The Crash, page 17
There is a problem, however.
‘They’re in code,’ Jess says. ‘Some kind of runics.’
‘What?’
‘It’s what swotty kids used to do. Didn’t you?’
‘I wasn’t the Swallows and Amazons type.’
We rummage through the papers, looking for the most recent set of Filofax diary pages. They are missing.
‘Where do you think 2007 might be?’ Jess asks. ‘You checked the desk, didn’t you?’
A memory is triggered. I feel under the mattress on Marilyn’s side, and sure enough a brown leather Filofax is there. I stuff it in my rucksack.
As I do, Jess freezes and puts two fingers to her lips.
‘There’s someone outside the flat,’ she whispers.
‘I didn’t hear anything.’
Jess clenches her fists as someone turns a key in the latch. Fuck. Who else would have a key? No one we should meet.
The front door opens. The alarm is off. Will that tell the visitors we’re here? What if they noticed the tape was torn?
I hear heavy footsteps in the hallway. Maybe there are two people. There’s no way out. I scoop up the diaries and papers from the bed and stuff them in the Harvey Nicks bag. I gesture at Jess to follow. Stepping as quietly as possible, we return to the living room. The light has been switched on in the hall. Muffled men’s voices are conferring by the front door. I lead Jess to the window. We step behind the curtains. I delicately turn the key and open the glass door. We step onto the balcony. The curtains fall shut behind us, just as the living room door opens. Did they see the curtains twitch?
‘This is mad,’ Jess hisses. It’s a bitingly cold early October night, and her breath comes out in puffs of mist. ‘I can’t believe I’ve let you do this to me again.’
Through the glass, there’s the muffled sound of furniture being lifted and drawers emptied. They are ransacking. This is not the careful systematic work of the Met.
What if they look behind the curtains? The balcony is tiny, only about two feet deep. Looking down, I feel queasy. A fall from here, onto the pointed tops of the railings below, would be messy.
Out here, on this ledge, hiding from intruders in her flat, I suddenly wonder what kind of physical threats had been made to Marilyn, whether she feared she would be killed. I’m not going to articulate that. Jess won’t want to hear it. But there is something I can say. ‘What is the big secret they want to find?’ I whisper. Jess shrugs and puts her finger to her lips.
The cold has gone deep into my bones. Suddenly it’s quiet. We wait ten minutes. Still no sound. A few moments later, I hear the building’s front door open. Peering over the balcony, I see a man walk down the steps. A second follows. They’re wearing puffer jackets, and baseball caps shield their faces.
I recoil, flattening myself against the window in case they look up. They don’t. We wait until they’ve sauntered down to the end of the road, then I open the glass door and peer through the curtains into the sitting room. No one.
‘They’ve gone,’ I whisper to Jess.
We creep out through the flat as quietly as we can and walk down the stairs. I’m clutching the Harvey Nicks bag to my chest, terrified that it’ll split. After everything I’ve gone through, I’m not going to lose her testimony.
As soon as we get to the downstairs hallway, we realise our error. There weren’t two of them: there were three. A man with long blond hair in a ponytail, hazel eyes, wearing a blue Adidas tracksuit, is waiting by the front door; and the look he gives implies he’s been expecting us.
‘Hello, you two. Do you mind if I look in your bag?’
He walks towards us. Jess looks at me. ‘You should probably give it to him,’ she says.
His guard is down. He turns towards me, so fixed on the bag that he doesn’t notice Jess reaching into her pocket. Her hand comes out holding a can of Mace. An acrid mist spews into his face, and when he’s screaming about his eyes she walks straight up to him and knees him in his testicles.
He doubles over. There are lots of things I need to ask Jess, but now is not the time. Before he can recover, we bolt.
I glance back. The two men in puffers have seen us and are running back up the street. We’ll never outpace them. I hear a familiar and comforting rumble. It’s a black cab coming towards us with the yellow light on. I run into the middle of the road, to eliminate any risk he won’t see us. He stops.
‘All right, all right,’ the cabbie says. ‘Where’s the fire?’
I give Jess’s address, and he unlocks the back door.
When we’re settled on the bench, I look back. I see a huddle of three men outside the house, but they’re making no effort to follow. The blond man still looks in some discomfort.
The cab turns the corner and they’re lost from view.
‘Where did that come from?’ I ask Jess, pointing to the Mace can she’s still clutching.
‘Kilburn Community Centre self-defence classes. I knew it would come in handy one day. We learned all sorts of throws but the teacher had a simple golden rule. “If in doubt, kick him in the nuts.”’
For five minutes, we sit without talking as the taxi drives along the edge of Hyde Park to Marble Arch.
‘You OK?’ I ask eventually.
‘Yup. You?’
‘Not sure.’
She puts the Mace back in her coat pocket. ‘Who were they?’
I’ve been wondering the same thing. ‘They weren’t random burglars. Maybe private contractors?’ What is euphemistically termed corporate security has become a growth industry in the last five years, thanks to Johnny Todd’s policy of turning London into the billionaire’s tax haven of choice, the hot-money capital of the world. Former special forces operatives and spooks are making serious cash by offering bespoke protection and investigation, with the limiting factor on the offered services being the amount of money the client can offer, rather than the criminal law.
‘Who would have employed them?’ I ask.
‘Presumably whoever you’ve pissed off most.’
But who would that be? Jackson? Muller? Elliott? Absurd suggestions surely. They’re pillars of the City. ‘I’ve no idea.’
‘But they seemed to know about the diaries.’
‘Maybe. I agree they expected us. So they would want to take anything we’d removed from the flat.’
For a second I allow myself to feel the danger we’ve just outrun. Jess reaches for my hand and covers it with hers. I turn and mouth ‘Thank you,’ and we revert again to our own thoughts.
‘Shall we have a look at the Filofax?’ she asks.
I take it out of the rucksack. A quick flick through shows every page is in the same bloody code.
‘It’s daunting, the sheer number of pages we have to translate,’ I say, as the Edgware Road’s Middle Eastern super-markets and cafes morph into the Kilburn Road’s grittier pubs and Turkish kebab takeaways. ‘Even if we knew how to crack it.’
‘I’ve got an idea about that.’ Jess takes out her phone. It’s the new Nokia that has a built-in camera. ‘Give me the Filofax.’
She positions it on her knee and takes a picture. She then sends it to someone as an MMS.
‘That’s the first time I’ve ever seen the point of a camera on a phone,’ I say. ‘Who are you texting it to?’
‘Bloke called Tim. Works in IT at the FC. Geek. Plays Dungeons and Dragons every weekend. Loves codes and codebreaking.’
‘Will he be awake now?’
Her phone buzzes. ‘There’s your answer.’ She presses the button and puts Tim on loudspeaker.
‘It’s a very basic cipher,’ he says. ‘An old one. Pigpen. Incomprehensible, without the simple rules.’
‘It doesn’t look simple,’ I say, trying to make sense of’
‘The letters are placed in a noughts and crosses grid, with dots next to letters. Each letter is represented by its frame. What you sent me says “Marylin’s Diary”.’
I just about get it. Marilyn had a computer brain that allowed her to write it fluently.
‘Thanks, Tim,’ Jess says. ‘I owe you.’ She disconnects. ‘So now all we have to do is take a week off work to translate them.’
‘A week?’
‘Maybe not that much. But it’s a chore.’
‘OK.’ I’ve got an idea. ‘Do you think it’s too late to ring a seventeen-year-old boy?’
She gives me a disbelieving look. ‘Have you really forgotten what it’s like to be a teenager?’
I dial Luke, Clare’s son, my nephew, and explain what I want him to do.
‘I’m revising for mocks, but yeah, sounds good.’
‘I’ll give you a tenner a diary.’
‘Thanks, Uncs!’
‘Don’t thank me till you see the code. It’s not easy.’
‘It’ll be a doddle.’
We pull up outside Jess’s house. ‘You’d better come in,’ she says. ‘Lots to discuss.’
Until she invited me, I hadn’t realised how desperate I was not to be alone. ‘You sure? Won’t you need to be up early to get Amy to school?’
‘I’m way too wired to sleep.’
We go into the kitchen where Jess’s mum, Joyce, is waiting up with a crossword. She’s been babysitting while her daughter was out burgling. I feel a stab of guilt at dragging Jess into my mayhem. Again.
‘You know Gil, don’t you Mum?’ says Jess.
Joyce gives me a broad, genuine smile. ‘Lovely to see you. Though of course, I see you all the time on the news. Have you two been to some boring business dinner tonight?’
‘It wasn’t that boring,’ I say.
Joyce turns to Jess. ‘I’m afraid Amy’s only recently got off to sleep. Sorry, darling, but she insisted on teaching me stud poker.’
Jess calls a cab for her mum and shoos me into the sitting room. ‘I’ll bring you a glass of wine.’
I collapse into the sofa. There’s no point looking at the pigpen diaries, so I spread out the bank statements from Marilyn’s desk. Lots of payments to Tesco, salary received from the Bank of England, cash withdrawals of £120 every time. After a few minutes, I hear the beep of the cab outside, the sound of the front door, and then Jess comes in with two glasses of red.
‘Chianti. Gallo Nero. Is that OK?’
I take a sip. ‘Delicious, thanks.’
Jess sits at the other end of the sofa, feet tucked under her and the papers between us.
‘Do you think Marilyn was as OCD as me?’ I ask.
‘Not by the look of her bedroom.’
‘It’s just the weirdness of only ever taking out a hundred and twenty pounds in cash. Every single time. It’s the sort of superstitious thing I do.’
I continue messed running one eye down the columns of figures, till I hit one that stands out.
I hand the paper to Jess. In late August there was a deposit of $5.2 million from a Cayman Island account.
‘Blimey. You said her family is wealthy. Could it be an inheritance?’
‘From the Caymans? Where pretty much every hedge fund and private equity fund is registered.’
Jess says what we’re both thinking. ‘Did Jackson bribe her to support his bid for NewGate?’
I down a large mouthful of the wine. It tastes of smoke and earth: simple, basic pleasures. ‘We should talk to the police about this, shouldn’t we?’ I say.
Jess gives me a pitying look. ‘I can see the headline in the Globe after you’re charged with breaking-and-entering. “Beeb burgles Bank of England babe”.’
I laugh. ‘You’re at the wrong paper.’ For the first time in I don’t know how long, I start to relax. Jess pours me another glass of wine, and the stresses of the night dissolve. Soon my eyelids are getting heavy.
‘Let’s get some sleep,’ Jess says. ‘The towels you used should still be in the bathroom.’
I ought to protest, call a cab and go back to my place. I don’t.
I check my diary just to make sure I’ve got time in the morning to go home and put on a clean suit. Looking at my schedule, I burst out laughing, maniacally.
‘You OK?’ says Jess.
‘Yeah. It’s just that most of tomorrow I’m with a crowd who think of me as the embodiment of evil.’
‘Bankers?’
‘Bankers.’
‘Ah. Hug?’
She wraps herself around me. Not everything is shit.
Chapter 14
H
ONESTLY I’M NOT TOO BOTHERED whether people warm to me. If people dislike me for things that I consciously meant, then that’s their problem. I can usually detect when people are wary of me, and sometimes I try to work out what’s going on. Often I’ve got better things to do. Today I know I’m going to be surrounded by men who wish I didn’t exist. But a contract’s a contract, and the show must go on.
I was booked to chair the annual conference of UK Finance, the trade organisation for banks, insurers, fund managers and other City firms, before I became notorious for blowing the whistle on NewGate. Poor Moira Squires, the director general, regrets offering me the gig. She said as much in the briefing call a few days ago. But it would have been embarrassing for both of us to replace me, in these fraught circumstances. So here I am on a raised platform at the front of the hall in Chiswell Street’s Old Brewery, facing a couple of hundred hostile bankers, jaws tight, wide-eyed gazes on me. Am I intimidated? Do I give a fuck? Not really.
The Old Brewery is what its name suggests, a Victorian ale factory repurposed as a conference centre on the Barbican’s east side in the City of London. I am here to moderate a discussion with Sir Stan Blackwell, boss of Peking and Taiwan Banking Group. PTBG is one of the world’s biggest banks, created in the mid-nineteenth century by intrepid Scots who were the backbone of the East India Company and the Indian Civil Service. Its headquarters are in Edinburgh, and it is fiercely proud of not being part of the City of London. Sir Stan, its lantern-jawed chief executive, is a working-class Glaswegian who started at sixteen as a bank messenger, and has been sucking up and punching down ever since.
He’s just wrapping up his speech about how the problems at NewGate are a blip, an exception to the generally sound state of the banking industry, and why technological change means banks have never been stronger and sounder. While I listen, I’m calibrating what to say when he’s finished. Should I go in guns blazing, stating for the record that he’s a wanker, and a dangerous one at that, in denial about the crisis engulfing his industry? Or do I humour him, because we’re both British after all and also because presumably no one in this room cares what I think?
Blackwell is waxing lyrical about how collateralised debt obligations and credit default swaps have allowed credit risk to be dispersed safely to investors all over the world, thus making the banks themselves much less vulnerable to losses when borrowers struggle to repay. It’s the big lie. Should I say that out loud?
‘When credit risks are shared with other investors – fund managers, insurers, hedge funds – the banking system is strengthened. What we are seeing in markets right now is the kind of temporary disruption and malfunctioning you often witness during important industrial revolutions. It will settle down, just as soon as these financial innovations are more widely understood.’
I am incredulous. Scanning the room, I see Chris Ravel sitting three rows back. He’s the top of the food chain, the predator, surveying the complacent lambs ripe for the slaughter. Ravel latches on to my gaze, and feigns a theatrical yawn. I don’t want to conspire with him, but the urge to wink is almost irresistible.
Blackwell is wrapping up. ‘These are challenging times for our industry. But I am confident we will emerge stronger, and will continue to be the strong and stable foundation of our economies.’
Polite applause. I stand up, shake Blackwell’s hand and guide him to a white chrome and leather armchair next to mine on the stage.
‘Thank you for that enlightening and fascinating talk, Sir Stanley.’ My sarcasm is lost on this crowd. I turn to the audience. ‘Who wants to be first with a question?’
Hands go up. I point to a dark-haired man in the middle of the room. An usher brings a wireless microphone, and he stands. This won’t be dull. It’s Maurice ‘Mo’ Levine. He’s a brash billionaire, who made his fortune by buying businesses that were temporarily undervalued on the stock market when they fell out of favour. Which no doubt is why he is now eyeing the banking sector.
‘Sir Stanley. Very interesting presentation. But if you’ll indulge me, you have a trillion-dollar balance sheet, is that right, sir?’
Blackwell nods.
‘Well, I have your latest report and accounts here with me, and it shows balance sheet footings of one point six seven trillion. In other words, sir, your bank is roughly the same size as the British economy.’
‘Some would say it’s a mistake to compare a stock, the debt we hold, with a flow, like GDP,’ Blackwell replies. He gives a condescending smile. ‘But, yes, we are a big bank.’
Oh my God. Blackwell has just made the schoolboy mistake of patronising Levine. This will be interesting.
‘Thank you, Sir Stanley, for that tutorial.’ I look at Sir Stan, who seems in that instant to have become older and greyer. ‘Now, there are three hundred and twenty-five pages in your report and accounts. That’s a lot of pages, and a lot of numbers, and I’ve been through every one of them. Nowhere can I find your exposure to US subprime. In view of what we know about losses in that basket case of a market, it is the only number of relevance to your owners. Would you care to enlighten us now and share with us how much subprime is on your books?’
There’s a pregnant pause. A hush in the room. Blackwell grinds his teeth.
‘Mr Levine,’ he begins, ‘we are fastidious in following stock exchange and SEC disclosure rules. If we had a material problem with subprime, you can be assured we would have disclosed it.’
