The Money Makers (65 page)

He needn’t have worried. The old oak door creaked admittance to two newcomers, a man and a woman. He was tall, fit, clean-cut, tanned, perfect teeth, perfect suit, crisp white button-down shirt, dark red tie. George knew from the sight of him that he worked out, had quality time with his kids, ate a low-fat, low-salt, high-fibre diet, attended church on Sundays, and played a mean game of golf. And as for his partner - well, she’d have turned heads at the Oscars. She, too, was tall, fit, tanned, perfect teeth, perfect sand-coloured suit, crisp white shirt - plus, she had the face of a movie star and the billowing auburn hair that usually only lives in cosmetic ads. George didn’t need to ask to know that she graduated with honours from a good Ivy League school, that she believed women were entitled to careers and kids, that she jogged every morning, and was up with current affairs and probably flossed her teeth too. George stared like a street kid at a peepshow. Then he shook himself. He could recognise them, but they had no way of distinguishing him from the other jacket-and-tie Yorkshiremen in the bar. He rose and went over to the two Americans.

‘Mr Thurston? Miss, I guess I mean Ms O’Shea? I’m George Gradley.’

‘Hey, George, nice to meet you,’ said Thurston, gripping George’s hand like something in a gymnasium. ‘Please call me David.’

Thurston quit mauling George’s hand, which wasn’t delicate but still felt ragged. George turned to Kelly O’Shea. Close up, she was dazzling. George went weak at the knees, in a way he hadn’t done since he was fifteen. She took his hand. It was a firm grip for a woman, but next to Thurston’s, it was rose petals.

‘Kelly O’Shea. Pleased to meet you,’ she smiled at him.

Her smile lingered for the amount of time prescribed by the best business schools: use your assets, but respect yourself; don’t flirt.

They took their places at the table. George’s briefcase still sat beneath him. Inside were management accounts, statutory accounts, tax filings, product brochures, customer analyses, cash flow forecasts, design prototypes; everything. A waitress came to take their orders. George ordered shepherd’s pie and another beer. Thurston asked for lasagne with a big mixed salad and orange juice. His partner asked for the same but with mineral water.

‘So, George, you have a pretty nice business, we hear,’ said Thurston with a perfect smile.

‘I hope so. We’ve put in a lot of work over the past couple of years. Brought the company back from the brink.’

Thurston nodded, like a therapist listening to some childhood trauma.

‘That must have been a whole lot of hard work, right? But pretty satisfying, I’ll bet.’

‘Do you mind?’ asked O’Shea as she got a portable computer from her bag. ‘I put all my notes on here now.’ She laid her mobile phone beside the PC, ‘In case I need to download stuff from head office.’

‘Go ahead,’ said George. ‘First, maybe, you could tell me a bit about Oregon Furniture and your interest in coming over to Britain.’

‘Sure, George, I’d be glad to do that. Have you had the chance to review any of our corporate documents? Annual report and review, corporate profile, our “what the press says” brochure, 10-K filing, 10-Q? You’ll see they each carry our mission statement on the inside cover.’ Thurston began to lay a bunch of glossy brochures one on top of the other in front of George, who leafed through them aimlessly. Thurston began to recount the company’s story, from its humble beginnings to its current dominance of a swathe of the US furniture market. ‘Our research indicates we have the opportunity to replicate that success in Europe, and that’s why we’re here, George.’

At this point, the waitress returned with the orders. Thurston’s orange juice came from one of those irritatingly small bottles they still serve in pubs, poured into a wine glass over a rapidly melting ice cube. The mineral water was similarly small and warm and the mixed salad wasn’t mixed enough, or green enough, or something, for Thurston. He began to give rapid instructions to the waitress on how to remedy the situation. She listened wide-eyed and dived off to get her manageress, who listened impassively as Thurston explained what he wanted. To pass the time, meanwhile, O’Shea gave George a smile which made his knees wobble. ‘David’s very particular,’ she explained, then frowned as some­ one at a next-door table lit a cigarette.

As Thurston’s attention returned to the matter in hand, George took charge of proceedings.

‘How much do you know about Gissings?’ he asked.

‘Not nearly enough,’ smiled Thurston.

George dragged out his briefcase and started to stack his own piles of documents on the table. ‘I didn’t know exactly what you wanted, so I copied the lot,’ he said. ‘If there’s anything additional you want, then you should ask, and if we’ve got it, you can have it.’

Thurston’s hand hovered over the pile. ‘Did you want us to sign a confidentiality agreement?’

George was thrown by the question. ‘Er, no, that’s OK I mean as long as you’re not going to post this stuff on the Internet or something,’ he said nodding at O’Shea’s computer.

‘Ha, ha, ha! The Internet!’ Thurston laughed, and nodded at O’Shea who laughed as well. The laughter was careful, like the laughter of missionaries. ‘Very good, George. The Internet! No, seriously though. You’re quite right. We take business integrity very seriously. It’s right up there on the mission statement. We won’t misuse this material, you have our corporate word. Right, Kelly?’

‘Right.’

Thurston’s hovering hand dived into the pile. He began identifying the documents in the pile and Kelly began to tap the titles into her computer. The waitress returned with the orders as amended by Thurston. The manageress stood behind her in silent support.

‘This is the freshest orange juice you have?’ he asked. Waitress, manageress and George nodded.

‘OK. Fine then. Thank you.’ He sipped it, as though testing for contamination, but it appeared to pass. The mixed salad was still the same mixture of iceberg lettuce, supermarket tomatoes and cucumber, but it had grown to fill a large mixing bowl and Thurston passed it without comment. George happened to catch O’Shea’s eye and she wrinkled up her eyes at him, flashing him another my-dentist’s-more-expensive-than-yours smile. Her auburn hair tumbled in cascades down on to the gleaming white collar of her blouse and shone there like coils of copper. George dug into his shepherd’s pie and burned his tongue.

Lunch proceeded with a detailed examination of the documents George had brought. Thurston and O’Shea were both very complimentary.

‘You’ve lifted sales a long way in a short time,’ he said.

‘And good margin improvement too. Nice!’ she said. They looked at the product brochures.

‘Nice design concept,’ he said.

‘Yes, really neat,’ she echoed. ‘Like our own Blue Mountain range, isn’t it?’

They passed on pudding. There was no decaf coffee available, so Thurston ordered a herb tea which the pub by some miracle had available, while O’Shea risked a normal coffee.

‘We can take these documents away with us, can we, George?’

‘Sure.’

‘That’s great.’ Smile. ‘Get us crunching numbers early, eh? This is really very interesting, very interesting indeed.’

O’Shea leaned forward. ‘Tell me, George, why are you keen to sell now? Not that I think it’s the wrong thing to do - not at all - I’m just interested in your motives.’

‘Quite right,’ said Thurston. ‘We’re sure you’re doing the right thing. The industry’s consolidating fast. Economies of scale, one-stop shopping, retail power, national marketing. Things are going to get tough for the little fellers, right, Kelly?’

George shook his head. ‘Gissings is doing just fine. It’s got years of profitable growth ahead of it as an independent manufacturer. I’m not selling out of fear. I’m selling because I want the money. That’s all.’

‘Ha, ha! Right, the money. Well, that’s the best reason there is. Right, Kelly?’

They began sorting themselves out to leave. George called for the bill but Thurston beat him to it.

‘No, no. We absolutely insist, George. It’s been a great pleasure, even if next time we have to bring our own juice. Ha, ha. Only kidding, honestly. It’s a neat place. Seventeenth century, right? My wife’ll go bananas when she hears. She loves historic things.’ The pub wouldn’t accept Thurston’s corporate Amex card, and he paid with dollops of notes, counting them out like a five-year-old with Monopoly money.

‘We’ll take it as far as we can with what you’ve given us. Kelly’s our spreadsheet genius-’

‘Oh, I wouldn’t say that-’

‘No, really, she is - and we’ll do our crunching as fast as we can and kick the idea round at head office. If we need any more information, Kelly’ll give you a call. I’ll keep my eye on her, though, make sure she doesn’t ask you for too much. Always the perfectionist, right, Kelly?’

‘Oh, I wouldn’t say that -’

‘All being well, we’ll call you in a couple of weeks to sort out a site visit and maybe start to negotiate ourselves a deal. OK? How does that sound, George?’

‘That’s fine. But the fact that I’m considering a sale is very confidential. Nobody except for me knows about it, and for the moment that’s how I want to keep it. If you want to call me, that’s OK, but just pretend you’re a friend of mine. Don’t let my - er - secretary know that you’re calling about a business matter.’

‘You want confidentiality, George. Sure. We understand that.’ Thurston was very earnest. ‘You’re not alone in that. Many of the companies who have joined the Oregon family have had similar considerations, and we do our best to respect that. We believe that honouring confidentiality is a key part of ethical business behaviour. Kelly, you and George are old friends, right?’

‘Sure. Right.’ Another big smile made its way down George’s spine and lodged like jelly in his knees. ‘I’ll be very sensitive to that.’

‘And one other thing,’ said George. ‘I assumed you would want a site visit at some stage and that’s fine. But if you could make yourselves as inconspicuous as possible when you come, it would really help. I don’t want your visit to upset my workers.’

‘We’ll be so inconspicuous, you won’t even notice we’ve been.’

George shook hands, and made ready to leave.

‘Nice to meet you,’ he said.

‘Great meeting you,’ they said. ‘And see you again soon.’

George watched them leave. A billow of late spring rain coming in from the west washed across the grey pub car-park. George drove away, feeling depressed.

2

A moral conundrum. How far would Matthew go for his million?

Insider trading was somehow OK. He hated the fear and the risk and the lying, but it was only the risk of getting caught that perturbed him. If he could be a hundred percent sure it was safe, he’d do it all day every day, make his million and as much more as he could, until his time ran out.

Betray Fiona? No. That he wouldn’t do, not after Sophie. He knew that his insider trading had taken risks with Fiona’s trust that weren’t his to take, but all the same she was more precious than a million pounds and all his father’s money. She was off-limits.

But between the black and the white, there lie a million greys. Dove, silver, ice, ash, steel, slate, char­ coal, gunpowder. What Belial suggested wasn’t at the nearly-white end of grey. It was up there with the gunpowder and charcoal. It’s true, no individual would be obviously hurt by it, but all the same, even as Bernard Gradley’s son, you couldn’t help but learn some basic rules. And the rules were explicit. What Belial suggested was wrong.

Would Matthew do it? The rules were clear, but his mind was not. He didn’t know. He honestly didn’t know.

3

‘Sorry you had to trail all the way out here,’ said Lord Hatherleigh to his son-in-law. ‘Parking’s getting so damn difficult these days.’

The service elevator dropped them at the top storey, leaving them to walk the last bit up two flights of concrete stairs. From the windswept roof of the office block, the dense heart of London stretched away to the south. West of them, Hampstead Heath spread like a dark island in the neon tide.

‘I love this thing. Saves hours, despite the trouble parking. Elizabeth’s none too keen on it though.’

Zack wasn’t all that keen on ‘this thing’ either, but he didn’t like to seem wimpish in front of his father-in-law, and he climbed resolutely into the small helicopter. As Lord Hatherleigh checked his instruments and established radio contact with Central London flight control, a spatter of rain fell across the windscreen. Zack looked at the rain and found himself wishing he had been able to join Sarah and Elizabeth on the train down to Ovenden House a few hours earlier. When he was at work he hardly thought about Sarah. He had a job to do and he got on with it. But at other times he resented time spent away from her. It wasn’t that he was in love, he insisted, just that in one package Sarah supplied him with all the things that an eighty-hour week at Weinstein Lukes deprived him of: relaxation, fun, sex, warmth, laughter. He was looking forward to seeing her this evening, and he let his mind skip over the two hundred dark miles that lay between them.

Hatherleigh was done with his checks. ‘All set?’ he asked, and started the engine.

Above their heads, the drooping fins began to tum. As they increased in speed, something in the feel of the helicopter changed. Before it had sat heavily on the concrete roof, a thing of metal, clumsy and dead. Now, life vibrated through it, standing as a dancer stands, lightly. Before Zack even noticed movement, the helicopter was six feet off the ground, the lovely safe roof below unreachable, and all those windy miles ahead.