The Predator

1

Chris returned to Carpathian’s office in London determined to ensure that the firm survived. It would be difficult: Carpathian was much more Lenka’s creation than his. He knew all the details: the administration of the funds, the individual securities in the portfolio, the accounts, the computer maintenance contracts, the people who managed the building and so on. But the vision was Lenka’s. And so were the relationships with investors.

Lenka’s murder had torn at Chris from many different directions. There was the horror of the act itself. Every time he closed his eyes, he saw her pale face beneath him on the street, felt the warmth and stickiness of her blood on his hands, watched her die. Then there was the guilt that he hadn’t been able to stop it. In his waking moments, he replayed the attack again and again. If only he had reacted a second sooner to the sound of footsteps, if he had grabbed the arm half a second earlier. He fantasized about how he could have caught the attacker, thrown him to the ground and overpowered him. All pointless, he knew. If he had been quicker, he would probably have been stabbed too.

There was also straightforward grief at the loss of a friend, of someone who had helped him when he really needed it, of someone to whom he owed a debt, of a genuinely good person. He missed her laughter, her hoarse voice teasing him, the immediate rush of vitality that she brought to a room when she entered it.

And lastly, there was the worry about her company, their company. She had put so much of her energy into Carpathian over the last couple of years. It had become the most important thing in her life. He found, after the initial shock wore off, that Carpathian became the focus for all his feelings about her. He couldn’t prevent her murder, he couldn’t bring her back, but he could make sure that her creation survived.

First, he had to deal with the two remaining members of the team, Ollie and Tina. Ollie was a wreck. Chris and Lenka had picked him the previous year from the collapsing investment-banking arm of a British bank. He was twenty-four, very bright, but very shy. He seemed to live his life in permanent terror. Lenka, in her more wicked moments, had taken cruel advantage of this. But both she and Chris had liked him, and thought that he would mature into a real asset. In the meantime, he didn’t cost much, and he made the coffee without complaining. Until that week, Ollie’s worst nightmare was screwing up on the settlement of a trade and having Lenka scream at him. But this was so much worse than that. He seemed incapable of the simplest task; he was barely able to speak. When Chris talked to him about Lenka’s death, he cried. Chris felt sorry for him, and in a strange way he was pleased that Lenka had meant something to Ollie, despite her occasional mocking of him. Chris let him collapse for five minutes, but only five minutes. Chris needed Ollie: he was bright, he was familiar with how Carpathian worked, there was no one else. Ollie was going to have to grow up. Immediately.

Tina was made of sterner stuff. She was a fiercely competent nineteen-year-old from Ongar who could fix the photocopier when Ollie broke it, and who would not stand any nonsense from pushy brokers. During the couple of days Chris had been away, it was she who had fielded calls from the market. She had little experience or knowledge of finance, but Chris had to rely on her too. She seemed to sense his determination to ensure Carpathian’s survival, and to share it.

The four of them all sat in an open-plan room, with Lenka and Chris’s desks overlooking the square outside. The entire office consisted of this room, a reception area, a boardroom, which doubled as a conference room, a kitchen, and an alcove for photocopier, fax machine and computer equipment. It wasn’t large, but it had been nicely designed by an American friend of Lenka’s, and it was airy, light and professional. The work hadn’t cost much, except for a sweeping curved wall in the reception area, which sported a mural of swirling blues. Chris and Lenka had argued about it: Lenka loved it, but Chris had objected that it was too frivolous.

We’ll keep it, Chris decided.

Chris gazed at Lenka’s desk. Dramatic orange and purple flowers leaned out of a tall crystal vase. ‘Birds of paradise’ she had said they were called. She bought a new bunch of exotic flowers every week from the florist round the corner. Chris hesitated, and then dumped them into the bin. It seemed wrong that they should be so bright and alive, as though they hadn’t heard the news. But he left the vase there, empty. Under her desk were four pairs of scuffed shoes. Lenka said she thought best in bare feet, and she would even occasionally meet visitors shoeless. It had taken Chris a couple of months to work out how she had accumulated so many pairs at work; surely even Lenka wouldn’t go home in bare feet. The answer was, of course, that when the markets were going against her she would nip out to Bond Street and buy a new pair, which she promptly took off when she returned to the office.

But Chris couldn’t afford to waste the day wallowing in thoughts of Lenka. He checked the prices of their portfolio. The market was weak. The Russian Finance Minister had resigned in the midst of a corruption scandal, and Eastern Europe was looking jittery. The big Eureka Telecom position was down five points. Chris would have to work out what Lenka had had in mind when she bought that. But that, too, could wait. He didn’t intend to trade at all if he could avoid it over the next few days.

He spoke briefly on the phone to Ian Darwent. Ian was still at Bloomfield Weiss; he was now a European high-yield bond salesman. It was from him that Lenka had bought the Eureka Telecom bonds.

The conversation was awkward. Ian had turned his back on Chris when Chris had left Bloomfield Weiss, and Chris couldn’t quite bring himself to forgive him. Ian clearly felt just as uncomfortable with Chris, especially since Carpathian was now a purchaser of European high-yield bonds. So they had come to an unspoken agreement that Ian would speak to Lenka. That would have to change. Tina had told Ian about Lenka the day before, so for now they exchanged shallow commiserations about her death. Chris was sure Ian was genuinely sorry about what had happened, but he wasn’t about to help Ian overcome his public-school reticence to discuss it. They rang off with a promise to talk about Eureka Telecom the next day.

Chris also spoke to Duncan at the sales desk of Honshu Bank, the second-tier Japanese firm where he now worked. Chris had called him from Prague to tell him about Lenka. The conversation had been brief; Duncan had been too stunned to say much of anything. Now he had lots of questions. Chris agreed to meet him in a pub after work to answer them.

The next task was to inform the investors in Carpathian’s fund. There were eight of them and they had invested a total of fifty-five million euros. They were mostly based in the US, and they were nearly all Lenka’s contacts from her days at Bloomfield Weiss in New York. The largest was Amalgamated Veterans Life, where Lenka’s contact was none other than Rudy Moss. He was the only investor Chris really knew. The rest had met Chris, but it was Lenka they trusted. Still, he and Lenka had managed to provide them with a twenty-nine per cent return in the first nine months, so they ought to be happy.

Chris decided to send them all an e-mail, which would be ready for their opening, and follow it up with a phone call in the afternoon. They were difficult calls to make. Everyone was shocked by the news. Most of them seemed to think of Lenka as a personal friend. None of them mentioned rethinking their investment in Carpathian, much to Chris’s relief. The only person he couldn’t get through to was Rudy, who didn’t return his call. Chris wasn’t concerned by this: not returning calls was a macho thing with people like Rudy, and since they knew each other, he was the investor Chris was least worried about.

Ollie seemed to pull himself together as the day wore on. Chris had him talking to the market to find out if there was any risk of the latest Russian crisis spreading in a serious way to the Central European countries in which Carpathian invested. This was the kind of thing that was usually left to Lenka and Chris, but Ollie didn’t do a bad job. Chris left the office at eight that evening feeling that perhaps they could keep Carpathian going after all.

By the time Chris arrived at Williams, Duncan had already sunk a pint or two. Williams was a dark pub in a small lane off Bishopsgate. They had first drunk there ten years before. It was close enough to Bloomfield Weiss to be convenient, but far enough away to avoid colleagues or bosses. So far, it had managed to escape the frantic redevelopment that had overtaken the area, and it had become the natural place for them to meet over the years.

Chris bought himself a pint and Duncan a refill and joined him at a small table in a corner. The pub was full of sleek men in their twenties unwinding. The pissed, overweight old farts in their baggy double-breasted suits who had inhabited the place ten years before had moved on. Chris sometimes wondered what they were doing now they had been elbowed out by his generation. Perhaps he’d find out himself in ten years’ time.

‘Thanks,’ said Duncan, draining his previous pint and pushing it to one side to make room for the new one. ‘Cheers,’ he said without much conviction.

‘Cheers.’

‘I can’t believe it,’ said Duncan. ‘I just can’t believe it. What happened?’

‘Someone came up behind her and slit her throat,’ Chris said, as matter-of-factly as he could. He didn’t like going into the details of that evening.

‘And you were there?’

Chris nodded.

‘Who was it?’

‘I have no idea. I couldn’t see much of him — he was wearing a dark jacket and a hat.’

What about the Czech police? What do they think?’

‘Well, their first guess was a mugger, a drug-addict desperate for cash. That’s an increasing problem in Prague, apparently. But by the way it was done, they think the killer was a professional. He knew how to use a knife.’

‘But who the hell would want to kill Lenka?’

Chris sighed. ‘I have no idea.’

‘I suppose it must have been some kind of mafia hit,’ said Duncan. ‘There’s all kinds of organized crime in Eastern Europe, isn’t there? Didn’t I read about some American banker being shot in Russia last week?’

‘I don’t think the Czech Republic is quite as dangerous as Russia. Although the police say there is a Ukrainian-run mafia. That’s their best guess at the moment. But I can’t see how the kind of companies we invest in would be involved in that sort of stuff.’

‘You never know,’ said Duncan. ‘I mean, it’s all junk over there, isn’t it?’

‘It’s technically junk, yes, but that just means that the bond issuers are rated below investment grade. It doesn’t mean they’re crooks.’

‘Yeah, but you can’t always be sure who’s behind them, can you?’

Chris drank his beer thoughtfully. ‘No, you can’t,’ he admitted. It was true that by the time Carpathian invested in a company it had been sanitized for Western consumption. In the anarchy that had marked the transition from communism to capitalism in all of these countries, there had been greed, corruption and violence. Even Lenka couldn’t always get to the bottom of it. That was one of the reasons why she had been so keen to open offices in places like Prague. ‘Maybe it was something to do with one of our investments.’

‘It doesn’t much matter, anyway,’ said Duncan.

They sat in silence, thinking of Lenka.

‘You know she was the only woman I really loved,’ said Duncan.

‘What about Pippa?’ asked Chris. Pippa was Duncan’s wife. They had been married three years and separated for six months.

Duncan shook his head. ‘I liked Pippa. I was attracted to her. But I never loved her. That was the trouble.’ He drank his beer. ‘I’ve been thinking about Lenka a lot recently, ever since things went wrong with Pippa. Although I’ve never really been able to get Lenka out of my mind. I know we were only together for a few months, but those are the only months when I felt truly alive.’

Chris thought Duncan was exaggerating, but he didn’t want to argue with him. ‘She was a special person,’ he said.

‘She was, wasn’t she?’ said Duncan, smiling for the first time. ‘She was so warm, so generous, so full of life. And she was the sexiest woman I’ve ever met. What she saw in me, I don’t know. I’m not surprised she got rid of me.’

‘It was a long time ago,’ said Chris.

‘But it seems like yesterday to me,’ said Duncan. ‘I can remember her touch, her smell, her laugh so clearly. You know that perfume she wears? What is it, Annick Goutal? There’s a French woman in the office who wears it. Whenever I smell it, I think of her. It brings her back.’ His eyes misted over, and he looked down. ‘We had something back then. I’m sure she felt it as well as me. If we’d stayed together after the programme, my life would have been very different now.’

Once again, Chris wanted to argue, to point out Duncan’s inconsistency. But he didn’t. No doubt Duncan’s life would have been different if he and Lenka had stayed together. And Duncan had not had a good last ten years.

Alex’s death had nearly destroyed him. Duncan had been so filled with guilt that it seemed to ooze out of every pore. It ruined what little self-confidence he had, it made him bitter, angry, full of self-pity. The naïve puppy-like innocence had disappeared. His fresh face became lined, jowls appeared under his chin and a small paunch emerged above his trousers. The winning smile disappeared completely. He lost most of the friends he had, driving them away with complaints and bitterness. Chris had stuck by him. It wasn’t just that he felt loyalty to a friend. The cover-up of Alex’s death made Chris feel not exactly guilt, but complicity. He couldn’t abandon Duncan. Ian could, though, and had.

As expected after his performance on the programme, Duncan had been fired from Bloomfield Weiss on his return to London. Over the next few years, he limped from job to job as a Eurobond salesman at minor foreign banks in the city. The big bonuses of the boom years passed him by; he was one of the foot soldiers in the struggle to spread bonds to the four corners of the globe, a cheap body for a new boss of a revamped sales desk to call upon in his efforts to meet a headcount target. Duncan wasn’t necessarily bad at his job. He was honest, he could be reasonably personable when he tried, and some customers bought bonds from him. But he had about him an air of defeat, so that when the reorganizations came, as they did on an almost annual basis at every bank in the City, his was always the first head to roll.

After several years of this, things started to look up. He met Pippa, a straightforward trading assistant a couple of years younger than him. They married. He held down the same job at an Arab bank for nearly four years. They bought a house in Wandsworth. He became good company over a pint again.

Then it all went wrong. Pippa threw him out, Chris was never clear exactly why. The Arab bank fired him, and it took him four months to find another job. And now Lenka.

Duncan was down and out again. This time, Chris wasn’t sure he could face picking him up.

‘How’s the new job?’ Chris asked, in an effort to change the subject.

‘It’s a job. They’ve given me a list of accounts to contact who never return my calls. Same old story. We’ve got no product to sell, and no customers to sell it to.’

‘What’s your boss like?’

‘He’s a decent enough bloke. Ex-Harrison Brothers originally, although he’s been around since then. I’m not complaining. They pay me.’

‘That’s good,’ said Chris lamely.

Duncan’s eyes flicked up to him. ‘There’s something I wanted to ask your opinion on.’

‘Oh, yes?’

‘One of my Arab clients wants to invest in some European high yield. He doesn’t know anything about it, and all the big investment banks assure him that their deals are the best and the competition’s are all crap. We haven’t got anything we could give him, but I’d like to help him out. You couldn’t give me some ideas could you?’

‘Lenka was the expert on high yield, but I’ve picked up a little bit,’ said Chris. ‘I can try. It’ll all be Eastern European stuff, though.’

‘Go on then,’ said Duncan.

Although he was slightly irritated to have his brains picked for free, it was a relief for Chris to talk about something other than Duncan’s misery. He listed four issues that he and Lenka liked. Duncan dutifully jotted them down on the back of one of his business cards.

‘What about Eureka Telecom?’ he asked, when Chris had finished. ‘My client said that was strongly recommended. Very cheap, he was told.’

Chris grimaced. ‘I’m not at all sure about that one. We own some, but I fear it might be a Bloomfield Weiss special. I’d say it’s better to start off with the expensive stuff the brokers want to buy. Avoid the cheap stuff they’re desperate to sell.’

Duncan smiled. ‘Sounds good advice. So Eureka Telecom is one of Ian’s, then?’

Chris nodded. ‘Yes. I’m going to talk to him about it tomorrow.’

‘Jerk,’ muttered Duncan.

Chris shrugged and looked around the gloomy pub. The three of them had had many a long evening in there, many years before. ‘It’s a pity,’ he said.

‘You’re getting sentimental,’ said Duncan. ‘Ian Darwent has always looked after himself. He could be perfectly charming when he thought we might be useful, but as soon as he decided we were no good to him any more, he couldn’t be bothered to give us the time of day.’

Chris sighed. ‘Perhaps you’re right.’

It was sad. Ten years ago the six of them had seemed to have such a bright future. They were going to be the humane investment bankers of the twenty-first century. But it hadn’t quite worked like that. Duncan was a wash-out. Chris had lasted longer, but he had been fired from Bloomfield Weiss as well, and more spectacularly. Ian hadn’t really fulfilled his potential, and, as Duncan said, he was a jerk. Alex, and now Lenka, were dead. Only Eric was doing well, in some high-powered corporate finance job at Bloomfield Weiss in New York.

Chris shook his head and glanced at his empty glass. ‘Your round.’

2

Chris could tell it was bad news just by looking at Tina’s face, and the slight tremble with which she held the fax. His heart sank. He had had enough bad news, surely.

She passed it to him wordlessly, and he laid it on the desk in front of him.

Chris exploded. ‘With best wishes! Jesus Christ! No mention of Lenka. Nothing about how sorry he is to hear of her death, about how he wants to support us in this difficult time.’

Tina shook her head. ‘Wanker, innee?’

‘Yes, Tina, he is.’ Chris grabbed at the phone, ready to scream at Rudy.

‘Tell you what, Chris,’ said Tina as Chris jabbed out his number.

‘Yes?’ said Chris, putting the receiver to his ear.

‘Why don’t you ring him in five minutes, eh?’

Chris heard Rudy’s voice at the other end of the line. He glanced at Tina. She was right. Yelling at Rudy was not the best way to get him to keep his money in the fund. He replaced the receiver, and gave her a quick smile. ‘Thank you.’

Tina left him alone. Chris stood up and looked out of the window at the neat square below. Despite the cold, there were several well-wrapped office workers finishing late lunches on the benches, watched by clusters of rat-grey pigeons.

This was serious. Ten million euros was almost twenty per cent of the fund. What was worse was the signal that Rudy’s move would give to the other investors. The rest had held steady, waiting to see how Chris coped. To some extent, all investors, even the biggest, are like sheep. The easiest decision, the lowest risk, is always to do what everyone else is doing. Yesterday, everyone was sticking with Carpathian. Tomorrow?

Why had Rudy decided to redeem? He knew Chris. They had been on the programme together, where Chris had performed reasonably well. Chris remembered disliking Rudy, but he couldn’t remember falling out with him. He took some deep breaths, counted to ten, and dialled Rudy’s number again.

‘Rudy Moss.’

‘Rudy, it’s Chris from Carpathian.’ Chris used his surname as little as possible. It just caused confusion.

‘Oh, hi, Chris,’ said Rudy neutrally.

‘I received your fax.’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘And, frankly, I was a little surprised. All our other investors have decided to stick with us, and I had expected Amalgamated Veterans to do the same.’

There was a pause at the other end of the line. ‘Well, Chris, I’d like to stay with you, but you must understand this is quite a material change in the management of the fund we’re talking about here. Depth of management is always important to us. We thought just the two of you was a little thin, but now it’s only you... I’m afraid we just can’t live with that.’

Be reasonable, Chris told himself. Be calm. Find out what’s really bugging him.

‘I can understand your concerns, and I respect them. In fact, I’m planning to find another experienced investment partner as soon as I can.’ He hadn’t been, but he was now. Anything to keep Amalgamated Veterans in the fund. ‘But I can assure you the fund will be perfectly safe in my hands. We’re fully invested. The market looks a little weak in the short term, but we’re confident it will recover. We’ll make you good money, Rudy, I can assure you of that.’

‘We?’ There was the slightest of sneers in Rudy’s voice that raised Chris’s hackles immediately.

‘Yes, myself and my colleagues.’

‘Who are?’

‘I have two assistants here with me.’

‘But it’s basically just you running things?’

‘Yes, it is,’ admitted Chris. ‘But I’ll find someone to join me shortly.’

‘I know your record,’ said Rudy, an unpleasant tinge creeping into his voice.

‘What do you mean?’ Chris snapped.

‘I mean, I know your history.’

‘Are you talking about when I left Bloomfield Weiss?’

‘Yes, I am.’

Chris was silent.

‘I figure it’s best to be straight with you,’ said Rudy. ‘That way we know where we stand.’

‘You know it wasn’t me who was responsible for that loss.’

‘If you say so. I wasn’t there.’

‘Damn right you weren’t there!’ Chris snapped, and then instantly regretted it. He had to keep his cool. ‘Lenka knew I wasn’t responsible. She trusted me.’

‘Lenka was a smart woman. I don’t mind telling you it was she I was backing when we put money in Carpathian. Now she’s gone...’

Chris took a deep breath. ‘Is there any way I can persuade you to change your mind?’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘What if I came to see you in Hartford?’

‘That won’t be necessary.’

Chris came to a decision. ‘I’m coming to Hartford. We can discuss this further then.’

‘I said, I don’t think that will be necessary,’ said Rudy with impatience.

‘Look, Rudy. You taking your money out of the fund is what you would call a “material change” for me, and it’s a material change I can do without. You owe me an hour so we can discuss it.’

Rudy paused. ‘All right. If you insist.’

‘I do insist. I’ll see you next Thursday. Shall we say two o’clock?’

‘I’m busy all next week.’

‘What about Friday?’

‘I said I’m busy all week. I’m in California Wednesday through Friday.’

‘OK, what about the following Monday? I’ll be there at nine o’clock.’

‘I can’t make nine o’clock. We have a morning meeting.’

‘Ten? Come on Rudy, I’m going to your offices and there’s nothing you can do to stop me.’

Rudy sighed. ‘OK, ten thirty.’

‘See you then,’ said Chris and rang off. ‘Bastard,’ he muttered.

The worst thing was that not once in the whole conversation had Rudy shown the slightest regret that Lenka had been killed. Not once.

He put on his jacket and grabbed his coat from the stand. ‘I’m going for a walk,’ he told Tina and left the building.

He crossed Oxford Street, and soon found himself striding up the broad avenue of Portland Place. The wind cut damp and cold through his clothes. Although there was no snow on the London streets, it felt colder than Prague.

He couldn’t believe that the Bloomfield Weiss cock-up had come back to haunt him again. Why couldn’t the world just forget it? He had tried to obliterate it from his mind, with limited success. Now he realized it would never go away. Someone somewhere would always remember what had happened and use it to undermine him.

The injustice of the whole affair once again rose up inside him, warming his body with anger. He now realized the attraction of litigation. Despite its huge cost and unpredictability, it provided a judge for you to plea to, a chance that your version of events could be publicly upheld. He had considered suing, even spent a few hundred quid discussing it with a lawyer, but his chances of a clear victory were small, while his chances of running up large legal bills were almost a certainty. A bad trade. Now he wished he had done it.

He had become a good trader at Bloomfield Weiss. Traders come in two sizes: the gamblers and the percentage players. The gamblers like to take big risks, with big payoffs. The best of them can make stunning profits, but all of them are capable of making big losses too. The percentage players like to take smaller risks, which they can understand and control. They tend to make small but frequent profits. Chris was one of the latter types. He made profits month in and month out, he rarely had a negative month. It did wonders for the desk’s P&L and for the budget. Good old Chris could always be relied on to lob in a few hundred thou to the bottom-line.

The bosses loved it. His immediate boss, a wiry, hyperactive American named Herbie Exler, was a gambler. He encouraged Chris to do his trades in larger and larger size. The logic was sound. If Chris could make two hundred thousand dollars on a hundred million dollar position, why not give him five hundred million, or a billion? With trepidation, Chris increased the size of his trades. And it worked.

Chris traded European government bonds. He did things like buying a hundred million Deutschmarks of German government bonds and selling an equivalent number of French governments, betting that the relationship between the two would change. Chris had an excellent feel for how the relationships between the European markets moved, and he understood the way the weight of money of the major global investors, most of whom were Bloomfield Weiss’s clients, sloshed from one country to another.

As Economic and Monetary Union approached, one trade dominated all others. It was known as ‘the convergence trade’. The theory was simple, too simple. The idea was that when the currencies of France, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Germany and the rest were all rolled into the euro, and when the interest rate for the whole euro currency zone was set by the European Central Bank, then the interest rates on these countries’ government debt would be broadly similar. So if Italian government bonds yielded two per cent more than German bonds, you bought Italy and sold Germany, confident that you would have a nice capital gain on the euro’s birthday, when Italian bond yields would fall to German levels, and Italian bond prices would rise.

It was a no-brainer. Chris did the trade in large size, and so did everyone else on the Street. And off the Street as well. In particular, a large hedge fund in Greenwich, Connecticut put the trade on. And it put it on in the biggest size imaginable. It borrowed many times its capital to buy literally billions of dollars’ worth of European government bonds.

At first, all went well. Partly as a result of the weight of money, nice capital gains soon emerged, for Chris, for the hedge fund, for everybody. But then, while they were all off on their summer holidays, Russia defaulted on its debt, causing a tremor of fear to spread around the world’s financial markets. This had no direct bearing on the chances of monetary union being disrupted, but it caused what the markets call ‘a flight to quality’. Nervous investors switched into what they considered to be the safest investments. They bought German bonds. They didn’t buy Italian, Spanish, Portuguese or even French bonds.

The unrealized capital gains became unrealized capital losses. In theory, this shouldn’t have been a problem: as the jitters subsided the old unstoppable move towards convergence would continue. But Chris was nervous. He wanted to take his loss, and buy in again when things had settled down. Now, Chris had a big position, and the loss would be several million dollars. Effectively he would be giving back all of his profits for the year. So he spoke to Herbie Exler first.

Herbie was furious. He had just told his own boss, Larry Stewart, that Chris’s profits to date were in the bag, and that he could be relied upon for as much again in the remaining months of the year. Herbie’s bonus depended on Chris meeting those figures. And the two-million-pound house that Mrs Exler had set her heart on in Kensington depended on that bonus.

Herbie suggested doubling up. Convergence was inevitable, profits were inevitable, doubling up would double these, and double the bonus. To Herbie, this was a no-brainer.

Chris’s position was already huge. He wanted to sell, not buy. Herbie and Chris had a series of vigorous discussions, where Herbie accused Chris of being a wimp, and Chris sounded like one. Afterwards Chris asked himself over and over again why he had given in. At the time, there were good reasons. Herbie was Chris’s boss. Although Chris was sure there was a chance that the trade could go against them, Herbie was undoubtedly correct that there was a chance the trade would work. But there was another reason that Chris caved in, and one that he couldn’t forgive himself for. Despite his impressive track record as a trader, Chris still saw himself as the Polish upstart from Halifax, the boy who scraped into school and university and investment banking, the boy who was lucky just to be doing what he was doing. Herbie Exler was a streetwise New York bond trader, a Bloomfield Weiss man through and through, a king of the market. At the final moment, Chris’s confidence defeated him. There was never any risk of that happening to Herbie. So they doubled up.

Things swiftly fell apart. While the rest of the Street were unanimous that the trade would come back their way, they had no choice but to cut their losses. Investment banks had spent hundreds of millions on computer systems that could tell their managements instantaneously what unrealized losses their traders were sitting on, and as these losses grew, the word came down to the trading floors to sell.

So they sold. Of course, this drove prices further against Chris. And against the large Greenwich hedge fund. It had bet everything on this trade; it couldn’t afford to quit. But the brokers that had fallen over themselves to lend money to it now fell over themselves to get their money back. So eventually the hedge fund had to sell.

But everyone else was selling. There were no buyers. The most liquid markets in the world, those for government bonds, dried up. There was a global crisis, which was only prevented from spinning completely out of control by the US Federal Reserve who encouraged a bail out of the hedge fund by the big international investment banks.

Those were terrible days for Chris. His losses had become astronomical, and there was absolutely nothing he could do about it. He couldn’t have sold even if Herbie had let him; the market could never have absorbed the size of his positions. He was stuck with them.

Every day was like a nightmare, each worse than the last. Every evening he would check the unrealized loss before he went home. He would try not to think about the position overnight, but with no success. He couldn’t concentrate on a book or a television programme for more than ten minutes without the horror of his losses encroaching. He tried getting drunk a couple of times, but that didn’t work either. It just made the morning worse. He would arrive at his desk to see that while he had been asleep the market had added another few million to the already enormous negative figure on his position report.

It was the loss of control that he found hardest to deal with. The market had gone against him before, but he had always been able to cut and start again. This was different. It was as though he was driving a fast car on a mountain road and had skidded on ice. The car was in a spin, the tyres wouldn’t grip, and the cliff edge was coming nearer and nearer. Except that it was taking him days, not milliseconds, to reach it.

Chris tried to take it professionally. He kept a straight stony face from seven in the morning until eight at night. He struggled to produce a smile for anyone who cracked a joke, or even said hello. But there were few of those. Everyone knew what was happening. They all knew he was being killed. And they avoided him, as though his disastrous luck was contagious.

Herbie felt the pressure even worse than Chris. He spent most of the day locked in his office, literally staring at the screens in the hope that the little figures would move his way. He had some friends at the Greenwich hedge fund whom he called several times a day, and who consistently said that the trade would come back their way imminently. Herbie would tell Chris this at great length, along with Herbie’s assessment of how smart these guys were. If Chris raised doubts about the position, Herbie would growl at him that it was a great trade, and he should believe in it. Any of the other traders who tried to talk to Herbie about anything else got nowhere. He was irascible and dangerous.

Chris couldn’t work out why Bloomfield Weiss’s management hadn’t followed the other firms on the Street and ordered Herbie to cut the position. It was true that Bloomfield Weiss had the reputation for having bigger balls than anyone else. Chris assumed he must be living through the proof. Yet another mistake.

Then a piece appeared in the Wall Street Journal that Bloomfield Weiss was sitting on a loss of five hundred million dollars. As Chris read this early in the morning at his desk, he knew that it was inaccurate. His losses were actually six hundred and twelve million dollars. The phones were soon ringing from brokers, clients, journalists. The answers were all the same. No comment. No comment. No comment.

Herbie came in, paced around Chris for a few minutes, and then was hauled off to talk to his bosses. Chris spent a miserable couple of hours at his desk. There was nothing he could do. Nothing he could say. No comment.

Then at twelve o’clock he was summoned to see Simon Bibby, the head of the London office. With Bibby were Larry Stewart, the American head of fixed income in Europe, and Herbie. Needless to say, they all looked like men who had lost more than half a billion dollars.

Bibby was English, forty-five, and ruthless. Larry was usually friendly to Chris, but he didn’t appear so now. And Herbie had a look in his eyes. A look that said to Chris: ‘I’m going to screw you, and you’re not going to escape, so don’t even try.’

Bibby did the talking. He said that he had spoken to Sidney Stahl, the chairman, who had demanded immediate action to come clean and clear up the mess. Then Bibby asked Chris why he had misled them over the revaluation of his position. At first, Chris didn’t understand. Then it became clear that Bibby had been told that the losses that were showing up on their reports weren’t real, and were offset by understated profits on derivatives positions. This was incorrect, and Chris began to explain why. Herbie interrupted. He looked Chris straight in the eye and told him that he had been misled by Chris, and had therefore unwittingly misled his superiors.

Chris protested, but Herbie was implacable. He recalled conversations that never existed that buried Chris. Then, when Chris looked at the other two, he understood. Bibby was glaring at Chris as though he were a criminal, but Larry, whom Chris liked and trusted, was looking at his hands, at the table in front of him, anywhere but at Chris. One of the four people in that room would have to take the blame for what had happened. The other three had decided that it would be Chris. Believing Herbie’s story was the easiest way to achieve this.

Chris protested for a further quarter of an hour, until the in-house lawyer came in with a two-page letter. Bibby told Chris that he was fired with immediate effect, but that he would receive six months’ salary, and Bloomfield Weiss would not seek to prosecute, as long as he signed the letter. Chris read it through carefully. Under it, he promised not to discuss the disaster with the press or anyone else, and not to take legal action against Bloomfield Weiss. Bibby handed Chris a pen, and said that if he didn’t sign the letter immediately, Bibby would be forced to call in the SFA, the City watchdogs.

Suddenly, Chris felt crushed. It was as though he had expected this moment ever since he had joined Bloomfield Weiss. He wasn’t an investment banker and he had been found out. Like it or not, he had put the trade on. He had acquiesced to Herbie’s demand that he double up. Of course he hadn’t misled Herbie, or Bibby, or anyone else, but it was his word against Herbie’s and he knew Herbie would win. Herbie was a ruthless street fighter. If there wasn’t evidence against Chris, he would fabricate it. And Bibby and Larry would believe Herbie. They didn’t want to believe the truth; they wanted to believe a lie, their careers depended on it. Chris now knew what he had long suspected: he wasn’t cut out for investment banking. He had no business to be in the room at all. He signed.

Bloomfield Weiss didn’t come right out and say that he had lost them six hundred million dollars. But they did say he had been dismissed. His name appeared in all the British press. Journalists wanted to interview him, his home phone rang constantly, people took photographs. He stood by the agreement he had signed; he didn’t talk to any of them. But he was famous. Famous as the man who had dropped over half a billion.

Ironically, the trade did come right in the end, monetary union happened and the government bonds converged. Some people made a lot of money. But not Bloomfield Weiss. Under Sidney Stahl’s insistence, they bared their chest, took their losses and moved on.

Chris tried to do the same. He called back the headhunters who had been calling him every week for a year. They didn’t want to know. Nobody wanted to know. He couldn’t get a job. He could probably have tried harder, but he didn’t have it in him. He didn’t want to be an investment banker anyway. So he gave up.

In time, Lenka pulled him out of it. They set up Carpathian together and everything went well, until suddenly, at the crucial moment, that loss came back to kick him in the balls again.

Except that this time, he wouldn’t just take it. He owed Lenka that much, if not himself.

He straightened up and lengthened his stride as he made his way down Harley Street back towards the office. He would try to talk Rudy out of his decision. But if that didn’t work, he would figure out a way to keeping going. He was determined to.

Back at the office, he examined the portfolio. The fund was set up so that there were two choices when an investor wanted to redeem: either find a new investor to take his place, or sell assets to raise the cash needed. Finding a new investor was out of the question without Lenka. She had the contacts, and it would be impossible for Chris to persuade someone he didn’t know to invest ten million euros with him when half the management team had been murdered.

So he would have to sell some bonds. Which ones?

Although they only had fifty-five million euros of funds available to them, their portfolio was much bigger. They had borrowed money and used the mysteries of the repo market to build up much larger positions. In fact, most of the portfolio in volume was made up of a new convergence trade, which was managed by Chris. The theory was that most of the Central European countries would be admitted to the European Union. So Chris had bought the government bonds of countries like the Czech Republic, Poland, Estonia, Hungary and Slovenia. He dabbled in some of the second-tier countries as well. At first he had balked at putting himself in such a familiar position, but Lenka had encouraged him, saying he was the best person she knew in the market to manage such a trade, and promising him that whenever he wanted to cut and run, she wouldn’t get in his way. He had taken a deep breath and started buying.

The resignation of the Russian Finance Minister had shaken all these positions, but Chris was convinced of their fundamental strength, and wanted to hold on.

The rest of the portfolio was made up of high-yield bonds, otherwise known as junk. Lenka had learned about these in the United States, and the idea was that she would use her experience to analyse the small but growing number of junk bonds issued in Eastern Europe. By far the largest of these junk-bond positions was Eureka Telecom. It was also the position that was performing worst, and the one Chris trusted the least.

Eureka Telecom it would be, then.

It might take a while to sell the bonds, so Chris decided to start the process immediately. If he succeeded in persuading Rudy to maintain his investment in Carpathian, then Chris could always reinvest the money elsewhere. He called Ian.

‘Where’s Eureka Telecom trading?’ he asked, dispensing with any small talk.

‘I think we’re making them ninety-five to ninety-seven,’ Ian answered.

‘Ninety-five! But Lenka bought them at par last week, didn’t she?’

‘I know,’ said Ian sounding uncomfortable. ‘But the market’s spooked by this Russian news. And the latest subscriber numbers came out on Monday. They were, er, disappointing.’

‘Bad news the week after the bond was issued!’ said Chris. ‘Wasn’t that in the prospectus?’

‘It was a complete surprise to everybody,’ said Ian. ‘That’s why my trader has marked the bonds down.’

In theory, that meant that Bloomfield Weiss would be prepared to buy Chris’s bonds at a price of ninety-five, and sell him more at a price of ninety-seven. Lenka had bought her twenty-five million bonds at a price of par, or a hundred. So, in theory, Chris could sell ten million of them for a five per cent loss, which was half a million euros. Not great, but not a total disaster. He had a bad feeling about this one. He wanted to get out straight away.

The trouble was, the junk bond market was illiquid. What this meant was that as soon as Chris said he wanted to sell the entire position, Bloomfield Weiss would drop their price. By how much, Chris would have to see.

‘What would you pay me for ten?’ asked Chris.

There was a pause on the phone. ‘Ninety-five was only good for a million,’ said Ian.

‘OK, I understand,’ said Chris. ‘Now, where can I sell ten million?’

There was a long pause. Eventually Ian returned. ‘My trader would like to work an order on that. Say at ninety-three?’

Chris wasn’t having any of that. Bloomfield Weiss wanted to tout his bonds around the market at no risk to themselves to try to find a buyer. Chris wanted out, and he wanted out immediately.

‘No, Ian. I want a bid for the ten million.’

‘I think we’d prefer to work an order.’

‘Ian, you sold us twenty-five million euros of this bond last week. You have to be willing to buy ten million back.’

Ian hesitated. ‘Chris,’ he said. ‘You’re not familiar with the way this market works. These aren’t government bonds. The high-yield market is illiquid; everyone knows that. Let us work the order.’

‘Don’t patronize me, Ian. Ask your trader where he would buy ten million. Now.’

‘But, Chris...’

‘Ask him.’

‘OK.’

Chris was left hanging on the phone for several minutes. Ian was right, Chris wasn’t as familiar with the junk market as the government bond market, but he wasn’t going to let Bloomfield Weiss take advantage of that. They sold Carpathian the bonds; they’d have to buy them back.

‘Chris?’ It was Ian. He sounded hesitant, nervous. Chris steeled himself.

‘Yes?’

‘If you want to sell the bonds on the wire, we’ll pay seventy.’

‘Seventy!’ Chris almost screamed. ‘That’s absurd. How can you pretend the price is ninety-five when you’ll only pay seventy?’

We’ve nowhere to go with them, Chris. The market looks bad and the subscriber numbers spooked everyone. If we buy them from you, we’re wearing them.’

Chris did the sums. At a price of seventy, the loss he would realize on the sale of ten million would be three million euros. The unrealized loss on the rest of the Eureka Telecom position would be another five. Basically, the value of Carpathian was eight million euros lower than it had been a week before.

‘Listen,’ Ian was whispering now. ‘Don’t sell them, Chris. Trust me. They’re worth hanging on to.’

‘Why?’ Chris asked.

‘Just trust me.’

Trust Ian! No way. Chris had a real problem, but trusting Ian wasn’t the best way out of it. ‘Send me the press release on the subscriber numbers. I need to look at this deal a bit more closely. We’ll speak again tomorrow.’

Chris slammed down the phone and put his head in his hands. This was a problem. A big problem.

He spent the rest of the afternoon going through the information in Lenka’s files on Eureka Telecom. It was a dog. Sure, it was an ambitious idea, to set up a mobile telephone network in Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, with the possibility of extending it to Romania and the Baltic States later. The networking agreements and licences were in place. But there was no cash, and precious few subscribers. Investment requirements over the next five years were huge. That was what the junk bond was for. But Eureka would get through the cash raised from that in eighteen months. Where the further money for investment would come from was a mystery.

Ian sent details of the subscriber information by e-mail. It was disappointing. For a company that was supposed to be entering a dramatic growth phase over the next few years, a five per cent increase in subscribers over a six-month period was pitiful. No wonder Bloomfield Weiss’s trader was worried.

Chris put down the prospectus and stared at Lenka’s empty desk. Why had she bought it? She was no fool. She could see this was a bad deal. He was surprised she had bought any, let alone twenty-five million, nearly half the value of the fund.

Oh, Lenka, Lenka. Chris felt a flash of anger. Not only had she gone and left him, but she’d left him with an enormous screw-up to deal with. He smashed his fist down on his desk with a crash that caused Ollie to look up in fright.

Chris put his head in his hands. Why was Lenka gone? How could such a horrible thing have happened to her? He wanted her back. Now.

‘Are you all right?’ said Ollie.

Chris looked up and forced a smile. ‘Not really, but thank you.’ He glanced back at the papers in front of him. ‘Ollie?’

‘Yes?’

‘Lenka didn’t tell you why she bought this Eureka Telecom deal, did she?’

‘No. I asked her. She just said she had a good feeling about it.’

‘You didn’t hear her discussing it with Ian?’

‘Not really. They did have a few conversations before the deal came out. He’s been calling quite a lot recently, hasn’t he? And then at the end of last week, Lenka said she didn’t want to take any more of his calls. It was a bit embarrassing, really. I had to take messages for her.’

‘Huh,’ said Chris thoughtfully. ‘Did she say why she didn’t want to talk to him?’

‘No. She was quite off-hand about it.’

Chris thought about that. Lenka being off-hand often meant that Lenka was angry. Angry because she had been sold a dog, perhaps.

‘There is something else I’ve been meaning to mention to you, though. About Lenka.’

‘Oh, yes? What is it?’

‘Well, one day last week, when you were away, someone came round here to speak to her.’

‘Uh-huh.’ People always came round to speak to Lenka, or Chris for that matter.

‘Yes. He wasn’t a broker or anything like that. He didn’t look like he worked in an office at all. Tall thin guy, in jeans. Big long coat. American accent.’

‘Young?’

‘Oh, no,’ said Ollie. ‘Old. Thirty-five, something like that.’ Ollie saw the look on Chris’s face. ‘Well, not exactly old, but not young either. You know.’

‘OK, OK, I know,’ said Chris. ‘What did they talk about?’

‘No idea. Lenka took him into the boardroom and shut the door. They were in there about an hour. When he left, he looked angry. And she looked really upset. She went off to the loo for ages.’

‘Interesting. Did Tina see this bloke?’

‘No. She was out, I think. I remember I was the only one here, apart from Lenka of course.’

Pity, Chris thought. Tina would have been able to give him a much more accurate description of what had happened.

‘And Lenka didn’t say anything afterwards?’

‘No. I tried to talk to her, to see if she was all right, but she told me to go away. So I went off and did some photocopying.’

The photocopier was Ollie’s equivalent of the gooseberry bushes. It was where he always liked to go when Lenka shouted at him.

‘Can you be more precise about this guy? Hair colour, eyes, nose, face?’

Ollie screwed up his face, thinking. ‘It’s hard to remember. Eyes? Brown, I think. Although they could have been blue. Brown hair. Yes, definitely brown. Longish. Stubble — I don’t think he’d shaved.’

‘That’s very helpful,’ said Chris. ‘But we’ve no idea who this man is.’ He tapped his fingers on the desk. ‘Can you remember what day it was?’

‘Monday, I think. Maybe Tuesday.’

‘Let’s have a look.’ Chris turned on Lenka’s computer and opened it at her diary. There was only one entry that was not easily explainable. Against two o’clock on Tuesday 15 February was the word ‘Marcus’. That was all, just ‘Marcus’.

‘Know who that might be?’ Chris asked Ollie.

Ollie shrugged. There’s a Marcus Neale at Harrison Brothers. But it definitely wasn’t him.’

‘I wonder who it was,’ said Chris.

3

It was eight o’clock and Ollie and Tina had already gone, when Chris was disturbed by a loud buzz. The security guard had left at six; after that time, visitors had to use the buzzer out on the street.

‘Who is it?’

He couldn’t quite make out the reply, beyond identifying the voice as belonging to a woman, but he pressed the button to unlock the entrance to the building, and told whomever it was to come up to the fifth floor.

He opened the door to a young woman with long dark curly hair tied back behind the nape of her neck, blue eyes, freckles and a turned-up nose. She was dressed in jeans and was carrying two large bags. She looked familiar, but Chris couldn’t place her.

‘Chris?’

The voice was familiar as well. From a long time ago.

‘Chris? It’s Megan. Megan Brook. Eric’s friend?’

‘Oh, yes, I’m sorry. Of course.’

He recognized her now. She hadn’t changed much. She looked older — perhaps twenty-five rather than eighteen, although he realized she must be closer to his own age of thirty-two. He didn’t understand what she was doing there.

She marched into the reception area and dropped her bags. ‘Very nice,’ she said, nodding towards the swirling mural. ‘So, where is she?’

Chris couldn’t answer.

‘Don’t tell me she’s not here! We agreed we’d meet here at seven thirty. I know I’m a bit late, but she could have waited.’

‘No, she’s not here.’

Megan heard the tone of his voice, saw his face. ‘Oh, God,’ she said. ‘What’s happened?’

‘She... she’s dead.’ Chris said.

‘No.’ Megan slumped back into a chair. ‘But I only spoke to her last week. When? What happened?’

‘Monday. She was murdered. In Prague.’

‘Murdered? Oh, how awful.’ Megan’s face reddened. Tears appeared in her eyes. She covered her face with her hands.

Chris didn’t know what to do. He stood awkwardly in front of her for a few moments, and then touched her arm.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Megan, sniffing. She took a deep breath. ‘It’s just such a shock.’

‘Yes, it is,’ said Chris. ‘For everyone.’

‘How did it happen?’

‘We were walking through an alley. Someone came up with a knife. It was very quick.’

‘How horrible. Oh, my God.’

‘You were meant to be meeting her now?’ Chris asked.

‘Yes. I’m supposed to be staying with her for a few days. I’ve just gotten in from Paris.’

She looked exhausted, slumped in the chair. Chris glanced down at her luggage. ‘What are you going to do now?’

‘I don’t know. I guess I’ll find a hotel.’

‘Come back to my place,’ said Chris. ‘I have a spare room. You don’t want to spend the evening tramping round looking for a place to stay.’

Megan hesitated, and then smiled. ‘No. I guess I don’t. Thanks.’

Chris locked up, and they took a taxi from outside the office to Chris’s flat in Hampstead. Megan stared out of the window of the cab at the London streets.

Chris felt awkward. He wondered whether he had been right to invite her to stay with him. The offer had been honestly made, and Megan had accepted in the spirit it had been intended, but they hardly knew each other. Perhaps she was having second thoughts now, as she gazed blankly out of the window. Perhaps he should give her a way out: he could help her find a hotel that evening. Then he realized that would be even worse. He was being too English: an American would have had no hesitation in doing the hospitable thing.

The traffic was light, and they soon arrived at his flat. He carried her luggage to her room and she followed him into the kitchen.

‘Wine?’ he asked.

‘I’d love some.’

He opened a bottle of Australian red and poured out two large glasses.

‘Pasta OK for dinner?’

‘You don’t have to cook for me.’

‘Are you hungry?’

Megan smiled and nodded.

‘Well, then?’

‘Pasta would be great. Thanks.’

Chris put a pan of water on to boil. Megan sipped her glass of wine and examined his flat.

‘Nice place.’

Thank you. You’re lucky. The cleaner came today.’

‘Did you do all this?’

‘Yes. Or at least I paid for someone else to do it. It was a few years ago now.’ Emboldened by his first big bonus at Bloomfield Weiss, Chris had spent a considerable sum on doing up the flat. Interior walls knocked down, blondwood floorboards laid, rooms remodelled, walls repainted. He had been very proud of it until the day he had been fired, since when it had become just a place to live. In fact, in the last year or so, he had become faintly embarrassed by it. It was taste that had been purchased: much more stylish than its owner.

‘Where’s that?’ Megan asked, pointing to an eerie black and white photograph of factory chimneys clinging to an impossibly steep hillside.

‘Halifax. Where I grew up.’

‘Wow. Now I know what they mean by “dark satanic mills”.’

‘They’re not satanic any more,’ said Chris. ‘They stopped working long ago. But I like them. They’re dramatic in their own way.’

‘Alex would have appreciated it.’

Chris smiled. ‘Yes, he would. I thought of him when I bought it.’

She sat at his small kitchen table with her glass of wine.

‘Sorry I didn’t recognize you,’ said Chris.

‘It was ten years ago.’

‘But you recognized me.’

‘I was expecting you to be there.’

‘Of course. Lenka didn’t say anything to me about you coming to stay with her.’

‘I only asked her last week. A grant just came through for me to study for my dissertation at Cambridge for six months. I thought I’d take a week’s vacation first: spend a few days in Paris and then stay with her in London.’

Chris took scissors to plastic packaging. ‘This won’t be the greatest home-cooked meal you’ve ever tasted,’ he said.

‘I don’t care,’ Megan replied. ‘I’m starving.’

‘Good. I’d forgotten that you and Lenka were friends. But, come to think of it, didn’t you go on holiday together a couple of years ago?’

‘That’s right. To Brazil. That was some vacation.’

‘I can imagine a vacation with Lenka would be fun.’

‘It was.’ Megan sighed. ‘We haven’t seen each other much since then. The last time was in Chicago about six months ago. I’m doing my PhD at the University of Chicago. She was seeing some investors in her fund. We met at a Thai restaurant downtown. It was only for a couple of hours...’ She tailed off, remembering.

‘How did you two become friends? I didn’t realize you knew each other on the programme.’

‘It was afterwards. After what happened with Alex. As you know, Lenka felt responsible. She felt guilty about leading Alex on. All she wanted was for Duncan to give up on her. She never thought Alex would be hurt, let alone killed. She needed to talk to someone. You guys had all gone back to England, so that left Eric and me.’

‘She must have been a mess.’

‘She was.’ Megan paused, remembering. ‘Then, after Georgetown, I went to Columbia for a couple of years. I had fixed that up so that I could be with Eric in New York, but we split up a month before I got there. Lenka was still working on Wall Street and we saw quite a lot of each other. We got on well. We were very different, but we were good for each other.’

‘I know what you mean.’

‘She said she thought you and she would make a good team,’ Megan said.

‘We did, I think. We had different strengths and weaknesses. But we respected each other. She was right. A good team.’

‘Lenka always liked to play the extrovert. But she seemed to prefer being around quieter people. Perhaps so she would shine next to them.’

‘She was quite a serious person in her own way, too,’ said Chris.

‘You knew her well,’ said Megan.

‘So did you, by the sound of it,’ said Chris, with a smile.

Chris served the pasta and the sauce, poured some more wine, and they sat down.

‘So, are you still studying medieval history?’ he asked.

‘Yes,’ said Megan. ‘You studied history, didn’t you? I can remember boring you about it on the boat.’

‘You have a good memory,’ said Chris. ‘But I don’t. I doubt if I can remember much more than the date of the Battle of Hastings.’

Well, my field was the Carolingian Renaissance. I spent some time in France a few years ago. But I’m writing my dissertation on the effect that had on monastic reform in tenth-century England. That’s why I’m going to Cambridge.’

That was all medieval gobbledygook to Chris. ‘Are you still enjoying it?’ he asked.

‘I have good days and bad days. Teaching I like, if the students are interested. And I’m still fascinated by the history itself. But I’ve got my dissertation to finish before I can get my PhD. There’s so much pressure to be original, you wind up having to study some tiny subject simply because it’s so obscure no one else can be bothered to write about it.’

‘No job’s perfect,’ said Chris.

‘At least in this six months at Cambridge I’ll get some time to do some proper thinking. I’ve been looking forward to that.’

Megan was tucking into the pasta with gusto. She was hungry. When they had finished, Chris offered coffee, or more wine. Megan went for the wine, and Chris opened another bottle.

‘I don’t usually drink this much,’ she said. ‘But I need it.’

‘I know what you mean,’ said Chris. As they began the second bottle, he felt some of the pressure of the last few days lifting off him. It was cheap solace, and he would pay for it the next day, but he needed it too.

‘She was a special woman,’ said Megan.

‘She was,’ said Chris. He took a gulp of wine. ‘She saved me.’

‘Saved you?’

Chris nodded.

‘What do you mean?’

Chris stared into the deep red liquid before answering. It was painful bringing back what had happened, but he wanted to do it. He wanted to talk about Lenka.

‘Did you know I was fired from Bloomfield Weiss?’

‘No.’

‘You obviously don’t read the financial sections of the newspapers.’

‘I have much better things to do with my time.’

Chris smiled. It was true. There were millions of people who had never heard of him, or had never even heard of Bloomfield Weiss. The trouble was, they were never the ones he was asking for a job.

‘Well, I was fired for losing six hundred million dollars.’

Megan blinked. ‘Wow.’

‘Yes. Precisely. Wow. It was written up in all the papers. It wasn’t my fault, but no one believed me.’

‘I believe you.’

Chris smiled. ‘Thanks. I wish I’d known you then, or people like you. But I didn’t. Everyone I knew assumed it was my fault.’ He took a deep breath. ‘I tried to get another job as a trader. I was good at it, and I thought everyone realized that. But they didn’t. Then, two weeks after I’d been fired, Tamara left me. Do you remember Tamara?’

Megan shook her head.

‘You met her once. At Eric’s party. Actually, it’s probably a good thing you don’t remember her. Anyway, at the time I thought she was wonderful. I thought I was lucky to be going out with her. When she rejected me, after the City had rejected me, I thought I was just a fraud. I gave up.’ Chris glanced at Megan to see if she was listening. She was. He had thought he was going to talk about Lenka, but now he found he was talking about himself. He also found he wanted to.

‘I moped around here for a few weeks, not seeing anyone, except perhaps Duncan, reading the newspapers, watching TV, sleeping. I slept a lot. Then I decided I’d travel the world. I had quite a lot of money saved, and I thought I just had to get away. So I bought a one-way ticket to India.

‘I thought I’d always wanted to travel to India, although I’d never quite thought through exactly why. I hoped that going to a strange country might help me to find myself. If I wasn’t really a young successful investment banker, what was I?

‘India was a total disaster. It’s a stupid place to go to when you’re alone and miserable. I barely spoke to anyone the whole time I was there. I saw the Taj Mahal on a cloudy day, and all I can remember is how crowded it was and how difficult it was to get a bottle of mineral water. I got stuck in some godforsaken town in Rajasthan where it seemed to be impossible to get a seat on the train out no matter how long I stood in a queue. I got sick. I think I can remember the Coke that did it. It was in a place called Jaipur. You weren’t supposed to drink anything with ice in it, because it could have been made from contaminated water. I was really ill. I couldn’t eat, I had barely the strength to drink, and I spent days holed up in a dusty, decrepit hotel. Somehow, I managed to get myself to Delhi and a flight home.

‘I was still ill when I got back to England. I came back here, saw a doctor, had some tests, took some medicine and lay in bed. My mother kept calling; she was worried about me, but I told her I was all right. She didn’t believe me. One day she just showed up on my doorstep. We had an enormous fight. She wanted to take me back with her to Halifax so she could nurse me better, but I refused to go. She drove back by herself in tears.’

‘Why didn’t you go with her?’ Megan asked.

‘Stubbornness. Stupidity. I have nothing against my mother. Usually, we get on well. She’s a strong woman, and I owe her a lot. She brought me up believing I could do something in the world. I suppose that was my problem. I had spent my entire youth planning my escape from Halifax, with her encouragement. Going back would have been an admission that I’d failed, not just myself, but also her. Although I was in a bad way, I didn’t quite want to do that yet. So I stayed, and festered.

‘Then Lenka called. She said she knew I was a good trader. She asked what had happened when I’d been fired from Bloomfield Weiss, and when I told her, she said she thought it must have been something like that. She said I was her first choice as a partner to set up a hedge fund. She wasn’t just being kind; she needed me. Of course, I did my best to refuse, to condemn myself to perpetual failure. But you know Lenka. What she wants, she gets.’ Chris stopped to correct himself. ‘I mean, what she wanted...’

‘You don’t look like a failure to me,’ said Megan.

‘No, I’m not. Not now. Provided I can keep Carpathian going.’

‘Are there problems?’

Chris took a deep breath. ‘Let’s just say that Lenka’s death brought some complications. Nothing I can’t sort out. I’d rather not think about it now.’

‘Well, good luck, with that.’ Megan stood up. ‘And now, I’d better get to bed if I’m not going to get totally drunk.’

That’s a good idea,’ said Chris, standing up as well. ‘Look, I’ve got to go to Lenka’s flat tomorrow evening and sort some stuff out for her parents. Would you like to come? You can stay here again tomorrow night if you want.’

‘I can find a hotel,’ said Megan.

‘Are you sure? You’re welcome to stay.’

She looked at him and smiled. ‘OK. That would be good. Now I must get to bed.’

4

It made no sense. Chris sipped his coffee as he stared at the Eureka Telecom papers in front of him. The first thing he had done when he had arrived at the office that morning was go through them one more time in the hope that the reason Lenka had bought the bonds would become obvious. It hadn’t. In fact, he found it difficult to believe that she had bought them at all.

But she had. Carpathian owned them. And they had no means of selling them.

The phone rang. It was Duncan.

‘You remember you gave me some junk bond recommendations the other day?’ he began.

‘Yes.’

‘Well, my client checked them out. He said they seemed to make more sense than anything anyone else had told him.’

‘Good.’

‘Do you think you could have lunch with him?’

‘Duncan! There’s a lot going on here, and only me to do it now Lenka’s gone.’

‘Come on, Chris. This guy’s my best client. He’s stuck with me since United Arab International. I know you’d give him an honest idea of what’s going on out there. I’ll pay.’

‘Oh, all right,’ Chris said. ‘Who is he, anyway?’

‘His name is Khalid. Royal Bank of Kuwait. Smart guy. Don’t underestimate him. How are you placed next week?’

Reluctantly, Chris agreed a date. He put down the phone, reflecting that Duncan couldn’t be that useless a salesman: he seemed to possess that essential ability to make people do things they didn’t really want to do.

Now what the hell was he going to do about the Eureka Telecom bonds?

He stared across at Lenka’s desk. Tina had put some fresh flowers in her vase, delphiniums or something. But they didn’t know the answer.

If only he had been there the previous week. Although they trusted each other, he and Lenka always discussed major investment decisions. She would certainly have gone over this one with him. He had given her his phone number in Courchevel before he went skiing, but she had refused to use it, saying he needed a complete break from the office. If only he could at least have listened in to her end of the phone conversation with Ian when she had bought the bonds.

At Bloomfield Weiss, that would have been possible. All phone conversations were taped to resolve any disputed trades. But they hadn’t installed any recording equipment at Carpathian. The firm was too small, and both Lenka and Chris hadn’t liked the Big Brother aspect of bugging phones. Besides, if there was a problem they could always rely on the broker’s recordings.

That was it!

Chris hit the number for Bloomfield Weiss.

Ian answered. ‘Where are the Eurekas trading this morning?’ Chris asked without preamble.

‘One tick.’ Chris waited. He knew the Bloomfield Weiss trader would have to think about this one. Eventually Ian returned. ‘He’s indicating ninety to ninety-two. But that’s only good in a million.’

‘That’s down five points!’ protested Chris.

‘What can I say? There’s a big seller out there.’

‘I can’t believe this market!’

‘I told you it was different from trading govvies,’ said Ian, with little sympathy in his voice.

Chris didn’t bother to ask where the bid for his ten million block would be. He knew the answer would be below yesterday’s price of seventy and he didn’t want to hear it. There was no point going to any other houses in the market, either. Eureka Telecom was a Bloomfield Weiss deal, and if Bloomfield Weiss were moving the price down sharply no other dealer in his right mind would want to buy the bonds. They might pretend to make a price, but if Chris tried to hit the bid it would fade immediately. No, he’d have to argue this one out.

‘Ian, why did Lenka buy this deal?’

‘It looked great last week, before the numbers came out.’

‘No, it didn’t. I’ve looked at the prospectus. It was a dog. It’s not the kind of deal she’d do. And certainly not in twenty-five million.’

‘I don’t know. It yields three per cent more than Buck Telecom.’

‘Yeah, but Buck has a network already in place. And a market cap of three billion quid. This is a totally different deal. Didn’t she say anything about why she liked it?’

Ian didn’t reply.

‘Come on, Ian. Help me here. This is a major headache for me. Lenka’s dead, it’s not as if she and I can talk about it.’ Chris had no compunction in using Lenka’s death as a means of getting what he wanted. It was her company’s survival that was at stake; he was sure she wouldn’t mind.

‘Sorry, Chris. I’ve no idea.’

Although Ian was an experienced salesman, he couldn’t keep the guilt from his voice. Chris knew him too well. And he knew he was lying.

‘I’d like to listen to the tapes,’ Chris said.

‘What?’

‘I’d like to listen to the tapes of Lenka buying the bonds.’

‘Come on, Chris. There’s no need for that.’

‘Yes, there is. There’s something funny about this and I want to find out what.’

‘But you can’t listen to the tapes unless you query the trade.’

‘Then I’m querying the trade.’

‘But it’s already settled.’

‘Ian. These are special circumstances. The person who did the trade is dead, and I have reason to believe that the deal was never done.’

‘What reason?’

‘It doesn’t make sense.’

‘What kind of reason is that? If everybody who bought a bond argued about it when the price went down, the market would grind to a halt.’

Ian was right. Chris didn’t have any evidence. But his suspicions were growing.

‘Look, Ian,’ he said, trying to take on a more conciliatory tone. ‘If there’s nothing wrong with the trade, then it won’t do you any harm if I listen to the tapes, will it?’

‘I told you, there’s no need.’

‘I demand to listen to them.’

‘No.’

Ian was hiding something. Chris was now certain of that.

‘Put me on to Larry Stewart,’ Chris said. He wasn’t exactly sure how the reporting lines worked at Bloomfield Weiss, but he knew Larry would be somewhere up above Ian.

‘Do you think he’d listen to you?’ said Ian, with something close to a sneer.

For a moment, Chris’s confidence nearly deserted him. Ian knew Chris’s reputation. If it was his word against Chris’s at Bloomfield Weiss, Ian was pretty confident that his would be believed. Then Chris pulled himself together. Larry knew Chris had done nothing wrong three years before. Chris was willing to gamble that Larry had at least a scrap of humanity left in him somewhere.

‘Yes, Ian. I think Larry would listen to me.’

There was silence at the other end of the phone as Ian tried to decide what to do. Chris had got him!

‘Chris, I really don’t think it would be a good idea for you to listen to those tapes.’

‘Put me through to Larry, or I’ll hang up and dial him direct.’

‘I can explain.’

‘Go ahead.’

‘Not here,’ said Ian in a whisper. ‘Let’s talk about it later. Out of the office.’

‘Let’s talk about it now.’

Chris could hear Ian exhaling down the phone. ‘OK. There’s a café at the bottom end of Liverpool Street. Ponti’s. I’ll meet you there in half an hour?’

‘See you there,’ said Chris.

It took Chris twenty minutes to get there, but Ian was already waiting. The ten years since the programme showed. Lines had begun to etch his face, in particular a frown crease between his eyebrows. He was still trim; in fact, he exercised at the gym three times a week. His suits were tailor-made, his shirts hand-made, his ties the latest fashion from the latest fashionable house. His hair was cut rakishly and frequently. He looked older than his thirty-three years, and more experienced. The only clue that belied the veneer of elegant self-confidence was his fingernails, which were still bitten down to the quick.

Chris fetched a black coffee and joined him. ‘Well?’

Ian played with the froth on his cappuccino with a spoon. He stirred the bubbly cream for several moments before replying. Finally, he looked up, straight at Chris.

‘Lenka and I were seeing each other,’ he said simply. ‘That’s why I don’t want you to hear the tape.’

‘Seeing each other? What, sleeping together?’

‘Call it what you like. We were doing it.’

‘I can’t believe it,’ said Chris.

Ian shrugged.

‘But why would Lenka...?’

Ian frowned. ‘Come on Chris. There are a lot of women who don’t find me that unattractive.’

‘Yes, but Lenka?’

‘You know I always liked her. Turns out she liked me too.’

‘No.’

‘Stop saying that!’ snapped Ian. ‘She and I were seeing each other, OK? Now we’re not, because she’s dead. Do you understand that?’

‘Sorry,’ said Chris. ‘How long had this been going on for?’

‘Not long. Remember we had that European High Yield Conference in Barcelona last month? We both got a bit drunk. That’s when it started.’

‘Was it serious?’

‘Not really. But it wasn’t totally meaningless either. It was just fun. I knew there was no point in getting serious with Lenka.’

‘No,’ said Chris. Lenka never got serious with anyone. He tried to remember any clue that Lenka had given that she and Ian had had a relationship. Nothing. Ian had been phoning her more frequently over recent weeks, but Chris had always assumed that was the flow of business. It had obviously been something more.

‘And this comes out on the tape?’

‘Probably. I haven’t listened to that particular conversation, but there’s probably something there that would suggest we had more than a business relationship.’

‘OK. Let’s listen to it then,’ said Chris. ‘Just you and me.’

‘We can’t do that,’ said Ian. ‘An IT geek needs to be there as well. To make sure no one messes with the recording.’

‘All right. We’ll have the IT geek as well.’

‘Please, Chris.’

‘I understand why you wanted to warn me. And I certainly understand why you don’t want anyone else to hear. But I want to listen to the tapes. Now more than ever. I want to know why Lenka bought those bonds, and the fact that you and she had something going just makes me more suspicious.’

Ian sighed. ‘I guessed you say that. Just stay here for twenty minutes, while I dig them out.’

‘No,’ said Chris. ‘Call whoever you need to call on your mobile. We’ll go and listen together.’

‘Don’t you trust me?’ asked Ian.

‘No,’ said Chris. ‘I don’t.’

Chris followed Ian through Broadgate Circle to the entrance of Bloomfield Weiss. They passed the twenty-foot iron phallus standing at an angle outside, rusting. It seemed exactly right for the firm. Chris felt a shiver as he entered the squat, marble-clad building; he hadn’t set foot in there since that awful day three years before.

They took the lift to the third floor, passed quickly through the deceptively sedate reception area, and entered one of the largest trading rooms in Europe. Chris tried to look straight ahead as he followed Ian weaving his way through the desks, but he couldn’t help noticing the activity around him. The familiar cries, the bustle, the oaths, the screens, and the paper. Paper everywhere. There were some faces he recognized, but most he didn’t. Turnover at investment banks is high; traders come and traders go. He spotted his own desk, occupied now by a youth who didn’t look a day over twenty, lolling back in his chair, cradling the phone. Near the far wall of the room, he spied Herbie Exler. Their eyes met. A rush of pure disgust coursed through Chris’s veins, taking him by surprise, and he was gripped by an urge to vault the desks, grab the little American’s head, and ram it into a screen.

‘Come on,’ said Ian. ‘Don’t make a spectacle of yourself. Let’s get this over with.’ He steered him towards a conference room in the far corner.

‘This is Barry,’ said Ian, introducing Chris to a skinny man with a shaved head who was facing a computer screen. ‘Things have changed since your day. All the tapes are voice activated now, and they’re not actually tapes. We record to disk. Barry will have to listen to everything that’s said, but don’t worry, he’ll keep it all confidential, won’t you, Barry?’

Ian managed to lace these last words with a heavy dose of threat.

Barry seemed unconcerned. ‘That’s right, Ian,’ he said.

Barry handed Ian a log to sign, and then tapped commands into the computer. Barry and Ian put on headphones and listened, searching backwards and forwards until they found the conversation. Chris couldn’t complain about this. It would be unthinkable that Ian could let him listen to a conversation with another client.

After about five minutes, in which Chris fidgeted uncomfortably, Ian held up his hand. ‘I think I’ve got it.’

‘OK,’ said Chris. ‘Let’s hear it. But I want the whole conversation, mind.’

‘All right, all right,’ said Ian. He took off his headphones and flicked a switch. The conference room was filled with the sound of Lenka’s voice. Ian hurriedly turned the volume down, and checked that the door was closed.

‘Hi, babe, how are you?’

Babe! She called him ‘babe’. For the first time, Chris realized how difficult this was going to be. Lenka had been able to say what she liked to Ian without fear of being overheard. Chris had been away on holiday, and Ollie and Tina would have been too far away and too busy to hear.

‘I’m OK,’ drawled Ian. ‘I’m really feeling pretty good.’

‘After last night I’m surprised you made it into work,’ said Lenka, with the wicked laugh that Chris knew so well. He flashed a glance at Ian.

Ian shrugged. Barry stared fixedly at the computer screen. Although he was trying not to look it, Ian was clearly embarrassed. ‘You asked for it,’ he said.

Chris had. He took a deep breath and listened.

‘I’ve got more stamina than you think,’ Ian said from the speaker.

‘Oh, please!’ said Chris, rolling his eyes in a mixture of embarrassment and fury.

Ian ignored him. But on the tape he said: ‘Have you thought any more about the Eureka Telecom?’

Yeah. I think I’ll go for twenty-five. Will I have any problem getting them?’

For you, anything,’ said Ian.

‘Seriously. Is there a chance that I’ll be cut back?’

‘No. This deal isn’t going terribly well.’

‘What about the takeover play?’ Chris’s ears perked up. Ian saw his reaction.

‘No one else knows anything about it.’

‘But it’s an obvious fit, isn’t it?’

‘I think so,’ said Ian. ‘Radaphone needs to fill in its Central European network. Eureka has all the agreements in place. All Radaphone has to do is buy them.’

‘And then I’ll own Radaphone credit risk at a yield of twelve per cent.’

‘Precisely.’

‘And you’re sure this takeover is going to happen?’

‘I spent a week with these guys doing the road shows. You get to know people. They think it’s going to happen, and soon. Don’t you trust me?’

‘Of course I trust you,’ said Lenka. ‘Do you want to know why?’ The wicked tinge had crept back into her voice.

‘Why?’

‘Because if you lie to me I will personally see to it that your Little Jan will never be any use for anything again.’

Although this was meant to be a threat, the way Lenka said it, it sounded more like an invitation. And Chris could guess what Ian’s ‘Little Jan’ was.

‘Well, that’s something I would hate to happen,’ said Ian. ‘So I think you’re safe.’

‘All right,’ said Lenka, suddenly businesslike. ‘Put me down for twenty-five.’

‘OK. We’re pricing tomorrow afternoon. I’ll confirm you’ve got the full twenty-five then. Any chance of seeing you tonight?’

‘Greedy,’ said Lenka. ‘I’m busy.’

‘Busy? What are you doing?’ asked Ian, a tinge of something that sounded like jealousy creeping into his voice.

‘Wouldn’t you just love to know,’ said Lenka, and rang off.

Chris and Ian exchanged glances. Hearing Lenka talk like that had been tough for both of them. But it was what she had said that interested Chris. No wonder Ian hadn’t wanted him to hear the tapes. It wasn’t just that it revealed their relationship. It also revealed that Ian had been effectively giving Lenka inside information.

Radaphone was one of the big three European mobile telephone networks. If they bought Eureka Telecom, the bonds would shoot up in price. Carpathian would make a nice quick return on twenty-five million euros. As Lenka had said to him when he had phoned her in Prague, there was a story.

Chris glanced at Barry. His ears had progressively reddened throughout the conversation. Chris remembered him vaguely. He was an IT guy through and through. He might have picked up the possibility that Ian had given away too much information to Lenka, but he would be much more interested in the nature of the relationship between her and Ian. The Bloomfield Weiss gossip machine would have plenty of new material before the day was out. Tough.

‘Well?’ said Chris, after Barry had left the room.

‘What can I say? I’m embarrassed.’

‘Not that. Radaphone.’

‘Oh. Radaphone.’

‘Will Radaphone take over Eureka Telecom?’

Ian paused for a long time before answering. In the end, he seemed to make up his mind. ‘It’s possible.’

‘But no signs yet?’

‘None at all.’

‘Do you have any concrete evidence of a takeover?’

‘You heard the recording,’ said Ian. ‘It’s just guesswork.’

‘You didn’t see Radaphone executives talking to anyone from Eureka Telecom?’

Ian shook his head.

‘What about any of your corporate finance boys?’

‘I wouldn’t know about it if they did, would I? Chinese walls, and so on.’

‘She just trusted your hunch, didn’t she?’

Ian smiled. ‘Looks like it.’

Chris had had enough. Lenka’s death, Rudy’s demand for his money back, the collapse of Eureka Telecom’s bond price, his presence in the Bloomfield Weiss trading room and now the discovery that Ian and Lenka were having an affair, all combined in some cavity deep within him to produce a surge of disgust.

‘You lied to her, didn’t you?’ he muttered through clenched teeth.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Because she was sleeping with you, you sold her a pile of crap and took the sales credits. And now that she’s dead, you think there’ll be no comeback.’

‘That’s just not true.’

‘What’s going on here?’ A sharp voice barked behind Chris. He recognized it. Herbie Exler.

The feeling of disgust became overwhelming.

Chris turned to face his old boss. ‘You probably put him up to this,’ he said, getting to his feet. ‘Well, you can take the Eureka Telecoms and shove them up your arse. Both of you.’

‘Get out!’ hissed Exler. ‘Get out now. I don’t ever want to see you in this building again.’

‘I’m going,’ said Chris, and he left the conference room, passing the stares of a hundred salesmen and traders as he made his way to the lift.

5

Megan was waiting for him in the Drayton Arms, a pint of bitter in front of her. Chris liked the way American women ordered pints; they thought it was English and it didn’t seem to worry them that it might look unladylike.

‘Sorry I’m late,’ he said. ‘Have you been here long?’

‘Ten minutes.’

‘Here, let me get myself one of those.’

Chris returned from the bar with a pint and took a long drink. ‘I needed that.’

‘It tastes good,’ said Megan.

‘I’m glad you like it. Did you have a good day?’

‘Oh yeah. I went to the Tate Modern. And the Wallace Collection. And the ICA.’

‘All in one day?’

‘What can I say? I like art. You have a lot of it in London. How about you?’

‘Jesus,’ Chris said, shaking his head. ‘I had a pretty awful day. I lost it with someone, and I think I’ve blown my only chance of getting rid of a disastrous bond position.’

‘Oh,’ said Megan.

‘Sorry,’ Chris smiled. ‘I don’t mean to burden you with my work problems. But you might find it interesting. Do you remember Ian Darwent?’

‘He was with us on the boat, wasn’t he? He jumped into the sea after Alex. English. Quiet. Quite good-looking.’

Chris winced. ‘I wouldn’t know about that. But that seemed to be Lenka’s opinion.’ He explained what he had found out.

Much to his disappointment, Megan didn’t seem surprised.

‘Don’t you think it strange that she and Ian were sleeping together?’ he asked her.

‘Not really. You know Lenka,’ Megan said. ‘And I do remember Ian.’

‘Actually, I don’t know much about that side of her life. She didn’t talk to me about it. I didn’t ask.’

‘Probably wise.’

But now Chris couldn’t restrain his curiosity. ‘So she slept around, did she?’

‘That would be unfair,’ said Megan. ‘We did talk about men sometimes, especially when we went on vacation to Brazil. She said she often went for months without sex, then she would see two or three men in succession. She liked men, and she liked sex, but she hated the idea of tying herself down. I guess you could say she was confused. And she sometimes chose the strangest guys. Ian isn’t nearly as weird as some of them, I’m sure.’

Chris shook his head. ‘I’m glad I didn’t know about all that.’

Megan looked at him closely over her pint. ‘What about you and Lenka?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Megan. ‘I didn’t mean to suggest anything. It’s just you obviously liked each other, and...’

‘That’s OK. We did like each other. And I can’t deny she was an attractive woman. But somehow I never considered it. She was too good a friend, I suppose. I always assumed she was out of my league. If I had tried something, and she’d rejected me, it would have been awful. And even worse, if we had gone out together it wouldn’t have lasted long and then I’d have lost a good friend. No, we were much better as we were.’

‘Perhaps.’ Megan looked at Chris steadily.

‘Did Lenka say anything to you about her relationship with Ian?’ he asked, uncomfortable under her gaze.

‘No. I only had that one conversation last week. It didn’t come up. She did sound a bit stressed out, though.’

‘Stressed out?’

‘She said that something had happened that she wanted to talk to me about when I came to stay. She didn’t say what it was.’

‘No clue at all? Was it something to do with work?’

‘I don’t know. I was curious, of course, but I thought I’d find out all about it when I got here.’

‘Hmm. Did she mention Eureka Telecom to you?’

‘No.’

‘Or a man called Marcus?’

‘Marcus? No. Who’s he?’

‘A tall thin American man came to see her in our office last week. Apparently, he upset Lenka pretty badly. But I’ve no idea who he is.’

‘Neither have I.’

Chris stared thoughtfully into his pint. ‘Something was going on,’ he said. He glanced over to Megan’s glass. It was almost empty. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘We’d better go and check out her flat.’

Lenka had lived on the first floor of an elegant white-stuccoed building guarded by twin pillars in Onslow Gardens. The Czech police had recovered the key from her bag, and her parents had asked Chris to sort through her things and send them any personal belongings. There was going to be a lot to do. Chris was counting on a helpful neighbour.

He let himself and Megan into the building. There was a pile of mail for Lenka neatly stacked on a windowsill in the hallway. Chris carried it upstairs with him. Her door opened easily. It was as though she had been away for a day, not a week. The heating was still on. The flat was untidy, but not a total mess. Her bed was made. There was a note from ‘Adriana’ to Miss Lenka saying she was owed twenty pounds for Wednesday. The cleaning lady, no doubt. The flat was a mishmash of furnishings, things she had seen around the world that she just had to buy. They formed a pleasing jumble, and some of them, like a set of two-foot-high wooden carvings of elephants from Africa and a large intricately decorated table from somewhere in Asia, were quite dramatic.

Then there were her clothes. What seemed like miles of them, in wardrobes, chests of drawers, walk-in cupboards, trunks. Many years’ bonuses from Bloomfield Weiss had been pumped into the world’s fashion industry. And shoes. There must have been a hundred pairs. It was a staggering sight.

‘Makes my closet look like a thrift shop,’ said Megan.

Chris went through to her desk, which was in a kind of den just off the living room. It was a large pine affair, covered with papers and a computer. Chris took a deep breath. He would have to sort through this lot. He didn’t want to. Going into Lenka’s flat hadn’t felt like an intrusion, neither did gaping at her massive collection of clothes. But going through her papers? He wanted to leave them there, undisturbed.

But something would have to be done with them. There would be the Czech equivalent of probate. Someone would have to sort out her assets. God, perhaps there was a will in there somewhere. Then there would be bills, rent, credit cards, bank accounts. Chris’s heart sank. Perhaps he could get away with dumping it all in a box and sending it over to the Czech Republic.

‘Would you mind helping me with this?’ asked Chris.

‘OK,’ said Megan. ‘I’ll sort the papers into piles. You read them.’

They worked for two hours, getting progressively more depressed. They didn’t find a will, or any evidence of investments, but there was a massive balance in a current account at US Commerce Bank. Like many investment bankers, Lenka would fight tooth and nail over a hundredth of a basis point at work, but leave a hundred thousand pounds of her own money in a low-interest account.

At ten o’clock, Chris stretched. ‘Look, why don’t we stop now? We can’t do all this. I’ll write a letter to her parents saying what we’ve found so far, and suggesting they get a solicitor to sort it all out.’

‘Don’t you think we should look in there?’ Megan said, nodding towards the computer.

‘But that’s private,’ said Chris.

‘What do you think all that lot is?’ asked Megan, pointing to the piles of papers, now neatly stacked.

‘I suppose you’re right. Go on then. Let’s have a look.’

Megan turned on the machine. She expertly skimmed through the folders. There was very little there. Quite a few word-processed documents, many of them in Czech. No other software, no games, no personal finance packages, no will-making programs. But there was e-mail.

‘Let’s have a look.’

Megan seemed to have no trouble navigating the Internet software and downloading Lenka’s mail. She came up with a list of the most recent e-mail correspondence. The names were fascinating. There were some to Ian. And one to ‘Marcus’.

‘There!’ Chris cried, pointing to it. ‘Open that one!’

‘No. Let’s do this in chronological order. It’ll make more sense.’

Impatiently, they skimmed a dozen e-mails, half of them in Czech, until they came to one from Lenka to Ian:

The reply from Ian was terse:

Then, immediately following that, there was an e-mail to the mysterious Marcus. The subject line read simply Alex.

There was a reply, short and simple:

‘Let’s print those off,’ said Chris.

As the small printer next to Lenka’s machine chugged away, Megan clicked on the last e-mail Lenka had received. She opened it:

‘I wrote that last Sunday. It seems like a whole life ago.’ She blinked back a tear.

‘It was,’ said Chris.

Megan sniffed and dabbed her eyes. ‘So, who can this Marcus be?’

Chris shook his head. ‘You can’t tell much from the e-mail address. He could be from anywhere. I wonder what she wanted to tell him about Alex?’

‘The truth, presumably,’ said Megan. ‘That Duncan knocked him into the sea. But I wonder why she’d want to do that. We all agreed to keep it quiet, and I thought everyone had.’ She gave Chris an enquiring glance.

‘They have, as far as I know,’ he said. ‘I thought that was all buried. And I thought Lenka was as keen as anyone on burying it. It’s strange that she’s the one who wants to tell, and Ian’s the one who wants to keep it quiet. I’d have thought he wouldn’t mind risking getting Duncan into trouble.’

‘We’d all be in trouble,’ said Megan. ‘We lied to the police. That’s against the law.’ She frowned. ‘Big trouble.’

Chris sighed. ‘Well, whoever this Marcus is, he needs to know what happened.’

He sat down in front of the keyboard and began to write:

He glanced at Megan, who nodded, and then he clicked on Send. ‘There. He should identify himself now.’ He yawned, and stretched. ‘Let’s go. I think we’ve done all we can here.’

He turned off the computer, took the small bundle of papers they had sorted, turned down the thermostat for the heating, and switched off the light. They left the flat.

Chris looked at his watch. Twenty past ten. ‘Damn,’ he said. ‘I wanted to talk to one of her neighbours. It’s too late to disturb them now.’

But they were lucky. Just as they were about to reach the front door, it opened, and a bespectacled man in a smart overcoat and suit came in, bringing with him the waft of alcohol. He glanced at them with curiosity.

‘Hello,’ said Chris.

‘Hi.’

‘Do you live here?’

‘Yes, I do. Can I help you?’

He was American, about thirty-five, slightly overweight with a friendly face.

‘Did you know Lenka Němečková?’

‘Sure. I live in the apartment above hers.’ Then his eyes narrowed. He had caught the tense Chris had used. ‘What’s wrong?’

‘I’m afraid she’s been murdered. In Prague. We’re friends of hers.’ Chris introduced himself and Megan.

As so many other people had been when Chris had told them the news, the American was stunned.

‘Her parents asked me to take care of her stuff,’ Chris said. ‘They gave me the key. Can you keep an eye on her flat for me? Give me a call if there’s anything wrong.’

Chris handed him his card. The American took it, and looked dully at the writing on it. ‘I can’t believe it,’ he said.

‘Perhaps I can take your number?’ Chris asked.

‘Oh, sure,’ said the American, giving Chris a card in return. Richard H. Storebrand, Vice President. He worked for one of the large US investment management companies.

‘Thanks. Oh, by the way, you didn’t see anything odd last week, did you? Any strange visitors, anything like that?’

‘No, I don’t think so,’ he said. Then he furrowed his brow. ‘There was a guy who used to hang around here. He used to lean against the lamppost on the other side of the street. He was kind of creepy. Anyway, I was coming back here a couple of weeks ago and I bumped into Lenka. He crossed the street toward her. She saw him, pushed me into the building, and shut the door behind us. The guy rang the doorbell and shouted after her. She told me to ignore him and went up the stairs to her apartment. I haven’t seen him around since then.’

‘Did she look frightened?’ Chris asked.

‘No. More pissed off. But I guess a girl like that gets used to men hanging around her.’

‘Was this man American?’

‘No, I don’t think so. But he did have some kind of accent. Irish or Scottish, I think. I’m not real good on those.’

‘What did he look like?’

‘Big guy. Red hair, kind of messy. Wore a suit. He looked respectable, he didn’t really look like a weirdo, but he was just hanging out.’

Duncan.

‘Thanks,’ Chris said, smiling. ‘Let’s keep in touch, OK?’

The man nodded absently. ‘Lenka. I can’t believe it.’

And Chris and Megan left Richard H. Storebrand, Vice President, shaking his head at the horrors of the world.

When they returned to Chris’s flat the light on the answer machine was blinking. Chris pressed the button.

‘Hi, Chris, this is Eric. I heard about Lenka. I’m very sorry. I’m going to be in London for a couple of days early next week. I’m getting in Sunday. Would you like to meet me for a drink at my hotel Sunday evening? Say seven o’clock? I’m staying at the Lanesborough. Just leave a message there if you can make it. Hope to see you then.’

Chris glanced at Megan. She was standing very still, looking at the machine.

‘A voice from the past,’ said Chris.

‘Yes,’ Megan answered, almost in a whisper.

‘Do you want to come with me? I’m sure Eric wouldn’t mind.’

Megan took a moment to answer. ‘No, no. I’d better not. Anyway, I should be going to Cambridge tomorrow.’

‘OK,’ said Chris.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Megan. ‘It’s just weird to hear his voice again. Look, er... I’d better be going to bed.’

‘All right. Good night.’

‘Good night.’

6

‘Come here, bloody dog!’

The angry grey-haired man puffed past them in an attempt to catch up with his dog, a red setter that was streaking up the hill in pursuit of a spry fox terrier.

‘Algy!’ he screamed, and then the dog was out of sight.

It was a lovely morning: cold, crisp and clear. The northern slope of Parliament Hill was still brushed with frost, but the sun had warmed the southern side into freshly glistening dew. To their right stretched London, in the great grey bowl of the Thames, streaks of mists still lingering amongst the tall towers of the City. The low winter sun reflected in a bright orange triangle off the roof of Canary Wharf.

They paused when they reached the summit. The young setter was heading full speed for the Highgate duck ponds, leaving his master striding rapidly down the hill after him.

‘I wonder who is taking who for a walk,’ said Megan.

‘The dog’s certainly having fun,’ Chris said.

The setter stopped abruptly, and turned back towards his master, at a lope, tongue hanging out, tail wagging, oblivious of the curses raining down on him.

‘This must be dog heaven,’ said Megan, looking round at the four-legged creatures of all shapes and sizes going about their Saturday-morning business.

‘Did you ever have one?’ Chris asked.

‘Yes,’ Megan smiled. ‘He was a very fat basset-hound called Beau. Hills weren’t really his thing. His two favourite pastimes were eating and lying in front of the TV with his eyes shut. I loved him, though. He died when I was twelve. I cried and cried.’

They made their way down the northern slope of the hill towards the centre of Hampstead Heath, their shoes crunching through the dusting of ice.

‘Did the Czech police have any idea who might have killed Lenka?’ Megan asked.

‘Funny, I was just thinking about that,’ said Chris. ‘They hadn’t much of a clue when I first spoke to them, but that was right after it had happened. I haven’t heard anything from them since.’

‘Do you think this man Marcus might have had anything to do with it?’

‘Possible, I suppose. It’s hard to say when we don’t know who he is or what Lenka wanted to say to him.’

‘It’s odd that in the week Alex’s death resurfaces Lenka should be killed.’

‘Yes,’ said Chris. ‘It is.’ They walked on in silence together, both thinking. ‘Let’s say that you were right and Lenka was telling this man Marcus what really happened. Why would he want to know?’

‘Perhaps he’s a cop?’

‘Doesn’t sound like one,’ said Chris. ‘If he was, you’d expect him to be waving a badge around. And he wouldn’t use his Christian name. If it is his Christian name.’

‘Private investigator? Maybe he was hired by Bloomfield Weiss?’

‘Possible. Or perhaps he’s a journalist?’

Megan winced. ‘That would be bad. The last thing we need is all that dredged up in the papers.’

‘It would make a good story though. “Investment Bankers Cover Up Ten-Year-Old Murder on Boat.” ’

‘It wasn’t a murder.’

‘It would be after the newspapers got at it.’

‘I think what Lenka’s neighbour said about Duncan sounds pretty creepy,’ Megan said.

‘That’s nothing,’ Chris said. That’s just Duncan.’

‘Hanging around women’s apartments isn’t nothing,’ Megan replied fiercely.

‘But Duncan has always had a thing about Lenka.’

‘Yeah. And now she’s dead.’

‘What are you suggesting?’

‘I’m just saying. It sounds pretty creepy.’

Chris had to admit she had a point. ‘OK. Let’s say it does. But I know Duncan. He might follow Lenka, he might even pester her, but she would be the last person in the world he would kill. When I told him about her he was devastated.’

Megan sighed. ‘I’m not accusing him of killing her. But someone did.’

‘Yes, someone did.’

‘Do you think we should tell the police about this?’ Megan said.

‘About Duncan?’

‘Maybe.’

‘No. He’s a friend of mine and I don’t want to get him into trouble needlessly.’

‘What about the mysterious Marcus?’

‘Hmm.’ Chris thought it over. ‘The problem is, if we tell them about Marcus, we have to tell them about the e-mail, and about Alex. And I don’t think that’s a good idea. We could still get into a lot of trouble about it all. Besides, perhaps the Czech police have some good leads in Prague. Who knows, maybe they’ve arrested someone.’

‘I doubt it, don’t you?’

‘Yes,’ said Chris. ‘I do. I was planning to call Lenka’s parents this afternoon. I’ll ask if they’ve heard anything from the police. But I think if anyone is going to find out why Lenka died, it has to be us.’

‘But what can we do?’ asked Megan.

‘Try to find out who this Marcus is. Talk to him. Find out what Ian knows.’

‘And check up on Duncan.’

‘And check up on Duncan,’ Chris repeated. ‘I can also ask Eric whether he has any ideas when I see him tomorrow evening. He usually has a good take on things.’

‘He does,’ said Megan.

They walked on.

‘What happened between you and him?’ Chris asked.

Megan glanced at Chris, as though she were trying to decide whether to tell him. In the end, she seemed to make up her mind. ‘We split up. A year after your training programme.’

‘Why?’

‘I still don’t know,’ Megan replied. ‘Or at least, I probably do know, but I don’t want to believe it. At first he said it just wasn’t practical living so far apart, which was why I arranged to move to New York. Then he said we were becoming different people: he had his life, and I had mine. I didn’t understand that. I was devastated. I tried to change his mind, but I knew there was no point. If Eric decides he wants to do something, he does it, and there’s not much you can do about it.’

‘A bit like Lenka,’ Chris said.

‘I suppose. The thing is, two months later he met another woman. Cassie.’

‘She’s some high-society type, isn’t she?’

‘Yes. She’s also beautiful and intelligent, and very charming. I was as jealous as hell of her. They got married a year later, as you probably know.’

‘I heard.’

‘I think I just wasn’t good enough for Eric’

That’s a bit harsh, isn’t it?’

Megan shot Chris an angry glance. This was clearly something she had been thinking about a lot over the years. ‘My father ran the five-and-dime in Oneonta, upstate New York. This town is small. Fourteen thousand people and fifty-four churches. You have to drive seventy miles to Albany for your thrills. I have no money, no influence. I’d be no use to Eric. But Cassie... Cassie’s different.’

‘I’m sure Eric wouldn’t be bothered by someone’s background,’ said Chris. Eric had always struck him as too sensible to spend the rest of his life with someone just because of how rich they were. Besides, Eric was quite capable of making his own money.

‘Oh, no?’ said Megan. ‘It’s not just that Cassie knows everyone. Nor that she’s the perfect successful banker’s wife. Do you know who her father is?’

‘No,’ said Chris, regretting now that he had contradicted Megan on such a sensitive subject.

‘He’s a Republican Senator. As was her grandfather. And her uncle was in the Reagan Administration.’

‘Ah.’

‘So, when Eric makes his move into politics, the whole family will be there to smooth the way for him.’

‘I see. But do you think Eric will do that? I mean, he’s doing so well at Bloomfield Weiss, why would he want to pack it in?’

‘Oh, I’m sure Eric wants to do that. He’s wanted to all his life. It’s the kind of ambition that doesn’t go away. I’d bet on it. He’ll make his move one day, probably one day soon.’

‘Do you still see him?’

‘I tried for a few months. You know, we were “just good friends”. He did a good job of it too, which infuriated me. But I couldn’t stand it. I hated him. And I hated her. She was always so damned nice all the time. Every time I saw him for a normal social occasion I’d come back mad, and it would take me a week to recover. So I stopped. I was invited to the wedding, but I didn’t go. I haven’t seen him for eight years now.’

They walked on. They were in a quiet part of the Heath now, amongst gnarled old oak trees, whose bare branches intertwined like old women’s fingers over their heads.

‘He was a fool, you know,’ said Chris. ‘To let you go.’

Megan glanced at him. ‘Thank you,’ she said.

Chris waited in the bar of the Lanesborough, drinking a gin and tonic. It didn’t quite seem the place for a pint of bitter. Book-lined walls, dark wood, leather chairs and sofas, crystal glasses, a fire: the place oozed wealth and comfort. It was heaving with aged American tourists, cigar-smoking businessmen, and a group of men in black tie there for some function or other. Chris was glad he had changed out of his jeans into trousers and a sports jacket. But he still felt underdressed.

He had taken Megan to King’s Cross the day before and said goodbye to her. He also called Lenka’s parents, and in a slow stilted conversation, he suggested that they should get a solicitor to sort out Lenka’s affairs in London since her estate could certainly afford one. He asked them how the police investigation was going. They said that the police had questioned a local criminal with ties to the Ukrainian mafia, but that they had had to let him go again. Or at least that’s what Chris thought Lenka’s father had said; it was difficult to be sure. One thing he was sure of was that Lenka’s funeral would be on Wednesday. Chris planned to go, and so did Megan. He called Duncan, who said he would come. A Czech funeral in February promised to be a grim affair. But at least Megan would be there.

He thought about Marcus. Who could he be? Lenka had said that he had a ‘right’ to know the truth about Alex’s death. Who could have a ‘right’ to know? That didn’t fit policemen or private investigators and it especially didn’t fit journalists. It had to be someone with a closer link to Alex. Friend? Relation?

Suddenly, Chris knew the answer. It should be easy enough to check: Eric would be able to confirm it.

‘Hey, Chris, how are you?’

It was the man himself, wearing a blazer, shirt and tie, and looking totally at ease in the surroundings. Like Ian, he gave the impression of experience and authority beyond his years, but unlike Ian, he wore it in a relaxed, self-confident way.

‘I’m all right. And you?’

Eric perched on a stool next to Chris. ‘It’s crazy. But it’s always crazy. I’ve just done my calculations for the IRS. Do you know I spent one hundred and forty-three days out of the country last year?’

‘All on business?’

‘All but four of them. We were supposed to have a vacation in Bermuda for a week, but I got called back early. Cassie was mad as hell, and I don’t blame her. But I guess I like things this way.’ He ordered a kir from the barman. ‘It’s been what? Over a year?’

‘Almost. It was just after Lenka and I had started Carpathian. We all met up for dinner at that place in Chelsea.’

‘I remember,’ said Eric, smiling. Then the smile disappeared. ‘I’m very sorry about Lenka. You were there when it happened, I hear?’

Chris sighed. ‘That’s right. I still dream about it at night. I don’t think I’ll forget about it for a long time.’ Involuntarily he looked down at his hands. Eric noticed.

‘Messy, was it?’

Chris nodded. For some reason, at that moment, he almost fell apart. He had spent so long telling people about Lenka in as dispassionate a way as he could, that he had almost succeeded in persuading himself that he hadn’t really been there. But now, with Eric, he knew he had, and it all rushed back at him. He felt his eyes sting.

He swallowed. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

‘That’s OK,’ said Eric softly. ‘I can’t imagine what it was like.’

‘It’s not an experience I’d want to repeat,’ said Chris. ‘How did you hear about it?’

‘It’s all over Bloomfield Weiss. Did they catch the guy who did it?’

‘Apparently not. The police questioned someone in Prague last week, but they had to let him go. I’m not sure whether they’ve got any other leads.’

‘Lenka was an extraordinary woman,’ Eric said. ‘I’ll never forget her on the training programme. She added something, don’t you think? Colour. Spontaneity. Spirit. Do you remember when she took on Waldern, after he’d bullied that Italian woman, what was her name?’

‘Carla. Yes, I remember.’

‘First Alex and now Lenka.’ Eric shuddered.

‘Speaking of Alex,’ Chris said. ‘He had a brother, didn’t he? Do you remember his name?’

‘As a matter of fact I do. Marcus.’

‘I thought so!’ said Chris in triumph.

‘In fact, he tried to get in touch with me in New York a few weeks ago. He said he wanted to talk to me about Alex’s death. I wouldn’t see him. He was pretty upset about it, according to my assistant, but I thought it would be hard to talk to him without giving anything away.’

‘That was probably wise,’ said Chris.

‘Have you spoken to him?’

‘No, but Lenka did.’ Chris told Eric all about Lenka’s meeting with Marcus, and her subsequent e-mails to him.

‘God,’ said Eric. ‘Do you know what she said? Do you think she told him what really happened?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Chris. ‘But if she didn’t, it certainly sounds as though she meant to.’

‘That could be awkward if he goes to the police.’

‘I know,’ said Chris. He was struck by an unpleasant thought. ‘Christ, what will we do if the police ask questions?’

Eric thought for a second. ‘If the police ask, don’t say anything. It was a US crime, so it will be American jurisdiction. I don’t know how it is in this country, but in the States they can’t force you to incriminate yourself. In fact, better yet, give me a call, and I’ll get you a good American lawyer. You’d better tell Ian and Duncan that as well.’

‘And Megan,’ said Chris.

‘Megan?’ said Eric in surprise. ‘Have you seen Megan?’

‘Yes. She came to our office last week. She was supposed to be staying with Lenka. They’d become good friends, apparently.’

‘Really?’ said Eric. ‘How is she? I always liked that woman, you know.’

‘I think she liked you too,’ said Chris.

‘Yes, well.’ For a moment Eric looked uncharacteristically flustered. ‘Actually, I haven’t seen her for years. What’s she doing now?’

‘She’s studying medieval history at the University of Chicago. She’s spending the next six months at Cambridge researching her dissertation for her PhD, I think.’

‘Good. Well, say hi to her from me if you see her again.’

‘I will.’

Eric frowned. ‘I think we did the right thing about Alex. I mean, Duncan would have been prosecuted, I’m sure, and that would have been wrong. Provided we all stick together and don’t admit to anything, we’ll be OK. It’s a long time ago.’

‘I think we did the right thing, too. Besides, we don’t know what Lenka said to Marcus, let alone how he’ll react to it. I’m going to the States next week and I’d like to get in touch with him. Do you have his phone number, or address or anything? I’ve only got his e-mail address.’

‘I don’t know,’ said Eric. ‘I doubt it. I can check when I get back to New York, if you like. But I suspect my assistant jotted his number down on a scrap of paper and threw it away when I told her I didn’t want to talk to him. He shouldn’t be too difficult to find, though. Marcus Lubron can’t be a common name.’

‘Did you ever meet him when Alex was alive?’

‘No. If you remember, he was travelling. Skiing in the winter, and sailing in the summer, I think. He didn’t even come back for Alex’s funeral. I don’t think Alex’s mother could get hold of him in time. By the way, did you know she died a month later?’

‘No, I didn’t. I do remember she was awfully ill.’

‘Poor Alex.’

They both drank in silence.

‘Anyway, how’s your fund doing?’ Eric asked. ‘What’s it called again? Carpathian?’

‘That’s right. We had a solid start. Twenty-nine per cent return in the first nine months.’

Eric raised his eyebrows. ‘That’s more than solid. That’s damn good.’

Chris smiled. He lapped up the praise. Eric was one of the few people he wanted to impress, and he was proud of what he and Lenka had achieved.

‘But we’ve run into one or two problems since Lenka died.’

‘Oh.’

‘Do you remember Rudy Moss?’

‘Rudy Moss. I certainly do. The fat guy with the pointy nose. Didn’t he leave Bloomfield Weiss a few years ago?’

‘Yeah. He joined Amalgamated Veterans Life. Where he invested in our fund. Until last week. He said he’d take his money out now Lenka was gone.’

‘No? I always knew he was a jerk.’

‘He is,’ Chris confirmed. ‘The problem is the market’s down and Lenka took a big position in a Bloomfield Weiss deal that turns out to be a dog.’

‘Let me guess... Eureka Telecom?’

‘That’s the one. You didn’t have anything to do with that deal, did you?’ asked Chris.

‘Oh, no. It’s my group, though. I do international telecoms M&A. It’s a hot area. But Eureka Telecom is a bit small for me.’

‘Really?’ said Chris. ‘I knew you were in M&A, but I’d forgotten which sector. Maybe you can help.’

Eric stiffened. ‘I don’t know about that.’

‘You see, Ian told Lenka something quite interesting before she bought the bonds. He said there was a good chance that Eureka Telecom would be taken over by Radaphone. Since then, the deal has crapped out. Is there any chance that might be true?’

‘Whoa, Chris,’ said Eric. ‘That question blasts through about fifteen internal procedures, half a dozen regulations and a couple of Chinese walls.’

‘But Eric. As a mate. I really need the help. Just a clue.’

‘No, Chris. These rules apply especially to mates. And definitely no clues. And don’t assume from that that I know anything, OK? Also, Ian was way out of line telling Lenka that, whether it’s true or not.’

‘Sorry,’ said Chris. ‘I suppose I shouldn’t have asked you. Forget it. It’s just that it does worry me.’

‘Forgotten,’ said Eric. ‘But I suggest we stay well clear of the topic in future.’

‘Agreed. So how’s your business going?’

‘Pretty good,’ said Eric. ‘We did the Luxtel — Morrison Infotainment deal last year. And the Deutsche Mobilcom — Cablefrance deal. In fact, we’re number one in telecoms advisory worldwide. And as I said, it’s a hot place to be.’

‘You’re one of the top producers, I take it?’

‘I took over the group at the beginning of last year.’

‘Oh.’ Chris thought about that. At thirty-three, Eric was running probably the most profitable Mergers and Acquisitions group in the world. He must have got a good bonus last year. A bonus in the tens of millions of dollars. Chris was so tempted to ask, but decided against it.

Eric was watching him. He knew what he was thinking. He gave a tiny smile.

‘I always thought you’d do well,’ said Chris. ‘So well, that I think you can afford to buy me another drink.’

‘I’d like to, but I’m supposed to be going out to dinner with some clients in a couple of minutes. But look, you said you were coming to the States soon?’

‘I’m going to Hartford to see Rudy bloody Moss a week on Monday.’

‘Why don’t you come to dinner? I should be in New York that week, although the way things are going I can’t guarantee it. You haven’t met Cassie yet, have you?’

‘No. I’d like to do that. Thank you.’

‘Great. See you then.’

Eric slipped away, and approached a group of three Italian-looking businessmen in the lobby. Another big deal.

7

‘Bloomfield Weiss.’

‘Ian? It’s Chris.’

‘Oh.’

‘Where are you making Eureka Telecom?’

‘Do you want to deal?’

‘No. Just a level.’

‘One tick.’

Chris waited. He was expecting bad news, and he got it.

‘Eighty-eight to ninety.’ Ian’s voice was tense. Ready for an argument.

Chris didn’t give him one. ‘Ian, we need to talk.’

Ian sighed. ‘After Friday, I don’t think that’s necessary, do you?’

‘It’s about Lenka.’

‘We talked about Lenka.’

‘I went to her flat on Friday night. I saw her e-mails. Including one to you. And one to Marcus.’

‘To Marcus! What did it say?’

‘I don’t think we should talk about that on the phone, do you? I’ll see you in half an hour at Ponti’s.’

‘But Chris, I’ve got to talk to my clients!’

‘No, Ian. You’ve got to talk to me.’

This time it took Chris the full half hour to get there. The café was quiet at nine thirty on a Monday morning. Those who were going to work were already there, and it was too early for the loiterers to emerge. Ian was sitting at a table over a cappuccino and a cigarette, flirting with a striking six-foot tall waitress. His smile disappeared when he saw Chris. The waitress gave Chris a black look for interrupting them, and drifted off. Chris ignored her and sat down opposite Ian.

‘So, tell me about Marcus.’

Ian took a long drag on his cigarette and carefully flicked the ash into an ashtray before replying. ‘As you probably know, he’s Alex’s brother. He came to see Lenka about Alex’s death.’

‘And what did she tell him?’

‘I don’t know. You saw her e-mail to him. What did it say?’ Ian couldn’t hide his anxiety as he asked the question.

‘What do you think it said?’

‘I don’t know! That’s why I’m asking you!’ Ian’s impatience was growing.

Chris paused for a moment, enjoying Ian’s discomfort. ‘It said that she had something important she wanted to tell him about Alex’s death.’

‘But she didn’t say what it was?’

‘No. She said she wanted to see Marcus in person to explain it.’ As Chris said this, Ian relaxed. But only for a moment. ‘There’s a reply from Marcus. It says he’ll phone her.’

‘And you don’t know whether he did?’

‘No.’

Ian’s tension had returned.

‘There was also an e-mail from her to you saying she had to tell him about something. You begged her not to.’

‘That’s right.’

‘What was it?’

Ian thought for a moment. ‘What really happened, of course. That Duncan hit Alex and he fell in the sea. That Duncan was responsible for his death.’

‘And why should this bother you? You don’t care much about Duncan, do you?’

‘It’s not that. We’d all get in trouble, wouldn’t we? It was stupid of Lenka to even think of talking about it.’

‘Do you think that’s why she was murdered?’

Ian looked at him with derision. ‘Of course not. Are you suggesting I killed her? I was sleeping with her, for God’s sake!’

‘Ollie says that Lenka wouldn’t take your calls for a couple of days before she died.’

‘That’s true. I was angry about Marcus. She was angry with me. But there’s nothing odd about that. You know Lenka. She could lose her temper pretty easily.’

‘Her funeral is on Wednesday. Are you coming?’

Ian closed his eyes, and shook his head.

‘Why not?’

‘I can’t get away,’ Ian said wearily.

Chris stood up with contempt in his voice. ‘You weren’t really much of a friend to her, were you?’

Ian pursed his lips, anger flaring in his eyes. ‘Fuck off, Chris,’ he said.

Chris was still angry when he got back to the office. There was something about Ian that made him lose his temper every time. He knew it was stupid: his only chance of getting out of that bloody Eureka Telecom position was to persuade Bloomfield Weiss to buy the bonds. Well, if he hadn’t blown that on Friday, he definitely had now.

But what was it that was getting to him?

Obviously, the discovery of Ian’s relationship with Lenka had rattled him more than he had realized. Could he be jealous, as Megan had hinted? Did he regret that Ian had succeeded where he hadn’t dared to try?

He tried to think about that objectively. He was pretty sure the answer was no. He was very fond of Lenka, but he had never thought of her sexually. Right from the beginning, when he was still going out with Tamara, he had placed her off limits and kept her there ever since. That was the secret of their friendship. Lenka liked men. All her other relationships with males had deteriorated into sex and then breakup. But not with Chris. They felt safe with each other, they trusted each other, they were very good friends.

In which case, what was it about Ian that upset him so much? He had always assumed Lenka had torrid relationships with men, and although he had never known the details, he had accepted it as part of who she was: if anything, it made her more colourful. But to see Ian treating her as just another casual relationship, a hot babe to bonk for a few weeks, made him crazy. Why didn’t Ian recognize that she was so much more than that? He wasn’t even going to her funeral, for God’s sake! And the way he had used their relationship so cynically to sell her the Eureka Telecom bonds disgusted Chris. He didn’t believe for one moment that there was anything in the Radaphone rumour. It was just a product of Ian’s imagination, aimed at dumping twenty-five million euros of a difficult position. That should be good for a few grand on his bonus at the end of the year.

Could Ian have killed her to prevent her from telling Marcus about Duncan?

Chris had to admit that the answer was probably not. It wouldn’t make sense. Certainly, the police would cause trouble if they asked questions. But Eric was right; as long as all the witnesses on the boat stuck together, they would all be safe. The police couldn’t prove anything. With a shiver, Chris realized that Ian could even try to cut a deal if he agreed to tell the police what really happened in return for immunity from prosecution. That would be bloody typical. Either way, Ian would survive.

No. As much as he liked to think the contrary, Ian was probably not responsible for Lenka’s death.

Chris wished he could talk to Megan about all this. She would be able to add some objectivity. He wondered how she was getting on at Cambridge. Would she even have a telephone? He desperately wanted to call her.

What about Duncan? Megan had suggested that he should find out a bit more about Duncan and Lenka’s recent relationship. But before confronting him, there was someone else he wanted to talk to first.

He looked up the number for United Arab International Bank, dialled it, and asked to speak to Phillippa Gemmel.

‘Securities Trading,’ came the voice, bright and breezy.

‘Pippa? It’s Chris Szczypiorski.’

‘Chris. How are you?’ She wasn’t rude, but she didn’t sound exactly pleased to hear from him.

‘Look, Pippa, do you think we could meet for a few minutes after work? It won’t take long. There’s something I want to discuss with you.’

‘If Duncan wants to talk to me, he can speak to me himself,’ Pippa said.

‘It’s true, I do want to talk to you about Duncan. But he doesn’t know I’m calling you. Please. It won’t take long.’

Pippa was silent for a moment. ‘OK. But I’m leaving at five thirty. Can you meet me downstairs in the lobby?’

‘Fine. I’ll see you there at half past five.’

He hung up. Next, he pulled out the card of the English-speaking Czech policeman who had interviewed him after the murder. Poručík Petr Karásek. Presumably, poručík was his rank. He dialled, and eventually got through to him. Chris asked whether he had made any progress.

‘We have had some success,’ the policeman replied. His English was careful and clear. ‘We found a woman who said she saw a man with a moustache running out of the street where Miss Němečková was killed. We showed her photographs and she identified a criminal we know here who uses a knife. He is Czech, but he works for the Ukrainian mafia. We arrested him. But there are problems. She was not sure of the identificationwhen we put him in a line, and he has a — what do you say? Ah, yes. Alibi, I think?’

‘Yes, alibi,’ said Chris.

‘It may be false. We are still working on that line of inquiry.’

‘So you think the murderer is a local criminal?’ Chris asked.

‘From the way he used the knife, we think he was a professional. Unfortunately, we do have some professional killers in Prague. It is likely it is one of them. Do you have any idea of a motive?’

Chris knew that Karásek was thinking about Carpathian’s investments. ‘No,’ he answered.

‘You are sure Miss Němečková had no business deals in the Czech Republic?’

‘We own two million euros of a CEZ bond and a lot of bonds issued by your government.’ CEZ was the national electricity company, hardly likely to be the centre of an organized crime conspiracy. ‘Besides that, we were planning to open an office in Prague, but I can’t see why that would upset anyone. Have you spoken to Jan Pavlík?’

‘Yes, we have, but with no luck.’ There was a pause. ‘Have you any other ideas for us, Mr Szczypiorski?’

Marcus and Alex was a can of worms that Chris didn’t want to open at that moment.

‘No. Nothing’

Karásek didn’t sound surprised. ‘OK. Thank you for keeping in contact. Goodbye.’

Chris put down the phone. Nowhere. They were getting nowhere. Chris wasn’t convinced by the identification. The more he thought about it, the more he suspected that the key to Lenka’s murder lay in London, or possibly New York, rather than the Ukrainian mafia in Prague.

He stared down at the papers in front of him. There was his portfolio, mocking him. If Amalgamated Veterans did want to withdraw their money, what would he liquidate?

It would be next to impossible to sell the Eureka Telecom position to Bloomfield Weiss now that he had pissed off Ian so comprehensively. He checked the prices with other brokers. They were all floating around the Bloomfield Weiss level, apart from Leipziger Gurney Kroheim who were making the bonds ninety-one to ninety-two. But he knew he’d never be able to offload the whole ten million with them. The truth was Bloomfield Weiss were the market in these bonds, and Bloomfield Weiss didn’t want to buy them.

So what else could he sell?

There were four other relatively small positions in junk bonds that Lenka had bought, plus a couple of better quality issuers like CEZ. All of them were good companies with good prospects. He considered his own large government bond position. This had moved against him following the wobble from Russia, but he was sure it would come back. Now was the wrong time to sell. It would be against all his principles to get rid of his good positions and be left with his bad one.

Then there was the problem of valuation. The fund was revalued once a month, and the February reval was the following day. Technically, he might be able to get away with a price of eighty-eight for the twenty-five million euro position. But he knew that the real price, the price at which he could actually sell the bonds, was more like seventy. That was a seven and a half million loss. Chris winced. The investors would not like that one bit.

But he would have to use that price. He knew what could happen if you didn’t disclose your losses immediately, and he didn’t want to find himself in a similar position again. Besides, allowing Rudy to sell out of the fund at a higher price would be unfair on the other investors who remained in. If Rudy was determined to sell, he would just have to take his loss and lump it. And Chris would have to pray that the fund survived the consequences.

Chris leaned back in his chair and exhaled. This was getting all too familiar. A big position spinning out of control, taking everything else down with it. He could tell himself that it wasn’t his fault of course, just like it hadn’t been his fault last time. But he should face reality. He couldn’t handle this kind of thing. Somehow, it always went wrong, and he could never figure out why.

Perhaps trading really was like chess. People assumed that the secret to chess was the ability to plan precisely several moves ahead, just as they assumed that good traders were those who could calculate precisely what was going to happen next in the markets. But both chess and trading were much more imprecise than that. Good chess players developed a feel for a position. They would plan many moves ahead to achieve a position that they felt was strong: an unassailable knight, a bishop attacking the opponent’s centre, a crushing pawn attack on the queen’s side. For them, chess was as much an art as a science.

Chris had been good at chess. His father had taught him young, and taught him well. He had never pushed him to work hard at it, but had shown a quiet satisfaction whenever Chris played well. Chris played for his school, he played for his club, he beat players several years older than himself. After his father died, he tried even harder, with some success. At eleven, he could beat the average adult club player. He won a junior county chess championship. People expected great things of him; everywhere he was compared to his father.

And then, when he reached thirteen or fourteen, things changed. As he played in higher circles, his opponents improved. He lost matches. Once he even lost to a precocious twelve-year-old. He became even more competitive, he spent hours reading chess books, perfecting his openings, trying to understand the deeper subtleties of strategy, but none of this seemed to help. He lost to better players, and he didn’t understand why. He came to realize that they had a better feel for a position than he did, that he could be pottering along quite happily through the game, while his opponent was consolidating a winning position that Chris hadn’t even recognized. If his father had still been around, he might have explained what was going on. But his father wasn’t around. It came to him that he was never going to be as good a player as his father. There would always be thousands of chess players better than him. The memory of his father’s quiet smile of satisfaction as he made a good move, a memory that had sustained him through so many games in the years since his father’s death, began to fade. It was no longer fun to play chess. He gave up.

He had done similarly well as a trader. For a few years, while he was trading so successfully at Bloomfield Weiss, he had thought he’d sussed it. He developed a feel for a good position and a bad one. He knew when to buy more of a good position, to have the courage to be a pig, as George Soros would say, and when to cut a bad one. The profits rolled in, until that disastrous summer when, thanks to Herbie Exler, he had dropped six hundred million. Eventually, with Lenka’s help, he had managed to tell himself that that really wasn’t his fault, that it wouldn’t happen again.

And now it was happening again. Sure, he wasn’t going to lose six hundred million dollars, but he could lose Carpathian’s reputation, and with it its investors. And that mattered.

Once again, none of this seemed to be his fault. But perhaps there was something he just couldn’t see, something about how to deal with the people he worked with, that meant that he found himself in these disastrous positions. Lenka could have helped him. But Lenka, like his father, wasn’t there.

As he sat at his desk, he felt the icy fingers of panic slowly grip at his chest. He was afraid. Not just afraid of losing money on the Eureka Telecom position, or even of losing Carpathian, but afraid of losing the shreds of his self-esteem that he had fought so hard to regain. The market was battering him, and he was hurting.

The phone rang. He picked it up.

‘Carpathian.’

‘Chris? It’s Megan.’

‘Oh, hi. How are you?’

‘I’m fine. What about you? You sound sort of tense. Or do you traders always answer the phone like that?’

‘I suppose we do,’ said Chris, although he was impressed and pleased that Megan had managed to pick up his mood. ‘But it’s true, I’m not having the world’s greatest day.’

‘Are the markets going against you?’ she asked.

‘You could say that,’ said Chris. ‘Never mind. How’s Cambridge?’

‘Great. They’ve given me some really nice rooms in college in a building that must be three hundred years old. And I’ve met my supervisor and found the library. I’m really quite excited by it all.’

‘That’s good.’

‘I was calling because I’ve booked a flight to Prague with Czech Airlines from Stansted Airport for Wednesday morning, coming back that night. I thought we could go together.’

‘That’s a good idea. Give me the details. By the way, I think Duncan will be coming with us.’

‘OK,’ said Megan, unenthusiastically.

‘Look at it this way, it’ll give me a chance to find out what he was doing hanging around Lenka’s place.’

‘I’d have thought that was pretty obvious,’ Megan said disapprovingly. But she gave Chris the flight information.

‘By the way, I’ve worked out who Marcus is,’ Chris said.

‘And?’

‘Alex’s brother.’

‘Of course!’

‘I checked with Eric, who confirmed it. Apparently, Marcus tried to speak to him too, but Eric avoided him. And Eric told me to say “hi” to you, whatever that means.’

‘OK,’ said Megan. ‘How is he?’

‘Doing formidably well. He must be earning millions in bonuses.’

‘That doesn’t surprise me,’ said Megan. ‘Well, I’d better go now.’

‘OK. Oh, Megan?’

‘Yes.’

‘Thanks for ringing. It has been a bad day, and it was very nice to hear from you.’

‘Good,’ said Megan, and she was gone.

Chris waited for ten minutes in the cool glass-clad atrium of United Arab International’s office in Bishopsgate, watching suited bankers come and go. At last, Pippa emerged from the bank of lifts. She was a small woman with curly blonde hair and a bright smile. Quite pretty.

Chris kissed her on the cheek. ‘Let’s go to Williams. It’s close.’

‘Isn’t that where you and Duncan used to meet?’ Pippa asked.

‘That’s right.’

‘Well, I hope he won’t be there now.’

‘I don’t think he will,’ said Chris.

They reached the dark pub in five minutes. Duncan wasn’t there. Chris bought himself a pint of bitter, and Pippa a glass of white wine, and they sat down in the same dark corner he and Duncan had occupied the week before.

‘I haven’t got long,’ Pippa said. ‘I’m supposed to be meeting someone later in Covent Garden.’

‘OK,’ said Chris. ‘I’ll be quick. It’s about Lenka.’

Pippa’s face clouded over. ‘Oh God, not that woman. What’s Duncan done now?’

Chris was taken aback by her reply. It was clear she hadn’t heard. It would be unfair to ask her any more questions until he had told her.

‘Lenka’s dead. Murdered.’

Pippa was shocked. ‘Oh, my God. It wasn’t Duncan was it?’ Then she looked confused. ‘Sorry, I shouldn’t have said that. But that’s why you’re here, isn’t it? It must have something to do with Duncan.’

‘I have no reason to think that it has,’ said Chris, although in truth Pippa’s initial response had alarmed him. ‘It happened in Prague. The Czech police think it was a local who did it.’

‘Whew,’ said Pippa. ‘Duncan must be in a state.’

‘He is.’ Chris took a sip of his beer. ‘I take it that you knew about Duncan’s feelings towards Lenka?’

Pippa snorted. ‘Knew about them? Yes, I knew about them. At first, she just had the status of old girlfriend to be wary of. But then, pretty soon after we were married, I realized she was much more than that.’

‘How did you find out?’

‘From Duncan. He told me. It was mad. He began to talk about her occasionally, and then more and more often. You know how frank Duncan can be. I used to think it was cute. Now I think it’s just plain stupid. Once he came back from somewhere drunk and he went on about how Lenka was the only woman he’d ever really loved. To his wife, for God’s sake! He wanted to go and see her for lunch or a drink. I told him not to, but I’m sure he must have gone anyway. Not that I think he did anything. I think she had more sense than that.’

‘I don’t think they “did anything”, either, if that helps,’ said Chris.

‘I couldn’t give a shit one way or another, now,’ said Pippa. ‘Probably better if they had, quite frankly.’

‘Was that why you split up?’ Chris asked. ‘Duncan never said.’

Pippa sighed. ‘That’s probably the reason, but I wouldn’t want to put all the blame on Duncan. At first, I thought he was great. He’s cute, and he seemed to think I was the most wonderful person he’d ever met. He had that adoring puppy-dog look.’ She scowled. ‘I really fell for it. Then we got married, things changed, and it turned out Lenka was the most wonderful woman he’d ever met.’

‘Difficult,’ said Chris.

‘Yeah. But I said it wasn’t all his fault. Has Duncan told you about Tony?’

Chris shook his head.

‘He’s a guy at work. I’d been seeing him. Duncan found out about it. He was quite good about it, really. Things just fell apart from there.’

‘Oh.’

‘Yes. The whole marriage was a right cock-up. Thank God there weren’t any kids.’

‘Is it Tony you’re going to see now?’

Pippa reddened. ‘No,’ she said. ‘That ended pretty quickly. It turns out I’m not the world expert on relationships, either.’

Chris had to summon up his courage to ask the next question. ‘Do you think Duncan could have killed Lenka?’

‘Um, no. No, I don’t.’ But Chris noticed the hesitation in her voice.

‘Isn’t that what you seemed to think when I mentioned Lenka had been murdered?’

‘Yeah.’ Pippa looked down into her glass. ‘I’m sorry about that. It was just that I assumed you wanted to see me because Duncan had got himself into some kind of trouble, and when you said she’d been killed, my first thought was that was it. But even in his weirdest moments, Duncan wouldn’t do something like that.’

‘A neighbour said that Duncan had been hanging around Lenka’s flat.’

‘That doesn’t surprise me.’

‘It also seems that Lenka had been avoiding him.’

‘Neither does that. I never got any impression that Lenka felt the same way about Duncan that he did about her. She obviously had more sense.’

‘So, if she rejected him, wouldn’t Duncan have been upset?’

‘Yes. He’d have been devastated.’ Pippa downed her wine. ‘Look. He drove me crazy, but for a while I loved the stupid bugger. He’s not a killer. I know that.’ She looked at her watch. ‘I’ve got to go. Thanks for the drink. Oh, and I am sorry about Lenka. I know she was a good friend of yours, too.’

With that, Pippa disappeared, leaving Chris even more confused.

As Chris opened the door to his flat, he heard the phone ringing. He picked it up. It was his mother.

‘Chris. How are you? Are you all right?’

How the hell did she know there was something wrong? Chris had avoided talking to her about Lenka. It was something he wanted to sort out by himself; the last thing he wanted to deal with then was his mother’s panicking.

‘Chris? Are you there? I’ve been ever so worried.’

‘Why, Mum?’

‘Because you haven’t telephoned me for two weeks, that’s why.’

‘But I don’t have to call you every week, do I?’

‘You don’t have to, no, dear. But you always do.’

Chris closed his eyes. There was no escaping his family. It was the same with all the Poles in Halifax. Even when you were an adult, you couldn’t escape your parents. He knew a close family was supposed to be a good thing, but sometimes, no, most of the time, he just wanted to grow up and get away from it.

‘There is something wrong, isn’t there?’ said his mother, worried now, rather than nagging.

‘Yes, Mum, there is.’ Chris took a deep breath. ‘Lenka has been killed.’

‘Oh, no!’

‘I’m afraid so.’

‘What was it? A car crash?’

‘No.’ Chris explained what had happened in some detail. To his surprise, he could hear his mother sobbing on the phone. She was a strong woman, his mother. She scarcely ever wept. It caught Chris unawares.

‘Mum, don’t cry.’

‘She was a lovely girl,’ said his mother. ‘She did so much for you.’

‘Yes, she did.’

‘I got the most wonderful letter from her after you and she started your business together. I wrote to her thanking her for helping you out—’

‘You did what?’

‘I wrote her a letter.’ Chris’s heart sank. Not for the first time he was mortified by his mother. ‘And she wrote me one back. She said you were her first choice for a partner. She said you were extremely good at your job, but that wasn’t the important thing. She said you were totally trustworthy, and she knew she could always rely on you if things went wrong. I kept the letter. I’ll show it to you if you like.’

‘That was nice of her,’ said Chris.

‘Oh, she meant it, dear. I know she meant it.’

Chris felt his eyes pricking. He knew she meant it, too.

‘How are you coping without her?’ his mother asked.

‘Struggling, to be honest.’

‘Ah, well. Never mind. I’m sure you’ll sort it out. I know you won’t let Lenka down now.’

‘No, Mum, I won’t.’

‘Can you come up and visit us next weekend? Anna will be here with Vic and the boys. And your granddad would love to see you.’

Anna was his sister. He supposed that it would be nice to see her, but they had drifted apart since her marriage to Vic at the age of twenty. And he wasn’t at all convinced about his grandfather. As a boy, Chris had idolized the crotchety old war hero, but as they had both grown older, they seemed to inhabit different worlds. His grandfather was suspicious of international banking, feeling it was a suitable profession for a Jew or a German rather than a good Polish Catholic, and Chris found the old man’s increasingly extreme political opinions hard to take. He could get by without seeing his grandfather.

‘Sorry, Mum, I can’t. As you can imagine, there’s a lot to sort out down here. And I’ve got to be in America on Monday.’

‘You’re always off somewhere or other, aren’t you? All right, dear. Have a good trip. And I am so sorry about Lenka.’

Chris said goodbye, and put down the phone. He slumped back in his chair and thought about his mother. He cringed as he imagined her writing to Lenka about him. But Lenka hadn’t cringed. She had understood a mother’s concern for her son, and her pride in him. Chris smiled to himself. Despite their very different styles, Lenka and his mother would probably have got on very well. It was a shame they had never had the chance to meet.

A twinge of guilt nagged at him. It wasn’t the usual guilt he felt about his efforts to distance himself from his family, about disappointing his mother and grandfather. For the first time he had an inkling that his desire to keep away from them was not a sign of maturity, but rather the opposite. His mother was a good woman, who truly loved him, and would do anything for him. If he really was an independent adult, there should be nothing in that to threaten him. Once he had truly established his own identity away from his family then there would be no shame or danger in seeing them. Lenka was a strong, independent person who had immediately seen the goodness in his mother. He was ashamed that he hadn’t the strength to do that too.

Lenka.

He glanced across the room at his computer, and wondered whether the mysterious Marcus had anything more to say about her. He switched on the machine and checked his e-mail, as he had done at frequent intervals throughout the weekend.

There was something. Between Hot Russian Babes Download and How to make $2,000 per week from home was a message entitled simply Lenka. It was from Marcus.

Chris opened it.

Chris stared at the message. He had promised Marcus information about Alex’s death. What could he tell him?

The problem was that he couldn’t be sure what Marcus already knew. Megan had guessed that Lenka had told him about Duncan knocking Alex into the sea, and Ian had confirmed that that was what Lenka intended to do, but Chris couldn’t be sure what she had actually said to him. And even if Lenka had told Marcus about Duncan, what if Marcus had decided to go to the police? With Lenka dead, he would have no evidence, unless Chris gave it to him now. That didn’t seem to Chris a good idea.

He started tapping the keyboard.

Chris signed off giving a handful of phone numbers: home, work, fax, mobile, and his address, and sent the e-mail. He had to know what Marcus had discovered, and what he was planning to do with the information.

8

Wednesday was horrible. Since it was possible to fly to Prague, attend Lenka’s funeral, and fly back in one day, that was what they had done. Duncan was ostentatiously miserable the whole time. Chris’s pleasure at seeing Megan again was tempered by her distracted manner. It was clear that she didn’t like Duncan’s presence. And, of course, she too was upset by the occasion. Most of the long day’s travelling was passed in silence, or desultory small talk.

They took a taxi from Ruzyně airport to Mělník, about thirty kilometres north of Prague. It was an ancient medieval town situated at the meeting point of two large rivers, the Vltava and the Elbe, dominated by an impressive castle, and surrounded by vine-clad slopes. But the crematorium was functional and depressing, the many mourners, most of them Lenka’s contemporaries, raised no more than a hushed greeting to each other, and her parents were devastated. There was no religious service, just music, and a eulogy from one of Lenka’s friends. Although Chris couldn’t understand a word of what she said, he could understand the sorrow.

Apart from that moment, Chris was surprised by how little he felt during the ceremony. It was hard to imagine Lenka growing up in this pretty little town, much harder than it was to be aware of her presence in the office in London, or even on the streets of Prague. Although he knew that the coffin must contain her body, he didn’t feel that the Lenka he knew was there. He didn’t know quite where she was, but he knew she wasn’t there.

The ceremony, such as it was, ended, and, after a few sad words with Lenka’s parents during which Chris managed to tell them that he had instructed Carpathian’s solicitors to take care of Lenka’s affairs in London, the three of them gratefully climbed back into the waiting taxi.

At Stansted, Megan took a train back to Cambridge and Chris and Duncan took one in the opposite direction to Liverpool Street. They sat opposite each other and stared out at the Essex night rushing by, their reflections interrupted by the flash of station lights.

‘Thanks for agreeing to have lunch with Khalid tomorrow,’ Duncan said.

‘No problem.’

‘I’m sorry, but I don’t think I can make it. Something’s come up.’

‘That’s OK,’ said Chris, although in truth he was a little annoyed that he could be bothered to see Duncan’s client and Duncan couldn’t.

‘Have you ever heard of someone called Marcus?’ Chris asked.

‘Marcus? I don’t think so. Wait, isn’t there a Marcus Neale who works for Harrison Brothers?’

‘No. Not him. This man’s American. Tall, thin, longish hair.’

Duncan shook his head. ‘No.’

‘Oh.’ There was a pause. Chris noticed that Duncan was wary. Well he might be. ‘I went round to Lenka’s flat last week.’

Duncan grunted.

‘I met one of her neighbours. He said he’d seen you hanging around.’

‘Me?’

‘It sounded a lot like you from his description. He said that you’d approached Lenka and she’d ignored you.’

Duncan didn’t answer. He turned to face the night. Chris waited.

Eventually, Duncan answered. ‘It’s true. When things went wrong with Pippa, I tried to get in touch with Lenka. She didn’t want to see me. But I didn’t give up. She was too important to me to give up on.’

‘So you hassled her?’

‘No. I did watch her from a distance, sometimes, but I don’t think she saw me. I wrote to her. And I approached her a couple of times, like that one you mentioned. But I didn’t “hassle” her. I didn’t force myself on her, if that’s what you mean.’ He smiled. ‘It’s funny. The week before she died, she called me. She wanted to see me. She said she had something important to tell me. We met in a bar somewhere near your office.’

‘What was it?’

Duncan sighed. ‘I don’t know. I think I screwed it up. There was so much I wanted to tell her. She tried to stop me, but I needed to say it. I think I must have gone over the top. She left.’

‘Before she told you anything?’

‘Oh, she told me there was absolutely no chance of us ever getting together again,’ muttered Duncan bitterly. ‘The last time I saw her, and that was the last thing she said to me.’ Tears were forming in the corners of his eyes.

‘Bloody hell, Duncan, don’t you realize that she must have had something quite important to say? Why didn’t you listen to her, for God’s sake?’

For a moment, Duncan looked surprised at the vehemence in Chris’s voice. Then the resigned expression returned. ‘I don’t care now. It’s too late.’

Chris leaned forward. ‘Listen to me, Duncan. I know who Marcus is, even if you say you don’t. He’s Alex Lubron’s brother. Lenka sent him an e-mail saying she wanted to tell him something, and she wanted to talk to you.’ Chris was careful not to mention Ian in all of this. If Duncan found out about his relationship with Lenka, it might seriously unbalance him. And Chris wanted Duncan to be as balanced as possible. ‘I think it was something to do with Alex’s death. Now, do you have any idea at all what Lenka was going to say to Marcus?’

Duncan sighed and closed his eyes. ‘I do know who Marcus is. In fact, he came to see me. He’d just seen Lenka in your office that afternoon. She’d told him that I’d hit Alex on the boat, and that was how he fell in the sea. Marcus waited for me outside the office. He got me on the way home. We were shouting at each other in the street.’

‘What did he say?’

‘He asked if it was true that I’d killed Alex. He asked why. He asked why I’d kept quiet about it. Then he gave me a lot of abuse.’

‘And what did you do?’

Duncan sighed. ‘I took it. You know I never felt comfortable about keeping it all quiet. I mean, it was very good of you all to do it, and I know I could have ended up behind bars, but Marcus had a point. It was unfair to him not to know what really happened.’

Chris grunted. ‘Perhaps.’

‘Then he ran out of steam. He stood there, sort of shifting from foot to foot. I thought he was going to leave me alone, when he took a swing at me. I just covered my face. He kept on trying to hit me, until some passers-by pulled him off. I turned and legged it. I didn’t want to fight him.’

‘What do you think he’ll do?’ asked Chris. ‘Do you think he’ll go to the police?’

Duncan shrugged. ‘Maybe. I don’t know.’

‘Why didn’t you tell me this before? Why did you pretend you didn’t know who he was?’

Duncan sighed. ‘After everything all of you had done to keep things quiet, I didn’t want to admit that I’d let you down. That I’d let out what had really happened. I just hoped that Marcus would go away and I could forget about him.’

‘But why didn’t you deny it?’

‘It was too late. Lenka had already told him. Besides, he had a right to know.’

He had a right to know. Lenka’s words. Well, he knew now. And Chris had no idea what he would do with that knowledge.

Chris spent all the next day at the office, with only a break at midday to have lunch with Duncan’s client, Khalid, at a restaurant in Devonshire Square in the City. Khalid was twenty minutes late, but was all smiles when he finally arrived. He seemed to be about Chris’s age, neatly dressed with a small black moustache, warm brown eyes and a ready grin. They indulged in the typical market small talk. It turned out that Khalid was a friend of Faisal, the Saudi on Chris’s training programme who was now apparently in charge of a large pan-Gulf investment fund. The waitress came, and Khalid flirted expertly with her before ordering his sole done in a very particular way. No wine.

Khalid asked about the Central European high-yield bond market, and Chris answered him as best he could. The problem was that there weren’t yet many issues to choose from, and only three that Chris could strongly recommend.

The sole came, and it was prepared to Khalid’s liking. ‘But you don’t just invest in high yield, do you?’ he asked.

Chris told him about his government bond trades: about the florints, zlotys, korunas, kroons and lats he dealt in every day. Khalid was intrigued, and asked intelligent questions. He, too, had been involved in trading the Continental European bond markets before the euro, and from the sound of it, he was probably quite good at it. As Chris talked, he realized that after a couple of years of thorough immersion, he really did know these markets well.

They had finished the coffee, and Khalid insisted on paying the bill. ‘That was fascinating,’ he said. ‘And thank you for steering me away from Eureka Telecom.’

‘No problem. I think that’s wise, at the moment. I wouldn’t trust Bloomfield Weiss an inch on that kind of stuff.’

‘I know what you mean,’ said Khalid. ‘Do you know Herbie Exler?’

‘I used to work for him.’

‘Ah,’ said Khalid carefully.

‘Don’t worry. He screwed me.’

‘He screwed me, too,’ said Khalid. ‘Several times. I think he thinks I’m just a dumb Arab who he can leg over whenever he feels like it. What did he do to you?’

‘Remember that big convergence trade Bloomfield Weiss were involved with a couple of years ago?’

Khalid nodded. ‘How could I forget it?’

Well, that was me. But when I wanted to get out of it, Herbie wanted to double up. We did, we lost, I got the blame, I was on the street.’

Khalid watched Chris carefully as he said this, as though trying to judge whether Chris was spinning a convenient cover story. He could probably tell he wasn’t. There was no need: Chris had no reason to try to impress him.

‘He’s an asshole,’ Khalid said matter-of-factly.

Chris smiled. ‘I wouldn’t argue with that.’ It was late by the time Chris got back to his flat from the office that night. He checked his e-mail before he went to bed. There was one from Marcus.

Damn! Chris quickly typed out a reply.

He sent the e-mail, and went to bed.

There was an answer waiting for him the next morning. One word.

Chris sighed. Still, Eric was right. It couldn’t be that hard to track down someone with a name like Marcus Lubron. He’d never heard the name Lubron before he’d met Alex. He’d allow himself some time while he was in New York to find him. Perhaps Eric could help.

Chris leaned against the wall by the porter’s lodge and watched the children go by. He remembered how infuriated he had been when he was at Oxford to read an article by a graduate about how young all the undergraduates looked to him. Well, twelve years on he knew it was true. Surely, Chris thought, he had never looked quite like these kids?

Then he saw her, striding across the quad, or whatever they called it in Cambridge, in jeans, jersey and a denim jacket. He was relieved to see that she looked a couple of years older than most of the spotty inhabitants of the college. She brightened when she saw him. He kissed her cheek, already cold in the March air.

‘Hi, it’s great to see you,’ she said.

‘And you. Thanks for inviting me up here.’

‘It seemed the least I could do after your hospitality last week. Do you mind if we just walk? I’d like to explore the town a bit.’

‘That’s fine with me,’ said Chris.

‘Do you know Cambridge?’ Megan asked. ‘You didn’t go here, did you?’

‘I went to the other place,’ said Chris. ‘I spent a couple of drunken evenings here ten years ago seeing friends from school. I’m afraid I don’t remember it very clearly.’

They walked. Chris hadn’t been back to Oxford for years, and he was surprised by how different Cambridge felt from the way he remembered university. There were few tourists around at this time of year. People were walking to and fro with quiet purpose. Although he knew, because he could remember, that students had their own problems, their own worries, their own crises, the atmosphere seemed to be one of calm serenity. Traffic had been banished from the centre of Cambridge and at times the loudest noise he could hear was the sound of footsteps around him, or the rattle of an old bicycle. He felt like a grubby outsider from the materialistic bustle of another world, from the world of pay cheques, commuting on the underground, suits, mortgages.

‘What’s the University of Chicago like?’ he asked Megan.

‘Nothing like this,’ she said. ‘At least, not physically. The oldest buildings are only about a hundred years old. But it’s a good school. There are some good historians there: people even these guys respect.’

‘I’m sure you’re one of them,’ Chris said.

Megan smiled. ‘We’ll see. What I really like about Cambridge is that it seems like a place where history happens. My kind of history.’

‘You mean all the old buildings?’

‘Yes, but it’s more than that. You can imagine people studying here for centuries, reading and writing Latin, arguing about theology. It somehow makes the study of, I don’t know, manuscript illumination in the tenth century, more real. In Chicago, I felt as if I was on a different planet. In fact, Mars seemed to be closer and more real than St Dunstan and his friends.’

‘It seems an awfully long time ago to me.’

‘Not to me,’ said Megan. ‘I remember the first time I became interested in all this stuff. I was an exchange student at a high school in France, in Orléans. The girl I was staying with couldn’t care about anything that happened before about nineteen seventy, but her father was fascinated by history. He took me to this tiny little church in a place called Germigny-des-Prés. There was a blind curate who showed us round. Most of it was standard grey gothic, but one part of it, the apse at one end, was decorated with the most gorgeous frescos. I can still remember the curate describing them from memory. I couldn’t believe that something so beautiful could have been created a thousand years ago, in the so-called “dark ages”. Ever since then, I’ve been trying to understand what it was like to live then, how mysterious and dangerous the world must have seemed, and how people tried to make sense of it.’

‘And I thought all they did in Chicago was trade pork-bellies.’

Megan smiled. ‘I know. I must sound pretty weird to you.’

‘No,’ said Chris. ‘Not at all. You must show me some of this stuff.’

‘I’ll take you to see The Benedictional of St Aethelwold in the British Library. It’s completely beautiful.’

‘Do that.’

‘All right,’ Megan smiled. ‘I will.’ She pointed down a narrow alley. ‘Shall we try this way?’

They wandered down the small road. Along one side was a row of cottages washed in varying shades of pink and grey, along the other was the back of a college, Chris had no idea which one. He was lost.

‘The funeral was pretty grim, wasn’t it?’ he said.

Megan shuddered. ‘Yes. But I’m glad I went.’

‘I’m sorry we didn’t talk much.’

‘It was difficult with Duncan there. Did you get a chance to speak to him?’

‘Yes, I did,’ said Chris.

‘And?’

‘Although he wouldn’t admit it at first, he did say Marcus had been to see him. Apparently, you were right: Lenka did tell Marcus what really happened on the boat. Marcus asked Duncan whether this was all true, and threatened him.’

‘Threatened him?’ said Megan in alarm.

‘Yes. Nothing specific. But it seemed to rattle Duncan.’

‘So why didn’t he mention this to you before?’

‘He said he didn’t want to admit that he’d given away what really happened, after all we’d done to keep it quiet.’

‘Yeah, right,’ said Megan.

‘I believe him,’ said Chris.

‘Did you ask him where he was the day Lenka was killed?’

‘No, I didn’t.’

‘Why not?’

Chris took a deep breath. ‘It was the day of her funeral. He was upset. I’m sure that was genuine. I think he would have been pretty angry if I’d suggested he was responsible.’

Megan looked at Chris disapprovingly.

‘He’s my friend. I know him,’ said Chris. ‘And I’m sure he didn’t kill Lenka.’

They had reached the river, swollen by the recent rain. Wisps of fog still hung eerily over the fields towards Grantchester. A solitary, cold-looking student was propelling a punt downstream.

‘What a stupid way to drive a boat,’ said Megan. ‘Can you do that?’

‘Not in March,’ Chris said, shivering.

They walked on. ‘At least we now know what Lenka told Marcus,’ Megan said.

‘Yes,’ said Chris. Then he stopped in his tracks. Wait a moment!’

‘What is it?’

‘We don’t know what Lenka was going to tell Marcus. We don’t know at all.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, we know Marcus came to see Lenka on the Tuesday. We also know, because Duncan told us, that that is when Lenka told him that Duncan knocked Alex into the sea. Marcus went straight off to wait for Duncan coming out of work that afternoon.’

‘OK.’

‘But the e-mail Lenka sent to Marcus was written twenty-four hours later.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Yes. Hang on, let me check.’ Chris dug the e-mail out of the breast pocket of his leather jacket. ‘Yes, here it is. It was sent on Wednesday the sixteenth of February.’

‘That doesn’t make sense,’ Megan said.

‘It does. It means that there was something else that Marcus had a right to know.’

‘Something else?’

‘Must be.’

‘But what?’

‘I’ve no idea.’

They crossed the river and walked along towards the Backs.

‘There is one possibility,’ Megan said. ‘Did you hear Alex was in trouble over drugs?’

‘No,’ said Chris. He furrowed his brow. ‘I don’t remember anything like that.’

‘Oh, yes. He was very worried about it. There had been some kind of sneaky random drug test and he’d been caught with traces of cocaine in his sample. It was a big deal. Bloomfield Weiss was threatening to make an example of him.’

‘A random drug test? I don’t remember a random drug test.’ Chris thought hard. ‘Oh, yes. I think there was some kind of medical for the American trainees after the final examination. The rest of us were allowed to leave. That must have been it.’ He shook his head. ‘Wow. He kept that quiet.’

‘Yes. Eric knew, of course, and therefore so did I. But you can imagine it’s not the sort of thing he wanted to broadcast.’

‘I didn’t realize Alex did drugs.’

‘A lot of people did back then,’ said Megan.

Chris grunted. ‘I’m a complete innocent when it comes to drugs. You read in the press that it’s going on all round you, but I’ve hardly ever seen any. Although I did catch Ian once.’ He remembered Tamara barging into Ian’s bedroom, and the look of embarrassment on Ian’s face as he looked up from the white line of coke. But then he remembered his own discomfort when Tamara had taken some. ‘Ian was very lucky he wasn’t tested.’

‘Perhaps Lenka knew about Alex getting caught,’ Megan said. ‘Perhaps that’s what she wanted to tell Marcus.’

‘But why? I hardly think that it was something Marcus had a “right to know”.’

Megan shook her head. ‘I suppose not. But it’s another reason to look for him. Have you heard any more from him?’

‘He’s scared,’ said Chris. ‘He won’t give me his address. He doesn’t want me to find him.’

Megan looked at Chris. ‘That’s worrying.’

For the first time, Chris wondered whether Marcus had reason to be scared. And if so, whether he should be scared also.

They walked miles that afternoon, criss-crossing the town and its parks and meadows. They were dawdling by the river, surrounded by waterlogged stretches of grass, when darkness crept in around them. They made their way through the gloom to a pub, the Fort St George, standing alone by the bank of the river, and ate in front of a glowing fire.

Later, they walked back to Megan’s college. Chris had intended to drive back to London that evening, but she invited him back to her room for a cup of coffee. They cut through two courtyards, past an ancient tree, a tangle of bare branches looming out of the darkness, to her building. Her room was warm and cosy, and it was cold and damp outside. He and Megan talked late into the night, and Chris didn’t want the evening to end. Neither did Megan.

He stayed.

9

Chris tried to edge his left elbow on to the armrest beside him, but the large man reading a computer magazine wouldn’t have any of it. On Chris’s other side, a much smaller, skinny boy was playing a frantic game of cards with his brother. The research piece on macroeconomic adjustment in the Baltic States that lay on his lap was not making any sense. Chris cursed himself for travelling Economy. Lenka refused to do it, and became quite upset if Chris ever tried to travel that way. But with Carpathian in so much difficulty, Chris had felt guilty about shelling out the enormous fare for Business Class. Stupid. A thousand pounds here or there would make no difference to whether Carpathian survived. In any case, he had had to buy an expensive open ticket. The trip out to Hartford to see Rudy Moss should be straightforward. But he didn’t know how long it would take him to find Marcus Lubron, or to discover more about Alex’s drug problem.

Chris gave up on the Baltic States, leaned back, closed his eyes, and thought of Megan. He had said goodbye to her in Cambridge before driving back to London to get his stuff ready for America. It had been a great day, a great night. He remembered her smell, the softness of her skin, her hair against his face. She had awakened something in him that he had not experienced for a long time. Since Tamara. No, it was different from the way he had felt with Tamara. It was something new, something much better. There was so much more he wanted to know about her, and yet he felt he knew her well already. Spending time with her seemed so natural. He hoped that he would see a lot more of her; he was determined that he would see a lot more of her.

He thought about her and Eric, and wondered for a moment how he and Eric compared. But only for a moment. Rivalry with Eric was pointless: Eric was always a winner at everything, and it was best just to accept that as a fact of life. He winced at the only stupid remark he could remember making during the night. Sometime in the small hours, after they had made love for the second time, he had mentioned Eric. She had stiffened, and then asked him whether no one had ever told him not to discuss old lovers with new ones. He thought of Duncan and Pippa and felt like an idiot. His transgression had soon been forgotten, but it was clear that Eric was a taboo subject with Megan.

He smiled as he thought about seeing her again. Then the kid on his right whacked him in the ribs with a sharp elbow.

Rudy Moss’s arrogance had matured. He used to be cocky or sycophantic, depending on whom he was with. Ten years had given him a certain authority. His pudginess had transformed into prematurely middle-aged flab. He used his long nose to great effect, holding his head at exactly the right angle to be able to look down it at whomever he was talking to. He was an expert too at the weighty silence, the pause that implied that he alone knew the right answer and was debating whether to divulge it. Chris couldn’t stand him.

But he had to sit there and beg, a process that he found very difficult, but that Rudy seemed to be enjoying greatly.

The meeting started off promisingly.

‘I got a call from Eric Astle about you last week,’ Rudy began. ‘He was quite complimentary.’

‘Good,’ said Chris.

‘Yeah. He’s done well,’ said Rudy. ‘Did you see that piece in Business Week a couple of months back? “Dealmakers of the Twenty-first Century” it was called. Something like that.’

‘No, I didn’t.’

‘It seems that Eric is quite the M&A star.’

‘It does.’

‘It’s a shame he couldn’t do quite as well as me on the programme,’ Rudy said, with a smile.

Chris’s recollection was that Eric had just pipped Rudy for top place at the end, but he let it rest. Chris looked around Rudy’s office. Small, but at least he had his own. He had a nice view of other tall buildings housing insurance companies. Amalgamated Veterans Life was a respected institution, and Rudy obviously had some responsibility. But he was hardly ‘dealmaker of the twenty-first century’. Chris smiled to himself.

Mistake. Rudy saw him and frowned. He was probably all too aware that he hadn’t fulfilled the promise of the training programme.

‘I’m impressed by what Eric says, but I need to make up my own mind on this. I told you the reservations I have now you’ve lost Lenka. Why should I keep my funds with you?’

Chris launched into an explanation of the opportunities for Central Europe, of the rapid integration of the countries there into the European economy, and of how the hiccups on the way provided opportunities for the fund to trade its way to a stronger return. He focused on how he proposed to recruit a high-yield bond expert to replace Lenka. Chris convinced himself. He didn’t know about Rudy.

‘What do you think about Latvia?’ Rudy asked. ‘Do you think it will make the second wave of candidates for the European Union?’

Typical of Rudy to ask a technical question out of the blue that he had probably mugged up beforehand. But Chris knew his stuff, and, aided by what he had read on the plane, gave a convincing answer.

It seemed to satisfy Rudy. ‘Do you have a current valuation for the fund?’ he asked.

This was it. The moment Chris had been dreading, but that he couldn’t avoid. He handed Rudy the February revaluation. Rudy scanned it.

‘But this says the price is one hundred and fifteen euros. Wasn’t it a hundred and twenty-nine last month? What happened?’

‘It’s the Eureka Telecom position we bought recently. It was a new issue, but we would only get a price of seventy if we were to sell it today.’

Rudy grimaced. ‘Nightmare. So the fund’s down, what, ten per cent in a month?’ he said, with the hint of a mocking smile. ‘That’s not very good is it?’

‘No. It’s our worst month to date,’ Chris admitted. ‘But remember you invested at a hundred. You’ve still made good money.’

‘We might have made it in the past, but we’re losing it now, aren’t we?’

‘The Eureka Telecom was Lenka’s position.’ Chris hated to say it, but it was true.

Rudy raised his eyebrows. ‘That’s not very gentlemanly, is it? Blaming your partner when she’s not here to defend herself.’

He was getting to Chris. Chris took a deep breath, counted to three, and replied. ‘Lenka has made some very good investments. She’s half the reason that the fund has performed so well overall. But her last one doesn’t seem to be working out.’

‘Do you know why she bought it?’ Rudy asked.

It was a good question, testing the level of communication between them and, by implication, how much Chris knew about what Lenka did. A good question that Chris couldn’t answer. ‘She bought it while I was away on holiday.’

‘So it’s fair to say that you know nothing about the fund’s biggest position. The position that’s giving you most trouble?’

‘I’m finding out,’ said Chris.

Rudy shook his head. ‘Finding out. I’m not sure Amalgamated Veterans should be financing your learning curve.’

‘Trust me, Rudy. I will make you money,’ Chris said.

Rudy chuckled. ‘Like you made Bloomfield Weiss money?’

Suddenly it all became clear to Chris. He was here so Rudy could enjoy rubbing his nose in the fact that his future was in Rudy’s hands. Rudy would toy with him, then go in for the kill. He could draw out the process for quite a while before he said no. Well, Chris had insisted on the meeting, so in a way it was his own fault. But his pride couldn’t let Rudy get away with it.

He stood up and held out his hand. ‘Thank you for investing with us, Rudy. But I think from now on the Carpathian Fund will get on better without you.’

Rudy, looking disappointed, shook the outstretched hand.

‘I’ll see myself out,’ Chris said, leaving the office.

A waste of time.

Chris sat on the Amtrak from Hartford to New York, fuming. He had travelled thousands of miles to see Rudy, only to be abused and humiliated. He should have known. After all, Rudy had made clear his lack of enthusiasm to see him. But he had had to try. It was only by seeing Rudy face-to-face that he could be absolutely sure there was no hope of getting him to change his mind.

What now? Sell bonds at the bottom of the market? Give up? Close down Carpathian? Perhaps the market would bail him out this time. Perhaps, when he got back to London, there would be a rally in the junk market, a big buyer of Eureka Telecom bonds, or an announcement on the expansion of the European Union.

Once again, he was relying on the fickleness of the markets to survive: he hated that.

Once again, he felt helpless. But this time, his mind didn’t go back to the disaster at Bloomfield Weiss, but to another time, twenty years before.

He was eleven. His father had been dead for nine months. The lives of his mother, his younger sister and himself had changed dramatically. They had moved house, from a semi-detached in a nice cul-de-sac, to a flat on the seventh floor of a tough tower block. His mother went out to work in the local VG Stores during the day and had taken on night-shift work at a warehouse three days a week. Although she was proud of him for getting into grammar school, even that would bring more expense. But despite the lack of sleep, the worry about money, the red-rimmed, fatigue-darkened eyes, he never saw her cry. She always had time for him and Anna, to listen to their fears, to comfort them. At eleven, Chris had found that he once again needed to feel the warmth of his mother’s arms, and they were always there.

Until one evening, when he left school late, and met her outside the shop. Anna was playing at a friend’s house. They walked home rapidly, chattering together, and took the stinking lift daubed with graffiti up to the seventh floor. Their flat was at the end of the walkway. As they approached, his mother suddenly quickened her pace and then broke into a run. Chris followed. The front door was swinging open. Inside, the flat was trashed. Chris’s mother ran to the chest of drawers where he knew she kept a lot of his dad’s stuff. The drawers were open. She stood silently staring at the mess inside. Tentatively, Chris joined her. His dad’s watch was gone. So was his wedding ring. So were several chess medals, worth nothing to anyone but Chris’s mum. Their wedding photograph lay on the floor, the glass broken, the print ripped.

Her shoulders heaved, and she let out a kind of animal howl. Then she began to sob. Scared, and unsure what to do, Chris grabbed hold of her and led her back to the bed. She began to bawl like a child, tears streaming down her face. Chris’s eyes stung, but he was determined to hold back the tears, be the one to support her for once. He clung tightly to her shoulders, hoping she would quieten down. She pressed her face into his chest and wept.

Eventually, much later, she stopped. She lay still for several minutes, Chris unwilling to disturb her. Then she sat up on the bed and turned to him, her face puffy and damp with tears, her dark curly hair, usually so carefully tamed, a mess.

‘You know what, Chris?’ she said.

‘Yes, Mum?’

‘Things can’t get any worse than they are right now, can they? It’s just not possible.’ She sniffed, and from somewhere she summoned a quivering smile. ‘As long as you and me and Anna stick together and help each other, they can only get better. So come on. Let’s get this mess tidied up.’

And she was right. Eventually things had got better. The flat was cleared up. The pain of the loss of his father became a persistent ache. She found a better-paying job in a travel agency, and was able eventually to afford a small house for them. Anna married and had two kids. Chris went to university. She’d done it. She’d pulled through.

So would he.

The train drew into Penn Station and Chris took a taxi downtown to Bloomfield Weiss. He remembered the thrill of anticipation he had felt that morning ten years before when he had first entered the building with Duncan and Ian. He took the lift up to the forty-fifth floor. And, just like that first day, Abby Hollis was waiting for him.

She had changed little. She was wearing a white blouse and her blonde hair was tied severely back. But she was chewing gum, and she smiled when she saw Chris.

‘Well, how are you doing? Good to see you.’ She held out her hand, and Chris shook it. ‘Come through to the floor. It’s quiet enough at the moment. We can talk there.’

She led Chris through the clutter of desks, chairs, bins, jackets, papers and people towards the far corner of the room.

Chris looked around him. ‘This hasn’t changed much,’ he said.

‘Management keep on talking about getting a new one, but there’s not much point. This is still where it all happens on Wall Street.’

If that was true, then there was nothing happening on Wall Street at that particular moment, which wasn’t too surprising for four o’clock on a Monday afternoon. The room was crowded, but those on the phone looked casual and unhurried, and most people were staring at their screens, the newspaper, or simply into space. There was the odd cluster of large men in white shirts goofing off. Somehow, it all seemed less intimidating than it had ten years before. Chris no longer expected someone to scream at him at any second to go and get a pizza. In fact, he saw a couple of frightened trainees squatting at the edge of a row of desks that he could scream at himself if he felt like it. He didn’t.

Abby worked in Muni sales, not the most glamorous of departments at Bloomfield Weiss. As they reached her desk, Chris recognized Latasha James, wearing a smart black suit.

‘Hello, Chris! It’s been a long time.’ She gave him a hug. ‘I’m so sorry to hear about Lenka.’

‘Yes, it was terrible,’ Chris said. ‘I see they still haven’t let you out of Municipal Finance.’

Latasha rolled her eyes. ‘I guess not. I work upstairs in origination. But it’s not so bad. Some of these cities need the cash we can get them, you know what I’m saying? I guess I’m doing more good here than I would in many places.’

‘Doing good at Bloomfield Weiss. Now there’s a thought!’

‘Isn’t it just? I’ve got to run,’ Latasha said. ‘See you around.’

‘She’s really good,’ said Abby, sitting down at her desk. ‘She wins us more deals than the rest of the guys upstairs put together. The public officials love her. And not just the black ones.’

‘I’m very glad to hear it,’ Chris said, pulling up a chair, and glancing at the familiar screens on Abby’s desk. ‘How long have you been doing this?’

‘Nine years,’ Abby said. ‘I eventually escaped from George Calhoun’s clutches. It’s OK. I keep my head down, I’m nice to my customers, I put up with shit from my boss, they keep me around.’

‘An achievement these days,’ Chris said.

Abby smiled. ‘I heard it was Herbie Exler who screwed you on the convergence trade. They should have gotten rid of him, not you.’

Chris raised his eyebrows. ‘I didn’t realize other people knew.’

‘Oh, yeah. They all know,’ Abby said. ‘They’re not about to mention it, though. Herbie is not someone you want as an enemy. Nor is Simon Bibby. He’s head of Fixed Income in New York now.’

‘Well, I’m glad I’m out of it.’

Abby chewed her gum contemplatively. ‘I’m sorry I was such a bitch on the training programme.’

Chris was startled. ‘You weren’t a bitch.’

Abby smiled. ‘Oh, yes I was. I wanted to be the meanest programme coordinator Calhoun had ever seen. I know that’s what he wanted, and I thought that was the only way I was ever going to make it in an investment bank. I was so uptight about everything.’

‘They get you like that, don’t they?’ Chris said.

‘They sure do. I was just as bad here, at first. Then, it dawned on me that it was possible to have a quiet life and work at Bloomfield Weiss. You just have to know how. Excuse me.’

One of the lights on a panel flashed and Abby answered it. She chatted amiably with someone on the other line, and ended up selling him three million dollars of a New Jersey Turnpike bond.

She hung up. ‘Where was I?’

‘Reliving the good old days.’

‘Oh yeah,’ Abby laughed. ‘Now, how can I help you?’

‘I wanted to ask you something about the programme. I think it might be related to Lenka’s death.’

‘Go ahead.’

‘It’s about Alex Lubron.’

Abby raised her eyebrows. ‘Alex Lubron? Now that’s a subject that I thought you had all the answers to, not me.’

Chris ignored the dig. He knew he would have to be careful. ‘Actually, I wanted to talk to you about what happened a little before he died.’

‘I’ll see if I can remember.’

‘I understand he tested positive for drugs?’

Abby nodded. ‘I do remember that. We were supposed to have a crackdown on drug abuse in the firm. You might recall that a couple of salesmen had been caught supplying clients. Well, the idea was to fire one or two employees quite publicly to show that the firm was coming down hard on the issue. But they didn’t want to fire real employees that were making real money. So they had the idea that they would pick on a couple of trainees. No one would miss them, right?’

Chris smiled.

‘As you can imagine, Calhoun loved this idea. So he set up a fake medical exam, which would be taken without warning right after the final examination. The Frankfurt and London offices objected that their trainees were going to be sacrificed as well, so Calhoun was forced to restrict things to the American hires.

‘So, they took the samples, and much to their surprise only one trainee tested positive.’

‘Alex?’

‘That’s right. Alex. And what’s more, he had some kind of mentor in mortgage trading who raised hell. Calhoun spent a lot of time with Alex; I’m not sure what the deal was, exactly. Anyway, after Alex died it was all forgotten. Bloomfield Weiss wanted a quick and easy sacking of someone who’d never be heard of again. Once Alex had drowned, he became entirely the wrong person to be found with drugs.’

‘Did the police know?’ Chris asked.

‘I’m not sure what the police knew,’ Abby said. ‘They seemed suspicious about Alex’s death for a week or so, and then they dropped the whole thing. But I’m sure you remember that.’

‘I do,’ said Chris. ‘I definitely do.’

‘Now, whether Bloomfield Weiss put some kind of pressure on them, I don’t know.’

‘Can Bloomfield Weiss do that?’

Abby looked around her. ‘What do you think we do here? We’re one of the top three firms on the Street for raising municipal finance. We know a lot of public officials.’

‘Hmm.’

Abby leaned forward. ‘So tell me,’ she said, a twinkle in her eye. ‘What did happen on that boat?’

Chris sighed. ‘Alex got drunk. The boat was going fast. The sea was choppy. He fell in. Ian, Eric and Duncan jumped in to try to find him. They couldn’t. We were lucky to find them, quite honestly. Alex drowned.’ Chris’s voice was flat as he recited this. All of it was true, even if it wasn’t the whole truth.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Abby, her curiosity punctured by Chris’s tone. ‘Sometimes you forget that disasters involve real people.’

‘Yeah,’ said Chris. ‘You do.’

‘There were rumours afterwards. That it hadn’t been an accident.’

‘I’m sure.’

‘It was a big deal in HR. You see, they’d been trying a new approach to recruitment for a couple of years. Do you remember doing some psychometric tests when you joined?’

‘Vaguely.’

‘Well, one of the things they were looking for was extreme competitiveness, aggression, even ruthlessness. The theory was that investment bankers need to be predators, kings of the jungle, some crap like that.’

‘Sounds just like George Calhoun,’ Chris said.

‘Exactly. In fact, I think the whole thing might have been his idea. Well, a lot of the people produced by this process were your average nasty red-blooded investment banker. But one or two of them were borderline psychotic’

‘And Bloomfield Weiss recruited them anyway?’

‘You got it. With open arms. One of the psychologists who did the tests kicked up a fuss about it. In the end we stopped them.’

‘Do you know who these “borderline psychotics” were?’

‘I found out who one of them was later. A guy called Steve Matzley was convicted for rape a few months after he left Bloomfield Weiss. I don’t think he was on your programme. But he was recruited about that time. The rumour is that the psychologist’s report flagged him as being a dangerous person.’

‘And they took him anyway?’

‘You got it. He was a great government bond trader. It was pure luck he wasn’t working here when he committed the rape.’

‘Jesus. So was the rumour that one of us on the boat had a similar profile?’

‘That was the rumour. After Steve Matzley, it made some kind of sense. But it was pure speculation. The files were strictly locked up and confidential. Besides, you just told me it was an accident, didn’t you?’

Chris didn’t respond to her question. ‘Did you know the name of the psychologist who complained about the tests?’

‘No. Sorry. But you should ask George Calhoun about all this. He’d be able to tell you more.’

‘Is he still in Human Resources?’

They fired him about a year ago.’

‘Oh, what a shame. Couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy.’

‘Especially after all he did for us,’ said Abby, grinning.

‘Do you know how I can get hold of him?’

‘I don’t know if he got another job,’ said Abby. ‘And in case you’re wondering, I don’t have his home number.’

‘Never mind. I’ll track him down. Thanks for your help.’

‘No problem,’ said Abby, picking up her phone.

10

Chris took the elevator up a couple of floors. The doors opened on a large, hushed reception area, guarded by a beautifully groomed young woman, who asked Chris to take a seat, offered him a cup of tea, and promised that Mr Astle would be with him shortly.

Of course he wasn’t, but Chris didn’t mind waiting. He watched people come and go through a heavy smoked-glass door, waving their passes at a blinking green eye on a black panel each time. He thought about the police investigation into Alex’s death.

It had been tense. The first set of questions was quick and easy. They had all agreed to describe what actually happened, including Duncan’s argument with Alex, but to miss out the fight. Only Lenka and Duncan were to admit to actually seeing Alex go overboard, the rest of them were up on the bridge looking the other way. But a couple of days after the initial questioning, they were all interviewed again, by a pair of detectives who were much more probing. They seemed to think there was something wrong about the story, but they didn’t know quite what. One of them had asked Chris if there had been a fight, and Chris had said that if there had been, he hadn’t seen it. Afterwards, everyone’s nerves were on edge, but they all felt they had succeeded in keeping to their stories. Duncan wobbled and said he was going to tell the truth, but Eric and Chris persuaded him that since they had lied this far, they may as well see it through. Eventually, Duncan had agreed.

Ian, Duncan and Chris had been asked to stay in New York for an extra week, so that they would be available for further questioning. It also gave them a chance to attend Alex’s funeral. They spent a lot of time together, with Lenka and Eric. Both Lenka and Duncan were distraught, blaming themselves for what had happened. Ian was moody, talking little, and brooding often. Lenka got herself hopelessly drunk twice in that week. She and Duncan were careful not to talk to each other, and it was always awkward when they were in the same room.

Eric, and to a lesser extent Chris himself, had been a calming force on all of them, although Alex was a closer friend of Eric’s than any of the others. Then, after a week, the police had closed the case, and with a great feeling of relief the three Brits flew home.

‘Hi, Chris, thanks for waiting.’ It was Eric. ‘I hoped I could get away early this evening, and I think I still can, but something’s come up. I’ll be another twenty minutes or so.’

‘Can I wait in your office?’

‘Sorry,’ Eric said. ‘You’re not allowed beyond those doors. Security is everything in M&A these days.’

‘I understand,’ Chris said. ‘But I wonder if I could ask you a quick favour. I thought I’d try to track down George Calhoun tomorrow. I know he got the boot from here a year ago, but I don’t know where he is. Who can I ask?’

‘George Calhoun, eh?’ said Eric. ‘Don’t worry. I’ll get someone to find out,’ and with that he disappeared back behind the mysterious glass doors.

Chris spotted a phone in a quiet corner of the reception area, and asked the woman behind the desk whether he could use it. No problem. Chris dialled Carpathian’s office. Ollie was still there, and he was agitated.

‘Bad news.’

Chris’s heart sank. ‘What now?’

‘It’s Melville Capital Management. They want out.’

Chris closed his eyes. Melville was a small firm, based in Princeton, that managed the endowment funds of half a dozen private colleges across the United States. They were a relatively small investor in the fund, at three million euros. But after his disastrous meeting with Rudy, the withdrawal of another three million was the last thing the fund needed. And two investors jumping ship could be enough to scare the rest of them.

‘Did they give any reason?’

‘No. Just that they wanted to give their thirty days’ notice.’

Although Lenka was the main point of contact with all of the investors, Chris had met most of them a couple of times. But not Melville. He remembered his phone call to them to inform them of her death. ‘Who’s the man there? Something Zissky, isn’t it?’

‘Dr Martin Zizka,’ said Ollie.

‘Give me his number.’

Ollie read out the digits.

‘Thanks.’

‘What are you going to do?’ asked Ollie.

‘Tell him he’s staying in the fund.’

‘Good luck.’ Then, in a tentative voice. ‘How did it go with Amalgamated Veterans?’

‘You don’t want to know.’

Chris hung up, and punched out the number Ollie had given him.

‘Zizka,’ a voice answered, so quietly Chris could barely hear it.

‘Dr Zizka?’

‘Yes?’

‘This is Chris Szczypiorski of the Carpathian Fund.’

‘Ah, yes.’ Zizka didn’t sound exactly pleased to hear from him.

‘I understand you are thinking of withdrawing your investment.’

‘That is correct.’

‘Melville Capital is a very important investor to us, and we’d be sorry to lose you. I wonder if it would be possible to meet you to discuss this further.’

As Chris had expected, Zizka didn’t sound thrilled with this proposal. ‘Aren’t you based in London?’

‘I’m in New York at the moment. I could come and see you tomorrow.’

‘Oh, I see. I’m very busy all day tomorrow. I’m not sure I have any free time.’

‘Dr Zizka. All I need is half an hour. As I said, you are an important investor to me. And I know you were important to Lenka as well.’ Chris winced as he said this, but he knew he had to use Lenka’s name all he could if he were to keep Carpathian intact.

Zizka sighed. ‘All right. Four o’clock. But it really will be half an hour. I have a meeting at four thirty.’

‘That’s fine, Dr Zizka. I’ll see you then.’

Chris was just putting the phone down when Eric returned. ‘What’s up?’ he asked, noticing the expression on Chris’s face.

‘Don’t ask. It serves me right for checking in with the office.’

Eric smiled sympathetically. ‘Always a mistake. Now let’s get out of here before someone else grabs me.’

They swept out of the building, and just as Chris was wondering whether Eric would insist on taking a taxi to the train station rather than the subway, a black limo swept up, leaving half a dozen similar vehicles behind it. A driver leapt out and opened the door for Chris and then Eric.

‘This is Terry,’ Eric said. ‘He’ll take you to see George Calhoun tomorrow morning. You are staying the night, aren’t you?’

‘If you don’t mind.’

‘That’s great. You don’t want to come all the way back into the city late at night.’

‘So where do you live?’ asked Chris, as the limo, which was really just a large saloon car, pulled away from the front of the Bloomfield Weiss building.

‘On Long Island. A place called Mill Neck. It’s right near Oyster Bay.’

It was rush hour, and it took them over an hour to fight through the traffic. Eric spent most of his time on the phone. It wasn’t for show, there seemed to be two live deals going on at the same time. Chris pretended not to listen, but of course he did. Eric was frustratingly vague, and kept on telling people he ‘couldn’t talk now’, although he did mention Rome, Munich and Dallas a lot. He was talking to someone called Sergio about someone else called Jim. Some big Italian deal, perhaps with a US company based in Texas?

After a particularly obscure session, Eric turned to Chris. ‘Do me a favour. Don’t try to guess what’s going on.’

‘Of course not,’ said Chris.

Eric sighed. ‘You’d think just one night I’d be able to leave at five o’clock, wouldn’t you?’ Then his phone chirped its tune again.

Eventually they were on a small country road that wound its way through woods, past mansions surrounded by high walls and snatches of sea shifting darkly in the moonlight. After a couple of miles, they rounded a bend; Terry pressed a remote control, a set of iron gates swung open, and the car pulled up in front of a rectangular white house bathed in a soft light from the lamps placed strategically around it.

‘We’re here,’ said Eric.

‘Is this the place you showed me on the boat? The place you said you always wanted to buy? Wasn’t it designed by some fancy architect?’

‘Meier. That’s right. I’d forgotten I’d shown you that. You have a good memory.’

‘I remember that night, at least.’

‘Yeah. Well, come inside.’

They got out of the car, and Terry drove off. Chris was almost expecting a footman, but it turned out that Eric had his own set of house keys, and was capable of using them himself. ‘Hi!’ he shouted, as they entered a huge hallway, with a wide set of stairs heading upwards.

A slender woman in jeans and socks, with her fair hair tied back, appeared and gave Eric an affectionate kiss.

‘Chris, this is Cassie.’

‘Hi,’ she said with a friendly smile, and held out her hand to be shaken. There was a cry of ‘Dad!’ and a small boy with blond curly hair, who looked very much like his mother, hurtled into the hallway and grabbed his father’s leg.

‘And this is Wilson.’

‘Howdeedodee,’ said the boy, from between Eric’s legs.

‘Hello,’ said Chris.

Eric heaved the boy up into his arms. ‘Do you mind if I go up and read him his story?’

‘No, go ahead,’ said Chris, and followed Cassie into a huge kitchen. He passed an Hispanic woman who was putting on her coat.

‘Good night, Mrs Cassie.’

‘Good night, Juanita. Thank you.’

Cassie poured Chris some white wine and attended to the cooker, set on a kind of marble island in the middle of the vast room. ‘Wilson’s thrilled to have his dad home in time to put him to bed,’ she said. ‘He won’t be long.’

‘Are you working at the moment?’ Chris asked.

‘Part time. Since Wilson was born and we bought this place, it seemed a shame to spend the whole time in the city. I have a PR company. Fortunately, my partners are extremely good, but there are lots of evening functions that I still have to go to, which are kind of a drag.’

‘This is a nice house.’

‘We like it. Eric’s family comes from round here.’

‘I know. What about you?’

‘Philadelphia. The Main Line. It’s handy for Washington, which seems to be where all my family end up.’

‘Including Eric?’

Cassie smiled. ‘Probably. He can tell you about that himself. Now, how do you know Eric? He did tell me, but I find it difficult to keep track of all his friends.’

‘We were on the Bloomfield Weiss training programme together. Ten years ago.’

‘Do you still work there?’

Chris smiled. ‘No, thank God.’

Cassie laughed. ‘They all say that. I don’t know how Eric survives.’

‘He seems to be doing rather well.’

‘I don’t believe it,’ said Cassie. ‘I’m convinced he works in the mailroom. Have you seen his office?’

‘No.’

‘Precisely. Nobody has. And he calls his horoscope line every few minutes on his cell phone so that I’ll think he’s important.’

‘And then the horoscope line rings him back?’

‘Maybe it’s got callback. I don’t know. Eric would. He does seem to know about telephones.’

Chris laughed. Megan was right: Cassie was a nice woman. And attractive.

‘He says he spends a lot of time out of the country,’ Chris said.

‘Tell me about it.’ Cassie rolled her eyes. ‘But I think he genuinely does try to get back here whenever he can. Here, help yourself to another glass if you like.’

After twenty minutes or so, Eric joined them, and they all carried dinner through to the dining room. The table, chairs and cutlery were over-designed modern stuff, and didn’t look as though they were meant to be used for a real dinner at all. But Chris’s attention was grabbed by a painting on one wall. It was the picture of the petrochemical plant in the Saudi Arabian desert that he knew so well.

‘I recognize that,’ he said.

‘Yeah,’ said Eric. ‘I think it was Alex’s best. His mother gave it to me.’

‘I’m glad you’ve kept it.’

They sat down. Another wall of the room was entirely glass, and it gave a terrific view of the bay and lights twinkling in the distance.

‘Is that Oyster Bay?’ Chris asked.

That’s right,’ said Eric.

‘Do your parents still live there?’

‘Not any more. Five years ago, my father ran off to California with some awful woman twenty years younger than him. My mother was so ashamed she moved out of town as well.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Chris said.

Eric sighed. ‘That kind of thing happens in families, these days. I’ve got to say, it was quite a shock. Dad never struck me as that kind of man.’

Chris changed the subject. ‘This is delicious,’ he said, digging in to the exotic salad Cassie had made. And it was. So was the main course, tuna steaks in a pineapple salsa sauce, and there was crème brûlée afterwards. The evening passed very pleasantly, and then Cassie announced she was going up to bed.

‘Would you like a cognac, Chris?’ Eric asked.

‘Here, I’ll help you with the dishes first,’ Chris said.

‘Oh, don’t worry about them,’ said Eric. ‘Juanita will deal with them in the morning.’

Chris paused for a second, thinking how nice it would be never to have to do the washing up after dinner parties, then followed Eric through to a large living room, with very little furniture and acres of empty floor space. Embers were glowing in a large open fireplace. It all looked good, but Chris suspected that Wilson spent very little time in there. Eric poured two brandies from a smooth curvilinear decanter.

‘Thanks for putting in a good word about me to Rudy Moss.’

‘No problem. How did it go?’

‘Waste of time,’ said Chris. ‘I had to try it, and I thought that I’d be able to persuade him, but he wasn’t having any of it. I reckon he just wanted to demonstrate his power over me. Gave him some kind of kicks I suppose. Nasty little man.’

Eric smiled. ‘It’s a shame someone so bright could be such a jerk.’

‘The fund’s in real trouble now. I’m going to have to sell some bonds to raise the cash to pay Rudy out, and the market timing is all wrong. Bloomfield Weiss won’t give me a decent bid for that stupid Eureka Telecom position Ian Darwent stuffed us with. And now another investor wants out. I don’t know what I’m going to do.’

‘You’ll figure it out,’ said Eric.

‘I wish I had your confidence. I’d hate to let Lenka down.’

‘Don’t take it so personally. She’d understand.’

No, she wouldn’t, Chris thought. She would fight tooth and nail to save Carpathian. And so should he.

‘Have you tracked down Marcus Lubron yet?’ Eric asked.

‘Not yet. That’s tomorrow’s task. Once I’ve seen George Calhoun.’

‘Oh, yes. What on earth do you want to see him for? That really is a bad memory I’d like to keep in the past.’

Chris told Eric all about his discussion with Abby Hollis. Eric listened closely. When he had finished, Chris asked him about Alex taking drugs.

‘I knew he did some drugs occasionally,’ said Eric. ‘But it was no big deal. It’s not like he had a problem or anything. We didn’t talk about it much.’

‘Until he got caught.’

‘Even then. Of course, he was really worried about it, and when I asked him, he eventually told me what was wrong. But he didn’t want to discuss it.’

‘Abby said that Calhoun was threatening him.’

‘Probably. Something was going on. But as I said, he didn’t want my help. I respected that. He and I were good friends, I knew him well. The thing with Alex was, sometimes he just wanted to be left alone. And that was one of those times.’

‘So you don’t know specifically what was going on?’

Eric shook his head.

‘And you didn’t say anything about it afterwards to any of us?’

‘No way,’ said Eric. ‘It just didn’t seem the right thing to talk about. Especially after what happened to him. Whatever his problems were, they died with him.’

‘I’m trying to think how this might be related to Lenka’s death,’ Chris said.

Eric looked blank. ‘I can’t see how. Why should it be?’

‘Well, I know Lenka wanted to tell Marcus something before she died. I’m pretty sure now that it was more than just Duncan knocking Alex into the sea. I thought maybe it had something to do with Alex getting caught with drugs.’

Eric frowned. ‘I can’t see a possible connection.’

Chris sighed. ‘Maybe Marcus can tell me. If I can find him.’

‘Perhaps,’ said Eric. ‘Let me know.’

Chris leaned back in his chair by the warm fire, and sipped his brandy. He looked across at Eric. Although he had a glittering future, indeed, was already living one, in many ways he was the most straightforward of Chris’s friends from the programme. Duncan was an emotional wreck, Ian had become cynical and selfish as his career had progressed, but Eric was still basically a friend. He didn’t have anything to prove to Chris, and there was no point in Chris trying to compete with him. He was glad it was Eric, not Ian, who had done so well.

‘What is it?’ asked Eric.

‘Oh, nothing,’ said Chris. ‘Are you still intending to go into politics?’

Eric smiled. ‘I guess so.’

‘Everything seems to be going according to plan so far.’

‘Partly. I’m making good money at Bloomfield Weiss, and I’ve also made some lucky investments. You can make excellent contacts in this business; it’s amazing how grateful a big company boss can be if you help him make the biggest acquisition of his career. The problem is I never have any time for all the schmoozing. I’m going to have to figure out how to make more time. But yes, I’m still interested.’

‘And you’d be following in the family tradition.’

Eric looked at Chris sharply. ‘You mean Cassie’s family? Wilson’s a good man. I respect him. I can learn a lot from him.’

It took a moment for Chris to realize that he was talking about his father-in-law. Eric had even named his son after Cassie’s father! But perhaps Chris was being too cynical: some American families did that, he supposed. Chris could see Eric felt sensitive about the whole subject.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘Good luck with it. You deserve to go far.’

‘We’ll see,’ said Eric. But he didn’t smile. His tone was surprisingly serious. This was clearly more than an idle fancy. Suddenly the edge of Eric’s ambition, which he kept well hidden, but which Megan had spoken about, showed through. But what was wrong with that? They were all ambitious, Chris included. That was, after all, why they had been so enthusiastically swept up by Bloomfield Weiss.

11

Eric’s driver Terry opened the door of the limo, and Chris climbed in. It was nine o’clock: Terry had already driven Eric into Manhattan several hours earlier, and Cassie had left at eight, leaving Juanita in charge of the house and Wilson.

‘You know where we’re going, I hope,’ said Chris to the closely cropped blond hair at the back of the driver’s head.

‘Westchester,’ Terry replied. ‘Home of a Mr George Calhoun. Don’t worry. I know the way.’

‘It’s good of you to take me,’ said Chris.

‘Whatever the boss says.’

‘I didn’t know Bloomfield Weiss ran to limos for managing directors.’

Terry laughed. ‘I don’t think they do. This is more of a private arrangement. I drive for Mr Astle when I don’t have any other work.’

‘I see. And what is that work?’

‘Personal bodyguard. That’s how we met. I got Mr Astle out of a tough situation in Kazakhstan a couple years back. I’ve done quite a bit for him since then.’

This surprised and intrigued Chris. ‘I didn’t realize Eric needed a bodyguard. What happened?’

‘Attempted kidnapping. We got away.’

‘Wow. Investment banking must be getting more dangerous than in my day.’

‘Not really. I only accompany clients to particularly troublesome parts of the world. Or to meet particularly dangerous people. Even then, ninety-five per cent of my job is just watching and waiting. But occasionally I need to put my training into action. I haven’t lost a client yet.’

‘So I’ll make it to Westchester?’

Terry laughed. ‘You’ll make it to Westchester, sir.’

They pulled into the lines of traffic on the Long Island Expressway.

‘Pardon me for asking, but are you related to Stanislaw Szczypiorski?’ Terry asked.

‘I am. I’m his son. But you’re about the first person I’ve ever come across who’s heard of him. Do you play chess?’

‘Sure. And I like reading the books, going through the old matches. I have an old book on the King’s Indian Defence that features a lot of his games. They even have a variation named after him.’

‘That’s right. It was his favourite opening as black.’

‘Do you play?’

‘Not any more,’ Chris said. ‘I played a lot as a boy, but I was never going to be as good as my father.’

They chatted about chess until they reached the leafy county of Westchester. George Calhoun lived in a classic American suburban house: wooden, white-painted, with a large patch of grass in front of it running down to a mailbox and the sidewalk. Terry waited in the car, while Chris rang the doorbell.

Calhoun answered. He was greyer, balder and fatter, with a few more wrinkles. His hatchet face had become both softer and more bitter. He didn’t recognize Chris.

‘Chris Szczypiorski,’ Chris said, holding out his hand. ‘From the Bloomfield Weiss training programme.’

‘Ah, yes. I remember,’ said Calhoun. ‘I remember quite well. What do you want?’

‘I want to talk to you about Alex Lubron.’

‘Alex Lubron, eh? Another one. Well, you’d better come in.’ He led Chris into a living room. The TV was on. Adverts for laxatives or something. ‘Sit down. Have you come to tell me what really happened?’

‘No,’ said Chris. ‘I’ve come to find out what really happened.’

Calhoun snorted. ‘You were there. You ought to know. It would sure be interesting if you could let the rest of us in on it.’

‘I know what happened on the boat,’ said Chris. ‘Alex fell in and drowned. But what interests me is what happened beforehand.’

‘Beforehand?’

‘Yes. Wasn’t Alex in some kind of trouble with drugs?’

Calhoun looked at Chris suspiciously. ‘That’s all very confidential.’

Chris returned his stare. ‘I’m sure it is,’ he said, after a moment’s thought. ‘And I’m sure that after all your years of loyal service to Bloomfield Weiss the last thing you would want to do is discuss something confidential that happened ten years ago to someone who is now dead.’

It was the right thing to say. Calhoun laughed. Or at least Chris thought it was a laugh. It actually sounded more like a bark.

‘I still can’t believe it. Twenty-six years. Six months short of my fiftieth birthday, and they give me the pink slip. What chance have I of finding another job at my age?’

Chris smiled in what he hoped could be mistaken for sympathy. He enjoyed the irony. Calhoun had loved firing people. He had made it a personal business philosophy. If ever an ego needed to be downsized, it was his.

‘All right. I’ll tell you. We tested all the American trainees after the final examination. Alex Lubron was the only one who tested positive. I wanted to have him out of the firm the next day, but the head of mortgage trading, Tom Risman, wouldn’t let him go without a fight. So I thought I’d try to get him to finger whoever had supplied him. He had the weekend to think about it. I think he would have told us, too. His mother was very ill, and he had loans and big medical bills to pay off. Also, he seemed worried about what effect a public dismissal and a conviction would have on her. He asked us to keep it quiet.’ Calhoun smiled to himself. ‘Big mistake. I said I’d make it as public as I could. Press release, the works. I had him. I’m sure he would have talked.’

‘But wouldn’t that have been bad publicity for Bloomfield Weiss?’

‘No. That was the whole point. We’d gotten some PR consultants in after those salesmen were convicted for supplying drugs. They said it was vital for Bloomfield Weiss to be seen to be cleaning up its act.’

‘So who was it who was supplying Alex?’

Calhoun sighed. ‘We never found out. He died before he could tell us.’

‘Do you know if it was anyone in the firm?’

‘Not for sure. It could have been anyone from his doorman to Sidney Stahl. But somehow I think if it was his doorman he’d have been quick to tell us all about it.’

Chris nodded. ‘Did you pursue the investigation after he died?’

‘Certainly not,’ said Calhoun. ‘Once he was dead, we just wanted to hush everything up as quickly as possible. Especially once the police started getting suspicious.’

‘I remember they were asking us lots of questions.’

Calhoun smiled. ‘The thing is, they didn’t believe you. That was a problem. We had to apply pressure.’

‘How did you do that?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Calhoun. ‘That was done at a very high level. But one day they were asking a whole lot of questions. The next day they stopped.’

Thank God, thought Chris. ‘I wonder if you could tell me something about the psychometric testing programme?’ he asked.

Calhoun seemed surprised at the change of tack. But he answered the question. ‘It was very successful. Psychometric tests are often used to measure what kind of a team player someone is, leadership, that kind of thing. I realized that wasn’t really what Bloomfield Weiss wanted. Sure, we said we did, just like every other corporation in America, but we were just kidding ourselves. We wanted winners. People who were determined to come out on top, no matter what the cost. It’s not like we used the psychometric tests alone to hire people, but they were a useful pointer.’

‘Didn’t they show up some people as borderline psychotic?’

‘No. I mean not really. Everyone has psychological problems. You could argue that the truly successful have them more than most. Most driven people are driven by something, if you see what I mean. And that something may be ugly. But we weren’t interested in their personal problems. We just cared about how they performed at work.’

‘What about Steve Matzley?’

‘A case in point. He did an excellent job for us before he moved on.’

‘But then he raped someone?’

Calhoun’s eyes flared up. ‘That’s not my fault! That’s his responsibility.’

‘Didn’t the psychological assessment point out a high risk?’

‘Who told you that?’ Calhoun snapped.

Chris shrugged. ‘It’s just a rumour.’

Calhoun sighed. ‘If you read the report with hindsight, it is just possible that you could have identified pointers to what happened. But you can do that with anything with hindsight.’

‘I suppose so,’ said Chris, trying to sound sympathetic. He didn’t want to alienate Calhoun. He still had more he wanted to find out from him. ‘Were there any others who had similar concerns raised in their reports?’

‘I really don’t remember,’ said Calhoun.

‘People on the boat the night Alex was killed? Alex himself, perhaps?’

Calhoun glared at Chris. ‘I told you, I don’t remember.’

‘After Alex died, you checked the files, didn’t you?’

‘I have no idea.’

‘What do you mean, you have no idea? We’re not talking about some routine personnel matter, here. This was a big deal. You must remember whether you did check the files or you didn’t.’

‘I don’t remember,’ Calhoun growled through gritted teeth. ‘And if I did remember, I wouldn’t tell you. Those files are personal and very confidential.’

Chris was sure that there was something in those reports that had been of great interest to George Calhoun. He was equally sure Calhoun wouldn’t tell him. There was no point in pushing it.

‘OK, I understand,’ he said. ‘What about the psychologists who did the tests? Wasn’t there one who was unhappy about it?’

Calhoun snorted. ‘Marcia Horwath. I remember her. She was the one who persuaded the firm to drop the programme.’

‘Did she test Steve Matzley?’

‘She did.’

‘And anyone else she was worried about?’

‘Possibly. I really don’t remember.’

Chris realized that he had got as far as he was going to go. ‘Thank you very much, Mr Calhoun.’

‘So you’re not going to tell me what really happened?’ asked Calhoun with a leer.

‘I already have.’ Somehow, Chris had no difficulties lying to him.

‘Come on. All these questions about whether any of your friends on the boat were psychos. Something must have happened.’

‘Alex Lubron fell in the water and drowned,’ said Chris.

‘OK,’ said Calhoun. ‘Have it your way.’

Chris got up to go. Then he paused. ‘When I came in, you said “another one”. Has someone else been asking about Alex?’

‘Yes. His brother. Or at least he said he was his brother.’

‘Marcus Lubron. Tall thin guy?’

‘That’s him. Scruffy. Probably hadn’t had a bath in a week. He was on some kind of mission to discover the truth about his brother’s death.’

‘What did you tell him?’

‘Not much. A guy like that, you know.’ He wrinkled his nose in something close to a sneer.

‘He didn’t give you an address or anything?’

‘No. I don’t think he liked me much, either. But his car had Vermont plates.’

‘Vermont plates? Thank you.’ That might make finding him easier. ‘Well goodbye, George,’ Chris said, extending his hand. Calhoun shook it. Once he had left the house and was walking down the drive, Chris wiped his hand on his trousers. He hoped George Calhoun never got another job.

Terry drove Chris back to the city and dropped him off at a bland business hotel midtown. After Chris had checked in, he powered up his laptop, logged on to the Internet and started to look for Marcus Lubron.

It wasn’t quite as easy as he had hoped. There wasn’t a Marcus Lubron listed in the phone records anywhere in America. There were two M. Lubrons, one in Washington State, and one in Texas. Chris called them. A Matthew and a Mike. Marcus must be ex-directory.

He looked up ‘Lubron’ on one of the search engines, and discovered that it was the name of an anti-creasing solution for textiles. More promisingly, there was a mention of furniture made by a Marcus Lubron in the apartment of a wealthy Manhattan family named Farmiloe. Theirs was an easier number to find. Mrs Farmiloe was delighted that Chris had read about her apartment, but hadn’t dealt with Marcus Lubron directly, although she knew he came from Vermont. She gave Chris the number of her interior designer, who was uncooperative at first, but, when Chris convinced her that he was an old friend from England desperate to catch up with Marcus after ten years, she relented and gave him the name and address. Chris looked it up on a map. Marcus lived in a small town in the mountains in the middle of nowhere, Vermont.

He decided not to call him. The chances of Marcus talking to him on the phone, or agreeing to meet him, were slim, and there was no point in alerting him that Chris was looking for him. Much better to surprise him. So, Chris called a travel agent, and booked a seat on a plane to Burlington the next day.

It was much easier to locate Dr Marcia Horwath. She had an office on the West Side, and said she could spare Chris fifteen minutes at a quarter to nine the next morning. Pleased that he finally seemed to be making some progress, he took a taxi to Penn Station and a train to Princeton.

Melville Capital took up the first floor of a neatly painted wooden building that looked more like a house than an office block, the ground floor of which was occupied by an upmarket stockbroker. Chris arrived at a couple of minutes before four, and was ushered by an overweight middle-aged woman into Dr Zizka’s office. Large and airy with a couple of comfortable sofas, pleasant prints of college buildings on the walls, shelves stuffed with books and academic journals, and only one computer in the whole room, it seemed a very pleasant place to spend the day untroubled by the turmoil of the markets. The late afternoon sunshine streamed through the window, gleaming softly off the polished wood of the desk, and the bald head of the man sitting behind it reading a journal of some kind through half-moon glasses.

It was a few seconds before the man put his text to one side and looked up. He smiled, leapt to his feet, and scurried round the desk, extending his hand. ‘I’m Martin Zizka.’

‘Chris Szczypiorski.’

‘Come, come. Sit down,’ Zizka said, indicating one of the sofas. He was a small man in his fifties, with bright blue eyes twinkling out of a round face. ‘I’m very sorry we only have thirty minutes, but it’s been crazy round here,’ he said, waving vaguely at his serene office.

‘I understand,’ said Chris. ‘The markets are never quiet.’

‘Never,’ said Zizka, shaking his head.

‘You manage money for a number of colleges, I believe?’

‘That’s right,’ Zizka said. ‘I used to be an economics professor at Melville College in Ohio. They were very disappointed by the attitude of the firms advising them on their endowment fund. Conflicts of interest, poor performance, lack of personal attention. So I offered to manage their money for them. I had a good couple of years, I have many contacts in the academic world, and now I advise on the funds of five more similar institutions.

‘And you do that from here?’ Chris said, glancing round the office.

Zizka smiled. ‘Oh, I don’t trade myself any more. I did to start with, but now I find it’s not necessary. I parcel the money out to others to do that, such as yourself. I take the major strategic decisions. I find if you get those right, the returns take care of themselves. What I can never seem to get enough of, even here, is peace and quiet to read and think.’

There was something in that, Chris thought. He realized he was in danger of underestimating Dr Zizka.

‘And presumably that was why you invested in Carpathian. It seemed the right strategic decision?’

‘Partly.’

‘Partly?’

‘Partly that. Mostly Lenka.’

‘You’ve known her for a long time?’

‘Yes. When I started in this business, I got involved in the high-yield bond market. That was when I was still buying individual securities myself. I dealt with all the big brokers, including Bloomfield Weiss. While the others seemed happy to sell me any deal as long as it was one of theirs, Lenka only sold me bonds that worked. Although I was only a small client, she looked after me. I ended up giving her all my business. The returns were good, and she never abused my trust. We got on well: my parents were from a small town outside of Prague, you know. So, when she told me she was setting up Carpathian, I thought, why not support her? She deserves it. And so far it’s worked out fine. The problem is that some of the trustees keep asking questions about it. It sort of sticks out on our list of investments.’

Zizka paused, and took off his little spectacles. ‘I was shocked to hear what happened to her. A terrible thing.’ He shook his head and rubbed his eyes. Then he looked up at Chris. ‘But now she’s gone, it seems the right time to get out, given all the other factors. I’m sure you understand.’

Chris did understand. But he couldn’t allow himself to agree. ‘Do you still think the strategic argument makes sense? That as the Central European economies become integrated with Europe there will be opportunities for making money?’

‘Yes, I do, but...’ Zizka shrugged.

Chris launched into his spiel on the opportunities in Central Europe, his view of the economic prospects there, the track record of the fund since inception, how the current market jitters provided a chance to make more money. Zizka listened politely, but Chris could see he wasn’t getting anywhere. Zizka had invested to support Lenka. Now Lenka was gone, there was no reason for him to stay involved. His mind had been made up.

The minutes were ticking away. His half hour was nearly up. Chris stood up to go.

‘Thank you for listening to me, Dr Zizka.’

‘It’s the least I could do,’ he said. ‘You were Lenka’s partner, after all.’

‘I was.’ Chris shook Zizka’s hand. A decent man. A fair man. A far cry from Rudy Moss. ‘You know, I feel like I still am her partner. That she’s still there, looking over my shoulder. Carpathian is still her firm. She trusted me and I won’t let her down.’

Zizka’s eyes flicked over Chris, examining him closely. ‘I’m sure.’

‘Will you reconsider?’ Chris asked. ‘If not for me, then for her?’

Zizka hesitated. He looked as if he was about to say something, but then he walked over to the door and opened it.

‘Goodbye,’ he said. ‘And good luck.’

Chris arrived back at his hotel depressed. Zizka hadn’t actually said he still wanted to withdraw his money. But he hadn’t said he had changed his mind, either. Chris called Ollie at home. It was nearly midnight his time but Ollie was happy to talk. The market was weaker; prices were down. A miraculous bid for Eureka Telecom had not materialized. Ollie was enthusiastic, though. He thought that the latest news about the Slovakian economy was encouraging, and that investors hadn’t picked up on it yet. Chris’s first instinct was to tell Ollie to wait until he returned. But Ollie was convincing, and with Lenka gone Chris would have to start trusting him soon. So why not now? He told Ollie to buy Slovakian bonds in the morning. Ollie didn’t ask about Melville, so Chris didn’t tell him.

Chris put down the phone and looked around his sterile hotel room. He couldn’t face moping the evening away in there, so he changed out of his suit, grabbed his wallet and headed out into the street. He was hungry. He made his way up the East Side, looking for his old haunts. He found a place that he, Duncan and Ian used to go to on Seventy-First Street and Second Avenue, and spent a pleasant hour drinking a couple of beers, devouring a chunky cheeseburger and remembering the good times of that summer in New York ten years before.

He wished that he had somehow got to know Megan better back then. In retrospect, all that time he had spent with Tamara was a total waste. Of course, it could never have happened, he would never have been able to prise her away from Eric. But it was a nice thought. He would see her again soon. That was a nice thought too.

He wandered back haphazardly and finally found himself on the cross street near his hotel. It was cold in New York in March and it began to rain. The temperature could only just have been above freezing and the cold hard drops of water bit into his face. He was glad he had been sent on the second training programme of the year: spending five months in the dark and cold and rain would not have been nearly so much fun. Now, it was hard to imagine the sweltering heat and humidity of the New York he had experienced. The rain intensified. He stared down at the sidewalk and quickened his pace, hands deep in his coat pockets, eager now to get back to the warmth of his hotel, only a block away.

Suddenly, a sharp jolt against his back propelled him into a doorway. He lost his balance and crashed into a metal door. As he tried to turn, he felt cold steel on his cheek. The flat of the blade of a knife pressed his face against the door. He tried to move his head to get a look at his attacker but the knife cut into his cheek. He did catch a glimpse of a black scarf, moustache, dark glasses and woollen hat, with long dark hair curling out beneath its rim. The man was a few inches shorter than him, but he was strong and determined.

‘Stay still,’ hissed a hoarse voice. ‘And listen.’

Chris’s cheek stung. He could feel blood trickling down to his jaw. He kept still.

‘I’m gonna tell you this once,’ whispered the voice in a good imitation of Marlon Brando. ‘You’re not gonna ask any more questions. You’re gonna get on the next plane home. You’re gonna forget all about Lenka. Got that?’

‘Yes,’ Chris said, through clenched teeth.

‘You sure, now?’

‘I’m sure.’

‘OK. I’ll be watching you.’ Then the knife lifted from Chris’s skin and he felt a blow to his ribs that doubled him up. He gasped for breath and turned to see a figure running off. He looked around him. He caught the eye of a woman who had watched the whole thing open mouthed from the other side of the street. She ducked and hurried off in the opposite direction. There were no other witnesses.

Chris picked himself up off the pavement and felt his cheek, which was bleeding quite badly. He set off at a jog to the entrance of the hotel.

The concierge was shocked to see him, and swiftly found a first-aid pack. He offered to call the police, but Chris said that since he wasn’t badly hurt and nothing was taken there was no point. So he took the first-aid kit up to his room, breathing heavily and shaking.

He headed straight for the bathroom, holding his handkerchief to his cheek.

He looked into the mirror and froze. There, written on the glass in blood, were the words I killed Lenka.

He staggered back into the bedroom and slammed the bathroom door. He slumped down on the bed and put his face in his hands. He was shaking all over now. Who was this guy? Where was he? Was he still in the room?

He leapt to his feet and checked the room, behind the curtains, in the wardrobe, and in the bathroom behind the shower curtain. There was no one there, of course. He sat down on the bed and tried to get a grip of himself. After five minutes, when the worst of the shaking had stopped, he called the hotel manager.

The manager came, followed swiftly by two uniformed policemen. They were big men, who seemed even bigger with all the hardware they carried around their waists. Their toughness was both intimidating and comforting. They took notes. Their interest perked up considerably when they heard that Lenka was a murder victim and then subsided when they heard that the crime had taken place in the Czech Republic, which Chris had to spell.

They asked him whether the man who had attacked Lenka was the same one who had attacked him that evening.

Chris thought hard before answering. The clothes, although similar, were different. The moustache could have been the same. He couldn’t remember seeing long curly hair in Prague. But the run was familiar. He had seen both men run away and they were the same man.

The policemen were not convinced that this counted as positive identification but they wrote it down anyway. Then their radio crackled, calling them to a shooting somewhere or other, and they were gone.

The manager fussed over Chris. He said he had no idea how anyone could possibly have got past the front desk and into his room. Chris suspected it was easy. The manager gave him a new room, and Chris requested that the hotel be particularly careful not to divulge his new room number to anyone. The manager made lots of assurances and then left him alone.

Chris had a bath and went to bed. He couldn’t sleep. The warning was as clear as could be. Someone wanted Chris to stop asking questions. If he didn’t, he would be killed. And whoever had made the threat seemed perfectly capable of carrying it out. So what should Chris do?

The obvious answer was give up and go home. Chris resolved to cancel his ticket to Vermont and fly back to London the next day.

Having made that decision, he hoped that his brain, relieved, would shut down in sleep. But it didn’t. A voice somewhere, deep down inside, protested. It called him a coward. Spineless. It whispered Lenka’s name. Chris tried not to listen, but the voice wouldn’t leave him alone. It pointed out that if someone wanted to stop Chris that badly, then Chris must be on the verge of discovering something important. Something about Lenka’s murder. If he persisted, he would find out who had killed Lenka and perhaps do something about it.

But why should he? He wasn’t a hero. It wasn’t his job to solve crimes. Lenka was dead; there was nothing he could do to bring her back to life.

He knew what his grandfather would do. He would risk his life to find out what had happened to Lenka, just as he had risked his life so many times fifty years before.

But his grandfather was a bloody-minded bigot. A pain in the arse.

What about his father, the voice asked. That quiet man of steady principles also wouldn’t quit. It had taken courage to defect when he had. And it had taken courage to stick with his ideals amongst his more conservative compatriots in Halifax. And what of his mother? The woman who had battled through so much hardship to give him and his sister every advantage she could. She would never give up and fly home.

He had left these people behind when he had gone to university, and then into investment banking. He had intended to become someone else, someone better, more successful, wealthier, and yes, more English. But it hadn’t quite worked out like that. He had come close: he had proved to himself at least that he was a good trader, he could earn good money, he could turn a blind eye to the everyday deceptions of people like Ian Darwent or Herbie Exler. But then he had been spurned by the system, unjustly ejected on to the scrap heap of burned-out, toxic traders, ignored, left to rot.

He saw that he had a choice. He could remain in the world of Bloomfield Weiss and George Calhoun, or he could do what his parents, his grandfather and Lenka would do in his place.

If he was going to live with himself, however short that life would be, there was only one choice. He made it and swiftly fell asleep.

12

He awoke afraid. He still knew he had made the right decision, but he was scared of the consequences. Chris prided himself on his ability to assess risk. And he knew he was right to be scared.

But he had some leeway. He was safe until whoever was after him realized that he had decided not to be deterred. The longer whoever it was thought that he might have given up, the more grace he had.

He ate breakfast in the safety of his room, and packed. He caught a cab outside the hotel, and it crawled across town towards the Lincoln Tunnel. Then, as the cab drove through a light changing from green to red, Chris asked the driver to turn north. He looked over his shoulder. The streets were crowded with cars going in every direction. If someone was following, he might have lost him. Or he might not. He directed the cab left and right, along a few cross streets, before barrelling up Tenth Avenue towards the Upper West Side. It was impossible to tell whether he was being followed. The Indian driver thought he was crazy, but didn’t care.

Dr Marcia Horwath’s office was in a five-storey building in a quiet cross street. Chris leapt out of the cab, overpaid the driver and, quickly scanning the empty street, rushed into the building. It was ten minutes to nine and Dr Horwath was waiting for him.

She was in her fifties with short grey hair and an air of authority. Her office was an office, not a consulting room. No leather couch, no potted plants. Filing cabinets, charts on the walls, a computer, an expensive but businesslike desk. It looked more like the place of work of a management consultant than a psychologist.

She didn’t have much time, and she let him know it. ‘How can I help you, Mr, er...?’

‘Szczypiorski. I would like to talk to you about Bloomfield Weiss.’

‘I see. Bloomfield Weiss used to be a client of mine. Even though our relationship terminated many years ago, my duty of confidentiality still stands.’

‘I understand,’ said Chris. ‘So perhaps I’ll talk and then you can decide how much you can tell me.’

‘Go ahead.’

‘I was recruited by Bloomfield Weiss as a graduate trainee ten years ago. As part of the recruitment process I was given some psychometric tests. I never found out the results, and quite frankly I forgot all about them. But my understanding is that Bloomfield Weiss used these tests to screen for particularly aggressive individuals.’

‘That’s true.’

‘And you were one of the psychologists that they used to conduct the tests?’

‘That’s true also.’

‘What did you think of their approach?’

At last, Dr Horwath smiled, and some of the caginess left her. ‘At first I was intrigued. There has always seemed to me to be some hypocrisy in the way companies claim they are looking for all the noble virtues in their employees. One of the strengths of psychometric testing is that it doesn’t necessarily show that people are good or bad. You don’t pass or fail. Different people have different strengths and weaknesses that mean they are more or less suitable for different roles. Bloomfield Weiss realized that many of the successful people in their organization had traits that were often looked upon negatively by recruiters.’

‘Such as?’

‘If you worked there, I’m sure you saw them. Aggression. The desire to win at any cost. The ability to lie and deceive. The ability to manipulate other people. A certain recklessness. Even a propensity to violence.’

‘Violence?’

‘Many traders are violent people, wouldn’t you say?’

‘Some,’ said Chris.

‘Civilized society sublimates the tendency towards violence in a number of ways. The most obvious is playing sport, or watching it. But trading the financial markets seems to be another way. Come on, don’t tell me you haven’t seen the macho language, the posturing, the desire to dominate on the trading floor?’

‘I suppose I have,’ Chris admitted.

‘Well, that was what we were looking for.’

‘So what went wrong?’

‘I’m afraid I can’t say.’

Dr Horwath looked at Chris neutrally. He could read nothing from her expression.

‘My understanding is that one of the psychologists responsible for the testing, yourself, raised some concerns about some of the trainees you tested. You were afraid they might turn out to be dangerous. Your warnings were ignored and the candidates were recruited anyway. One of these, Steve Matzley, was subsequently convicted of rape. I’m concerned whether there were any others that troubled you.’

‘There may have been,’ said Dr Horwath. ‘But I couldn’t possibly discuss them with you if there were. And I’m not sure what your interest in this is. You don’t still work for Bloomfield Weiss do you?’

‘No, I left two years ago. But I witnessed the death of one of the trainees on my programme, Alex Lubron. He fell off a boat and was drowned. Did you hear about it?’

‘Yes, I did,’ said Dr Horwath. Weren’t the circumstances suspicious?’

Chris had to be cautious here. Dr Horwath owed no duty of confidentiality to him, so he had to be careful not to say anything that could be used against him, or Duncan, or any of them later.

‘I thought the circumstances were straightforward at the time,’ he said. ‘But now I’m not so sure. One of the other trainees on the boat, Lenka Němečková, was murdered in Prague a couple of weeks ago.’ Dr Horwath’s eyebrows shot up at this. ‘I believe there may be some connection with what happened on that boat.’

‘What kind of connection?’

Chris sighed. ‘I don’t know.’

‘So what do you want from me?’

‘If I give you the names of the people on the boat, can you tell me whether you were worried about any of them?’

‘The short answer, Mr, er.... is no. For reasons I have already explained.’

Chris went on regardless. ‘There were seven of us. Myself, Lenka, Alex, Duncan Gemmel, Ian Darwent, Eric Astle and one other woman whom you wouldn’t know.’ Chris listed these names slowly, watching Dr Horwath’s face very closely as he did so. Nothing. Not a blink of an eyelid. ‘Do any of those names ring a bell?’

‘All of those people told me or my associates personal details in the strictest confidence. As did you, yourself. While I didn’t approve of Bloomfield Weiss’s approach to this programme, I do have to respect that confidentiality.’

‘But Dr Horwath. A friend of mine has been killed already. I myself was attacked by a man with a knife last night.’ Chris touched the cut on his face. ‘Please. At least tell me if nothing showed up in the tests of any of us.’

Dr Horwath looked up at the ceiling for a long moment, and then returned her gaze very deliberately to Chris. She said nothing.

‘You can’t tell me that, can you?’

Still nothing.

Chris leaned forward, eager to pin her down. ‘There was something wrong with one of them. Which one? You didn’t have to look the names up in a file. One of them means something to you, doesn’t it? One of them you remember, ten years later.’

Dr Horwath looked at her watch. ‘I do appreciate the seriousness of your enquiry. But I cannot help you. I absolutely cannot. Now, I have an appointment at nine.’

Chris realized that was as much as he was going to get. But he had got something, he was sure of it.

‘Thank you, Dr Horwath. If you do change your mind, here’s my card. And,’ he paused. What he wanted to say was melodramatic, but it needed to be said. ‘If, sometime in the next few weeks, you learn that something has happened to me, please remember this conversation and pass it on.’

Dr Horwath’s eyes flashed at him. He knew he sounded paranoid, but he hoped that she would be able to tell he wasn’t crazy. ‘I’ll do that,’ she said.

Chris left the room and, as he was putting on his coat outside her office, he saw Dr Horwath looking through a drawer of her filing cabinet.

The rented four-wheel drive ground up the hill, the tyres somehow gripping to the compacted snow under the wheels. Chris knew he wasn’t being followed. All he had to do was look behind him down the ravine to the highway two miles behind and several hundred feet below him. He had taken a cab to Newark Airport, hung around International Departures, and then taken the monorail to the terminal for Burlington. So far, no one knew where he was.

There was snow in Vermont. The valley would have looked pretty on a sunny day, but the skies were leaden, the dark clouds hugged the mountainside only a couple of hundred feet above him, and Chris was pushing the four-wheel drive well beyond the limits of a normal car. So far, no skids. Which was fortunate, because there was a hundred-foot drop to his left.

What kept him going were the clear tracks of another vehicle along the road in front of him. Someone else had been along here since it had last snowed. If they had made it, so could he.

About four miles from the highway, he rounded a bend and came to a high meadow. The trees were cleared for about half a mile up a gentle slope to a white-painted house. Near it was a big red barn. Smoke trickled out of a chimney. A four-wheel drive similar to his own stood outside. Relieved that he had arrived intact, Chris parked his vehicle next to it, and got out. After the warmth of the car the cold engulfed him, making him catch his breath. He glanced up at the sky. He was no expert, but it looked to him like snow.

He approached the front door. It opened when he was still a couple of steps away. A tall woman with long greying hair eyed him suspiciously.

‘Hi,’ he said. ‘Can I come in? It’s freezing out here.’

‘What do you want?’

‘To see Marcus.’

The woman hesitated. Finally, her sympathy overcame her suspicion, and she let him in. She led him through to a warm living room and asked him to take a seat. He did so, on a strange-looking squat wooden chair that was surprisingly comfortable. The woman sat on the floor near a stove. The room was adorned with wild Indian-style fabrics. There were other pieces of furniture in a similar style to the chair Chris was sitting on, and at least a dozen pots of various sizes and shapes, all decorated in primitive browns and greens. And no TV.

‘One of Marcus’s?’ Chris asked, tapping the chair.

The woman nodded. She had a smooth face, serene. Despite her grey hair, she didn’t seem to be much older than Chris.

‘Is he here?’

‘He’s out back. He’ll be here in a moment.’

Chris heard a metallic click, and looked up. A tall man wearing a long coat was standing in the doorway. In his hands was a rifle. The rifle was pointing straight at Chris.

Chris slowly rose to his feet, holding up his hands in a placating gesture. He knew it would be difficult to talk to Marcus. The barrel of the gun didn’t make it any easier.

‘There’s no need for that,’ Chris said gently.

‘I think there is,’ Marcus growled. He sounded like Alex. He looked like him, too, only much taller. He had the same thin face and dark eyebrows. The stubble on his cheeks reminded Chris of Alex on a Sunday evening. But of course Marcus looked older, more than ten years older, and he lacked Alex’s sense of humour. At least while he was holding a gun.

‘Marcus, please,’ the woman said.

‘Be quiet, Angie. I don’t trust this guy.’

‘Put the gun down,’ she said.

‘No. I’m keeping hold of the gun. Now, what’s your name?’

‘Chris. Chris Szczypiorski.’

‘I thought so. Didn’t I tell you I didn’t want to talk to you?’

‘Yes, you did. But I want to talk to you. And I’m here now.’

‘Well, just turn around and go right out the way you came in.’

Chris took a deep breath. ‘Please, Marcus. I’ve travelled a long way to see you. Give me ten minutes.’

Marcus thought this over. His eyebrows knitted together in a frown. ‘Since you’re here,’ he said. ‘Talk.’

Chris returned to his chair, and Marcus sat opposite him. Angie watched carefully from her position on the floor. The gun rested on Marcus’s knees, pointing at Chris.

‘Tell me what happened on the boat.’

‘Right.’ Chris found it impossible to take his eyes off the rifle, and very difficult to get his thoughts in order. But having come this far, there was no point in prevaricating. He told Marcus about the evening on the boat in some detail. Marcus’s intense brown eyes hung on every word. When he had finished, Chris fell silent.

‘And that’s it?’ Marcus asked.

‘That’s it.’

‘You haven’t left anything out?’

Chris shook his head.

‘If that’s what happened, why didn’t you tell the police?’

‘We didn’t want Duncan to get into trouble.’

‘Why not? He killed my brother didn’t he?’

‘It was an accident. He didn’t mean to knock Alex into the sea. He was drunk, and provoked.’

‘So you covered it up. I thought Alex was a friend of yours.’ The anger and contempt seethed in Marcus’s voice.

‘He was,’ said Chris. ‘That’s why three of us, including Duncan, risked their lives to try to save him. It was very lucky they weren’t all drowned. I thought we weren’t going to find Ian in the end.’

‘Shame you did,’ Marcus muttered.

Chris ignored the comment.

‘Trouble is,’ said Marcus slowly. ‘That’s not what happened.’

Chris shrugged. He had told Marcus the truth. There was nothing more he could do.

‘You investment bankers never quit lying, do you?’

‘I’m not lying, Marcus.’

‘How am I supposed to believe you? You lied to the police, didn’t you?’ A contemptuous smile flickered on his face. ‘I know about the police investigation. A few months ago I was going through some of my mother’s old stuff and there was a letter to her from my aunt talking about how the police suspected Alex’s death was murder. I called my aunt, who said that there were all kinds of suspicions right after the death, but nothing ever came of them. I go to New York from time to time to sell my furniture, so the next time I was there I tracked down a detective who worked on the case. He said he was suspicious. There was bruising on Alex’s jaw that was consistent with a blow. He thought you guys were all lying. Then suddenly his boss told him to forget all about it. So he forgot it. But I haven’t.’

‘That’s why you went looking for Lenka?’

‘That’s right. I tried Eric Astle first, but he wouldn’t even see me. And the guy who ran the training programme wasn’t much help either. Pretty soon, I realized that most of the people on that boat were in London, so I went over there to find them. You were out of the country somewhere, but I spoke to the Czech woman. Lenka.’

‘Who told you the same as I just have,’ Chris said.

‘More or less.’

‘And then you found Duncan and screamed at him?’

‘Yes.’

‘So what’s the problem?’

‘I’m not sure,’ said Marcus. ‘But there is one.’

‘Is it something Lenka told you?’

Marcus didn’t answer.

‘I know Lenka sent you an e-mail saying she had something important to tell you. You said you’d phone her. Did you?’

Marcus nodded.

‘What did she say?’

‘She said she was planning a trip to America in a couple of weeks, and she wanted to come out here to see me. We agreed on a day.’

‘Did she say what she wanted to talk to you about?’

‘I asked her. She said it was something to do with Alex’s death. But she’d only tell me the details when we met.’

‘Did she say why?’

‘I asked her that, too. She said she had something to tell me that I had a right to know, but that she was worried about what I might do with the information. She said it would be better to discuss it face-to-face.’

‘So you have no idea what this “something” was?’

‘All she would say was that what she had told me happened, didn’t happen. I asked her whether Duncan knocked Alex into the sea or not. I mean that seems a pretty difficult thing to get wrong. Lenka said he had, but that wasn’t how Alex had died.’

Chris was stunned. ‘What could she mean?’

‘I don’t know. I asked her, but she wouldn’t tell me more. But you tell me.’

‘What?’ said Chris.

‘How did my brother die?’

‘I’ve no idea.’

‘You were there. What happened? Did you all throw him in together? Is that what happened? Did you beat him senseless and toss him into the sea?’ Marcus raised his voice. ‘Tell me, for God’s sake!’

‘I don’t know,’ said Chris. ‘If what Lenka originally told you is wrong, I just don’t know.’

‘How can that be?’ said Marcus. ‘You were there.’

Chris shrugged.

‘You’re all going to cover this up, aren’t you? And then one of you is going to come out here and kill me too.’ His eyes lit up as the thought took hold. ‘Is that what you’re doing here? Stand up!’

Chris didn’t move.

‘I said, stand up.’ The end of Marcus’s rifle twitched.

This time Chris did as he was told.

‘Frisk him, Angie.’

‘What?’ Angie looked at him as if he was mad.

‘He might have a gun.’

‘I haven’t got a gun,’ Chris said.

‘Frisk him. I can’t. I want to keep him covered.’

‘OK.’ Angie gently ran her hands over Chris’s legs and then inside his coat. She checked his pockets. ‘Nothing,’ she said.

‘Check the car!’

Angie looked at Marcus, and then at Chris. ‘Keys?’

‘It’s unlocked,’ Chris said.

Chris sat down again. He and Marcus waited for Angie, staring at each other, Marcus’s brown eyes simmering with anger.

‘You look like him, you know,’ Chris said.

‘No, I don’t.’

‘I think you do.’

‘He’s dead.’

‘Oh, come on,’ said Chris in frustration. ‘You know what I mean.’

‘I don’t know how you guys could do it,’ said Marcus. ‘Lie about him. You all say he was a friend of yours. Why don’t you act like it?’

Chris felt a surge of anger rise in his chest. ‘What do you mean, “why don’t we act like it”? You have no idea how we felt about Alex’s death. We’d all become good friends that summer. We all liked Alex, and with reason. He was a good person in a place where good people were thin on the ground. He lightened the whole place up a bit. He was fun.’

Marcus was listening grudgingly. The door shut as Angie returned from the car, shaking her head.

‘It just about destroyed Duncan,’ Chris continued in a lower voice. ‘And Lenka, although she did a better job of getting over it. That evening comes back to me all the time, even now. Especially now. I’m sure it must be bad to lose a brother. But it’s not much fun to lose a friend, especially when it happens right in front of your eyes and there’s nothing you can do about it.’

‘You know,’ Marcus said. ‘I was so disappointed when he became an investment banker. He was a good artist. See that painting over there?’ He pointed over Chris’s shoulder to a painting of a petrochemical plant at night: looming metal curves, orange glows, and bright halogen flashes. It wasn’t one Chris recognized. It was out of the line of sight of the doorway, so Chris hadn’t noticed it when he came in. It looked totally out of place in that room, but it had obviously been hung with pride.

‘He did that. It won him a prize at college. He’d begun to sell some of his work, and then he gave it all up to go on Wall Street. It’s good, isn’t it?’

Chris nodded, and was surprised to feel the prick of tears in his eyes at such a tangible sign of Alex. He blinked, and looked directly at Marcus. ‘Did you ever forgive him?’

‘What? What do you mean?’

‘Sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.’ But Chris could tell from Marcus’s suspicious glance that he had guessed correctly.

‘You’re right: I didn’t forgive him. I was a couple of years older than him. It was the end of the eighties, all anybody wanted to do was get a big job and make big money. It made me sick. I wanted to travel. See the world. Stay in touch with myself. Develop into a creative human being. Alex was my kid brother, and he thought the same way I did.’

Chris sensed that a powerful urge to talk about his brother was bottled up within Marcus, and now he had the opportunity to release it, it was overcoming his distrust. Chris tried to encourage it.

‘What about your mother?’

‘She didn’t understand any of this. Since our dad died, she had become obsessed with us both getting a good job. Nothing exciting, just something that would guarantee us a pay cheque for the rest of our lives. And when I left college, it got worse. You see, I didn’t even apply for any jobs; I just went bumming around the Caribbean, crewing on sailboats. Mom couldn’t stand it. So I took off completely. Went to Europe. Australia. The Philippines.’

‘And you lost touch with Alex?’

‘Not at first. I came back, occasionally; spent time with both of them. But it was an ugly time, especially with my mother. I remember I came home one Christmas and she said she’d contracted breast cancer. Of course that shook me up, but then it turned out she had it beat. Or at least that’s what she thought. Then Alex took his job at Bloomfield Weiss, and I thought, screw them, and I stayed out of touch for nearly a year.’

He sighed. ‘The cancer came back. Later, I think I discovered the reason Alex took the job.’

‘What was that?’

Marcus took a moment to answer. He was breathing heavily, trying to control himself. Chris saw the concerned look on Angie’s face as she watched him.

‘Mom wasn’t properly covered. For healthcare. After Alex died, I found out he’d taken out some large loans. And I found Mom’s healthcare bills. They were pretty big.’

‘Alex did spend quite a lot of time with her,’ Chris said. ‘He got a couple of warnings for it. He looked after her.’

‘Yeah. And I guess I’m grateful. Although sometimes it makes me so angry. I get angry with him and her for not telling me what was going on. But of course I realize it’s me that I’m really angry with. I was so stupid, so selfish.’ Marcus shook his head. ‘You know, I only found out two months after Mom died. I kept calling her and getting no reply, and then I called my aunt and found out what had happened to the two of them. I missed their funerals, everything.

‘I came right home. Sorted through all their stuff, tidied up, and moved up to Vermont.’ He looked around at the small cabin. ‘I like it here. It’s quiet. Sometimes here I can feel peace. And finally I’m beginning to make some money out of the furniture. But I still miss Alex. Mom, too, sometimes, but it’s mostly Alex.’ He took a deep breath. ‘And believe me if I find that someone, one of your friends, did kill him on purpose, did murder him, I’ll, I’ll...’

Chris kept quiet. He didn’t want to know what Marcus would do. But Marcus told him anyway.

‘I’ll kill him.’

13

Chris was not prepared for what confronted him at the office. He had arrived straight from Heathrow after a lousy night with no sleep. The German stock market had wobbled the night before, and was now in full retreat. There were doubts about the strength of the German recovery, which meant that there were severe doubts about the prospects for Eastern Europe, which meant that most of Carpathian’s government bond holdings had fallen. Ironically, German and other euro zone countries’ bond prices had actually risen on the expectation of lower interest rates. This was the worst possible combination for Chris’s positions. And, of course, Bloomfield Weiss had taken the opportunity to mark Eureka Telecom down by another five points.

Ollie was despondent. The Slovakian bonds he had bought had fallen with the rest of the market, and he seemed to blame himself for Germany’s economic jitters. Chris tried to be supportive, as he knew he must, but it was difficult. He knew that in a month or two things would sort themselves out, but he didn’t have a month or two. Rudy Moss would want his money back in two weeks, and Chris would be faced with either trying to sell his Eureka Telecom bonds at a huge loss, or unwinding his fundamentally strong government bond positions at exactly the wrong moment. Carpathian’s performance would be severely damaged either way, possibly terminally.

And there was no message from Melville Capital. Chris had been half-hoping that Dr Zizka would change his mind. But he hadn’t.

Chris spent the day with Ollie ineffectually wrestling with the markets. There was really nothing they could do. They didn’t want to sell yet if they could possibly help it. Although there were bonds out there worth buying, they had no spare cash with which to buy them. All they could do was listen to the doom and gloom of a bearish market on a cold grey Friday afternoon.

There was definitely no chance of getting Rudy back into the fund. But Chris still had hopes for Dr Zizka. At the very end of their meeting, he had had a strong feeling he was finally getting through to him. There was nothing to be gained by waiting for Zizka to change his mind. Either he would, or he wouldn’t. Chris needed to find out which. He picked up the phone.

‘Zizka.’ The voice was little more than a murmur.

‘Dr Zizka? It’s Chris Szczypiorski, Lenka’s partner.’

For a moment, Chris thought Zizka had fled, leaving his phone dangling, but Chris could feel, as much as hear, gentle breathing down the line.

‘Dr Zizka?’

‘Yes, yes,’ he replied at last. ‘How are you?’

‘I’m fine. Look, I was wondering whether you had decided to change your mind about pulling out of Carpathian.’

‘Ah.’

‘Have you?’

‘It’s difficult,’ Zizka said. ‘I have a meeting with some trustees next week. I’d like to be able to say we’ve gotten rid of this investment.’

‘The markets are jumpy at the moment. I’m convinced you’ll get a better price if you hang on for a couple of months. Lenka got you into the fund with the promise of good returns, and I’d hate you to come out without them.’

Silence again. Chris could feel his heart beating. He wanted to jump into the void, to fill the silence with persuasive talk, but he kept quiet. Zizka was thinking. And Chris knew who he was thinking about. Lenka.

‘All right,’ Zizka said, at last. ‘Why not? Personally, I believe these worries about Germany are all overdone, anyway. It won’t do any harm to wait a couple of months. I’ll stay in. We’ll review the situation in May, shall we?’

‘Excellent. We’ll talk then. Thank you very much, Dr Zizka.’

Chris put down the phone with a whoop. They were still going to lose the Amalgamated Veterans money, but keeping Melville Capital in the fund was a psychological boost both he and Ollie needed.

After that minor victory, there was nothing more they could do at the office late on a Friday afternoon, so Chris told Ollie to go home. He took the tube to King’s Cross station and the train up to Cambridge, looking over his shoulder every few minutes to see whether he was being followed. To his relief, he didn’t spot anyone.

On the train, he thought through his conversation with Marcus yet again. Assuming Lenka was telling the truth and not just trying to confuse Marcus, his conclusions were inescapable. She had said that Duncan had knocked Alex into the sea, but that wasn’t how Alex had died. Alex was fine before Duncan hit him. So he must have died as a result of what happened afterwards.

Someone had drowned him. And that someone must have been one of the three people who dived into the sea after him. Eric, Ian or Duncan. One of Chris’s friends. Someone he had known for ten years.

But which one?

Duncan was too shaken at the time to do anything. Eric was possible. But Ian seemed the most likely. For a start, he was in the water the longest. Also, he was most obviously linked to Lenka’s death. From his e-mails to her, it was clear Ian had had problems with Lenka just before she was killed. Or rather, she had had problems with him. Ian knew Lenka was in touch with Marcus, he knew she was going to tell him something, and he wanted to stop her.

Perhaps he was afraid that Lenka was about to tell Marcus that he had drowned Alex ten years before. So he went to Prague to shut her up. Or paid someone else to.

The idea revolted Chris. But whichever way he looked at it, it was the only one that made sense.

It was dark by the time the train pulled into Cambridge station. Chris took a taxi to Megan’s college. His spirits lifted as he walked through the ancient college gates into the quiet First Court and then passed the sprawling plane tree in front of her building. He looked up: the lights were on in her rooms.

‘It’s so good to see you!’ Megan said when she opened her door to him. Before he had a chance to say anything, she gave him a long, warm kiss. He held her and thought it was good to see her, too.

‘You look a wreck,’ she said. ‘Did you sleep on the plane?’

‘No. Sleep is pretty difficult at the moment.’

‘Come here,’ Megan led Chris to the sofa, and nestled under his arm. Chris liked her room. It had white walls and large windows overlooking the court below. Black painted wooden beams ran across the ceiling. She had done her best to scatter the few possessions she had been able to bring to England about the place. On the mantelpiece were two photographs: one of Megan’s parents sitting on the porch of a yellow clapboard house, and another of a much younger Megan lying on the grass next to her grandmother, hugging an overweight basset-hound. Framed posters of exhibitions long gone by adorned the walls. Next door was a tiny bedroom with a single bed. Cramped, but Chris wasn’t complaining.

‘Tell me what happened,’ Megan said. ‘Did you find Marcus?’

Chris told her all about his conversations with Abby Hollis, George Calhoun, and Dr Marcia Horwath. He told her in detail about his trip to Vermont to see Marcus. But he only gave his visit to Eric’s house a brief mention, and said nothing at all about the double threat he had received in New York. He didn’t want to scare Megan. Having made his decision to continue the search for Lenka’s killer, he didn’t want Megan to talk him out of it.

She listened attentively, interrupting only once or twice for clarification. When Chris had finished, she asked the obvious question. ‘What was Lenka going to tell Marcus?’

Chris gave her his answer.

Megan didn’t say anything for several seconds. Her face was pale. ‘That’s horrible. I just can’t believe it. Do you really think Ian would do something like that?’

‘It was either him or Eric,’ Chris said. ‘I don’t believe Duncan was in any state to drown someone that night.’

‘I’m sure it wasn’t Eric,’ said Megan. ‘I know him too well. It must have been Ian. Yuk.’ She recoiled. ‘And you think he killed Lenka as well?’

Chris nodded.

‘Oh, my God!’ She shook her head. ‘But why? Why would Ian want to drown Alex? They weren’t enemies.’

‘No, they weren’t,’ said Chris. ‘There’s only one reason I can think of. Did I ever tell you I caught Ian taking cocaine on the training programme?’

‘Yes, I think so.’

‘I only saw him do it the once. But what if he was a regular user? What if he was the one who supplied Alex? Remember, only the American trainees were tested. Ian could have had a lucky escape. But what if Alex was planning to tell Calhoun all about Ian?’

‘So Ian drowned Alex to keep him quiet.’ Megan shuddered. ‘Are you absolutely sure that’s what happened? I still can’t believe it.’

‘No, I’m not sure. It’s my best guess. But remember, we were out of sight of all three of them. It could have been Eric, or perhaps even Duncan himself.’

‘It wasn’t Eric.’

There was something about Megan’s certainty on that score that irritated Chris. He knew it was jealousy on his part, and he wasn’t proud of it. But although he agreed with Megan, he couldn’t stop himself from arguing. ‘We shouldn’t rule him out.’

‘You don’t have to rule him out if you don’t want to,’ said Megan. ‘But I know it was Ian. What do we do now?’

Chris slumped back on Megan’s sofa. He suddenly felt very tired. ‘I don’t know.’

‘Can we go to the police?’ Megan asked.

‘I thought about that,’ Chris said. ‘And the question is, which police? There’s no point in going to the police in this country; no crime has been committed here. We could go to the police on Long Island and try to get them to reopen the investigation into Alex’s death. But we have no hard evidence. Just hearsay and deduction. And as soon as we start explaining what really happened, we’ll have to admit that we all lied to them ten years ago. All that will do is get us arrested for obstructing the course of justice. They might decide to get Duncan on a murder or manslaughter charge as well.’

‘What about the Czech police? If we’re right and Ian murdered Lenka, then they can go after him.’

‘True. But we have no real evidence at all linking Lenka’s death to Ian. The Czechs would have to go through all the evidence about Alex’s death, which would get us back to square one with the American police. And then they’d have to extradite Ian. It’s unlikely to stand up.’

‘I see,’ said Megan.

There was one further reason why Chris didn’t want to go to the police. He knew it wasn’t Ian who had accosted him on the street in New York. If Ian was behind the killings of Alex and Lenka, then he had an accomplice. A dangerous accomplice. And once Chris went to the police, that accomplice would know that he had ignored his threat. Unless the police moved very fast, which given the evidence available was extremely unlikely, Chris could wind up dead.

‘What about talking to Ian?’ he suggested.

‘That’s a bit dangerous, isn’t it?’ said Megan. ‘What if we’re right and he did kill Alex and Lenka? He might just kill us too. Chris, this is beginning to scare me.’

‘He can’t carry on killing everyone,’ said Chris. ‘I could talk to him and tell him that you’ll go to the police immediately if he tries anything stupid. Murdering someone in England in those circumstances would be just plain dumb. And Ian isn’t dumb.’

‘I don’t know. It still sounds dangerous to me.’ Doubt and fear were written all over Megan’s face as she looked to Chris for reassurance.

‘I don’t think so,’ Chris said, as convincingly as he could. He knew Megan was right: it was dangerous. But at least they would be taking the initiative. It was probably less dangerous than allowing Ian to pick them both off at his convenience.

‘What will you say?’

‘I’ll talk it through with him. Ian’s smooth, but he’s not that smooth. Even if he denies everything, which I’m sure he will, I’ll know.’

Megan took a deep breath. ‘All right,’ she said, nodding towards her phone. ‘Call him.’

Chris hesitated. Was he sure about what he was doing? It still wasn’t too late to bury his head in the sand, to pretend that he had stopped asking questions, that he didn’t care that Alex and Lenka had died.

But he did care.

He looked up Ian’s home number and dialled it. He told Ian simply that he had discovered some things in America that he wanted to talk to him about, and persuaded him to meet him at lunch-time in a pub in Hampstead the next day, which was a Saturday. At that time it should be crowded and, from Chris’s point of view, safe.

Or at least he hoped it would be.

Lovemaking with Megan that night was both tender and intense. The fear they felt for themselves and for each other drew them together. Afterwards, they held each other tightly in the darkness, neither one of them willing to give words to what they felt. Outside, beyond the comforting walls of the college, beyond the winter dawn only a few hours away, lay uncertainty, danger, and, quite possibly, death.

As Chris left the college before breakfast the next morning, he saw an indistinct figure in a car parked a few yards up the road put down a newspaper and drive off. Why would anyone want to read a newspaper in a car at half past seven in the morning, Chris thought. He shuddered, and walked through the damp morning gloom towards his own car, unable to shake the feeling that he was running out of time.