The Deal (9 page)

Lucy just wanted to say to them, “Go away, get absolutely blotto, fuck each other to kingdom come and wait for the Boot’s kit to test positive.”

But she’d smiled in her best caring manner. “We can recommend three clinics, each with their own good features.”

She was finding the three days a week at Whiteoaks Practice was working well. Her pay was excellent and she enjoyed the mental stimulus of diagnostic medicine. Her patients were so much better informed these days and she was used to being given an internet printout of what the individual thought might be wrong with them.

She was conscious of the dangers of routine. She faced a number of trivial illnesses but tried to take each seriously. The “come back in seven days if you do not feel better” approach cured many cases. There was much more administration, government returns and internal processes but, nevertheless, she enjoyed most days. Yesterday had been a surgery she would remember for a long time. Perhaps she had saved a young life.

Today was an exception and she knew in part that her thoughts were with her husband. They were talking continuously and she acknowledged that he was fighting to stay off alcohol. But she also realised that one relapse, just one, would put them back to where they started.

She’d always thought that her status as a doctor had impressed Charles from the beginning. They’d met at a party organised by the senior partner of her previous practice. She remembered thinking at the time that he was partial to alcohol, but she found herself attracted by his vivid stories of life in the City. She began to think less as a doctor and more as a potential wife. Alcohol made him happy and then silly. They began to spend more and more time together. When, to her complete amazement, she found that she was pregnant (having forgotten to take one of her birth control pills) they drifted into marriage, both agreeing that there was no possibility of termination. And she did love his stories of life in the financial centre.

There were five people sitting around the table at the City Fiction management meeting. As always, cash-flow seemed to dominate the agenda, but Alistair wanted to discuss publishing matters.

“Alistair, I can control things, but you must understand the HMV problem,” pleaded the long suffering David Singleton. “HMV own Waterstones and are under pressure from their shareholders. They are fighting massive debt problems. They’ve tried to improve Waterstones’ balance sheet by returning thousands of books to the trade. As a consequence, our expected payment at the end of June is thirty thousand pounds down.”

“But Waterstones have been bought by that Russian bloke, haven’t they?” said Glenn Davis, the PR and marketing manager.

“Right,” said David. “Alexander Mamut, that Russian bloke, is paying fifty-three million pounds for it, subject to shareholders’ approval, but we can guess how that works.”

“In fact,” contributed Amanda, “it’s good news. Waterstones is vital to the book publishing industry. I understand that the trade is convinced this Russian guy will expand the business.”

“I’ve spoken to their finance people and they’re expecting that the books will be wanted back and so we should probably get our money in September,” advised David. “The fact remains. We need a capital injection.”

Amanda banged her fist on the table.

“Are you saying that the owners of Waterstones, HMV or whatever they’re called, have improved their balance sheet – sorry, the figures of Waterstones – by returning all our books so that they can debit our account, but you aren’t worried because they’ll ask for them back again? And in the meantime they’ve left us short of money?”

“In a word ‘yes’.”

“So what do we do?” she asked.

“My cue, I think. We push on with our fund-raising,” said Alistair. “Our corporate advisers are now called Harriman Agnew Capital and remain in Queen Street. The merged business looks stronger. Oliver Chatham is head of corporate finance.”

“So do we have our contract letter?” asked David.

Alistair and Amanda looked at each other.

“They’ve employed an analyst called Sara Flemming. I met her for lunch today. She’s preparing a research note on us.”

“Did you know that she came into the office yesterday afternoon? We all went for rather a lot of wine with her in Leadenhall Market,” said Glenn. “Quite a girl.”

“You should have told me,” said Alistair. “I was on my mobile.”

“Why?” asked Glenn.

“Well, what did she want to know about?” snapped Alistair.

“What were our opinions of you,” he responded. “One or two of us told her what we thought.”

“Is it asking too much to enquire what you said to her?”

“Ask away. We’re not telling you. But she seemed pretty pleased that we were so open with her.”

After the meeting was over and the other three had left, Alistair and Amanda shut the door.

“You’re meeting her tonight?” Alistair asked.

“We’re having a drink in St. John’s Wood,” Amanda replied. “How do you think your lunch went?”

“She’s not easy to sum up. She seems quite sure of herself and she undoubtedly knows how to research a subject. I just wonder what Oliver expects to get out of her report.”

“Whatever it is, I get the impression it’s quite important to them,” his sister replied.

Oliver had decided to complete a second session at the gym and didn’t arrive back at his flat in Clerkenwell until after nine o’clock. He listened to Jane Jones on Classic FM on his way back and recalled his lunchtime chat with Edward, his barrister brother-in-law, who was himself well versed in modern classical music. He’d come up with a surprise suggestion.

Oliver had again explained to Edward the only clues he had on the piece of music he was trying to identify.

“I definitely heard the first word, which I thought was ‘ascent’ or something similar,” he had told him. “Then I gained an impression of a mountain. Can’t think why. The name of the composer was definitely Russian or sounded very similar.”

“And you say it was about eight minutes long?”

“Yes. I noticed the clock on the dashboard of the car.”

“You’re sure it was not the first part of a concerto?”

“Not certain, no, but my sense was that it was complete in itself.”

“So it must be a mini-concerto because you say it started with piano and then the orchestra came in.”

“Definitely. There were three movements each starting with the piano. Da-de-da.”

“We’ve ruled out Rachmaninov. Fair enough. Are you sure you’ve given Shostakovich enough consideration? He wrote an awful lot of music. Have you thought of listening to some of his film scores? Try ‘The Fall of Berlin’, which I think he composed in 1949.” Edward had paused. “Though, to be fair, you don’t normally get a mini-piano concerto in the middle of a film theme.” He’d sipped his glass of water. “I’ve had one thought,” he’d said.

Oliver had never heard of Nikolai Karlovich Medtner. When he googled his name he was amazed at what he read: “Born in January 1880 Medtner became a Russian master in the composition of piano music. This included fourteen piano sonatas, three violin sonatas, three piano concertos and thirty-eight piano pieces to which he gave a title of ‘Fairy Tales’.”

Oliver played the CD which he had bought from the Barbican music shop. He listened to the First Piano Sonata in F Minor which Medtner composed in 1903. It is said he was influenced by Rachmaninov. This was followed by the second, third and fourth piano sonatas (which were published as the ‘Sonata-Triad’). It was the fifth sonata which Oliver enjoyed the most. This had been written in 1910 (in G Minor, Op 25) and its sixteen minutes are said by some critics to contain several of Medtner’s best harmonies.

But the drums and the powerful strings were missing. Oliver knew that Medtner wasn’t the composer of the piece of music he was searching for.

He wondered what Amanda was doing. Should he send a text? Perhaps not tonight, he decided. He was finding it difficult to force the pace of their relationship. She was not going to revise the terms of their deal and yet, when they were together, she was so warm and affectionate. It drove him mad.

Amanda was back at her flat in Elm Tree Road reflecting on her meeting with Sara in a local wine bar. It had started badly. They argued about who should buy the drinks and then they could not agree where to sit, which was influenced by Amanda’s wish to be private. She had given some thought to the questions which Sara might ask but nothing prepared her for the opening barrage.

“Alistair says that you get yourself in a mess with men,” said Sara.

Amanda was apoplectic.

“I’m here to talk about City Fiction, young lady, nothing more!” she snapped.

“Young lady?” repeated Sara. “I can teach you better put-downs than that if you wish.”

“What I want is to finish this conversation as soon as possible. Now what do you want to know about Alistair and City Fiction?”

“Nothing.”

“Good. I suggest we drink up and then we can go.”

“I want to know about you, Amanda. So stop being so uptight and relax. You are Alistair’s sister. He adores you. You are obviously his prop. You back him totally. I want to understand how stable you are.”

“So I’m unstable now, am I?” she said. “Who are you to judge me?”

“What’s the name of your present boyfriend?” asked Sara.

“Er... well... he works in the City. What’s this got to do with publishing exactly?”

“How long have you been together?”

“You don’t give up do you? Well, he’s a total Adonis, if you must know. Six foot tall, handsome and great company. Ok?”

“How long have you been together?”

“It’s a newish relationship. Can we please talk about City Fiction now?”

“Who was your last boyfriend?” asked Sara.

Amanda groaned. She really didn’t want to talk about Zach. But the strange thing was that she did. She was falling into the trap of relieving her frustrations by telling somebody about them. She started to tell Sara the whole story. Even more surprising was Sara’s reaction.

“So, let’s understand this better. Zach was everything you wanted. You accepted he was married. He puts a ring on your finger. You had this great weekend in Stratford – and you get up the next day and end the relationship because he is not seemingly considering his wife and his children.”

Despite her sudden openness, Amanda still felt slightly uncomfortable talking so personally to Sara. But she knew her report was very important and, anyway, she had already given away enough to make further revelations pretty harmless.

“That’s about it. We really were good together… but I just couldn’t understand how he was just absolving himself of his responsibilities.”

“Perhaps he was protecting you.”

Amanda pondered Sara’s point for several moments.

“Why? We were always open with each other.”

“Do you think that perhaps he was concerned that he might lose you if he talked about his family too much?”

Amanda considered this statement. “It’s ironic but I suppose if that’s the case he’s managed to get it completely wrong!”

“Hmm, maybe so,” said Sara, taking a sip from her drink.

“Now, shall we talk about foreign rights?” Amanda prompted.

Sara agreed immediately. She had, believe it or not, been nervous about meeting Amanda and had decided that a direct approach was her only chance of understanding the woman who seemed to have such an influence on the chief executive of the publishing company.

Detective Chief Inspector Sarah Rudd left Ealing police station at nine o’clock in the evening. She would use the twenty minutes of her journey home to Nick and the children, who would pretend to be asleep, to plan the long weekend ahead. She had taken three days holiday and booked a cottage for them in North Devon. They would be leaving early the following morning and expected to be travelling along the M4 by eight o’clock.

During the last four weeks she had led a team of detectives in closing down an illegal operation masterminded by a gang from Eastern Europe. They had devised a way of tampering with cash machines and succeeded in grossing around three hundred thousand pounds.

After she had arrived home and parked her car she let herself into the house to find her husband asleep in front of the television. She woke him up with a cup of tea and told him about her recent success at work. Nick was always interested in what she did, although he worried about her safety.

“They were pretty nasty, Nick,” she confided. “We were well prepared but the armed guys had to step in.”

She then told her husband how well her posting from Paddington Green police station was working out.

“It’s never easy to settle in and some of the officers have been there for a number of years,” she said, pausing to drink some tea. “So far it’s going ok. I just don’t want a problem case. You know what I mean. A rapist on the loose.”

“Or worse,” said Nick.

“Or worse,” she agreed. “So, let’s go to North Devon.”

“Let’s go to bed,” suggested Nick.

At the end of the week, at eleven in the morning, Sara Flemming was shown into the board room of Harriman Agnew Capital.

She looked quizzically at Andrew. She did not like surprises.

“Sara,” he said, “this is Charles Harriman. Since we met we’ve merged our firms. Charles is our chairman.”

Sara ignored the chairman. Despite an invitation to take a seat, she remained standing and handed Andrew four envelopes.

Andrew opened the first envelope.

“That is my report,” said Sara. “There are ten printed copies in your outer office.”

He flicked through it and handed it to the chairman, who started to turn the pages. It was later agreed by the members of the corporate finance team that Sara’s report on the publishing industry was one of the best and most informative on any sector that they had ever received.

Andrew picked up the second package. “What’s this?” he asked.

“My invoice,” she said.

The chief executive opened the envelope and looked at the single piece of paper. He nodded.

“The funds will be in your bank account on Monday morning,” he said. “Thank you, Sara.”

“There are two more envelopes,” observed Charles.