Final Venture

4

I left the office at six, early for me, and walked home. My route took me up from the Financial District over the Common to Beacon Hill. It was a warm evening for early October, and there were plenty of people walking about in shirt sleeves or T-shirts. But there had already been a couple of cold nights, and the first of the leaves were beginning to turn.

I walked slowly, trying to relax, letting the low sunlight caress my face. There was no doubt that fall was the best time of year in Boston. And winter was the worst. In a couple of months I would be battling through the bitter cold to make my way home.

Beacon Hill was quiet, as usual. I stepped past a woman cajoling four dogs back from the Common to their various mistresses, and smiled politely at a man who gestured at the 'goddamned son of a bitch' who had taken two parking spaces with one car. Parking and dog shit were the two big issues on Beacon Hill. I was for one and against the other, but in this neighbourhood it was prudent to keep such opinions to yourself.

Half way up the hill to my right was where Gil lived, a sedate town house on Louisburg Square, supposedly the most expensive piece of residential real estate in New England. But our apartment was on the 'flat' of the hill, at the bottom, down a pretty little street of dappled sunlight, green leaves and black railings.

I had just broken out a bottle of Sam Adams from the refrigerator when Lisa came in.

'You're early,' I said.

'So are you,' she replied, and gave me a kiss. 'It's kinda nice, isn't it?' She hugged me. 'What's wrong? Bad day?'

'Horrible day.'

'Oh no. What happened?'

I got her a beer and we sat down together on the sofa. She tucked herself under my arm and listened as I told her about the meeting, about the way Frank had humiliated me and the stand I had taken at the end. Then I told her about Craig's reaction. I had been dying to talk to Lisa about it all day.

She exploded. 'I can't believe Dad did that! Let me call him right now'

'No, don't do that.'

'Simon! He shouldn't jerk you around at work. That's way out of line.' She untangled herself from me and moved towards the telephone.

'No, stop Lisa!' I said. 'That'll only make it worse.'

She picked up the phone. I put my finger on the cradle.

She glanced at me, and seemed to calm down.

I pulled her to me and kissed her. 'It's sweet of you to be so concerned,' I said. And it was. For Lisa to come down on my side so unambiguously was exactly what I wanted. 'So far, I've managed to keep my relationship with him at work purely professional. I'd like to try to stick to that.'

'OK,' she said reluctantly. 'I bet he's upset about seeing you with Diane last week. But he's overreacting. No way should he have done that to you.'

'No, he shouldn't have.' I picked up my beer, and took a swig. 'Gil wants to see me tomorrow.'

'What are you going to say?'

'I don't know. Maybe I should resign. I promised Craig the money. I mean we promised it to him, Frank and I. And now Gil expects me to pull the plug on Net Cop. I'm not sure I can live with that.'

'Can't Craig get money from somewhere else?'

I shook my head. 'No other venture firm would touch him if Revere pulled out now.'

'What about his customers? In the biotech world small companies are always doing deals with the big pharma companies who market their drugs.'

I paused for a moment to consider the suggestion. 'We could give it a go. It'd be difficult. But it's worth a try.'

Lisa took a gulp of her beer.

'What do you think?' I asked her.

She was silent. I waited.

'Do you really want to quit?' she said eventually.

'No. But I think maybe I should.'

'But do you want to? Give up, I mean.'

'No, of course I don't want to give up,' I said. 'But sometimes you can be forced into a position where the only right thing to do is resign. I'm afraid that's what's happened to me.'

'I guess you can give up if you want to. And it sounds like you've got a real problem. You can either run away from it, or you can try to solve it. Your choice.'

I listened to what she was saying. 'You talk about "giving up". I was thinking that resigning was the honourable thing to do. The courageous thing to do.'

'Quitting is quitting,' said Lisa. 'Look, I'm not suggesting that you forget your promise to Craig. Sure, you've let him down. It wasn't your fault, but you've got him in a horrible mess. So you've got to get him out again.'

'Net Cop is history.'

'Not yet, it isn't,' Lisa replied. 'I've never seen such a determined guy as Craig. He's smart. So are you. You'll figure something out.'

Her confidence in me was touching. But misplaced.

'I'll think about it.'

The phone rang. I picked it up. I heard the clear English tones of my sister.

'Helen! What time is it? It's the middle of the night in London, isn't it?'

'I couldn't sleep. And I thought this would be a good time to get you at home.' She sounded tired. Tired and worried.

'What's up?' I said. It had to be bad news. Bad news always happened to Helen.

'I spoke to the lawyers today. They think we can appeal. I don't know what to do about it.'

'But we lost the case. What makes them think we'll win an appeal? More fees?'

'They've found two more expert witnesses who will say that the doctor was definitely negligent. They're good. Well respected. Lots of letters after their names.'

'They'll need to be paid, of course.'

'Of course. And so will the lawyers. Especially the barrister. That's the killer.'

It was. Helen had already spent all her meagre savings on the case. And I had spent all mine. And Lisa's. And I'd added all I could to my business school loan. Sixty-five thousand pounds had been swallowed up by the lawsuit. And after all that, Matthew still had cerebral palsy, and Helen had still been forced to give up her career in a television production company. She had taken on a job as a part time secretary so that she could spend most of her time looking after him.

'Have you spoken to Piers?'

Piers was Matthew's father, an unsuccessful TV scriptwriter who had disappeared from Helen's life just before the boy had been born.

'There's no point. He has no interest, and he has no money, and he's no bloody use at all.'

'What about Mother?'

'Come on! I haven't spoken to her for six months!'

Our mother, Lady Ayot, hadn't approved of her daughter having a baby out of wedlock. Besides which, she had no money either.

'What do you want to do?' I asked.

Helen sighed. 'If we win, we could get a large settlement. Enough for me to look after Matthew. And we'd get costs, so I could pay you back.'

'That doesn't matter,' I said.

'It does to me,' said Helen.

What mattered was how Helen was going to look after her son without a full-time job, a husband, or any money. That was what mattered. I was very fond of my younger sister. She had come through a cold upbringing very well. She deserved more than this.

'And if we lose?'

'I've lost everything anyway, so I don't care,' Helen said. 'But it's you I'm worried about. I was going to leave you out of it. Tell them that we couldn't afford to go to appeal. But… But, it's our only hope. And… well, I thought you wouldn't want me to make up your mind for you.'

'You're right,' I said. 'I'm glad you called.' I sighed. 'But I haven't got anything left, Helen. I've borrowed all I can.'

'I know,' said Helen simply.

Silence.

'How much?' I asked eventually.

'Fifty thousand pounds. Maybe less. But we should expect fifty thousand.'

We sat in silence, thousands of miles apart. We had to try. Somehow, we had to try.

'We don't have to decide right now, do we?' I said.

'No. We've got time.'

'Leave it with me,' I said. 'I'll think of something.'

'Thank you,' she said, a glimmer of hope in her voice.

I put down the phone.

'She wants to appeal?' said Lisa.

I nodded.

And it's going to cost money?'

'Fifty thousand quid.'

Lisa winced. 'Where are we going to get that from?'

I shrugged. I had no idea where we were going to get the money. I slumped back in the sofa. I had done all I could for Helen, and it still hadn't been quite enough. A wave of despair swept over me.

'I can't believe how stupid your system is,' Lisa said. 'If this had happened here, we wouldn't be paying lawyers anything, and they'd have settled by now.'

She was right. The case had proved much harder to pursue than any of us had expected. There had been complications at Matthew's birth that had led to him being deprived of oxygen for a few minutes. The doctor had made some mistakes. When it became clear that Matthew had cerebral palsy, it seemed obvious that the doctor was responsible. Helen had decided to sue, with my support.

It had been an easy decision at the time. Abandoned by her lover, Helen was alone and angry. Mother was never going to be any help, and Matthew, now two, needed constant care. Helen had given up a promising career in television production and was faced with a life where every spare minute was taken up with either looking after Matthew, or scraping enough money together to pay for looking after him. She was finding it very hard to cope – if it hadn't been for Matthew's total dependence on her, I was sure she would have cracked by now. She hadn't deserved this.

The case had quickly become more complicated and the fees had risen. Although Lisa and I agonized over the money, it became harder and harder to pull out. In the end, I always came to the same decision: I wasn't going to abandon my sister.

'I'm sorry about all this,' I said to Lisa, taking her hand.

She squeezed it. 'Don't worry. I'd do the same for my brother, and I know he'd do it for me.'

We were lying naked in bed together, reading. Lisa was engrossed in The Quincunx, a thick, fiendishly complicated novel whose title I didn't even understand. I was skimming the Tetracom material Diane had given me, trying to keep my eyes open.

'We had some good results today,' Lisa said.

I put down my papers. 'Really?'

'Yes, the animal work on BP 56 is looking good. We'll be able to try it on humans soon.'

'That's great! So it really works?'

'We won't know until it has gone through the whole clinical trials process, but so far it's looking very good.'

'Well done, my love.' I leaned over and kissed her. It was Lisa who had first suggested that BP 56, some kind of small molecule called a neuropeptide that she had isolated, would have a beneficial effect on Parkinson's disease. And it now looked as if she was right. I felt a flood of pride at what she had achieved. 'Perhaps Boston Peptides will have a market cap of a billion dollars in a few years.' I smiled at her.

'All you venture capitalists ever think about is money! The best thing would be if we actually could treat Parkinson's. That really would be cool.'

'OK, you've got me,' I said, properly chastened. 'But I can still hope.'

She smiled. 'Poor Henry is so excited he can hardly control himself.' Henry Chan was her boss and the founder of Boston Peptides. 'But we're going to need cash from somewhere to fund the clinical trials. Venture First doesn't want to put up any more. I kind of sympathize with Craig.'

I winced. At least Venture First has an excuse. I think they've just about run out of money themselves.' They were a small venture-capital firm that had provided the initial funding to Boston Peptides. The rumours in the market were that their performance had been poor and they were having trouble raising more funds from their investors.

'So what kind of people do you get to take these drugs?' I asked.

'People with Parkinson's disease, of course.'

'No, I mean during the clinical trials. Who would want to be the first human ever to take a drug?'

'Oh, I see what you mean. Volunteers. Medical students, mostly. They get paid for it.'

'They must be mad.'

'It's perfectly safe.'

'How can you know until it's been tried on people?'

'We do very thorough tests on animals. If there's a major problem it will show up.'

'So why do the tests on people at all, then?'

'There are often some side-effects,' Lisa said. 'Headaches, nausea, diarrhoea.'

'You'd never catch me doing it,' I said.

'Someone's got to. And these volunteers really are doing something for science.'

'Mad,' I said. 'Brave, but mad.'

Lisa glanced at the papers I was reading.

'What are all these?'

'Oh, it's a deal called Tetracom that Diane is working on. It looks quite promising.'

'Diane, huh?'

'Yes.' I tried to come out with the next bit casually. 'We're going to Cincinnati next week to visit them. I'll be out Thursday night.'

She pulled back. 'OK,' she said, picking up her book again.

I watched as she studied the page in front of her intently.

'Do you have a problem with that?' I said at last.

'No.' She didn't look up from her book.

'I mean, I have to go. It's my job to work with Diane.'

Then she looked up, a spark of anger in her face. 'To tell you the truth, I do mind, Simon.'

'You shouldn't,' I said. 'There's nothing to worry about. You should know that.'

'You say there's nothing to worry about,' Lisa snapped. 'I think perhaps there is. A business trip to Cincinnati. The two of you alone in some hotel. If she has got her eye on you, that's when she'll make her move, Simon.'

'Lisa! She's a partner in my firm. A colleague. A boss.'

'She's done it before!'

'Who told you that?'

'Dad,' she said quietly.

'Huh,' I snorted. 'He put all this into your mind, didn't he?'

'No. I just don't trust that woman.'

'You don't even know her.'

'OK,' said Lisa. 'You go then.' She reached over and turned out the light.

We lay in bed, backs to each other. I was angry. I really had no choice but to go. And Lisa really ought to be able to trust me to go on a business trip with a colleague, even a beautiful one.

I was still fuming, when I felt a finger brush gently up my spine.

'Simon?' she whispered.

'Yes?'

'I have an idea.'

'What is it?' I turned to face her.

She pulled herself close to me, her hands moving over my body. 'I'm going to wear you out so completely that Diane will have to dump you for someone her own age.'

She gave me a long kiss.

'Sounds like a good plan to me,' I said.