Billionaire

12

Amanda sat in silence, a knot of fear gripping her stomach, her hands rigidly holding onto the front of the seat; the blurred red, white and occasional amber lights beyond the clacking wiper blades came and went like the programme of some nightmare slot machine. But she wasn’t standing in front of any slot machine; she was in the passenger seat of Alex Rocq’s Porsche, and she was speechless with fear.

For an hour, Rocq had cursed and sworn at the Friday night rush hour, through Battersea and then Wandsworth and then down the Kingston by-pass. They had driven down the motorway, first the M25, then the M23, at speeds ranging between 115 and 150 miles per hour; how they hadn’t been stopped by the police was a miracle, and she would have much rather they had been, for at least it might have made him drive slower.

Off the end of the motorway, in the thick two-way traffic, he had forged a third lane and resolutely stayed there, lights blazing, hooting frenetically, occasionally ducking in behind a car or a lorry and shouting, ‘Bastard!’ at the oncoming vehicle which had not given way. She looked at his tensed-up face, eyes squinting against the glare; he had been tensed up like this all week. Something was eating him, she was sure, but he denied anything was.

She had been to see Baenhaker again, and hadn’t bothered to tell Rocq. Baenhaker looked a lot better, but he too was in a livid mood. He wouldn’t say why either. The doctors had told him his injuries were not as severe as they had at first feared, and that he could expect to make a full recovery. She thought that news ought to have cheered him up, but all he could do was pour out a torrent of vitriol against everything. She had asked him about the accident but he could remember nothing, nor even anything he had done the day of the accident.

The Porsche braked hard, the wheels sliding over the wet tarmac, the nose snaking viciously; a chill went through her. ‘Oh, God, we’re going to crash!’ she thought, but they stopped about half an inch short of the tailgate of the Range Rover that was turning right. She turned to him. ‘For Christ’s sake, Alex, I don’t want to die, thank you very much. We’re not in any hurry — why can’t you drive a bit slower?’

‘I’m not driving fast,’ he said.

‘You’re driving like a maniac.’

‘Then get out and bloody walk.’

‘Right, I’ll get out and bloody walk.’ They started moving forward again. ‘Stop the car.’

Rocq swung the car over onto the pavement; Amanda climbed out, slammed shut the door, and marched off into the teeming rain. Rocq crashed the car into gear, floored the accelerator, and, spinning the wheels right through the gears, tore off down the road.

After about two miles he began to relent, and slowed down; apart from the fact she was getting soaked to the skin, anything could happen to her on that dark road. He looked in his mirror. There was heavy traffic behind him, but nothing coming up the opposite way. He accelerated hard, spun the steering wheel hard round to the right, and then jerked on the handbrake hard for a second and a half; the car slewed around, doing a complete about-turn. He released the handbrake, dropped into second, and accelerated hard.

Just over two miles back, he saw a very bedraggled figure marching along the side of the road. He pulled over, waited until there was a gap in the traffic, then turned around and pulled up alongside her. He leaned over and opened the passenger door. Ignoring him, she carried on walking. He drove down after her and stopped in front of her, and pushed the door wide open; again, she walked past. He climbed out of the car and began to run after her.

‘Amanda,’ he said, ‘come on, get in, this is ridiculous.’

She turned to him. ‘Get lost,’ she said. She carried on walking. He ran after her. ‘Come on, stop, you’re getting soaked to death.’ She marched on, determinedly. Suddenly there was an enormously loud bang behind them, followed by the screeching of brakes, the sound of tyres sliding on the wet and an extraordinarily eerie rumbling that sounded like a thousand oil drums crashing up and down in unison. They both turned their heads; the Porsche was cartwheeling across the verge; it smashed through a hedge, rolled over three more times, and came to rest upside down in the middle of a field. An articulated lorry slithered to a halt just past the spot where the Porsche had been.

‘Oh my God!’ screamed Amanda. ‘Oh my God, Alex!’

Rocq stared hard. He couldn’t think of anything suitable to say at all.

Two hours later they sat together, facing each other in the scalding hot water in the tiny cramped bathtub in his cottage.

‘They say bad luck always comes in threes,’ she said.

Rocq grinned at her. ‘Thanks a lot. We’ve had the row, right, that’s one?’

She nodded.

‘The car’s been smashed to pieces — that’s two?’

She nodded again.

‘So now there’s going to be something else?’

‘I hope not,’ she said — ‘but there usually is.’

‘Great.’ He looked up. ‘I expect the bloody roof’ll fall in during the night.’

She lifted her legs out of the water, and wrapped them over his arms, squeezing him tightly. ‘Then we’d better make love tonight very, very gently,’ she said.

Rocq woke at first light, to the sound of several noisy sparrows apparently having a fight to the death over what he presumed was a particularly fat worm. He had awoken full of fear, and with a sense of dread in his stomach. The image of the Porsche cartwheeling through the dark, bits showering off it like confetti, filled his mind. It was difficult to see the full extent of the damage in the dark, but the lorry had hit it at a good fifty miles an hour and there was unlikely to be much left intact. He now had no car, and no doubt many months of wrangling with the insurance to get the money for another one. He could hardly go back to his bank manager and ask him for a loan to buy one, having already hocked his soul. On top of all that, he wouldn’t be surprised, from what the police had said, if he were prosecuted for dangerous parking, having stopped on a clearway.

Then his mind jumped to his other big worry: coffee. He had bought at £1,042 a ton on the Monday. It was now Saturday. The stuff had dropped £18 this week. The Financial Times yesterday predicted it would drop a bit further during the next couple of weeks but begin rising in early July and reach £1,200 by late summer. Not exactly the ‘going through the roof’ that Theo had predicted, but at least in the right direction.

His mind moved next to his clients. Abr Qu’Ih Missh had been quiet during the past fortnight; he usually had instructions from him twice or three times a day. He had only given two buy orders and one sell order in the whole fortnight; he wondered if he had upset him by taking him into gold late on the day of the Osirak raid. He hoped he would come over to England soon; he had found something that would drive Missh absolutely crazy: blonde triplets, and they were on the game, as a treble-act.

The bouncing Baron was okay, although he wasn’t going to let Rocq forget Osirak for a long, long time. He was due to come over in ten days; Rocq didn’t particularly look forward to it. He would have to make his usual trip to the hideous little shop in Queenstown Road to buy the Baron his rubber suit and underwear — he never travelled with his own for fear of embarrassment at the customs, and in any event preferred a new suit each time, to savour the smell of fresh latex. Rocq made a note to remind himself on Monday to telephone the shop and make sure they had the Baron’s size; also to reserve the Baron’s two favourite hookers.

Sa’ad Al Rahir, the Kuwaiti, had been particularly active, and Rocq had had some good commission from him during the fortnight. Louis Khylji, the immaculate Iranian, was in love and had disappeared into the bowels of France with a red-headed concert pianist and a Michelin guide. Joel Symes, the investment manager of Country and Provincial, had been busy concentrating his mind on Royal Ascot, although for two days he’d had a big thing about platinum futures and Rocq had done nicely out of the commission on that one. Dunstan Ngwan, the Nigerian drug wholesaler, hadn’t been such a happy story. Rocq’s handling of this account during the week had been a comedy of errors. Rocq had advised him to go big into nickel three-month futures at £2,625 a ton, so he had gone big, and twenty-four hours later nickel was down to £2,104 a ton. Rocq had pulled him out of nickel and switched him into copper. Within three hours, copper had dropped by £15. Without telling him, he liquidated that position and reinvested it in gold on the New York exchange. He liquidated it several hours later on the Hong Kong exchange, and by 8.30, when the first brokers arrived at work, he had already switched Ngwan’s position back to London. But his luck remained out, and by the end of the week he had succeeded in wiping half a million off Ngwan’s net worth. Ngwan wasn’t amused, and Rocq knew that unless he pulled something out of the bag, and pulled it out smartly, he was going to be minus one very big and long-standing client — a client that was worth to him personally, quite apart from what the firm made out of him, about £5,500 in commission a year.

Outside in the garden, the worm decided to call it quits and allowed itself to be pulled from its burrow; the largest of the sparrows hadn’t read about share-a-worm, and up-sticked and offed with its prize, leaving the remaining ones to glare and shriek a few perfunctory recriminations at each other before dispersing. It became quiet again in the small Sussex country garden beyond the window of Rocq’s bedroom, and Rocq lapsed back into a troubled sleep.

The next thing that woke Rocq was a pile of newspapers — the Financial Times, The Times and the Mail, to be accurate, fitted one inside the other and landing near his head with a thump. The room was filled with bright sunlight, and he opened his eyes and saw Amanda fully dressed.

‘Morning,’ she said.

‘Hi. Whassertime?’

‘Quarter past ten. I’ve been out for a walk to get the papers. Want some breakfast?’

Rocq yawned; having felt wide awake at half past four in the morning, he now felt tired. ‘A cup of coffee would be nice.’

She leaned over and kissed him. ‘Who’s a tired little Rocky?’ she said.

‘Me am.’

She went out of the room; Rocq heaved himself up a few inches against the headboard, and pulled up the pile of papers. He took the Mail first, for easy reading, and glanced at the front page. In his tired and fuddled state, something in the headlines rang a bell, but he had to read it a dozen more times before it fully registered. The first four were to make sure he’d read it properly; the next four to make sure he wasn’t imagining it; the next four to make sure it hadn’t gone away again. He started shaking, and picked up The Times to make sure it wasn’t just some figment of a Daily Mail reporter’s imagination. It wasn’t; it was the second major headline on the front page of The Times. He picked up the Financial Times; it was there, too: ‘SHOCK NEWS ROCKS COFFEE MARKET.’ The Times headline read: ‘WORLD-WIDE COFFEE BAN IMMINENT?’ The Daily Mail’s read: ‘THE KILLER IN YOUR COFFEE CUP.’

Rocq ploughed straight into the editorials; the three newspapers all tallied. The World Health Organization had established definite links between coffee and several types of cancer, in particular, breast, stomach and bowel cancers. Tests and surveys proved that the risk increased in direct proportion to the amount drunk; there was little significant difference between fresh-ground and instant varieties, nor between caffeinated and decaffeinated varieties. The World Health Organization estimated that up to sixty-five per cent of these and other types of cancers would be prevented if coffee were not drunk, and was going to recommend to all governments of the world that an immediate ban be made on the growing, manufacture and sales of coffee and all coffee-based products.

Amanda appeared with the coffee.

‘You evidently didn’t read the papers yet!’ he said.

‘No.’ She shook her head, looking a bit surprised.

‘You’re right,’ he said, ‘what you said last night. Bad news certainly does come in threes.’