Love You Dead

96 Thursday 12 March

At 12.30 p.m. Roy Grace did the Asda run to get his lunch and something to drink. He’d eaten nothing since a few mouthfuls of porridge at 6 a.m., and a muffin in the café, and he was hungry again.

His eyes ran along the superstore’s sandwich shelves, and he was tempted to get an all-day breakfast bacon and egg feast. But guilt held him back. Cleo had repeatedly warned him of the dangers of the rubbish diet that so many police officers survived on. He looked at several cakes and doughnuts, too. Often in the past he had ignored her — and Sandy’s — entreaties for him to eat healthily. But Noah and Cleo had added a new dimension and purpose to his life. He felt an extra strong need to take care of himself, for his family. So in the end he bought a tuna and sweetcorn on brown bread and an apple, and allowed himself just two naughty treats, a Diet Coke and a KitKat.

As he walked across to the ‘10 Items or Less’ till he saw a rack of Argus newspapers. The headline read:

Good! The seed had been sown. He bought a copy.

Back in his office, Grace laid the paper in front of him. The front-page splash was accompanied by a photograph of the stocky, tanned billionaire barely recognizable, even to himself, as Norman Potting. The accompanying story, written by a reporter he didn’t know, told of one of the city’s favourite sons, born on the Whitehawk Estate, who had truly gone west to make his fortune in California’s Silicon Valley. He was now terminally ill with prostate cancer, and had decided to return home to his roots for the last months of his life.

Instead of buying a home in the city, because the doctors had told him he had so little time left, J. Paul Cornel had moved into a suite at an undisclosed hotel for a few days, before returning to California to tie up his business affairs there. With no dependants, he was intending to look at worthy local charities to leave the bulk of his estate to, and something by which the city would remember him. He said he hoped, if his health permitted, to return to Brighton to spend his remaining days here.

As he peeled open the wrapping round his sandwich, Roy Grace read on. J. Paul Cornel’s journey from Dorothy Stringer School — winning a scholarship to Boston’s MIT, the leading technology university in the USA — was documented in detail as were the visionaries he’d met and helped finance on the way, including acolytes of Danny Hillis, the founder of Thinking Machines Corporation and pioneer of the parallel processor, and of Nicholas Negroponte, head of the MIT Media Lab, plus half a dozen former employees of Apple and Microsoft.

Due to smart tax planning, the article continued, just as the Sunday Times Rich List team had found, Cornel’s true wealth was impossible to estimate. But many financial analysts put it as not far short of the $17.4 billion of Paul Allen, the co-founder of Microsoft.

Yes, Grace thought. Brilliant stuff! Yes, yes, yes!