The First Novels: Pay Off, the Fireman (9 page)

       
‘Must I?’ she asked, dropping the suitcase with a dull thud and taking my hand. She glanced at Sammy and smiled. ‘Yes, I suppose I must.’

       
The voice was pure Cockney, belying the name and the body, and I mentally cursed Tony and his twisted sense of humour. Ultimate Sloane, indeed.

       
‘I love the flat,’ I said, looking round and releasing the cool, scarlet-fingernailed hand. ‘How on earth do you keep it clean?’

       
‘Why should it ever get dirty?’ asked Carol. ‘Sit down, I’ll get you a drink.’

       
‘It’s OK, I’ll get it,’ said Sammy. ‘Anyway, I thought you had to go.’

       
‘Shit, yes, what’s the time? Oh no. Was there a cab outside?’ she asked me, her eyes widening.

       
‘No,’ I said, but just then we heard a horn sound in the street below and she picked up the case and headed for the door.

       
‘I must dash,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry I can’t stay, but I’m sure you’ll get on with Sammy. Oh, and when you see Tony next, give him my love. Tell him I’ll phone when I get back and he can check my tan.’

       
‘I’ll tell him,’ I laughed, and then the door slammed and she was gone.

       
‘Hectic,’ I said to Sammy.

       
‘Yes,’ she nodded, shaking her head so that the waterfall of red hair swung back and forth. ‘She got a call from a friend in Oman. Here today, gone tomorrow. That’s the way it is with Carol. No ties, no commitments.’

       
‘The flat?’

       
‘The flat’s mine. Carol helps out with the rent but she’d never take on a mortgage in a million years. In the sixties they’d have called her a free spirit.’

       
‘And now?’

       
‘Irresponsible, I suppose. No, that’s not fair, Carol just has different priorities to me.’

       
She walked past me and something smelled sweet and expensive, the sort of perfume that back-street chemists make cheap copies of and sell out of cardboard boxes in shopping precincts.

       
Walking over to the four-seater sofa was like wading through an uncut lawn, the thick lush pile came halfway up my shoes. I dropped onto the soft white upholstery and slowly sank into it until my backside was a good six inches below my knees.

       
The cat purred and rolled over, eyes fixed on my shoelaces. It was probably grateful to see something, anything, that wasn’t white. Hell, I’m surprised the poor thing hadn’t gone snow blind living with Sammy and Carol. I felt so sorry for it that I let it play with them, dangling my foot over its eager paws.

       
As the cat and I got acquainted Sammy came back from the drinks cabinet, which stood next to a large picture window overlooking a verdant garden square where sparrows fought and squabbled and a thrush sang its heart out. That’s what the residents pay rates of £1.68 in the pound for, I guess.

       
I didn’t think I could stand without an overhead winch so I was grateful when she walked over and handed the glass down to me. I was even more grateful when I discovered it wasn’t white wine or white rum or white anything. It was a malt, a good one, and it came with a splash of water which is just the way I like it and that meant she had a severe case of woman’s intuition, she’d made a lucky guess or she’d had a long chat with Tony and I wondered what he had told her and if he’d asked her to go ferreting for him. Or maybe she had just smelled the whisky I’d drunk for Dutch courage before I left my flat.

       
Our fingers touched as I took the crystal tumbler and I got a slight shock of static electricity, a combination of the carpet, her dress and the thin film of sweat that I could feel all over my skin. The girl made me nervous, she was almost too beautiful, too well-groomed. It was difficult being in the same room as her, I was like a schoolboy on his first date and it was all I could do to stop biting my nails.

       
She floated down into the settee next to me and pulled her knees up onto the cushions so that one brushed against the outside of my leg. I didn’t jump but my heart soared and I just melted as she looked at me and ran her finger up and down the stem of her glass. I came to as the cat began scratching its claws down my socks and I cleared my throat and started the semblance of a conversation.

       
‘Have you known Tony for long?’ I asked and wished I’d bitten my tongue instead.

       
‘About three years, on and off,’ she said. ‘I work for him every couple of months, usually Arabs, and usually they want something a little different.’ She raised her eyebrows, daring me to ask what was different, but I didn’t rise to the bait, all I could think of was the warmth of her leg against mine.

       
‘What is it you want me to do?’ she asked. ‘Tony said you had something special in mind but he wouldn’t tell me what.’

       
‘Tony was teasing you,’ I said. ‘I want you to do much the same as you do for him, only for a client of mine. Only he isn’t a client of mine. I’m not explaining this very well, am I?’ I was embarrassed, that’s why, discussing sex with this beautiful girl that I fancied something rotten as if I were talking about a secretarial job.

       
‘No, you’re not. Let me get you another.’ She uncurled and drifted up and off the settee, God knows how but I suppose the long suntanned legs had something to do with it. She returned with another whisky and I don’t remember drinking that one either. She made me laugh, she told me stories about Tony that I would dredge up next time I saw him so long as my memory held out; she told me about her parents, her time at Oxford, we touched on everything but her profession though after a while it became clear that it was more of a hobby than a job. I told her about David and Shona and before long I told her everything.

       
I needed someone to talk to, and I knew that unless I gave her good reason she wouldn’t help me and she was perfect for the job. It wasn’t pillow talk, that would come later, this was just getting it all off my chest. Like a chat with an analyst, that’s the way I looked at it. I was pissed, and when I’m pissed I talk too much.

If you’ve got a couple of thousand pounds to invest there are a number of things you can do. In fact a host of friendly advisors will beat a path to your door with a view to tucking away your nest egg in one of their many and varied schemes.

       
You can shove it into a building society or deposit account and forget about it, collecting the interest every few months. It’s boring, to be honest, and you’ll never make a fortune unless you start with half a fortune and wait ten years or so, but your capital is as safe as houses.

       
You can put the lot into Premium Bonds, and wait for Ernie to pick one of his electronic ping pong balls out of his electronic hat with your number on it. You’ve more chance of winning than you have of being struck by lightning but statistically you’re better off putting your hard-earned loot in the care of Mr  Bradford and Mr  Bingley. If your luck’s in you could cream off a fortune, but that could also be said of the football pools. I guess that’s why so many people are glued to their TV sets on Saturday afternoons – dreaming of the big one, but if it doesn’t come off, well, there’s always next week, isn’t there? It’s a mug’s game. You might as well toddle into a casino and plonk the lot on zero. Sometimes that comes up, too.

       
At the opposite end of the financial spectrum are the out and out gambles, the City equivalent of betting on a 250–1 outsider running in the Grand National. There are get-rich-quick schemes like buying those large containers used to ship antiques over to America, disgraced diplomats to Nigeria and stolen cars to the Middle East. You rent them out to export companies and pocket a healthy profit, in theory, but more likely they’ll just lie rusting in some disused dockyard and your money will evaporate faster than goodwill at a creditors’ meeting. Not to be recommended.

       
Anyway, back to Mr  Average looking for a home for his two grand. He’s probably heard about the stock market, the mystical exchange where fortunes are won and lost, and if he is a little curious he’s maybe read about penny shares, buying them at 9p each and selling a few months later when they’re worth £6.15. Mr  Average, being average, is more than a little greedy and reckons that the stock market is the place for his hard-earned cash.

       
He might be right, but he’ll be playing in one of the biggest casinos in the world, with rumours and counter-rumours sending share prices soaring and crashing, a bad set of results blighting a firm’s shares for months, a takeover bid sending them through the roof.

       
Putting all your eggs in one basket is a doubtful way of investing, but Mr  Average’s £2,000 would have to go on one share to make any sense at all, dealing costs and stamp duty see to that, and picking that one share makes it a gamble. Back to the racecourse.

       
There is an alternative: a unit trust or an investment trust. Different animals but with a similar aim, the spreading of risk. Get together a group of investors, pool their capital and put their money into several shares, gilts, maybe even property. Then spread the rewards. There’ll obviously be a few misses, but the many hits will more than cover them.

       
The main difference between unit and investment trusts is that investment trusts come in the form of shares listed on the stock exchange. To buy unit trusts you go to the firm which manages them. Both sorts of trusts specialize, in sectors like electronics or natural resources, or in parts of the world like the Far East or America.

       
Edinburgh has always been a major centre of investment trusts, going back to the days when canny Scots realized there was many a mickle to be made out of America, but they were also canny enough to realize that there was safety in numbers. Shareholders made small fortunes out of their investments, but even bigger fortunes were made by the men who managed the funds. That’s still the case.

       
Take a gold sovereign and place it over a small scale map of Edinburgh centred on Charlotte Square, and you’re probably covering more millionaires per square foot than anywhere outside the City of London. Many of them are fund managers, men who make their money by looking after other people’s.

       
These days most of the Ivory & Simes and Martin Curries have branched out into other lucrative areas like pension fund management, but my father had always stuck to what he knew best, looking after an investment trust that was his pride and joy. He’d managed Scottish Commercial Overseas Trust, SCOT as it was called, since he was a young man fresh out of St  Andrews University with a first in economics.

       
My grandfather got him the job by pulling a few well-greased strings. My family’s always been like that: doors are opened and more strings pulled than at a campanologists’ convention to make sure the next generation gets a head start on their peers. Don’t knock it until you’ve benefited from it.

       
Father took to it like a duck to water, long expense-account lunches, meeting old friends from school and university, drinks with the G and T brigade, and free publicity in the quality Scottish press. All he had to do was to keep up with the FT Index, and he had the experience of a flock of Scottish stockbrokers’ analysts to draw on. OK, I’m making it sound easy, but running an investment trust is a darn sight more fun than breaking rocks for a living.

       
It’s just a matter of running with the pack, switching into sectors as they become popular and ditching them when sentiment goes against them. Japan this year, America next, making sure you sell at a profit wherever possible but never being afraid to cut loose a dead loss.

       
The really good guys, the ones that earn £100,000 a year and more, set trends rather than follow them. They know, based on instinct or research, where to invest and where to sell, but everyone knows who to watch and the sheep follow the wolves and everyone makes a good living, my father included.

       
For the whole of his working life my father ran the SCOT investment trust with John Read, another St  Andrews graduate. But when Read died of a massive stroke two years ago my old man was left in sole charge, and the mantle didn’t fit too well on his shoulders.

       
He should have taken on more staff right away, beefed up the research side, maybe even taken on a few more non-executive directors, but at fifty-nine years old it was the first time he’d had his hands on the reins and he was reluctant to give them up.

       
By then SCOT was doing fairly well, with investments worth a total of fifty-two million, though its performance lagged well behind the high-flyers. In fact SCOT had under-performed the investment trust sector average for the past five years but it had still done better than many. It was just after Read’s death that Ronnie Laing, drugs dealer, and Alan Kyle, property developer and self-styled City tycoon, crawled out of the woodwork.

       
There’s another big difference between unit trusts and investment trusts. A unit trust is an open fund, the more money that comes in the more units are created. If investors withdraw their money then the number of units is reduced.

       
An investment trust is different, it’s a closed fund, set up with a limited number of shares. The only way to increase the share capital is to issue more shares, which sometimes happens. You buy them through a stockbroker and it’s the City that sets the price. A share that’s in vogue or is doing particularly well will have more money chasing it than a dullard, and its price will rise.