On the Edge Read online

‘Selling corners. That’s what you do. When the away team is stronger than the home team and they only play with one striker up front you sell corners. It always works. Well, nearly always.’

  ‘Is that what you’ve done here?’

  ‘Yep. Sold total corners at twelve.’

  That meant that if the total number of corners in the match was fewer than twelve, Nils would make money. If it was greater, he would lose. It was a lot like trading bonds, which was no doubt why Nils liked it.

  ‘Is twelve a good price?’

  ‘Yeah. Should be eight. Do you want some action?’ Nils took out his phone, ready to call his bookmaker.

  Calder shook his head. ‘No, thanks. But I’ll get you another beer.’ Nils had already sunk his first pint. There were heads on the TV talking football, but Calder was glad to see that Nils wasn’t paying attention.

  ‘So, how’s it going?’ Calder said, returning with another beer.

  Nils grimaced.

  ‘That bad?’

  ‘It’s not as good as it was when you were there. They brought Kevin Strumm over to head up the desk,’ Nils said. ‘And he’s a wimp. He won’t let me do anything without checking with him first, and the moment I build up a decent sized position he wants me to reduce it.’

  ‘It’s no bad thing to be careful.’

  ‘You don’t make money that way.’ Nils smiled. ‘You knew when to go in large. That’s something I learned from you.’

  ‘Be patient. You’ll get your break.’

  ‘Maybe. But I’ve got to say, if the right job came along somewhere else, I’d take it.’

  ‘Bloomfield Weiss are still the best in the bond business.’

  ‘Perhaps. But it’s not a God-given right. I’m keeping my options open. How about you? I heard you bought a flying school?’

  ‘Yes. Langthorpe in Norfolk. It’s going well.’

  ‘Any money in it?’

  Calder grinned. ‘None. I’ll be lucky if it ever turns a profit. But you should come up one Sunday.’

  ‘Sounds a bit hairy for me,’ Nils said. ‘All right. You’ve bought me two beers. What’s up?’

  Calder told Nils all about Perumal’s visit, his suspicions over Jen’s death and the coincidence of his disappearance. Nils listened closely. ‘Wow,’ he said at the end.

  ‘I want to find out why Jen’s death was so convenient to Carr-Jones. And I want to find out whether she and Perumal were murdered. He was visiting the Teton Fund in Wyoming – I’d like to know what deals the Derivatives Group was doing with them, and whether Jen had any contact with them. Also, I understand Tessa Trew left Bloomfield Weiss just after Jen died. Apparently she fell out with Carr-Jones. I’d like to find out why, and where she’s gone.’

  ‘Wow,’ said Nils again, taking a gulp of beer.

  ‘Will you help me?’

  Nils winced. ‘I admit it does sound dodgy. Very dodgy. But I can’t believe there’s anything in it. And if there is, it’s dangerous shit.’

  Calder pressed on. ‘You know some of the people in Carr-Jones’s group, don’t you?’

  ‘Sure. I was on the same programme as Derek Grayling. And I know one or two others.’

  ‘Can you ask them a couple of questions?’

  Nils didn’t answer, but glanced up at the screen. The players were coming out of the tunnel at White Hart Lane. Calder could see him begin to tense.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘It might piss some people off,’ Nils said.

  ‘It will piss some people off. Benton Davis for one. Carr-Jones for another.’

  ‘What’s in it for me?’

  It was the standard investment banker’s question and the question Calder had feared. ‘Nothing. Nothing at all.’

  Nils raised his eyebrows. ‘Then why should I do it?’

  ‘Two reasons,’ Calder said. ‘I’m asking you. And you worked with Jen. You know what happened to her was wrong. We both owe it to her to prove it.’

  Nils didn’t seem to react to this. Suddenly the noise level in the bar dropped a notch and Nils turned to the screen. The match had begun. Nils and Calder watched in silence. Within two minutes, Liverpool had won a corner. Then another. And another. A minute later and they conceded a corner at the other end.

  ‘Shit,’ said Nils. ‘Four corners in five minutes! I’ve got to get out of this.’ He pulled out his phone, hit a number and placed it to his ear. Calder didn’t hear the conversation, but there was no mistaking Nils’s reaction.

  ‘Jesus Christ!’ he said staring at his phone in disbelief. ‘I’d have to cover at sixteen.’

  He glanced at Calder in indecision. Calder could tell he had serious money riding on this. If he’d staked a hundred pounds a corner, he’d be set to lose four hundred quid. If he’d staked a thousand…

  ‘Remember the UEE bonds,’ Calder said.

  Nils grinned ruefully. ‘You’re right.’ He spoke rapidly into the phone and then slipped it back into his pocket. He glanced up at the screen in disgust. Another corner to Spurs. ‘I’m outta here.’

  Calder finished his beer and they made their way to the exit.

  ‘Thanks, Zero,’ Nils said.

  ‘For the beer or the betting advice?’

  ‘Both.’

  ‘Well?’

  They were standing on the pavement outside the bar. It was just beginning to rain.

  ‘I’ll do it,’ Nils said.

  21

  ‘You’re getting much better, Ken,’ Calder said as he stood at the desk in the flying school and filled in paperwork. The weather forecast was good, and he had been forced to abandon his investigations in London for a few days to help out Jerry.

  ‘Thank you,’ said the accountant, grinning like a schoolboy. ‘Those last couple of landings felt just right.’

  ‘You must watch your speed on the approach, but if you keep this up next time, we could be looking at a solo.’

  Ken almost jumped into the air, he was so excited. He shook Calder’s hand warmly and headed out to his Mondeo in the car park. Calder smiled as he filled in the technical log for the aircraft they had just flown. A natural flyer Ken was not, but he certainly had perseverance. He would get to his first solo, although it would be a long haul from there to the licence.

  Calder heard a cough behind him. A cough he recognized. He turned round. There, sitting in an armchair, was Justin Carr-Jones.

  Calder felt an almost physical shudder of revulsion at seeing him here, in his territory, the world away from Bloomfield Weiss. He was wearing the investment-banker’s uniform of suit and tie, but with his curly blond hair, glasses and pink cheeks he did look awfully young and powerless out of his own environment.

  ‘Shouldn’t you be at work? I take it you haven’t come for a trial lesson?’

  Carr-Jones stood up, smiled and held out his hand. Calder ignored it. ‘Can we talk?’ Carr-Jones said. ‘Privately.’

  ‘One moment.’ Calder turned to his next student, a young man of twenty-two who had only seven hours’ flying under his belt but was already making excellent progress. ‘Sam, can you go out and check Alpha Tango? I’ll be with you in a few minutes.’ Calder led Carr-Jones to the little box that was the office he shared with Jerry, who was safely in the air.

  Carr-Jones sat in the cheap chair opposite Calder’s desk. ‘I hear you’ve been asking questions about Jen Tan.’

  ‘I have,’ Calder said.

  ‘I don’t think it’s a good idea.’

  ‘I’m sure you don’t.’

  ‘It all happened a year ago. It’s been thoroughly investigated by the firm and by the police. There really is nothing to be gained by going over that old ground again.’

  ‘Perumal didn’t disappear a year ago.’

  ‘Perumal has nothing to do with Jen’s death as you well know.’

  ‘Doesn’t he?’ As usual in Carr-Jones’s presence, Calder was finding it hard to maintain his composure. ‘You know Perumal came up here to see me?’

  ‘Benton said you told
the police something like that.’

  ‘He seemed agitated about something. Afraid.’ Calder watched Carr-Jones for a reaction. There was none, so Calder went on. ‘He asked whether I was suspicious about Jen’s death.’

  ‘That was sad,’ Carr-Jones said coolly.

  ‘Yes,’ said Calder. ‘It was.’

  Carr-Jones glanced at him. ‘Oh, I know what you must think. And I can understand why you slugged me, I suppose. But her suicide did explain a lot.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘How strangely she was behaving. Her response to what I said in that bar was way over the top. She was obviously unbalanced. Some people can take the pressures of the markets and some can’t. She couldn’t.’

  Calder fought to control himself. ‘Are you saying it wasn’t because of you she killed herself?’

  Carr-Jones smiled sadly. ‘I’ve thought about it a lot since then, as I’m sure you have. I think she got herself into a vicious downward spiral of depression. Her histrionics were a symptom of that. I only regret someone at Bloomfield Weiss hadn’t insisted that she see a psychiatrist before it was too late.’

  ‘Justin, that’s crap.’

  ‘No. It’s what happened. I’m just sorry that you don’t seem able to accept it.’

  ‘Perumal suggested Jen hadn’t taken her own life,’ Calder said.

  ‘Did he actually say someone murdered her?’

  ‘That’s what he implied.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘He didn’t say. But he did say he thought Jen’s death was convenient for you.’

  ‘Oh, I see,’ Carr-Jones snorted. ‘So I killed her? That’s ludicrous.’

  ‘Is it? Was Jen’s death convenient?’

  ‘Convenient? Of course it wasn’t convenient! And anyway, that’s a pretty revolting suggestion. I suppose he’s talking about her lawsuit. But that was no big deal. She didn’t have a leg to stand on. She was going to lose and she knew it, which is why she killed herself.’

  ‘No, Perumal was talking about something else.’

  ‘Something else? What else was there? Did he give you any idea what he meant?’

  ‘No,’ Calder said.

  Carr-Jones relaxed slightly. Just very slightly. A tiny slump of the shoulders, a loosening of the jaw muscles, Calder couldn’t put his finger on what it was exactly. But he was sure he had noticed it. And in that instant he knew that there was something else, something that Carr-Jones was anxious for Calder not to find.

  ‘Bit of a coincidence, isn’t it?’ Calder said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘That within days of Perumal coming to see me, he should die.’

  ‘Oh, come on, Zero, that was an avalanche. An act of God if ever there was one.’

  ‘It’s true. You’d have to be pretty smart to hide a murder with a ton of snow.’

  ‘You’re not suggesting I killed him too? He was in America and I was in London. I couldn’t have. And believe me, I miss him. He brought us a lot of deals over the last year. This last week has been a nightmare on the desk without him. Our new risk-management system has fallen over and we’ve had to calculate the revals ourselves. They spend forty million bucks and end up with something worse than we had before. You remember how it is.’

  ‘Actually, I’m trying to forget. These deals Perumal did. Were they with the Teton Fund?’

  Carr-Jones didn’t answer.

  ‘He went on a business trip to Jackson Hole, Wyoming. What else could he be doing there?’

  ‘Yes. With the Teton Fund. There was another Indian guy there who Perumal did lots of business with. Complex structures. Big size.’

  ‘The kind of deal you make nice fees out of?’

  Carr-Jones smiled. He picked up a white circular ‘whizz-wheel’ navigational calculator that was lying on Calder’s desk. ‘Is this some kind of slide-rule?’

  ‘Kind of.’

  Carr-Jones played with it for a moment, his mathematical mind swiftly assessing its dimensions, its possibilities, and then tossed it back on to the desk. ‘You’ve told all this to the police, I take it?’

  ‘Yes,’ Calder replied.

  ‘Did they find anything?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘Not yet or not at all?’ Now it was Carr-Jones’s turn to examine Calder’s reactions. ‘I thought so. They found no evidence, so now you’re fishing yourself.’

  ‘I want to find out what happened,’ Calder said.

  ‘You know what happened. We all do. A year ago a disturbed young woman killed herself. A week ago one of my star traders lost his life in a mountain accident. There really is no point in asking more questions.’

  ‘Isn’t there?’

  Carr-Jones looked out of the window as a Piper Warrior landed, applied full power and took off again in a ‘touch and go’.

  ‘I’d rather you didn’t.’

  Calder snorted. ‘You’d rather I didn’t. You can’t stop me, Justin. I don’t work for Bloomfield Weiss any more. Your political manoeuvrings have no effect here.’

  Carr-Jones picked up the whizz-wheel and fiddled with it again. ‘Very neat,’ he said, mostly to himself. Then he glanced around Calder’s small office. ‘You don’t really own this airfield, do you?’

  ‘We own the leasehold, yes.’

  ‘But not the land itself?’

  ‘No. It’s owned by a local farmer.’

  ‘And when is the lease coming up for renewal?’

  The answer was in two months’ time. The renewal should be automatic. The land was actually owned by Mrs Easterham, whose father had taken over the aerodrome when the RAF abandoned it in the seventies. Since his death she had retained a strong emotional attachment to it and she seemed to be pleased with the rejuvenating effect Calder and Jerry had had on the operation. No, there should be no problem.

  But as Calder looked at Carr-Jones, he decided not to answer him. He suspected Carr-Jones knew already.

  Carr-Jones noticed his hesitation and smiled. ‘It would be such a shame if you had to close this place down after all the work you’ve put into it.’ He got to his feet. ‘You have someone waiting. Nice to talk to you, Zero.’

  With that, he was gone, leaving Calder to gaze out over the airfield which until a minute before he had considered his own.

  ‘So you see, I thought it only fair that I should discuss this with you first. Give you a chance to match their offer.’

  Mrs Easterham’s voice cut like glass. Her clothes were from Chelsea and the highlights in her blonde hair were applied in Knightsbridge on her frequent trips to London, but she was a Norfolk woman through and through. Tall and thin, toughness fought with elegance in her demeanour and toughness won. This corner of Norfolk had been in her family for five centuries, and she felt it was her duty to ensure that it remained in her family for at least one generation more. Her husband had died many years earlier, and she had devoted her life to bringing up her two sons, now both at public school, and seeing to the farm, which was a large one, and well run.

  Calder had not been surprised by Mrs Easterham’s appearance so soon after Carr-Jones’s visit. But he had been surprised by the offer she had received: two million pounds for five hundred and fifty acres of the Easterhams’ farm, including the airfield.

  ‘Have you no idea who this Brynteg Global Investments is?’ he asked her.

  ‘Not really. It’s an investment company based in Guernsey. I’ve no idea who’s behind it, I’ve just been dealing with a firm of lawyers in London. Brynteg is Welsh, isn’t it?’

  ‘Sounds it,’ Calder said. Carr-Jones was Welsh. The bastard wasn’t even trying to disguise the connection.

  ‘Hardly a centre for international money-laundering, I’d have thought, but of course one never knows. Whoever they are, they’re willing to put up a deposit of twenty per cent. And if they pay cash, who am I to quibble? The thing is, with agriculture in the desperate state it’s in, I’m going to find it extremely hard to hold on to the farm. If I can sell half of it at this
price, then the future of the rest is safe.’

  ‘But they’ll close down the airfield?’

  ‘Sadly,’ said Mrs Easterham. ‘They were very firm about that. They want the land for growing experimental crops. Apparently it’s the perfect location. I hate to do this to you, and I’m sure my father would have wanted me to keep it going if I possibly could, but I have no choice.’ She watched Calder and Jerry’s faces with concern. ‘Which is why I would much rather sell it to you. You wouldn’t even have to match the price. Just come somewhere close.’

  Jerry glanced at Calder. ‘I don’t know, Mrs Easterham. We can see what we can do.’

  Jerry was hoping that Calder would be able to come up with the money. Calder didn’t want to dash his hopes directly. All the time he was thinking: was Carr-Jones so desperate that he was willing to spend two million pounds to keep Calder quiet?

  ‘Well, that’s good. But I need to get back to them by next week.’

  After she had gone, Jerry raised his eyebrows at his partner. ‘Well?’

  Calder shook his head. ‘Sorry, I can’t do it.’

  ‘Could you do part of it? Maybe we could borrow the rest from the bank. I have no idea, is two million quid a lot of money for that much land?’

  ‘I think you’ll find it’s way over the market,’ Calder said.

  Jerry shook his head. ‘I can’t believe it. Just when things are going so well. And she assured us she would renew the lease when we bought this place last year. Greedy cow.’

  ‘I can understand it,’ Calder said. ‘I suspect times are tougher for her than she lets on.’

  ‘Maybe. But I’m screwed if this goes through. I know I’ve put less cash into this than you have, Alex, but it was everything I have. If I throw in the towel here, either I get a job somewhere else as a flying instructor for peanuts or go back to undertaking. And believe me, that’s something I definitely don’t want to do.’

  Calder winced and put his head in his hands.

  ‘Who are these people anyway?’ Jerry said. ‘What’s the point of buying a big patch of farmland in the middle of nowhere at an over-the-market price? And why approach Mrs Easterham? It doesn’t sound as if she had the place up for sale. There must be farmers going bust all over the country desperate to offload some land.’