What a Carve Up! (38 page)

‘I do hope we’ll be seeing you back on the television soon,’ said Thomas desperately, wincing from the pressure on his arm. ‘Another series of
Hancock’s Half Hour,
perhaps?’

They had reached a door to the outside world. Sid pushed it open and let go of Thomas, who breathed a heavy sigh of relief and started brushing down his trousers. When he turned to look at Sid, he was surprised to see his face now contorted with fury.

‘Don’t you read the papers, you ignorant pillock? Me and Tony are history. Finished. Kaput.’

‘I’m sorry, I hadn’t heard.’

And it was at this point that Sid James took a deep breath, pointed a wagging finger at Thomas, and sent him on his way with the parting words which were still fresh in the old man’s mind nearly thirty years later, as he sat chuckling over the incident with his brother Henry by the warm, homely fireside of the Heartland Club.

∗

Perhaps inspired by his visit to Twickenham Studios, Thomas had a number of peepholes installed in various key locations at the Stewards offices when he became chairman of the bank. He liked to know that he could spy on his juniors’ meetings whenever he wanted, and to feel that he had an advantage over everyone else who visited or worked in the building. It was for this same reason that he considered the chairman’s office itself to be such a masterpiece of design: for the oak panelling on the walls was, to all appearances, unbroken, and any visitor trying to leave at the end of an unsuccessful interview might spend several fumbling minutes looking for the door before Thomas would rise to his assistance with an air of tired expertise.

This feature was itself symptomatic of the secrecy in which all of Stewards’ business was habitually cloaked. It was not until the 1980s that merchant banking began to lose its gentlemanly, recreational image and take on a sort of glamour which threatened to encourage a tiny (though still, in Thomas’s view, profoundly unhealthy) flicker of public interest. To some extent he brought it upon himself. Recognizing the huge profits which were to be made from advising the government on its privatization programme, he took aggressive steps to ensure that Stewards secured itself a substantial share of this well-publicized business. He thoroughly enjoyed snatching these huge state-owned companies from the taxpayers’ hands and carving them up among a minority of profit-hungry shareholders: the knowledge that he was helping to deny ownership to many and concentrate it in the hands of a few filled him with a deep and calming sense of rightness. It satisfied something primeval in him. The only place Thomas could find even greater, more lasting fulfilment, perhaps, was in the area of mergers and takeovers.

For a while Stewards led the way in the upsurge of takeover business which swept through the City during the first half of Mrs Thatcher’s reign. It rapidly became clear that if a bank could prove itself capable, against the odds, of helping its clients to swallow up other, more profitable companies (not necessarily smaller ones), then there was no limit to the kind of services it would be able to sell them in the future. Competition between the banks intensified. New terms such as ‘bid fees’ and ‘success fees’ were introduced into City parlance, and it became an increasingly important part of Thomas’s job to mobilize ‘bid teams’ made up of banks, brokers, accountants, lawyers and PR advisers. New methods of financing the bids were devised – using the bank’s own money, for instance, to buy shares in the target companies, or underwriting generous cash alternatives to share offers – which were benignly waved through by the City’s self-regulating watch-dogs. By comparison, the series of largely uncontested mergers which Thomas had negotiated on behalf of his cousin Dorothy and her Brunwin group during the 1960s and 1970s now seemed very modest.

The Guinness trial, carefully timed during the run-up to a general election to prove that the government was taking a strong line on financial malpractice, put a temporary check on the more ruthless procedures. To find a classic instance of Thomas’s methods, then, you would have to look back to the halcyon years at the beginning of the decade, when Stewards’ profits from corporate finance were running at about £25 million and they were advising on thirty to forty takeovers a year. Of these, the case of Phocas Motor Services is about as representative as any.

Phocas was a profitable and highly regarded engineering firm based in the Midlands, supplying a wide range of parts, designs and accessories to the motor industry. They made batteries, central locking devices, in-car stereos, heaters, ventilators, fans and most small electrical components, and had a permanent research and development team working on safer, more responsive versions of existing steering and braking systems. At the beginning of 1982 it became known that a multi-national company working in a similar field was interested in buying them up. There was every reason to believe that the takeover would have been a friendly and beneficial one: the company in question had a track record of realistic expansion and good industrial relations.

Their bid, however, was contested by a flamboyant tycoon who happened to be one of Stewards’ most prestigious clients. He knew very little about the motor industry – most of his holdings were in publishing, retail and sport – and many City observers found it hard to see why he had decided to involve himself at all; but his entry now ensured that this would become one of the most closely fought takeover battles of the year. Both companies were intending to bid for Phocas with their own shares, and so it became the task of their respective bankers to quietly set about the business of mounting share support operations.

It was never going to be a fair contest. At Stewards, Thomas had a limitless range of contacts to whom he could turn for help, both in industry and the City; he was also unhampered by scruple, and had the not inconsiderable advantage of being on terms of close personal friendship with some of the most important members of the Takeover Panel. It was unlikely that any of his more belligerent tactics would earn anything worse than a gentle rap on the knuckles. Precise details are hard to come by, but it’s believed that he clinched the deal by going to another, smaller merchant bank and persuading them to buy several million pounds’ worth of his client’s shares; when their price soared in the closing days of the bid, the bank came back to him and told him they were thinking of selling; and to forestall this disaster, he persuaded his client to mollify them with a deposit, interest free, of the exact sterling equivalent of the current price of the shares in an unnumbered Swiss bank account. Even though this practice – the use of a company’s own money (or, if we’re going to be finicky about this, the money of its employees and shareholders) to support its own share price – was to become the subject of a criminal prosecution in the wake of the Guinness scandal, Thomas was never able to see anything wrong with it. He liked to refer to it as a ‘victimless crime’. It was something of a gamble, admittedly, but one which in his experience almost invariably paid off, and if there was anything at risk, how could he be expected to see it? Blinded by the many screens which had been put up between himself and the rest of the world, he was no longer in a position to catch even the most fleeting glimpse of the people whose money he was gambling with.

Thomas’s client won the battle, in any case, and shortly afterwards the reasons for his interest in Phocas Motor Services became very clear. In addition to its long-term profitability, the company had another valuable asset – namely, a pension fund which had been so well managed and so shrewdly invested that it was, at this time, substantially overfunded. Before the takeover, the Phocas employees were about to have been offered – did they but know it – a year’s holiday from pension contributions, but one of the tycoon’s first decisions upon assuming control was to sack the present fund manager and appoint one of his own men in his place; and when his publishing, retailing and sporting empire collapsed around him like a house of cards less than a year later, the independent auditors brought in to clear up the mess were astonished at the speed and efficiency with which this pension fund had been emptied – not just depleted, but literally emptied – and the money siphoned off to be squandered in a futile attempt to postpone the collapse of various failed imprints, failed chainstores, failed football teams and a dozen other worthless adventures.

Even now, years later, legal manoeuvres to help the pensioners recover their money are still in progress. There is no solution in sight. Thomas Winshaw, whose bank handled every aspect of the flamboyant tycoon’s finances, continues to profess his amazement at the scale of the fraud, and to plead his own baffled ignorance.

∗

Needless to say, I don’t believe him. And I should mention, perhaps, that I have a small personal interest in this case. Phocas Motor Services was the firm my father worked for. He was there for nearly thirty years, and retired just a few months after the pension scandal came to light. The money he had been saving all that time had vanished, and he was left to survive on a state pension, supplemented by a few extra pounds brought in by my mother, who had to return to part-time teaching. It wasn’t the retirement they’d been planning for.

There is no doubt, in my mind, that the stress brought on by this situation would have contributed to his heart attack.

Does this mean that Thomas was an accessory to my father’s murder?

December 1990

1

I lose count of the number of times Fiona and I contrived to go to bed together over the next few weeks: although a purist, I suppose, might take issue with my precise interpretation of the phrase ‘go to bed’. The procedure was something like this. She would come home from work – exhausted, like as not – and get into bed almost at once. Meanwhile I, in my kitchen, would be preparing some tasty morsel: nothing too substantial, because she didn’t have much of an appetite; some scrambled eggs or fish fingers would usually be enough, or sometimes I would just warm up a can of soup and serve it with bread rolls. Then I would take the tray of food across the hallway into her flat, and place it across her legs as she sat propped up against a bank of pillows. I would sit down beside her – technically
on
the bed, you see, rather than in it – and we would eat our little supper together, side by side, for all the world like a couple who’d been married for thirty years or more. And to cap it all, just to make the illusion complete, we would always turn the television on, and sit watching it for hours at a time, barely speaking a word.

I have always associated television with sickness. Not sickness of the soul, as some commentators would have it, but sickness of the body. It probably goes back to the time my father was lying in hospital, following the heart attack which was to finish him off in a matter of two or three weeks at the age of only sixty-one. I’d come up from London as soon as I heard the news and for the first time in many years I was staying under my parents’ roof. It was a peculiar experience, to be back in that newly unfamiliar house, in that suburb which was half-town and half-country, and many mornings were spent sitting at the desk in my old bedroom, looking out at the view which had once marked the full extent of my experience and aspiration, while my mother remained downstairs, trying to find housework to occupy herself or solemnly filling in one of the numerous magazine or newspaper crosswords to which she was by then addicted. But for the afternoons we had developed a little ritual, a ritual designed, I suppose, to keep the dread and the grief at a tolerable distance: and this was where the television set came into its own.

Although my parents lived on the outskirts of Birmingham, their lives tended to revolve around a quiescent, reasonably pretty market town which lay some six or seven miles from their home. It boasted one small hospital, to which my father had been admitted on the day of his attack: visiting hours were from two-thirty to three-thirty in the afternoon, and from six-thirty to eight o’clock in the evening. This meant that the hours between our visits were the most tense and problematic of the day. We would emerge from the hospital into the visitors’ car park and the bright afternoon sunshine, and my mother, who had completely lost the capacity (although it had never before deserted her in the last twenty-five years) to plan her shopping more than a few hours in advance, would drive us both to the local supermarket to buy some packets of frozen food for our evening meal. While she was making this purchase I would get out of the car and wander down the almost deserted High Street – indeed, the only real shopping street – puzzled to think that I had once been unable to conceive of a metropolis more teeming or animated. I looked into the branch of Woolworth’s where I used to spend my long-saved pocket money on budget-priced records; into the newsagent’s where it was possible to buy – although I’d had no inkling of it at the time – only a fraction of the titles available in London; and into the town’s only bookshop, laid out on one thinly stocked floor about thirty feet square, which for years had seemed to me to resemble nothing less than a modern library of Alexandria. It was here, towards the end of my teens, that I used to linger for hours, staring at the covers of the latest paperbacks while Verity fumed and stamped her feet outside. The very sight of these books had never failed to fill me with wonder: they seemed to imply the existence of a distant world populated by beautiful, talented people and devoted to the most high-minded literary ideals (the same world, of course, into which chance would one day allow me to dip my own uncertain feet, only to find it as cold and unwelcoming as the pool which had numbed me into unassuageable tears on that fateful birthday).

After this, anyway, came the most important part of the ritual. We would get back to the house, make two cups of instant coffee, lay out a plate of digestive or Rich Tea biscuits and then, for half an hour, settle down in front of the television to watch a quiz show: a show of awesome frivolity and tameness which we none the less followed with idolatrous concentration, as though to miss even a few seconds of it were to render the whole experience meaningless.

There were two simple elements to this programme: a game involving numbers, where the contestants had to perform some basic mental arithmetic (I was quite good at this one, whereas my mother invariably got into a muddle and found herself beaten by the clock); and a lexical game, in which they vied with each other to see who could make the longer word out of nine randomly selected letters of the alphabet. My mother took it more seriously than I did, always making sure that she had pencil and paper to hand before sitting down to watch, and every so often she would actually beat the contestants: I can well remember her flush of triumph at making an eight-letter word, ‘wardrobe’, out of the letters R,E,B,G,A,R,W,O,D, when the best that the winner could manage was ‘badger’, for six points. She was euphoric for hours afterwards: it was the only time during those weeks that I saw the lines of care wiped smooth from her face. And I can only think it was for this reason that we used to make such strenuous efforts to get back to the television every day at four-thirty, even sometimes, when our shopping expedition had taken longer than expected, driving at fifty or sixty miles an hour through the suburban streets, fearful of missing the early stages of the game or the host’s foolish introduction, peppered with terrible puns and delivered with the beseeching smiles of an overgrown puppy. There was another reason, though, why my mother watched every afternoon, her eyes aglow with the faith of the true believer, and this was that she clung to the possibility that one day she might be granted a vision, a revelation of the Holy Grail after which all of the programme’s followers quested: a perfect nine-letter word to be formed out of those randomly selected letters. It would have made her the happiest woman in the world, I think, if only for a few instants; and the ironic thing is that it did happen once and she never knew it. The letters were O,Y,R,L,T,T,I,M and A, and I could see it straight away, but neither of the contestants got it and my mother was struggling, too – all that she found, in the end, was a feeble five-letter word, ‘trail’. At least, that’s what she said at the time, and it’s only now that I wonder if she saw it as well, the word ‘mortality’ spelled out by those nine random letters, but couldn’t bring herself to write down the truth of it on the back of her scribbled afternoon shopping list.

In any case, Fiona and I had more serious matters to occupy us, because the dramatic change which her illness wrought on our viewing habits happened to coincide with a period of political upheaval in both the domestic and the international spheres. Late in November, just a few days after she had been to see her doctor for the second time, the Tory party leadership crisis came to a head and Mrs Thatcher was forced to resign. It was a week of intense, if transient, media excitement, and we were able to gorge ourselves on a diet of end-to-end news programmes, special late-night panel discussions and extended bulletins. And then on the day she went for her outpatients’ appointment, we heard that Saddam Hussein had rejected Security Council Resolution 678, an ultimatum authorizing the use of ‘all necessary means’ if Iraq had failed to withdraw from Kuwait by January 15th, and soon he was on French television saying that he thought there was a 50–50 chance of armed conflict; and even though he now started releasing the hostages, so that they were all home a week or so before Christmas, it still felt as if the politicians and the army leaders were hell bent on dragging us into war. But the strange thing is that Fiona, who Was a peace-loving person and not very interested in politics, took a kind of comfort from all of this, and I began to suspect that, like my mother with her quiz show, she had chosen to use it as a way of shielding herself from the fear which was otherwise liable to swamp her.

This time the doctor had listened more carefully. He examined her neck when she told him about the growth, which was bigger than it used to be, she said, almost two inches across, and he wrote down everything she told him about it but still said there was probably nothing to worry about, that the fevers and night sweats might well derive from something else entirely, some aggressive but treatable infection. But there was no point in taking unnecessary risks, and she was booked in for this outpatients’ appointment in the last week of November. They took some blood tests and X-rays, apparently, and she was supposed to go back in three weeks’ time to get the results. Meanwhile she had a temperature chart to fill in, and so our evenings together would always conclude with me fetching the thermometer, and faithfully entering the relevant figure before putting out the light and returning to my flat with the tray and the dirty plates or soup bowls.

As I mentioned, there was a good deal of silence between us: on Fiona’s part because talking made her throat burn, on mine because I could never think of anything to say. But I do remember one conversation which took place in the dead half hour between the
Nine O’Clock News
and the
News at Ten,
and which began with her making an unexpected remark.

She said: ‘You don’t have to do this every evening, you know.’

‘I know.’

‘I mean, if there are other places you want to be, other people you want to be seeing …’

‘Yes, I know.’

‘It can’t be much fun for you, being stuck here with me all the time. It’s not as if –’

‘You’re good company. Really. I’ve told you that before.’ (And it was true.)

‘I know, but – When I’m better, when I’ve got this thing licked, I’ll be … a lot more fun. And then – you know, then we’ll really start something, will we? Really try to make a go of it.’

I nodded. ‘Yes. Of course.’

‘I’m impressed, in a way,’ she continued hesitantly. ‘I mean, it’s not every man – There aren’t many men I’d feel comfortable with, having them around here all the time and seeing me in bed and everything. I suppose I’m impressed that … you haven’t tried anything on.’

‘Well I’m not going to take advantage of you, am I? Not while you’re feeling like this.’

‘No, but we’ve known each other a couple of months now, and most people, in that time, would have … I mean circumstances don’t permit, in our case, but – you know. You must have given it some thought.’

And of course I had given it thought, sitting night after night on Fiona’s bed, sometimes with her wearing a jumper, sometimes just her nightgown; touching her bare arms, brushing crumbs from her body, feeling her neck for signs of swelling, taking the thermometer in and out of her mouth, giving her consoling hugs and good-night kisses on the cheek. How could all of that attention be innocent, how could it not contain its quota of furtive glances and suppressed excitement? Of course I had given it thought. There was, and we both knew this, a strong undercurrent of feeling between us which it was both difficult to ignore and folly not to acknowledge.

But I merely smiled. ‘Don’t worry,’ I said, making for the kitchen to get two cups of cocoa. ‘Sex has never been further from my mind.’

∗

∗

I left the contents of the tray unwashed in the kitchen, then went back to my desk and read through this list again. It filled me with apprehension. Ever since my conversation with Patrick, I had been determined to show him that I could write about sex as well as anybody, that it wasn’t a subject I would shy away from in my book about the Winshaws. And the situation I’d chosen to describe had presented itself without much difficulty. When meeting Findlay at the Narcissus Gallery, I’d happened to overhear some gossip about how Roddy Winshaw had once seduced a young painter he’d invited up to Yorkshire for the weekend, and since I knew nothing of the circumstances, and had decided that, for the purposes of this book, the boundary between fiction and reality was no longer one which I was interested in observing, the incident seemed to form an ideal starting point. But I’d been working on it, now, for more than four nights, and it was perfectly obvious that I was getting nowhere.