Fatal Error (23 page)

‘You’re not serious?’

‘I certainly am.’

‘So you’re going to give us money just like that?’

‘Certainly not,’ said Henry. ‘We’ll beg you to let us consider
your business, string you along and then turn you down. We are venture capitalists after all.’

‘Henry?’ I said.

‘Yes?’

‘You aren’t doing a very good job of marketing me.’

‘Aren’t I?’ He had a sly smile on his face. Henry was no fool. He knew he was hooking me with candour where bullshit would fail.

‘What about the management issues?’ I asked.

‘The rules are changing. You’ve started up. The site looks great. And you’ve got Tony Jourdan on board. Now he has made money before. Also, I know you: you’re a safe pair of hands.’

I winced. It might be true, but I didn’t want to be known as ‘a safe pair of hands’ any more. I wanted to be a successful, imaginative moneymaker. Give it time and I’d show Henry.

‘By the way,’ he said. ‘I never realized that Guy was Jourdan’s son.’

‘Sorry. We discussed telling you earlier, but Guy was dead against the idea. He wanted to raise money as his own man.’

‘Admirable, I’m sure.’ Henry sipped his wine appreciatively. ‘So. How’s Ninetyminutes getting on?’

I told him. I incorporated all Guy’s ideas for an accelerated roll-out into Europe and an early start on merchandising. I told him the visitor numbers and extrapolated them wildly.

‘Golly, David,’ he said eventually. ‘I’ve never seen you that excited about anything before.’

I smiled. ‘Really?’ I thought about it. ‘I suppose you’re right.’

‘How much do you need?’

‘To do all that we need ten million pounds now, and maybe another twenty in six months.’

‘So Orchestra does this round and then we float the company in the spring?’

‘That will work. We should have a great story by then.’

‘Sounds good. Will you give us an exclusive to look at the deal?’

I couldn’t help laughing. Here was a venture capitalist asking me for the business.

‘Hey, that’s not fair!’ Henry protested.

‘No, you’re right,’ I said. ‘I’ll have to discuss it with Guy.’

‘You’ll let me know?’

‘I’ll let you know, Henry.’

Guy went for it. The following Monday, Henry arrived in our offices with his associate, Clare Douglas, a small, slim, no-nonsense Scottish woman with wispy blonde hair and enquiring grey eyes. They crawled all over us, asking everyone about everything. I was impressed by Henry’s thoroughness, but Clare was particularly well prepared. She must have spent the weekend scouring the web for everything she could find on football. She was a tenacious interrogator, picking up on any hesitation or waffle from any of us and pinning us down until she had the details right.

Henry asked Guy, myself, Ingrid, Gaz and Owen for references, several each. We were all happy to oblige, apart from Guy. I overheard his conversation on the subject with Henry. He refused, saying that since his previous career was acting there was no one who would have anything relevant to say about him. Henry didn’t back down: in fact he became more persistent. In the end Guy got away with giving him the phone numbers of his agents in London and Hollywood. Henry left him alone, but he didn’t look satisfied.

Neither was I.

After Henry had gone, leaving Clare to her interrogation of Sanjay, I voiced my fears to Guy. ‘Henry thinks you’re hiding something.’

Guy nodded.

‘Are you?’

Guy looked me in the eye. ‘Fancy a walk?’

We strolled out into the small street, bathed in the gentle sunlight of an Indian summer, and made our way north towards Clerkenwell Green.

‘Well?’ I said.

‘I had a bad time in LA,’ Guy said.

‘So I can imagine.’

‘No, it was worse than London. I totally lost it. Not just drink. Drugs. Lots of them. Very little work. I became low, very low. Clinical depression, they called it. I went to see a shrink.’

‘What did he say?’

‘She had lots to say. I have issues, Davo. Issues with my father. Issues with my mother. Issues with Dominique. She almost wet herself when I told her what had happened in France. To hear her talk about it, I’m lucky I’m not a psychopath.’

‘I can’t imagine you depressed,’ I said.

‘Can’t you?’ Guy replied quickly, his eyes searching mine.

He was asking me to think about it, so I did. Guy the charmer, Guy with the capability to make everyone around him smile, Guy the centre of attention, the natural leader. But I did remember those moments of inexplicable melancholy at school, when he brooded over the failure of a particular girl to fall for him, or just brooded over nothing at all. I had dismissed them at the time as just silly. Guy had the perfect life, everybody knew that.

But perhaps he didn’t.

‘One day I woke up fully clothed on the floor of some guy’s apartment in Westwood feeling like shit. Worse than shit. It took me twenty minutes to realize it was Monday morning and another ten to figure out I was supposed to be at an audition for a part in a TV pilot. It could have been my big break. There was no way I was going to make it.

‘The guy whose apartment it was came in. He was only a few years older than me, but he looked closer to forty. “What’s up, John,” he said. He didn’t even know my name! I’d gone there on Saturday night. Sunday had just disappeared.

‘I had an appointment to see the therapist that afternoon. She wanted me to talk about my mother and my feelings about her. Which I did. My brain felt like mush.

‘Then she began talking. About how I was angry with my father, how my mother hadn’t met my expectations, I don’t know, some psychobabble. I was sitting there, and suddenly my brain cleared. She was talking bullshit. It was all bullshit. I was the one who had got myself on to that floor. I was the one who was screwing up my life. And I was the one who could stop it.’

‘So what did you do?’

‘I walked out of her office there and then. Drove up into the hills. Thought about it. Came back to England. Started Ninetyminutes.’

We walked on in silence until we came to Clerkenwell Green, where we sat on one of the benches. Of course it wasn’t green any more, but it was a relatively quiet oasis away from the traffic of Farringdon and Clerkenwell Roads. ‘You never told me this,’ I said.

‘No.’

‘You should have done.’

‘I didn’t think it was relevant.’

‘Guy!’

‘I still don’t. The point is, I couldn’t admit to myself that it was relevant, let alone to you. All that stuff is in the past. Really. You’ve seen me every day for the last five months. You can see I’ve changed.’ He turned to me, begging for my agreement.

‘Yes, you have,’ I said. ‘Do you think Henry will find out?’

‘I don’t think so,’ Guy said. ‘The only number in LA I
would give him was Lew, my agent. He knows the story, or most of it, but I know Lew. His first instinct will be to lie. He’ll cover for me without really knowing why.’

‘You hope.’

‘I hope.’

He probably would. People did that kind of thing for Guy, as I knew very well.

We sat looking up at the dour façade of the Old Sessions House, the Masonic Centre for London, which seemed to frown down on the trendy bars and restaurants springing up around it. A latex-clad cyclist chained his bike to the pale-green railings of the public lavatories that decorated the centre of the green and sauntered into the one remaining caff in the area.

‘Should I tell Henry?’ Guy asked.

I thought about it. My strategy with Orchestra was to tell them everything. We would be working together through tough times and we needed to trust each other. But Henry thought Guy was flaky already: this would just make it worse. Also, I was inclined to accept Guy’s point of view. He had changed, I knew that. The past just wasn’t relevant.

‘No,’ I said. ‘We’ll leave it to him to find out, if he can.’

Henry still harboured doubts about Guy, but he definitely liked the business. Guy, Ingrid, Gaz and I made a presentation to Henry’s partners later on that week that seemed to go well. Guy and I went back to Orchestra’s offices the following day to thrash out a deal.

It took time. Essentially, we were arguing about what proportion of Ninetyminutes Orchestra’s ten million pounds would buy. After several hours we were still some way apart when Henry raised the question of Tony’s stake.

‘I’m not happy with how little of the company management will have after this round,’ he said. ‘Whatever price we
agree, it’s going to be less than ten per cent. I don’t like that. Not enough incentive.’

‘I wouldn’t argue with that,’ I said. ‘Perhaps you should pay more?’

‘That’s not what I mean, and you know it,’ said Henry. ‘It’s Guy’s father. He must be diluted.’

‘That’s going to be difficult,’ said Guy.

‘How did he end up with so much of the company in the first place?’ asked Henry.

‘We were desperate,’ I replied.

‘Well, I don’t mind giving him some uplift on the value of his shares, but we need to figure out a way of getting you chaps a bigger stake.’

‘I’m not sure he’ll agree to that,’ said Guy.

‘I’ll make it easier for him,’ said Henry. ‘He’d better agree to it, or there will be no deal.’

‘We have our board meeting on Monday. We’ll discuss it then,’ said Guy.

So Guy and I went away to plan our approach to Tony. Guy had told Henry it would be a difficult discussion. Neither he nor I had any idea just how difficult.

23

July 1992, Mull

The airfield was nothing but a strip of mown grass with an unmanned caravan beside it, which contained a cash box for landing fees. But only a few yards away was a hotel with a Scandinavian-style conservatory giving an excellent view of my landing. None of us had any desire to fly any further that day, so we checked in. Half an hour later we were in the bar. A couple of hours after that we were all well on the way to getting plastered.

You couldn’t blame us. Guy’s nerve had been seriously shaken and alcohol was his natural refuge. I had kept mine, but had a felt a surge of relief when we had finally landed. Mel had been terrified. Even Ingrid, who had seemed to stay cool, was knocking them back. For all of us at that age and in those circumstances drink was the natural response.

None of us mentioned what had happened. Far from admitting his error, Guy indulged in alcoholic bravado. I let him. Deep down I knew that I had trusted Guy for too long and that as a result of that trust he had almost killed us. It was a truth that I was unwilling to face, or at least not yet. I was unsure whether the girls had realized exactly what had happened. I wasn’t about to tell them. I was quite happy to share in the excitement of being alive.

The nearest we got to touching on the subject was when Mel put down her rum and Coke and said: ‘Tomorrow.’

‘What about tomorrow?’ said Ingrid.

‘Sod tomorrow,’ said Guy.

‘Tomorrow I’m going to take the train home.’

‘Won’t work,’ said Guy. ‘We’re on an island.’

‘Good point. I’ll take a ferry and then a train.’

Guy looked at her for a moment, as though considering argument. There was no point. ‘OK,’ he said.

‘I’ll go with you,’ said Ingrid.

‘Davo?’ After all the bravado, Guy suddenly looked small, deflated. He needed my support.

‘We’ll make sure the girls get away OK and then I’ll come with you,’ I said. ‘But I think we should fly straight back to Elstree. Provided the weather’s OK.’

‘That makes sense,’ said Guy, relieved. He stood up and reached for our glasses. ‘My round.’

We drank on into the evening, nourishing ourselves on crisps and peanuts. Ingrid’s eyes began to close. ‘I’m sleepy,’ she said, with a small smile on her face, and slipped over against Guy’s shoulder. He moved her upright. She slipped over again. He lifted her up. She waited a few seconds and then fell back. This time he let her head rest there.

It was innocent drunken fun, but there was something about it that sparked a surge of irritation in me. The purpose of this trip had been for me to get closer to Ingrid. How was I supposed to do that when she was slumped against Guy? In fact, how was I supposed to do that when she was so drunk? A little tipsy was fine, but I didn’t want the start of a relationship to be a drunken bonk that she wouldn’t remember and couldn’t prevent.

I felt Mel tense next to me. ‘Guy?’ she said.

‘Yes?’

‘Where were you on Tuesday?’

‘Tuesday? I don’t know. Why?’

‘Because you said you’d come round to my place on Tuesday.’

‘Did I? I don’t remember that.’ Guy was the picture of
innocence. Hammy, unconvincing innocence. You would never have known he was an actor.

‘So where were you?’

‘I was with Davo. Wasn’t I, Davo?’

I remembered Tuesday. We had gone to a bar in Chelsea. Guy had picked up an American redhead. I had left early. Guy knew he could rely on me to cover for him in these situations.

But not this time.

‘Only at the beginning of the evening. I left at half past eight.’

Guy looked at me askance. ‘That’s not right. That can’t be right.’

‘I got home for the nine o’clock news. I can remember it.’

Mel was watching this. She wasn’t dumb. She could see that there was a little wedge between me and Guy. She hammered at it.

‘So what did you do when David left you?’

Guy shrugged. ‘Went home, I suppose. Watched the nine o’clock news myself.’

Tears sprang into Mel’s eyes. ‘You were with a girl, weren’t you?’

‘Of course not,’ said Guy. ‘I wasn’t with a girl, Mel.’ He spoke slowly and steadily and looked her straight in the eye. I watched him. He was convincing. Totally convincing. I found myself wondering whether I had really seen him with the redhead that night. Maybe he was an actor after all.

Mel hesitated, her certainty shaken for a moment. Then she renewed her attack. ‘I called you. You weren’t in. You were with a girl.’ She turned to me. ‘Wasn’t he, David?’

I shrugged.

Guy shot me a look of the ‘Cheers, mate’ variety. But he wasn’t too worried. He knew Mel knew. She must have
known for a while. But she still stayed with him. He was toying with her.