Surrogate – a psychological thriller (27 page)

As I gazed down into the vast atrium of the Lloyd's building, brokers seemed to scurry like ants. Millions of pounds worth of insurance flowed through this atrium every day, and eleven floors below I could make out my old corner desk, where brokers used to come and place business. Not anymore. The syndicate had been suspended from underwriting any more policies while Dad and I had been summoned to meet Sir John Henderson, the chairman of Lloyd's, first thing Monday morning. Sir John I had met only briefly a couple of times - I don't think he had ever said more than two words to me - and I had never been to the top-floor boardroom before.

Now that Continual had called off the deal, we had come to plead our case for Lloyd's to step in to cover our losses. There was an emergency fund for just this contingency. Otherwise, Dad had argued, the entire system would collapse. And conveniently get you off the hook for embezzling the company, I thought.

Emily's car crash and my being questioned over Forget's death had only added to the miasma surrounding Berkshire RE. The police accepted, though, that I had acted in self-defence and had released me without charge. At least that was one good thing. Most of my money had been found in a holdall in the car wreck: Emily had transferred the cash from a bank account in Panama to the Isle of Man and collected it in person that morning. She had taken the ferry back to Morecambe, which is why she had wanted to meet there; I had been wrong about Alice's funeral: she clearly had felt little remorse over our surrogate's death.

So this was how it ended. Somebody once said that the moment of disillusion is the most poetic of all. What nonsense. My wife had betrayed me again and again. When she told me she had never loved me, with that, the last protecting veil had been torn away. I had seen things as they really were: everybody at war with each other, hating one another, fighting over the slightest advantage. Everything in conflict. Perhaps that was the moment I stopped being a boy and finally grew up. Newspapers, meanwhile, had started running stories about Names losing everything in the collapse of Berkshire RE, salesmen bullying the Good People of the Home Counties into a get-rich-quick scheme and who then faced ruin. The tabloids loved it. Combined with the boss of the company being questioned over the death of his wife's Harley Street doctor lover, well, you get the picture. "Top Sex Doc Death Plunge" was the headline in yesterday's
Sun on Sunday
.

Needless to say, Continual got spooked. "We just can't afford to be associated with any form of scandal," Bob Grauerholtz had informed me in a short telephone call. The company had behaved just as I’d expected: Continual was quite happy to buy Berkshire RE when investors were there to cover losses but disappeared at the first hint of trouble. And if the Americans didn’t buy the company, there was nobody left to pass the parcel to. We were broke.

"Not thinking of jumping, are you?" asked my father, interrupting my thoughts.

I turned to face him. "I feel like we're being called in to see Pontius Pilate."

"Except that we're both thieves."

A display cabinet groaning with silver celebrating Nelson's victory over Napoleon stood behind him. "What if they really go into the accounts?" I asked. "They'll soon find out the truth." In my heart I was glad this was happening. I was fed up with the lies and constantly having to stay one step ahead of the financial regulator. Before Dad could reply, a functionary stepped out of the boardroom, closing the door softly behind him. I glimpsed a very grand room indeed. "Mr Cox?" We both stepped forward. "Sir John will see you now."

"Listen, son," Dad whispered. "Don't get any ideas. You're just as much in this as I am."

Entering the Lloyd's of London boardroom was like stepping back into the eighteenth century, leaving the world of mobile phones and Twitter firmly on the other side of the door. The room itself was incongruously ornate compared with the rest of the space-age building: powder-blue walls with white Adam cornicing, the comforting hiss of a gas fire and a carriage clock ticking on the mantelpiece.

Of the three men were seated behind a dining table, I recognised only the one in the middle, Sir John Henderson, chairman of Lloyd's. He was younger than I remembered, stork-like and with a large head containing what everybody agreed was a very large brain. People who had tangled with him in the past complained that he already had you in checkmate while you were contemplating your first move.

"Please sit down," he said, indicating two chairs on the other side of the vast table.

"Thank you, Sir John," Dad said as we took our seats.

Sir John looked at me over his half-moon glasses. "First, I wanted to say how sorry I am about everything that has happened. What I read in the papers about your daughter being kidnapped and your wife being the kidnapper ... dreadful. And then the death of that poor girl. I can't even begin to imagine what you're going through."

"Thank you, Sir John," I repeated.

He cleared his throat. "However, this is not a social call. If anything, what we're here to talk about today is even more unedifying and lurid. I read in today's
Financial Times
that Continual Life has pulled out of buying the syndicate. Not very pretty, is it? I'm assuming you thought the Americans were going to ride in like the cavalry over the hill. Now you tell me you don't have enough cash in reserve to cover your losses. So you come here with your begging bowl out?" There was something refreshingly chilly about Sir John Henderson.

Dad shifted in his seat. "Well, the thing is, Sir John, that we've had call after call, and Dutch Marquez was the last of a bad run. Remember, that was the worst oil rig disaster in Britain since Piper Alpha. You've been a broker. These things happen."

"Not on this scale. Effectively you've put a gun to my head. Either we bail you out, or else. If we say no, then what?"

Silence. Dad had no answer to that. "There's something else I don't understand," the Lloyd's chairman continued. "What's this company that's paid these consultancy fees? I've looked and I can't find any explanation–"

"If you look in the appendix, I think you'll find–" I said, leaning forward.

"Oh, telling me how to read a set of accounts now, are you?" Sir John said acidly.

"No, of course not," I apologised. "I was just trying to point you to the right section."

"I'll be the judge of that," he said with a wintry smile. "It seems to me these accounts have been designed to be as hard to read as possible. They're almost completely unintelligible. Well, come on then, make your case."

Ronnie put on his best salesman smile and leaned forward. "That's easy to explain. It's a service company that my finance director advised me to set up for tax purposes. Based in Liechtenstein. He said it would be more tax efficient that way. Any consulting fees on top of my basic and dividends could be paid into this account. It was a way of recycling money that could then be paid back to the company. There was nothing illegal about it. After all, it was my duty to protect shareholders and deliver the highest dividend possible ..."

Dad looked like a tap dancer who’d just finished his routine, flinging his hands wide at the end of a number. There was no applause. Just the soft ticking of the carriage clock while I stared furiously down at the ink blotter. I felt a drop of sweat perch on the end of my nose. I felt I had to say something.

"That's not quite true, Dad, is it?" I said quietly. "The money, I mean. It never came back to the syndicate. You lined your own pocket with it." I felt as if I had just stepped off that balcony and this was the moment before gravity took hold. Telling the truth was such a relief.

"The whole thing was a giant Ponzi scheme, Sir John," I said, looking up. "We paid out on a few losses and then went out to investors, even when there should have been enough money on the balance sheet. Dad creamed off the lot. Isn't that right, Dad?"

Dad interrupted. "He doesn't know what he's talking about. Tax efficiency is complicated. I've tried explaining it to him but, to be honest, it goes over his head. If you don't believe me, ask our finance director."

"That's only because you paid him off," I snarled.

Sir John cut us both off, bringing his hand down on the table. "Gentlemen, that's enough. Clearly we're not going to reach any kind of agreement this morning. If what your son is saying is true, these are serious charges indeed. The police will have to be involved. For now I want a forensic audit of your accounts." He turned to his deputy chairman. "Graham, will you get on with that, please?" Then Sir John signalled to the functionary standing beside the door. "Please will you have Mr Cox escorted from the building?"

I could sense how angry Dad was, and I didn't dare meet his gaze. I felt the full blast of his laser-beam stare drilling into me, vaporising me for my betrayal. There was going to be hell to pay for this. Then I realised that what I had done was for my mother, for the way Dad had treated her, for the way he treated everybody. For once he was not going to get away with it. What was it that Mole said about him floating away on a sea of other people's money? Sorry, Ronnie, not this time.

Two burly security men came into the room and stood over Dad's chair. He got up, still protesting his innocence while being escorted out of the room.

I got up to leave myself. "Thank you, Sir John, I'll see myself out."

"Wait a moment, Hugo. What you did just now, that took guts. Your father might go to jail, and you will have to testify against him. You could go to jail, too. Are you ready for that?"

"Sometimes you have to do the right thing." Mole's words about whether I had the nerve to stand up to Dad came back to me.

"There will be lots of questions. The fraud office might press charges, even though you’re the whistle blower."

"Let them do their worst. I've got nothing to hide. Dad bullied me into signing off the accounts, otherwise, he said, Berkshire RE would go bankrupt. The Americans would never buy us. In a way I'm glad. You have no idea what it's like being the son of a famous man, always being measured against him and falling short."

Sir John made a steeple with his fingers. "All right. Let's assume that the police don't go after you personally. This is a real mess, an Augean stable that needs cleaning up. There will be a lot to do running down the book. Given everything that's happened, I would completely understand if you walked away. However, would you stay on if I asked?"

It was my turn to shake my head. Right now, Felicity, the girl who had taken Mole's job in Forget's clinic, was pushing my baby girl through Dogshit Park. She had agreed to help me look after Nancy until I could find somebody permanent. "I'm a single parent now," I said, "and I want to look after my daughter. It would be a way of making amends for everything that has happened. Every moment is a fresh start, don't you think?"

Sir John looked thoughtful and rested his chin on his hands. "What you've done, you might have opened Pandora's Box. Lots of bad things are going to come out."

I smiled back. Sir John was not the only one who could make classical allusions. "Oh I don't know," I said. "If you remember, the last thing that came out of Pandora's Box was hope."

First, I would like to thank Barrie Drewitt-Barlow, CEO of The British Surrogacy Centre, for advising me on the different types of surrogacy available in Britain. I have tried to be as accurate as my story allowed.

Maximillian Cox, executive director at insurance and reinsurance broker Willis, explained Lloyd’s of London to me and how a reinsurance syndicate such as my fictitious Berkshire RE would operate.

Any mistakes in either department are entirely my own.

Tom Williams of The Williams Agency has always been such an enthusiastic supporter.

Once again thanks to Catharine Browne for her exemplary copy editing, and my designer Chris Burton for coming up with such a striking cover.

Finally, thank you to the staff at Kindle Direct Publishing for formatting this book, and to Amazon itself for giving a voice to indie authors such as myself. In an industry that has tightened up considerably since my first book was published a decade ago, and with publishers unable to take as many risks as they could, Amazon should be thanked for giving a platform to new voices.