Trading Reality (9 page)

Everyone was sympathetic, Greg especially so. Ed didn’t say anything directly to me, but tried to anticipate my every wish. I caught him watching me with an agonised expression on his face. People left me to my own devices. If I wanted to come to the office, fine. But they didn’t expect me to do a proper day’s work; they would let me behave how I wished and take their cue from me. I thought I was behaving normally, although I suspect I wasn’t. Still, they let me be, and that was what I wanted.

The thoughts that had tumbled around my head the night I had found Richard began to straighten themselves in my mind. The pain of losing him was almost unbearable, but I was determined not to let it screw me up. I knew I was vulnerable psychologically: I had never got over my parents’ divorce and my mother’s death. But I would do all I could to deal with this new blow.

I felt guilty and angry. The anger sprang from the guilt, as a sort of frustration at my failure to have foreseen and prevented Richard’s death. It was also, in a strange kind of way, directed at Richard himself. My big brother, my only protector in the world, had abandoned me, got himself killed over his stupid company. If he had only been more sensible, and sold it like I had told him, he might still be alive. I knew these thoughts were irrational and disloyal, but that knowledge only fed my anger.

My mother could be an angry woman. She would vent her frustration over some minor domestic problem: my returning home for the second time in a day with muddy trousers, my father breaking a jug when washing up, the English summer raining on her every day. When she exploded, it was a phenomenon, a torrent of English breaking into Italian, of tears and gesticulation, even of thrown plates and glasses (always my father’s old possessions, never hers). But it went away. Within half an hour she was calm again, and within a day, she was smiling and laughing. Except once. When my father walked out, the explosion lasted for a week, and the anger stayed, festering, until she died.

And then it lived on in me.

I had her temper. It had been a problem, sometimes, at school. I’d got into fights. I’d rowed with girlfriends. So, as I’d grown older, I’d struggled to control it. Trading had helped; I’d soon realised that I would have to ignore my initial impulsive reaction to events if I were to maintain the self-discipline necessary to make money month in, month out. With Karen I had been the model of patience. But the anger was still there. It was just buried deep.

The more I thought about it, the more my anger at Richard’s death achieved a focus. The bastard who had killed him. I prayed the police would find him.

The police investigations were thorough. Inspector Kerr showed up at Harrison Brothers’ offices to talk to Karen and Greg, and then apparently made the trip to Godalming to talk to the fearsome Daphne Chilcott. Just to eliminate us, of course. I was sure that all the other people whose names I had given the police were also investigated.

There were a lot of phone calls. Sergeant Cochrane rang to say that the police had finished with Richard’s house, and I was free to enter it when I liked. The investigation was continuing, although they had very few leads as yet.

I rang the procurator fiscal in Cupar, the local market town, to talk about certificates and forms. To my disappointment, he said that although a post-mortem had been carried out on Richard, he would not be able to release his body for burial in case a future defendant’s lawyer later demanded his own examination. Since there was no defendant yet, the funeral would have to wait until one emerged.

Graham Stephens, a solicitor from the Edinburgh firm of Burns Stephens, phoned to tell me the contents of Richard’s will. He held eight hundred thousand of the two million FairSystems shares outstanding, or forty per cent of the company. The share price had fallen to four and a half dollars following news of his death, so this stake was technically worth about three and a half million dollars. This was split equally between our father and me. The only other asset of any value was Inch Lodge, which Richard had left to me. Fortunately, the large mortgage on the house that he had taken out three years before to temporarily slake FairSystems’ thirst for cash, would be paid off by a life assurance policy.

I didn’t really feel as if I was worth nearly two million dollars. Richard, too, had signed an undertaking not to sell his shares within two years of flotation. Besides, it would be impossible to sell that large a stake through a broker. To lock in the money, the whole company would have to be sold. Taxes would have to be paid. And I still wasn’t convinced that FairSystems would exist in eighteen months’ time, anyway.

On Wednesday, I received another phone call, just after I arrived home from work. It was an unfamiliar voice. It was loud, and forceful and American.

‘Is that Mark Fairfax?’

‘Yes.’

‘Good afternoon, Mark, this is Walter Sorenson. I’m a friend of your father, and I guess I was a friend of Richard as well.’

I had never met Walter Sorenson, but I knew who he was. My father had met him when he was at Stanford in the 1960s. Sorenson had been both a successful physicist and a great college football player, a rare feat, even in those days. He had become a well-respected figure in the computer industry in the 1970s, earning a reputation for himself as a coach for the young geniuses infesting the garages of Silicon Valley. Together with one such genius in the mid-seventies, he had founded a software company called Cicero Scientific and a few years later had sold out at a handsome profit. He now busied himself as a non-executive director of a clutch of growing computer companies that interested him in America and Europe. So, when FairSystems had floated on NASDAQ the previous year, and had needed a credible chairman in a hurry, my father had suggested to Richard his old friend Walter Sorenson.

Sorenson had been happy to take the job. Virtual reality was the hot new technology, and Glenrothes was three-quarters of an hour away from St Andrews and its golf courses.

Richard had told me that he had found him a useful sounding board and source of encouragement. FairSystems could certainly use his experience in the next few weeks.

‘I’m sorry to hear about your brother. He was a great guy, and a truly brilliant scientist. The industry will be much poorer without him.’ Sorenson’s regret, and tribute, sounded genuine. I felt a stirring of pride for my brother. ‘I’ve worked with entrepreneurs in California for twenty years, and I’d say that Richard was up there with the best of them.’

‘Thank you. I’m sure he was.’

‘As you can imagine, this news has hit FairSystems pretty hard. They don’t know whether they’re coming or going up there. I’ve appointed two of the management team, Rachel Walker and David Baker, as acting joint managing directors until we can come up with something more permanent.’ Sorenson’s tone was businesslike, inspiring confidence in a situation that badly needed it. ‘As you probably know, I’m based in the States, but I plan to come over next week to sort things out.’

‘Good,’ I said.

‘You and your father are the two major shareholders now. How well do you know the company?’

‘Not very well at all,’ I said. ‘I mean, I know roughly what they do, but I’ve never been to Glenrothes. I invested as a gesture of support for Richard, rather than anything else.’

‘OK,’ said Sorenson. ‘Well, I think it’d be good if you could come up to Glenrothes and spend some time with us. Can you manage that?’

‘I’d be delighted to,’ said. ‘I was thinking of going up to sort through Richard’s stuff next week anyway.’

‘Good. I’ll be in Scotland on Sunday. I’m planning a round of golf at St Andrews. Would you like to join me? It would be a good opportunity for us to get to know each other.’

‘OK,’ I said, ‘I’ll see you then.’

I drove up to Kirkhaven on Saturday. I wanted to drive. I felt more secure in the private world of my BMW than crammed into an aeroplane with strangers on either side intruding into my grief.

I had told Bob Forrester that I was not sure how long I would be out of the office. He didn’t mind me going; frankly, I wasn’t much use there anyway. I left Ed with instructions where to sell our positions if the market moved one way or the other.

The sun fell low over the upper reaches of the estuary as I crossed the Forth Road Bridge into Fife. I passed the rubble of grey boxes that was Cowdenbeath, swung south of Glenrothes, and followed the road running a mile in from the coast to Kirkhaven. I stopped in at the police station to collect the keys, and drove down the narrow streets to the quay, and my brother’s house.

I let myself in, and wandered round. The house had Richard’s imprint all over it. Neat, functional, with little in the way of decoration. I looked into the kitchen first. It was old and wooden. There was a big old oak table where we had spent long Sunday breakfasts chatting and reading the papers. Outside, the evening sun poured in, reflected off the gently swelling sea. I went back into the hall and down a couple of steps to the sitting room. My eyes fell on the stone hearth, and I winced when I saw the pile of neatly chopped firewood in the basket. The room was furnished with pieces I remembered from our childhood: the grandfather clock, a sideboard, my mother’s writing-desk, all salvaged from the house in Banbury Road after my mother had died. I checked the clock. I smiled as I saw the notches I had cut a foot from the base when I was six and had wanted to count the days of my imprisonment by pirates. Now
that
had caused an eruption.

There were several pictures of seabirds dutifully hanging on the walls. Richard had never really been interested in birds, but they were our father’s passion, and Richard had spent many frozen afternoons with him, seeking out obscure waders along godforsaken stretches of shore. The pictures had been gifts from our father over the years. I didn’t have any on my walls. I had always made my lack of interest in birds perfectly clear.

A few photographs were scattered about; my parents’ wedding, my mother looking worn and ill, Richard and me together, Richard walking in the Himalayas with an old girlfriend. There were books and magazines everywhere, most of them to do with computing.

A biography of Bill Gates, the billionaire founder of Microsoft, lay face-down on the sofa. I picked it up. Richard had got as far as chapter three.

Through the window, I could see the Inch Burn, and the tough, squat stone church, with its stubby spire on the far bank. The view was partially obscured by the back of the boathouse. I went into the hallway to look for the key. It wasn’t where it should have been, on a hook beside the door. The police hadn’t known where to return it. I stuck my head into the kitchen, and saw it on a counter. Grabbing it, I walked outside and round the back of the house to the whitewashed building. I paused by the door, and took a deep breath.

As I entered, my eyes were drawn to the patch of floor, six feet from the door, where I had last seen Richard, almost a week before. The old carpet had been cut up and removed, leaving a patch of bare concrete underneath. I tore my eyes away, and scanned the boathouse. Despite the attentions of the police, it still looked a total mess, a jumble of terminals, computers, circuit boards, dismembered headsets, wires and papers. I knew it was organised chaos. Richard had proudly shown me round a few years before. He’d liked to think amongst this chaos, to scribble furiously on A5 paper, to tinker with his software and hardware. There was a Compaq 486 computer by a window, the keyboard scuffed and dirty from frequent use. I stood for a moment and thought about Richard, sitting here for hour after hour, worrying at some intractable problem that was beyond the scope of most of us to understand, let alone solve. Many of the great computer companies, Hewlett Packard and Apple Computer amongst them, had started in garages. Richard had wanted FairSystems to be different: it had started in a boathouse.

Suddenly, I felt cold. I shivered, and left the small building, locking it firmly behind me. I didn’t want to go back in there again.

The ball flew straight at the old oak tree seventy yards to my left, hit it, and bounced back on to the fairway, much to my relief. I am not a good golfer. My strategy is to hit the ball short distances in a straight line, aiming for a consistent seven on each hole, and avoiding excessive embarrassment. It usually works, until I get overconfident and start trying to hit the ball too far. That always leads to lost balls, ploughed-up fairways, and intense frustration. So far, I was doing well. The sixth hole, and not a single lost ball.

Needless to say, Sorenson was a much better golfer than me. He was good company, offering tips and encouragement. But he was hard on himself; every time his big shoulders didn’t swing in perfect time, his wince showed real annoyance. Had I been a better player, I suspected that the round would not have been quite so light-hearted.

It was the first time I had met him since childhood. He was tall, with broad shoulders and a Californian tan. He had a big face with uneven features, a nose that was not quite straight, and one bushy eyebrow set off at a different angle to the other. It was a craggy, handsome face. He had a thick neck but no flab, and his figure was trim. He looked as if he could still play football, but his neatly brushed white hair and his expensive golfing clothes gave him the sheen of a successful modern American businessman. He had power. Not so much the power of money or of control over thousands of employees, but something much more elemental. It was a physical and psychological power, unused, but there if necessary. In Sorenson, it became charisma.

The setting was magnificent. A fresh breeze blew in from the Tay Estuary, and the grey town of St Andrews was lit up in that clear northern light that I was beginning to get used to. Here, perched on a promontory on the east edge of Fife, lay side by side the great grey cathedral of St Andrews, one of the oldest religious buildings in Scotland, and the place of pilgrimage of that more modern religion, the Old Course. If I hadn’t had to concentrate so hard on hitting that bloody ball in a straight line and not making a fool of myself, I might have enjoyed it.