Meltdown (26 page)

He ignored all this, which in a previous life he would have deemed unacceptable to a civilized standard of living, and simply pulled the wine from where it nestled in the fridge door.

What Jimmy could not avoid noticing was the upturned plug-socket protector. Even a brain-dead dysfunctional like him could not ignore that when treading on it. He screamed in agony and staggered backwards, dropping a third-full bottle of wine in the process and going for six over a plastic fire engine.

‘Are you OK, Jimmy?’ Monica asked, fetching a mop and a dustpan and brush.

‘I hate those plug protectors,’ he gasped from the floor.

‘We need them. Cressida’s rushing about all over the place now.’

‘I know, but I still hate them. And what’s more, when you want to get one out of the socket, you can’t.’

‘Well, that’s the point, isn’t it? If we can’t, then she can’t.’

‘Yes, but what about when you want to plug something in?’

‘Like what? We have sockets for the toaster and the kettle.’

‘I don’t know. Something new? Like that breadmaker my mother gave us for Christmas.’

‘Yes, you’re right, Jimmy,’ Monica said sarcastically, ‘because bread is so difficult to find in London, it would be well worth risking our daughter’s electrocution to bake some at home.’

There was silence for a while. Jimmy wasn’t really interested in plug sockets; he was just putting off the awful moment when he would have to tell Monica about Toby being chucked out of Abbey Hall.

Then a tiny piece of emotional good fortune came his way. It turned out that Toby had made the decision for them.

‘Jimmy,’ Monica said, ‘Toby’s been talking to me and he wants to leave Abbey Hall.’

‘Really? Why?’

‘He’s not stupid. He knows he doesn’t belong there any more.’

‘Is he being bullied?’

‘I don’t think so, not terribly. Teased, certainly, but he’s tough enough for that, I think. No. He just knows that he’s at a posh school but that his dad isn’t rich any more. We’ve already pulled him out of the skiing trip and there was a note today about a trip to the theatre which will cost sixty pounds in all. He’s worked out for himself that we can’t afford that sort of thing any more.’

‘That’s pretty sad, isn’t it? I mean if he’s feeling guilty about how much he’s costing us. Makes me feel a complete failure.’

‘He isn’t feeling guilty and this isn’t about you, Jim. It’s about him. I think the penny’s dropped for him in a way that it still hasn’t for us. He doesn’t feel like a rich kid any more. Maybe it’s because we used to bang on so much about how lucky we were and how we should never take it for granted. I honestly think he took us at our word and never did. Take it for granted, I mean. And now he can see that everything’s changed and he’s accepted it.’

‘Wow,’ said Jimmy. ‘He’s a good kid, isn’t he?’

‘Yes.’

‘As it happens, Mr Lombard was chucking him out anyway.’

‘No! The bastard! I can’t
believe
it. He’s an Abbey Hall boy.’

‘That’s what I said.’

‘Fuck him.’

‘Yes, fuck him.’

‘Toby’s a good kid,’ Monica said as Jimmy went back to the fridge.

‘Better than us, I reckon,’ Jimmy replied over his shoulder.

‘Yes, but he’s got our DNA. So we take some of the credit.’

‘Oh certainly. We get the credit for nature and I suppose Jodie gets the credit for nurture. A lot of it anyway.’

‘That’s a bit sad, isn’t it?’

‘Yes. I suppose it is.’

‘Funny it took us losing everything to work that out.’

Jimmy brought another bottle of wine and put it on the floor in front of them. Then he sat down beside Monica and for a while they just held each other.

Street Owning Man

Rupert’s peerage celebration dinner was in full swing.

‘How’s Webb Street going then, Jimmy?’ Robbo asked, his mouth full of chocolate soufflé and Sauternes. ‘Have those bloody Poles worked out which way round we have the taps in England yet?’

‘Don’t talk about Webb Street,
please
,’ Monica begged. ‘I’m embarrassed.’

Webb Street had just become a massive part of Jimmy and Monica’s lives and Monica in particular was still not quite sure how she felt about the whole thing. It was in Hackney, an unremarkable nineteenth-century thoroughfare which had escaped Hitler’s bombs and been pretty much left to rot ever since. Such had been its dilapidation that even during the eighties, when almost everything else in Hackney had been gentrified, Webb Street had been left to the roaches and the crack dealers. But the noughties were not the eighties and in the heady joy of a new millennium Webb Street, untouched, unloved, owned by absentee landlords who were not allowed to raise their rents or evict sitting tenants, was, as Rupert had put it when he suggested the idea to Jimmy, ‘a granny waiting to be mugged’.

‘It’s simple, mate,’ Rupert had said. ‘You work your way up the street, house by house, offering over-the-odds prices to landlords and fat inducements to tenants to bugger off. Then once you’ve bagged the lot you can develop a whole lifestyle community. The problem with lots of good houses in London is that they’re next door to shitty ones full of shitty awful people. If you’re developing a whole street that problem goes away.’

Jimmy had enquired at the time where Rupert supposed he was going to get the money for the over-the-odds prices and fat inducements with which he would gain control of all these homes.

‘You’re living in it, mate!’ Rupert replied. ‘One of the ten best houses in Notting Hill! Fully developed. Jacuzzi, gym, underground car park and ready to rock. You could raise five to seven million on that. We’d give it you tomorrow. You’re sound as a pound. You earn easily enough to cover the interest payments. God knows, your bonus last year alone would have done more than that.’

And Rupert was right. Fired up by the enormity of the scheme, Jimmy had found it absurdly easy to borrow six million pounds from the Royal Lancashire using his home as collateral. That, plus some share options and two million borrowed against his elephantine pension pot, had been sufficient for him to purchase the twenty-four houses in Webb Street.

Quite suddenly and in a flurry of excitement, Jimmy and Monica had become major property speculators.

‘I still can’t quite believe that we actually own a street,’ Jimmy said, digging into his foie gras and pulling a face that asked, should I feel a bit guilty about it, do you think?

Monica definitely did feel guilty. Or at least embarrassed. She admitted that she wasn’t sure which it was herself.

‘Don’t put it like that, darling, please,’ she said. ‘We don’t own all of it.’

‘We do, babes,’ Jimmy assured her, reaching for the wine with further expressions of mock tortured self-doubt. ‘It’s mad, I know. Bloody tonto.’

‘We do
not
own all of it,’ Monica protested. ‘The end bit isn’t ours. The bit behind the pub.’

‘That’s Webb Mews,’ Jimmy said, ‘and you’re right, we don’t own that. but we do own Webb Street. All of it.’

‘And we’re talking to Webb Mews,’ David chipped in, ‘because if we can get it plus the required planning permission then Webb Street will have its own private health club. Exclusive to one street, imagine that! God, Jimmy, I can remember you at university in your torn jeans, pinching food from the union shop. You were virtually a bloody punk! Now look at you – from Street Fighting Man to Street Owning Man, eh? Let’s face it, the Stones went the same way.’

‘The Stones were
always
middle bloody class,’ Robbo said. ‘Or at least Mick and Keef were.’

‘We
don’t
own it,’ Monica insisted once more. ‘For a start, Rupert owns most of it, or at least his bank does.’

‘Monica,’ Henry said soothingly, ‘don’t beat yourself up about it. Really. What you and Jimmy are involved in is
wealth creation
, which is a very good thing. There is absolutely nothing to feel embarrassed about.’

‘Hear, hear,’ said Rupert. ‘Well said, Henry!’

‘My God!’ Lizzie exclaimed. ‘Rupert and Henry actually agree on something. Let’s have a party!’

‘We
are
having a party,’ Amanda pointed out.

‘More wine then!’ Robbo announced. ‘We must drink to Rupert and Henry seeing eye to eye for the first time since they agreed that they fancied you, Liz.’

‘Shut up, Robbo!’ Lizzie said, reddening. ‘I mean it.’

‘Joking aside, Monica,’ Henry said, ‘you and Jim should take pride in what you’re doing. It’s exactly the type of project that we in government have been trying to encourage.’

‘What, me getting hugely richer?’ Jimmy laughed. ‘Blimey, was it in the manifesto?’

‘I’m serious. A project like Webb Street is an engine of
growth and prosperity
in this city. As a Labour MP I’m thinking about what this kind of profit generation means in terms of employment, consumer spending and a spur to further inward investment.’

‘There, you see, Jimmy?’ Rupert shouted, pouring more wine and thus recklessly reducing the value of his investment even further. ‘Webb Street is a job-creation scheme! You and Monica are
philanthropists
. Bloody social workers.’

‘Prosperity and equality are not mutually exclusive,’ Henry said pompously. ‘Tony has always made it clear that Labour is the party of business as well as the party of the people. After all, who is it that does business but people?’

After that, the evening degenerated into a discussion about the Congestion Charge, a subject on which everyone could agree.

They all loathed it.

What goes around

Detective Inspector Graeme Beaumont worked in Scotland Yard’s Financial Fraud Division and he did so with an evangelical zeal. He liked chasing white-collar criminals. In his opinion, far too much press attention was paid to hoodies on street corners and not nearly enough to those who stole via columns of numbers on screens and mountains of paperwork spread across continents.

‘You’re mugging old ladies every bit as much if you pinch their pension fund,’ he was fond of pointing out to the squad of bookish constables and civilian accountants who worked under him, ‘as you are if you assault them at a bus shelter. Stealing is stealing and it doesn’t matter if the crook flies first class and sits in the House of Lords. If he’s a crook, he’s a crook.’

Beaumont had been working hard at his desk all morning. And working, on this particular morning, with a growing sense of purpose. His was a tough and often thankless field of operations. Results were agonizingly slow to come by and months of meticulous work would often yield nothing. This morning, however, Beaumont felt he was getting somewhere.

Nonetheless, when the clock struck eleven he rose from his desk, crossed what was grandly called his operations room and inspected the contents of the small fridge that stood in the corner. Beaumont valued routine. He believed it disciplined and focused the mind. He felt that he was a better detective for strictly observing his eleven o’clock break.

Everything in the fridge was in order.

His milk had not been tampered with. His Twix lay unopened and the circular box of Laughing Cow Cheese Triangles with three remaining triangles in it was exactly how he had left it.

The constables and accountants who worked under Graeme Beaumont knew better than to tamper with Beaumont’s section of the fridge. His milk was sacrosanct. His elevenses untouchable. Let them share a communal carton of milk for their tea if they wished. Let them organize an honesty tin in order to pay for tea and a packet of Penguin biscuits if that was their desire. But that way was not Beaumont’s way. Beaumont knew a little too much about human nature to believe that such arrangements could ever lead to anything but tears.

It wasn’t that Beaumont lacked generosity. If somebody had asked him for a splash of milk for their tea he would have given it. Gladly. It was simply that a lifetime of experience had led Beaumont to conclude that in communal fridges, as in most cooperative ventures, there would always be somebody who, through either sloth or greed, would ruin things for everyone.

Beaumont made himself a cup of tea, took a cheese triangle and one finger from his Twix and returned with them to his desk.

He was excited and anxious to get on but also somewhat vexed. The case on which he was working had given rise to a moral question. Should he declare a vested interest? The thought had been on his mind all morning. Sipping his tea and toying with the foil wrapping of the cheese triangle, he decided that it was all right. That there was in fact no conflict of interest and that he had no need to trouble his superiors with it.

The fact that he had in his sights two men with whom he had briefly shared a house some seventeen years before hardly represented a difficulty. Yes, it was true that those men had chucked him out of that house. Perfunctorily. That those two confident, well-established second-year students had rendered a vulnerable fresher homeless and distressed. That was undeniable. It was also true that he, Inspector Beaumont, had never forgotten the incident, feeling to this day that he had been appallingly treated.

But these things did not represent a conflict of interest. Beaumont’s reputation was spotless, he had applied the law equally and fairly, without fear, favour or prejudice, throughout his career. The fact that he had a passing acquaintance with
Lord
Rupert Bennett and a certain Jimmy Corby was utterly irrelevant.

Beaumont had not sought out these men as objects of an investigation into insider trading. He had of course always been aware of them in a general sense. Of Bennett certainly. Bennett could not be avoided; his extraordinary success in banking meant that his name was known to anyone with even a vague interest in the financial world. And the almost equally enormous success of the other occupants of that extraordinarily lucky house of which he had briefly been a tenant was not unknown to Beaumont either. No single group of people could have done better in life. He had never been able to get away from the bastards.