Thursday legends

61

Dan Pringle's experience of bank managers had left him unimpressed; but Andrew John was different. For a start, he was a friend of Bob Skinner, and the Big Man did not surround himself with tedious or foolish people. But even more significantly than that, Pringle knew him of old.

More than thirty years before, the young Constable Pringle had occasionally drawn what were euphemistically known as crowd-control duties at Easter Road, home of Hibernian Football Club. He remembered the teenage wing-half who had forced his way into the side; one-footed but skilled, if not quite in the manner of Baxter or Puskas, a good passer of the ball and a solid tackier, and capable of bursting out of mid-field to change the course of a match.

Young Andrew John had flourished briefly in that sixties season, until visiting sides realised that he was at his most effective when Hibs were playing down their notorious slope, yet strangely anonymous and one-paced for the other half of the game. Word spread and he was marked accordingly.

The bubble had burst one winter day with the Hibees three-nil down to Falkirk before a sparse and unenthusiastic crowd, slogging uphill into cold sleety rain. Pringle had been there when it happened, when the wag had stood up in the front row of the season-ticket area and shouted, as the struggling midfielder allowed a blue-shirted opponent to evade him, 'See you, son, you're deceptively slow!'

Breaking all the unwritten rules, and a couple that were written, the young player had stopped and glared up into the murky stand. His hopes of lasting stardom in senior football, of great days at Hampden Park and around the world, all ended in that moment.

A month later he had been sent back to the reserves and, eighteen months after that, he had quit the game to concentrate on his career in banking, where there were, in those days at least, no hecklers.

'I saw you play, you know,' Detective Superintendent Pringle told him across the desk in his St Andres Square office. 'See if you'd had two good feet-'

'I'd have finished playing at thirty-five,' the banker retorted, 'and have come to see a guy like me to beg him to lend me the money to buy a wee pub somewhere. Now if I was a young player today, I'd work at it until I had two feet — and I'd do hill running as part of my training.

'Everybody used to laugh at the teams that trained on sand dunes, you know.' He paused. 'Don't start me reminiscing, or we'll be here all day. What can I do for you? You said when you phoned that it was something to do with the Diddler.'

Pringle nodded. 'That's right; the Shearer investigation. It's come to my attention that there was an incident at a bank function for business customers last Christmas. The Deputy Chief Constable suggested that I should get in touch with you. He hoped you might be able to tell us something about it, or you might remember a colleague who saw it.'

Andrew John gave a short, gruff laugh. 'Hah, that's come out, has it? I should have known it would.

'I saw it myself, Superintendent. Very unpleasant it was, at the time. Afterwards, the Diddler asked me to say no more about it, so I've never discussed it with anyone, until now.

'The man Heard must have had a drink before he got there, or he must have been going at the champagne flat out, for the party hadn't been going for very long before he started niggling away at the Diddler. In company too, it was; completely out of order.' The banker looked down and shook his head. 'Very unpleasant.'

'What happened exactly? We were told that the man took a punch at Mr Shearer.'

'Eventually, but there were a lot of verbals before that. Heard went on and on, just chipping away. The wee man tried to ignore him; I even took him away to another group, but the guy followed us. Finally, the Diddler said something back to him, something mild by comparison

… I think he joked that Paris Simons couldn't invest in a book of stamps without losing on the deal.

'That was all the excuse that Luke Heard needed; he dropped his glass and took a swing at the Diddler with his good arm.'

'Did he hit him?'

'No, no, he was well gone by then; he missed by a mile. The wee man saw it coming and ducked out of the way. I stepped in at that point, got hold of Heard and huckled him out the door. I told him that he wouldn't be welcome at another bank function until he apologised for his behaviour, both to the Diddler and to the Governor of the bank.

'All the top brass were all there, you know. They all saw it.'

'What did Heard say to Mr Shearer?'

John looked the policeman in the eye. 'He said, "I'll fucking kill you, you little bastard." His very words.'

Pringle remained deadpan. 'But before that?' he asked.

'Before it got to that stage. What sort of things did he say?'

'Ach, it was just unpleasant stuff. Bitterness, jealousy, nothing really; it wasn't just the Diddler he was niggling at. His partner, Johnston-White, he was there too.'

'Okay, but can you be more specific about what was actually said?'

'The gist of it was that Daybelge would do anything to get business. You could have taken the inference that they would lay on sexual favours of any sort for clients. At one point, he said that they were a bunch of faggots.'

'Do you know what was behind it? Where this hatred of Heard's came from?'

'It goes back to time immemorial, so the Diddler told me afterwards. He and Luke Heard were at university together; they were the two brightest people in their year, but the Diddler was brighter. Heard hates to lose at anything, so the problems started back then. There was quite a bit of animosity and, according to the Diddler, it got worse when he met Edith, because Heard had gone out with her first.

'It calmed down after they graduated, for they went their separate ways for a while. The Diddler went off to work with an investment house in London and Heard went straight into Paris Simons.

'Seven or eight years after that, Paris Simons decided to appoint a strategist, someone at partnership level responsible for long-term investment decisions. Heard assumed that he would get the job, but instead, the senior partner of the day went out and head-hunted the Diddler. Animosity turned to hatred then. The Diddler told me that he could have had Heard blown out the door, but he didn't. It turned out to be a big mistake, for the guy formed a sort of rival cabal within the partnership; there were disputes and arguments over every major decision, even although the senior partner always came down on the Diddler's side.

'Then one day, said senior partner — his name was Rawlinson — dropped dead in the car park. The Diddler had enough votes on the board to get the job, but he knew that if he did, Heard and his clique would leave and set up their own firm. So he beat them to the punch. He left Paris Simons to them and founded Daybelge, taking a couple of partners and a few big clients with him.

'Six months later, the Stock Market crashed. Today, just about every fund manager under the sun will claim to have seen it coming and to have gone liquid in anticipation, but the Diddler was one of very, very few who actually did. When it happened, the investment trusts which he had set up were holding nothing but gilts and cash.

'With the market on the floor, he reinvested in blue-chip companies and sunrise industries. When the smoke cleared, Daybelge was far and away the biggest independent fund manager in Scotland, and probably the most respected in Britain.

'The Diddler may have been a rotten footballer, a real wee gossip and a fornicating little bugger, but as a fund manager he was a bloody genius. That was why he would have landed the Golden Crescent deal, no question.'

Pringle tugged at an end of his moustache. 'Aye,' he said, 'the Golden Crescent deal. I've heard about that.'

'I think that was what prompted the hostilities at the Christmas party,' Andrew John suggested. 'It was only a rumour back then, but already the talk was that Daybelge was the top target.'

'Did Heard make any reference to it?'

The banker frowned. 'Come to think of it,' he began. 'I do remember him saying, at one point, "You look like the cat that's got all the fucking cream: but just you wait. It'll go sour on you before long." '