‘Then we have a problem, because I am not going to put my ideas into hands that I don’t trust.’
‘Milne’s OK. Don’t worry about Milne.’
‘I don’t care if he’s Mother Teresa, he’ll still sell to the highest bidder. He has to. You just told me he does.’
‘Cameron.’ Bryn’s voice was hard-edged again, hard and desperate. ‘You need to be realistic.’
‘True.’
‘You’re killing this company. This is the only way.’
She brought her face to within a few inches of his. Close up, you no longer noticed its pallor, the brusque way in which its owner treated it, all you saw were its commanding grey eyes, ablaze with intensity and passion.
‘Listen, I have a chance to develop a technology which will save lives. Potentially hundreds of thousands of lives, millions, even. The Schoolroom doesn’t have to be expensive. Peptides don’t have to be expensive. This is a medicine which can wipe out some of the nastiest diseases in not just the rich countries, but the poor ones, too.
‘You’re asking me to take a chance on Milne. Fine. If it was just me, just my career, just this company, I’d be happy to bet everything on him. But the patients? The AIDS sufferers, the hepatitis victims, all those grannies who die just because their poor old immune systems can’t cope with a simple flu bug?’ She shook her head. ‘I can’t do it, Bryn. I won’t.’
Bryn pursed his lips. He felt small for thinking the thought, but it bothered him when he heard Cameron talking about selling their technology cheaply. Not that he wanted to rip people off – not that he wanted the Third World to suffer – just … Well, after all, he was a businessman and this was his business.
He sighed. ‘I know, Cameron. I understand, believe me. But we have to face facts. We need the money.’
Cameron dropped her eyes and picked up the offer letter from Milne which had prompted the whole conversation. Tearing it into shreds and leaning far out of the window, she threw it into the river, where the white fragments began to float away, caught by the silent midnight ripples.
‘I agree,’ she said, ‘we need the money. But not from Milne. Not now. Not ever.’
1
The immense and mouldering college barge which had been sitting in the main boathouse had been hauled down the slipway to sink or swim, and after a brief hesitation, it had swum quite happily, moored up against the side of the boathouse, slapping against the wood at every change in the wind. It made a nice place to sit and watch life, and Bryn sat on the roof of the barge, protected from the green mould by a dustsheet left by Dai.
Meg, Bryn’s former secretary and a bouncy brunette who was just a few years younger than him, came round the corner of the boathouse, down the jetty, and scrambled breathlessly on to the roof. ‘Coffee,’ she said, dumping a bag down beside her. ‘And yes, it is from the Italian shop up the road, and yes, it is a double espresso, and yes it is continental roast, and yes, you are the most finicky coffee drinker in the whole world ever.’
Bryn took the coffee with gratitude, and began telling her about Cameron’s refusal to take money from the venture capitalists.
‘Twenty million quid,’ said Meg. ‘She tore it up?’
Scraps of the ripped-up offer letter still floated down by the side of the barge, trapped in a debris of floating twigs, plastic bottles and a kind of nameless oily scum. Bryn gestured at it with his coffee cup.
‘There it is. All gone. Shame.’
Meg had tried lying back on the roof to catch some early spring sun, but the sun was so feeble it was scarcely worth catching, and her head had poked over the edge of the dustsheet, quickly gathering an assortment of moulds, lichens and algae. Picking the green bits from her hair, she mused aloud. ‘Cammie had a point, though. It would have been gutting if you’d succeeded with everything, just for old Malcolm Milne to sell the whole kit an’ caboodle to Corinth.’
Bryn smiled wryly. ‘Right. Not that gutting, since I’d stand to make a bloody fortune from the sale. Besides, there’d be no reason for Milne to sell to the bad guys. It’s not as though he cares one way or the other.’
‘Cammie’s point exactly, sweetie.’ She looked at the green stuff collected in her hand and hurled it at a gull, missing by miles. She continued to gaze after it, then sprang to attention. ‘What the hell is that?’ she demanded, jabbing a finger downstream past the red-brick wharves towards the empty trees of Bishop’s Park.
‘It’s a tree, Meg, a willow tree.’
‘It’s what’s in the tree, matey. Look.’
Bryn rolled on to his elbow. In the bare branches of the willow tree, there was a blue-green smudge. ‘Bloody hell, you’re right. It’s a parrot.’ The blue-green smudge nodded its head and began to preen, as though to confirm the sighting.
‘Must have escaped,’ she said. Then, ‘Good on you, parrot!’ she screamed.
Bryn shook his head. ‘Actually, I doubt it. They’re meant to be quite common, apparently. Escaped parrots started breeding and London’s warm enough these days for the birds to survive through the winter. I’ll bet you we’re looking at a genuine wild parrot.’
‘Wild? Who’s wild? I don’t call you a wild Welshman, do I? It’s free, a free parrot.’
Bryn laughed and swigged at his rapidly cooling coffee. Meg continued gazing, mesmerised, at her find.
‘It’s a pity you had to go elsewhere for money,’ she said reflectively. ‘I know you. You wouldn’t sell out to the bad guys, however much you think you would.’
‘It’s a pity I’m not a multi-millionaire, Meg.’
She looked sharply at him, about to cross the unmentionable gap between banking secretary and banking boss. ‘You must be pretty close, though,’ she said. ‘Big swinger at Berger Scholes and all that.’
Bryn sighed. ‘I’ve had to split things with Cecily. She gets all the savings and most of the furnishings of any quality. I get the house, my deferred bonuses – ha, bloody ha – and sod all else. I’m not far off being a pauper.’
‘What’s ha bloody ha?’
‘All gone, Megsy, m’dear. You forfeit your deferred bonuses if you leave. I left. I forfeited them. Three quarters of a million quid.’
‘Bloody hell, you’re a madman.’ Meg pondered the notion of having three quarters of a million pounds and then losing it. ‘I wouldn’t have left if you’d dragged me by my hair. I’d have glued myself to my desk. I’d have nailed my –’
‘Yeah, well, your sympathy is duly noted.’ A pause. ‘That just leaves my house. It’ll fetch getting on for a million, though I had sort of planned to live in it … Anyway, even a million’s no good. This company needs way more than that.’
Meg rolled on to her belly, poking her head over the side of the barge, staring at her reflection in the turbid waters. ‘Why not borrow the money? Then we wouldn’t have to have horrible investors, just horrible banks.’
‘You can’t simply go out and borrow. You have to have assets to borrow against. If you don’t have assets, you have to have cash flows, revenues, profits. Old fashioned things like that.’
‘Well, there you