Fallen Gods

Fifty-Nine

"Where does the name come from?" asked Stevie Steele. The man behind the desk looked across at him, as if his attention had been wandering before their conversation had even begun.

"Eh? Sorry, you took me by surprise," said Francis Dolan; he was a trim man, with sharp blue eyes and sun-bleached hair and could have been aged anywhere between fifty and sixty. "The company was originally a Scottish-Spanish partnership; it was set up twelve years ago and those are the names of the founders. We're no longer a partnership, though. Three years ago we incorporated and floated on the Stock Exchange; at that stage I went from partner to chief executive."

"Are the founders still involved in the business?"

"Sir Allan Gordon's still the chairman, but Alfonso Tubau cashed in his stake soon after the flotation, and retired to make wine on his farm near Sitges. Actually the incorporation was a neat way of divesting ourselves of the Spanish end; it never did very well. Since the closure of the Madrid office, our share price has risen steadily; we're doing so nicely that we've become a take-over target for an American firm."

"Welcome?"

"Not very. There have been feelers, but so far the board do not regard the price quoted as being acceptable."

"What if they raised it?"

"If they raised it by enough, and wrote in some safeguards for existing investors, the directors would have a duty to recommend acceptance. All that's academic, though."

"Because of the fire?"

Dolan pursed his lips. "Not quite. Because of the consequences, would be a more accurate summation." He frowned at Steele. "Tell me, inspector, are you prescient, or do you have insider knowledge?"

The detective stared back; it was his turn to be taken by surprise.

"Neither. Why?"

"Because when you called me and asked for this meeting, I was on the point of telephoning Sir James Proud and asking him to send a senior officer to see me."

"Am I senior enough then?"

"For the moment you are. You can decide whether to refer what I'm going to tell you up your chain of command. But first, maybe you'd like to tell me why you wanted to see me."

"Certainly," Steele replied. "I'm investigating the outbreak of fire at the Royal Scottish Academy on Saturday. It's being treated as a case of arson."

"As a witness," Dolan exclaimed, "I have to tell you that that was self-evident at the time."

"Can you describe what happened?"

"I described it to one of your officers in the aftermath."

"I know, but I'd be grateful if you'd do it again; it's not uncommon for things to be recalled that might have been overlooked in the panic after the outbreak."

The lean, tanned businessman shrugged, swinging to and fro in his swivel chair. "Very well, but there's still not much to tell. David

Candela was halfway through his speech when there was a whoosh, and the picture burst into flames."

"What happened next?"

Dolan smiled. "I suppose you might call it David's finest hour. For all his army background, I've always thought of him as a dry, lackadaisical character, but he took command on the spot and ordered everyone out of the building. "Clear the gallery," I remember him shouting. "Clear the gallery. No time for heroes." We did clear it too, damn quick. David ordered his staff to gather us together at the side of the building and hold us there until the fire engines arrived and the blaze was under control."

"Did it seem out of control?"

"Not at that point, but David was concerned that there might have been more than one device."

Steele nodded. "You can't argue with that thinking," he conceded. "Who called the fire brigade?"

"I'm not certain. It could have been the curator, it could have been David, it could have been anyone; I was legging it out of there by that time. We weren't outside for all that long. The fire was contained pretty quickly, from what I gathered, and the firefighters checked everything else. After that we were allowed back in for the champagne and whatnots, and to be interviewed by your people. Now that I think about it, I remember seeing you there."

"And that's it? Specifically, you don't remember seeing anyone doing anything out of the ordinary at the time the picture went up in flames?"

"No, not a soul. That really is all I can tell you."

"Fair enough. It doesn't take us any further, but to be honest, I doubt if we're going to get any further. So what about your fire, and your problems? At least you're still able to operate, from what I can see."

"On these two floors, yes we are," Dolan agreed. "One thing they get right in modern buildings is the integrity of each level in extreme conditions."

"How has your business been affected?" asked the detective.

"Before I answer that," the other man replied, 'let me explain a little of what we do, and of our structure. We are investment trust managers, pure and simple… more or less. We don't get involved in the unit trust end of the business; never have, never will. We offer services to high net-worth individuals, for whom we believe that ITs are a far more reliable and efficient vehicle. Unit trusts have their place; they're okay for smaller investors, but that's not our market. I have a friend who runs a restaurant, which he describes as strictly for fat people. That's us in a way; we're the fat cats' fund manager.

"Investment trusts are companies which exist purely to make money. The only business they have is buying and selling shares in other companies. As an investor in an investment trust, you're a shareholder in that company, and your shares will rise or fall in value as the investments held by the trust rise or fall. Their beauty as a vehicle is that they allow you to spread risk by holding a very wide portfolio without the hassle of monitoring and trading them all individually.

Their management charges are lower than units, and these days they're tax-effective because you can invest in them through Investment Savings Accounts.

"Tubau Gordon invests in three sectors; the UK, for proven, steady performance, European markets, which are developing rapidly, and the Far East, which may have lost some of its sparkle, but which remains pretty sexy in the long term, if a little riskier than it was. Each of those sectors operates as a separate business within a business. Each has its own staff, its own analysts and its own decision-makers, reporting back to a responsible director, who reports in turn to the main board, of which he or she is a member, and to me. Each business is… or was located on one of our three floors. The fifth floor, where we're sitting now, accommodates Tubau Gordon Europe, and the executive offices. The seventh floor houses our UK business. The sixth floor, which no longer exists, was where our Far East trusts were located." Dolan stopped and looked at Steele. "With me so far?"

The detective nodded. "Yes. I've got some shares in ITs; even though I might not be that fat a cat."

The fund manager smiled. "Good choice, as long as you're not with Tubau Gordon Oriental." He pulled his chair closer to his desk. "In the financial world, confidentiality is everything. We take that to extremes here. We have no cross-over between the staff in each of our divisions. Each operates completely separately, with no interchange of information to avoid the temptation of insider dealing. To ensure this, each division has a completely separate information technology set-up. There's no way you can cut into seventh floor data from this level, and there's no way that I, as a corporate manager, can access any of it directly."

"I'm beginning to guess the consequences of the fire," said Steele.

"I'm sure you are. The damage upstairs was total. The entire IT system of Tubau Gordon Oriental has been destroyed, and with it all of our computer records for its current financial year, which has been running since January the first."

"Don't you back up?"

"We back up on to a separate mainframe, outside the network, but that was also located on the sixth floor. It's gone too."

"Paper records?"

"Yes, and all reduced to muddy ashes. The only paper that survived the fire was in rolls in the staff toilets."

"So what have you lost?"

"As I said, we've lost everything; the current investment position of every one of the clients of Tubau Gordon Oriental. We'd have to go back as best we can and rebuild every transaction to the beginning of the calendar year. That would take God knows how long and even then we'd only have an approximation. We will have to ask every company in which we're invested to issue duplicate share certificates, but with the settlement system we'll never know what was in the pipeline, since we do our own trading. It's impossible; in practice, all that we can do is credit everyone with everything they had at the time of the last audit and take it from there. It's a disaster of unthinkable proportions."

"What about previous years? Has all that gone too?"

Dolan looked up to the ceiling. "No, thank God. Once our audits are all completed we archive the records of each year in a secure data warehouse. On top of that we archive our computer records on a six-monthly basis. Had it not been for the fire, that would have happened on Tuesday."

Steele felt a flutter in the pit of his stomach, but kept it to himself. "How many Far East trusts were there?" he asked.

"Three public; Japanese, Chinese, and new markets."

"Three public, you said?"

"Yes. There was also one private trust located upstairs, and managed under our corporate umbrella. It's a family trust; not a unique situation. This one belongs to the Candela family."

"As in…?"

"Yes, it's David's. It used to be managed within Candela and Finch, but he switched it here a few years back, because he liked our security systems and our in-house trading facility. Ironic, is it not?"

"It sure is," Steele conceded, impassively. "When you began," he continued, 'you said that investment trusts were more or less all you did. What else is there?"

"We have a currency section," said the chief executive, 'speculating on the global money markets. That was on the sixth floor; it's gone too.

Never rains, eh."

"That's what we find." The policeman waited until he felt that he had all of Dolan's attention once more. "So why were you about to pick up the phone?" The silence continued, for several seconds.

"Because," came the reply at last, "I have just finished a reconciliation of our total assets; investments and cash in the bank and in transit. It's difficult, given the missing Oriental portfolios, but by my calculation, we're thirty million out… on the downside."

"Bloody hell," Steele exclaimed.

"That's an understatement."

"Will it finish you?"

"No, it won't, but it will send our share price floor-wards and make us a snip for any predators that are out there." Dolan stood up and walked to the window of his office; he gazed along the Western Approach

Road, at nothing in particular.

"So, inspector," he asked, 'are you going to call in the cavalry?"

"I'm going to call in the fire brigade, first off."

"I have done already. And I've called in independent experts. I did that on Sunday. They both agree that the fire started in a computer terminal that was left on over the weekend to receive incoming faxes … a normal procedure, and that there is no evidence of it being deliberate. Someone seems to have been dead lucky, Mr. Steele."

"So far," the policeman retorted. "I'm going to need a list of every person employed on the sixth floor with the skill to make thirty million disappear without being caught. Obviously, that will include the manager of the Candela family trust."

"I wouldn't bother with that, inspector. David manages it personally.

It's another of his many skills."