The First Novels: Pay Off, the Fireman (10 page)

       
Now, the fact that investment trust shares are sold on the stock market leads to an interesting phenomenon called the discount. The price you pay for a share is more often than not less than the actual value of its investments.

       
Say a fund’s investments are worth a hundred million and there are fifty million shares, then the net asset value, the value of each share, is two pounds. But you’ll be able to buy the shares for quite a bit less, perhaps for as little as £1.50. In that case you’ll be getting the share for three-quarters of its value and the discount would be one quarter, or twenty-five per cent. That’s not an unusual figure.

       
That’s fine and dandy, it means that shareholders are actually getting a boost to their investment, every £1.50 they put in has two pounds working for them and producing dividends. But it wasn’t too long before some wily investment trust managers realized that they could take over smaller trusts and take on ready-made portfolios at a bargain price. A hundred million pounds worth of investments might cost only seventy-five million on the stock exchange.

       
Well, it’s not exactly as simple as that because once the City gets wind of what’s happening the discount narrows pretty rapidly and the share price is soon the same as the net asset value. Timing is obviously crucial and the faster the takeover goes ahead the more money the predator makes. Tony dipped his toe into the investment trust pool and came out smiling once or twice.

       
It’s a good deal for the predator, who gets investments on the cheap, and the shareholders are happy because they make a quick profit, though more often than not they’re prepared to take shares in the predatory investment trust in place of cash. The only losers are the managers of the original trust who lose the goose that’s been laying their golden eggs, but they can always go back to accountancy, or soliciting, or selling shoelaces on street corners, or whatever it was they used to do before climbing on the gravy train of fund management.

       
Once investment trusts started snapping each other up other interested parties began to take notice; private trusts and pension funds didn’t need telling that they too could do a lot with cheap investments. They could keep the stocks and shares they liked and sell the rest through the market, a highly lucrative form of asset stripping, on a par with buying up cheap tenanted property, getting rid of the occupants and selling the freeholds. Nice work if you can get it.

       
She’d sat patiently by me on the virgin white settee and her eyes never left my face other than the two times when she’d refilled my glass. She hadn’t yawned, she hadn’t spoken. Sometimes she pushed her hair behind her left ear but it wouldn’t stay put, and occasionally she reached over and touched my shoulder gently and listened, head slightly on one side, which is why her hair kept falling across her eye. The cat had long since become bored with my shoelaces and lay on the back of the settee, eyes closed and paws opening and closing as it tortured dream mice. I’d stopped feeling her leg against mine and I wasn’t looking at her any more, I was looking at the window but not through it, just looking into the middle distance as I talked in a quiet voice that I barely recognized as my own, getting it out of my system like a fever that has to be sweated out.

       
Of course other people recognized a good thing when they saw it, and that’s how Laing and Kyle came on the scene. Laing was a drugs dealer with a cash flow that would make a Swiss banker blush with pleasure, Kyle was a downmarket version of Tony Walker.

       
For Kyle it wasn’t just business, it was a pleasure to grind people’s faces into their misfortune, particularly if it was a misfortune he’d brought about. Kyle was a short, stocky man with a hard face and a harder heart and a reputation for losing his temper, if he’d ever managed to find it in the first place.

       
He always dressed immaculately; his silk tie matched by a handkerchief, he wore sharp suits with a gold-buckled leather belt and his shoes never cost less than the average weekly wage.

       
He’d started his career as a property developer, doing up run-down buildings and selling them at an inflated profit, breaking rules and legs and trampling over anybody he could to get a leg up the ladder. Sometimes he’d trample on people just for the hell of it, just for practice, just because he liked it. He graduated to the City, set up a company offering financial services, took over an office cleaning firm, a pool table business, a couple of minor hotels that were barely disguised brothels. He was still breaking heads and working an eighty-hour week in his office near Bishopsgate.

       
He’d met Ronnie Laing one night in a gambling club in Mayfair, tall, willowy Ronnie Laing with his pale blond hair and deep set blue eyes covered by green-rimmed glasses, a blonde on each arm and a wide gold band on his wedding finger. Kyle liked him immediately, and liked him even more when Laing split the pair of blondes right down the middle, one each. The following morning they got to talking and that’s how the partnership was born. That’s what I heard, anyway, but that was afterwards when I was looking for information and paying for it and howling at the moon for revenge.

       
I don’t know how or why they picked on SCOT, maybe it was the twenty-eight per cent discount, maybe it was its size, maybe it was the fact that my father was in sole charge and less able to protect his baby than one of the larger investment houses, but they chose SCOT and went for it with all the subtlety of a Chieftain tank.

       
They attacked in two waves, each buying quietly in the market, softly softly until they reached just below the five per cent mark at which point they would have a notifiable stake. Then they pounced, lumped the two stakes together, snapping up another ten per cent in the market on the same day as the price started to take off. In all they bought one fifth of the £52 million trust for a little more than seven million, much of that the profits from Laing’s drug operations though the shares were in the name of Kyle’s company, Property and Financial Services. They’d been buying SCOT shares for about £1.18 compared with a net asset value of £1.51, and Kyle made a cash offer of £1.42 for the rest with the backing of a consortium of merchant banks who recognized a good thing when they saw it.

       
If the deal came off Kyle and Laing would get their hands on a £52 million portfolio for about £46 million, which meant a profit of six million once they’d liquidated it. Not bad for a couple of months’ work, and it would be a hundred per cent legal and above board. Well, it would have been if they’d played it by the book, which of course they didn’t. What Laing and Kyle wanted was a quick settlement, they wanted the directors of the trust to agree the bid and recommend that shareholders accept the PAFS offer before another predator started sniffing around.

       
One of the second ranking merchant banks prepared the bid document. Their fee of £120,000 would come off PAFS’s profits, but Laing and Kyle reckoned it was worth it, image was everything, but behind the scenes they played dirtier than anyone in the City had ever played before. They took the vicious techniques of Laing’s world into the sedate Edinburgh financial sector and the effect was similar to dropping a piranha into a tank of goldfish.

       
In the space of just four days one of the directors found that his £15,000 chestnut hunter had gone lame, not surprising with a six-inch nail rammed up its hoof as far as it would go; another received black and white photographs of his twin daughters stepping off the school bus. They’d been taken with a long lens and were slightly fuzzy, and they didn’t come with a message because one wasn’t necessary. Another opened his front door to find a bottle of sulphuric acid standing next to the early morning milk delivery and a carton of raspberry yoghurt. All three received phone calls on the same evening and at a board meeting two days later they told my father they’d decided to accept the PAFS offer, had already agreed to sell their shares to Kyle and would be recommending that shareholders did the same.

       
My father told them not to be so soft, that he was looking for a higher offer which would mean a better deal for the shareholders. That night he got a phone call and the next day his wife, my mother, got into the family Volvo and drove down the hill to the local shops and smashed headlong into a lamp post when the brakes failed. It wouldn’t have been so bad if she’d been wearing her seat belt but she wasn’t, and she ripped through the windscreen in a shower of glass cubes and crumpled onto the pavement where she died of a ruptured spleen and pierced lung three minutes later, in the arms of a passing postman, bleeding heavily over his grey slacks.

       
The following week she was buried in the pretty local churchyard and control of SCOT passed to Kyle and Laing.

       
Two days after the funeral I drove to the office. It was a Sunday and I wanted to get my desk straight, I knew that I had to keep working, keep my mind occupied, to do something to blot out the memory of how she’d died, an ugly freakish accident in a two-year-old car that had just been serviced. I stayed until after dusk, then threw my briefcase into the passenger seat of my Porsche and drove slowly back to the family home on the outskirts of Edinburgh, indicating at every turn, stopping on amber, checking the mirror at every opportunity and keeping both hands firmly on the wheel. My mother had named the rambling stone house in three acres of well-tended gardens Stonehaven, and she’d stamped her personality on it like an adopted child.

       
The house was quiet as I unlocked the front door, stepped into the oak panelled hall and rested the case next to the umbrella stand. I headed for the kitchen, I wanted a coffee, but I heard Bach through the study door so I changed direction and went in to see my father.

       
He was lying on his back by the side of his huge Victorian desk, a wedding present from a distant cousin, a black walking stick by his side. The damp weather always gave him trouble with his back and it had been drizzling steadily all day. I heard a sniff and a sigh and I turned to see David sitting behind the door, back ramrod straight against the hand-printed wallpaper, chin up, tears streaming from unseeing eyes down sodden cheeks.

       
He shuddered and sighed again, his lips tight together and his nose running and mixing with the tears. His fists were clenched and his arms clutched across his chest and he started to rock backwards and forwards, banging himself against the wall and wailing, a mournful moan of pain that shocked me to the core.

       
‘David, what’s wrong? What’s the matter?’ I asked. I knelt beside him, one knee either side of his outstretched legs, and held him close, his chin on my shoulder as he cried and cried. ‘Stop crying,’ I said.

       
I turned my head towards where my father was lying. ‘What’s the matter with David?’ I asked, but my father hadn’t moved and it wasn’t a stick lying by his side, it was his favourite shotgun and the blue and white wallpaper behind the desk was speckled with red. As I stood and walked towards his feet I could see that the top of his head was missing, and fragments of brain and skin and blood and shot covered the top of the desk. I noticed then the smell of cordite and shit in the room and I didn’t have to kneel by the body to see that he was dead.

       
I took David by the hand and led him from the room, sitting him in an armchair next to the telephone table in the hall as I rang Shona, Tony and the police, in that order. Then I brought a thick blanket down from a bedroom and wrapped it around David and I went back into the study and picked up the letter lying on the desk, and I sat next to David and waited and read the letter again and again and then I folded it up and put it in the inside pocket of my jacket and waited.

       
By then I was into my fourth tumbler of whisky and Sammy had leant her cool unlined forehead on my shoulder, breathing gently while her hand rested on my arm, her drink on the coffee table untouched.

       
I continued. ‘The coroner was sympathetic, and without a suicide note he was willing to accept that my father had shot himself accidentally while cleaning his gun. There was the usual warning always to check that guns weren’t loaded indoors but he wasn’t fooling anybody.’

       
‘What was in the letter?’ she asked, so quietly that at first I hadn’t realized she’d spoken.

       
‘It was rambling, the ramblings of a man who’d lost everything, almost everything, I don’t know, maybe everything. His job, his wife, what else was there for him to live for? Two sons, maybe, and a big empty house that would always remind him of her. He felt he didn’t belong in a world where gangsters like Kyle and Laing could get away with murder. The phone call he’d received before she died was from Laing, telling him to forget any ideas of master-minding a counter bid for SCOT, to let sleeping dogs lie, to keep out of it, old man, or you’ll be even more of a cripple, old man, and wouldn’t it be a pity if anyone else in your family had to use a stick to get around, old man.

       
‘He said in the letter that he didn’t want to live any more, not in a world where that could happen, he wanted to be with her and he said he was sorry, very sorry, and the notepaper was stained with tears and the handwriting shaky, the scrawl of an old, dying man. Christ, Sammy, he was only fifty-nine. He didn’t have to die. Neither of them did.’

       
‘Hush,’ she said, and put her arm around my shoulder. ‘They couldn’t have known what would happen. They couldn’t have known that your mother would be in the car or that she wouldn’t be wearing her seat belt. It was just a terrible, terrible mistake.’