaikovsky. His piano concerto no.1 is often played on the radio. Love. Amanda. x”

The tensions between Oliver and Gavin boiled over early in the afternoon, after the latter had spent nearly two hours in the pub. He was beginning to earn the sobriquet “a legend in his own lunchtime”, often used in the City by drinkers about other drinkers.

Oliver decided to reconvene the morning meeting, against the advice of his colleagues, Abbi and Martin. Once he had everybody together he attempted to review the process they would be following over the next few days.

Gavin wasn’t interested and kept snapping. His first target was inevitably Sara, to whom he had taken an intense dislike. She was rude back to him and seemed not to care.

“What the fuck are we paying you to do?” Gavin barked.

Sara ignored him, which added to his tension.

“Gavin,” said Abbi, “Sara is giving us a vital resource. We’ve agreed in the past that our research facilities are limited. If you think about it, Sara will help your salesmen sell shares.”

Martin nodded in approval and looked at Oliver, who was also quietly impressed.

“You’re just a pathetic little girl,” said Gavin, staring at Sara evilly.

“What’s that got to do with anything at all?” said Abbi. “You have to stop with these personal and sexist comments, Gavin.”

“You don’t understand the pressures we’re working under,” said Duncan. “The salesmen depend on commission for their living. We’re not finding the right deals. Gavin and I have real concerns about City Fiction. It’s not going to be easy to sell their shares to our clients.”

“Why?” asked Oliver. “It’s a good story. You’ve read Sara’s report. Whatever Gavin might think, the advent of electronic publishing gives the salesmen something to talk about. And Abbi is capturing that in her script.”

“That’s an important point Oliver is making,” added Abbi. “I will try to emphasise the excitement of the digital era in the salesmen’s selling story. Amazon is thought to be matching Waterstones in terms of total sales. Sales of Kindles are soaring and the readers are getting used to downloading their books at cheaper prices.”

“Which is where my report is relevant,” said Sara.

Gavin looked at her with his mouth wide open.

“The day you’re relevant...”

“I get that,” interrupted Duncan. “Perhaps it might help if you spent some time with us and heard some of the discussions we have with the investors. They want shares that have an added excitement. Can’t you find us a gold mine in Africa or an oil exploration company in Asia?”

“Then you’d need me, Gavin,” said Sara. “You’d never get that sort of deal away without the right research.”

“The day I need you, skinny, is the day I retire.”

Lucy was beginning to panic. Her neighbour couldn’t collect Tabitha that day and so she had to be at the school at four o’clock. She had been delayed at the surgery, stitching a cut on the back of the hand of a housewife who had been over-enthusiastic with her kitchen knife. She could have sent her to the local hospital but she knew that it only needed two stitches. But despite her best efforts the cut would not stop bleeding.

She phoned the school and was reassured that Tabitha was safe and looking forward to seeing her. A massive row between three of the teaching staff would ensue later about who was actually responsible for looking after the child. What was in no doubt was that she had somehow slipped out of the playground, through the locked school gates and onto the Broadway to await the arrival of her mother.

Gerald Masters and his wife Alice ran a confectionary shop on Ealing Broadway. They made a steady, if modest, living and were well used to having the school children in their shop. On that afternoon, once the shop was clear of the school kids, Gerald had slipped out onto the main road to light up a cigarette. He had tried and failed to give up.

He told the police in rather vivid detail that as he was watching the activities of the emergency services about two hundred yards down the Broadway on the opposite side of the street, suddenly, on his side of the road, about thirty, perhaps forty, yards away, a dark green car pulled up. A woman got out and went over to a small child on the pavement. He noticed that the young girl seemed to be trying to pull away, but at that moment two fire engines, with their sirens bellowing out, thundered past and diverted his attention. He was to tell the police how he went back into the shop and told his wife about the small girl. Alice insisted he phoned the emergency services.