‘Good luck,’ he said. ‘Take care of things. You will take care, won’t you?’ The old man began to shuffle from the room. The pound coin was clenched so tightly in his hand that George feared he would cut himself. Then at the door he turned and added, ‘Oh – the name. It’s yours to do as you please with now – but I’ve always liked the name. Gissings Furniture. It’s got a ring to it. Anyway, best of luck.’
His footsteps moved hesitantly away down the dark corridor which then fell silent.
The old man’s secretary had watched the whole scene. Her eyes blazed with contempt.
‘Delighted to have you on board, sir,’ she spat.
She held George’s eyes a moment, then she too turned and walked away, her face angry and complex, her deep eyes invisible. Minutes passed, and George was left, the only person in the whole factory.
His factory. His headache. His problem. His key to a million pounds.
3
McAllister’s ten days were up, but he was busy. Matthew watched his office like a hawk. McAllister was either in meetings or on the phone all day. Anxiety continued to chew at Matthew’s stomach. Get off the phone. Give me the answer.
Eventually, at four o’clock, McAllister caught Matthew’s glance and signalled him over. Matthew hurried across and was about to take his seat when McAllister asked him to close the door. That door was never closed. It was never closed, except, if rumour was true, when McAllister fired people. Matthew shut the door and sat down awkwardly.
‘I’ve three things to say to you, Matt. First, you did a fine job on that piece of work the other day. Too many traders, not just in this bank but everywhere, think that their market feel is so good that they don’t need to understand the facts. That’s bullshit. Every good trader has market feel, but a fine trader is a salesman, an economist and a diplomat as well. I think you understand that and I like it.
‘Secondly, we are going to give you a job here. You can finish your present assignment and then we’ll send you off to New York for the training programme. If you flunk that, or if your teachers there think you need to complete your degree, then we’ll chuck you out and that’s that. But I don’t see why you should fail. I think you will make a good trader.
‘The third thing is this. My good friend, Bob Landau, who runs the trading floor at Coburg’s, tells me that your brother is expected to do well in the corporate finance department there. They’ve never heard of you, and it’s pretty clear that you don’t know much about them. There are rules which matter a lot in banks and they matter most of all on the trading floor. At some point most traders break them. They don’t record a trade when they should do. They exceed a position limit. They tell a lie or conceal the truth from a client. I regret that this game is what it is. But I know that paying young men what we pay them and motivating them as we motivate them will encourage mistakes. What I tell traders in this firm is this: you can make one mistake and usually we will forgive it. But if you make two, it suggests you’re not capable of learning from your errors and we don’t want you here. You, Matthew, have used up your mistake.’
4
Home late after a party. The music had been excellent, the drink OK, the men crap. Josie tittered to herself, releasing a belch into the gentle autumn night, not walking quite straight as she turned into the street for home.
But beneath her giggles and her party dress, she was sad. Her best friends had been planning their skiing holiday and chatting about their fast approaching university life. Josie hadn’t the money to go skiing and she wasn’t going to university. She’d joined in, but sadly. Before the party broke up in a familiar scurry for taxis, mobile phones and sports cars, Josie had left, needing to catch the last tube.
She was annoyed with her mum. She knew, as Zack had said, that their mother’s plight was in part self-inflicted. But what was she to do? Ignore her? Leave her without an income? Tell her to get on her bike, get a job, get on with life? Roll up her increasing depression and put it out with the garbage? Her seventeen-year-old self wanted life now, skiing now, A levels, university, career, everything. She wanted the life she’d been promised and was angry at whatever stood in its way.
She unlocked the front door. In the living room, a light was on. Helen Gradley sat in the armchair, head slumped, a needle of saliva hanging from her mouth. Her hands were blue.
‘Mum? Mum! Jesus Christ.’ Josie leaped to the phone, dialling 999. ‘Ambulance, please.’ She reached for her mother’s mouth. There was no flow of breath that she could feel. ‘It’s my mum. Please come quickly. I think she’s dead.’
5
Buying a company is no different from buying a used car. You can go for a test drive, you can lift the bonnet, you can haggle on price. But once you’ve handed over your money and driven away, there’s no comeback. When the car overheats, when the big end blows, when the hydraulic system escapes the engine in a cloud of steam, it’s tough.
Some people are experts. They can spot a repainted panel from twenty yards and a dodgy dealer from twenty miles. They don’t need help. They can do the whole job – inspect the car, negotiate a price, agree the deal – by themselves. Lucky them. But most people aren’t like that. We either call in experts to inspect the car – the AA, the RAC or whoever – or we get used to clouds of steam, expensive call-outs, and handing money over to people who burst out laughing as soon as we’ve left the forecourt.
It’s the same with companies. If you want to buy a company, then, before you scribble out your cheque, you’ll lift the bonnet and have a damn good look. And, unless you’re very smart or very foolish, you’ll want to have an expert with you when you do. What’s more, if you’re about to write a cheque for a hundred million pounds, or a billion, or more, you probably won’t mind writing a little tiny one – not more than one percent of the purchase price – to the expert who looks after you so well. The experts in company takeovers are called corporate financiers, and if the good ones aren’t always happy you can be sure it’s not for want of money. One percent of a billion is ten million pounds.
Right now, two corporate financiers from Coburg’s had the bonnet up and yawned with tedium.
The room they sat in was twenty foot by fifteen. One side was wall-to-wall windows with a view out over the sweeping roofs of Liverpool Street station. One wall held the door and a low side-table for coffees and suchlike. The other two walls were covered in pale beech shelving stacked with eighty-eight lever-arch files. A further six files lay open on the table in the middle. Each file was thick with documents. The index to the files was fifty-five pages long, plus a three-page ‘Guide to Additional Material’. Zack rubbed his eyes.
‘Jesus Christ. Is it always as dull as this?’
The two men from Tominto Oil had gone off for lunch, so Zack and Sarah could speak freely. It was weird working together. She was engaged to be married, he was as attracted to her as ever. They weren’t even friends, really, just colleagues. Perhaps they had never been friends, just lovers who argued. So now they kept themselves to themselves, talked about work, tried to be polite, to ignore the electricity which filled the air.
‘We’ve got ninety-four files to cover. That’s not so bad. I once saw a data room with three hundred and seventy files, for a deal that lasted a year and a half then never happened. That was bad.’
Sarah spoke dismissively. She felt uncomfortable. Putting the two of them in the same project team was like mixing air and petrol and hoping there wouldn’t be a spark. But Piers St George Hanbury, the project leader, didn’t know their history, and Sarah did her best to muffle the possibility of any real contact, let