Читать книгу Head of State: The Bestselling Brexit Thriller - Andrew Marr, Andrew Marr - Страница 23

Alois Haydn carried his wealth lightly too. He called the substantial reserves of money he had amassed his ‘dither fund’ – inheritance and earnings he had been thinking about investing in property, shares or holiday treats, but had never got round to using. Because it was just sitting in the bank, slowly losing value, he also called it his ‘ice money’: drip by drip, it slowly shrank in value and leaked away. When, just before the previous Christmas, he had finally stopped dithering, the dither fund stood at £4,745,201.20. He wired most of it to a new account in the Gulf, cashing out the remaining half a million in £50 notes. This took a lot of paperwork, tedious discussions with bank staff and nervous packaging, but he eventually had the sum wrapped in waterproof paper and jammed into a rucksack.

Alois may have had an obscure background, but he had a very clear mind. Britain, he believed, was finished. Thirty years of spending ever more money on ever pleasanter lifestyles, while working ever less hard and ever less efficiently, had done the once-great nation irreversible damage. Tory and Labour alike: locust years. It wasn’t politics. It was decadence.

As Alois saw it, there were now two possible courses of events. Either the socialists would get back, and in the prevailing mood of public outrage the demands for higher taxes would drive the rich and the foreigners out, fleeing London like flocks of migrating birds affected by a sudden chilling in the weather. Or, despite the best efforts of the current prime minister, the radical and nationalist right would take over, doing enormous short-term damage to everything, including employment. Either way, property prices would crash, and those who remained in Britain would have nowhere safe to put their money. Alois didn’t trust government assurances about the security of the banks. He knew a little history.

He had screwed up his courage to talk about his worries with the prime minister. It wasn’t easy. The PM had a way of looking at you, his forehead creased and his thick, shaggy eyebrows casting dark shadows over his eyes, his mouth twisted in a wordless disdain that had you beaten in argument before he said a word. When it finally came, his voice – all gravel and pebbles and fast-running water between them – reminded Alois of his recent personal triumph in Germany, and the possibility of a negotiated solution acceptable to all sides. The very thing he was putting to the country in a referendum.

‘Why, Alois, do you suppose I am ruining – ruining – my health, and shredding what’s left of my popularity, if not to steer the poor old British people deftly between the two disasters you so eloquently describe? Grab the tiller. Port and starboard: the economically illiterate socialist Scylla and the saloon-bar nationalist Charybdis. My job is to jam wax into the ears of the people and get us past the Sirens, through the white horses and out into the open sea. And I will, if it’s the last thing I do. Believe me, Alois. Stick with us, and leave your money where it is.’

Alois had always admired the prime minister just this side of idolatry. It was his only weakness, and he rather liked himself for it. But after this conversation, and despite the prime minister’s almost hypnotic stare, he walked away unconvinced. Two days later he liquidated the entire dither fund and bought tickets for himself and Ajit to Dubai.

Various interesting people from the Islamic Republic of Iran and the Pakistani security service had found Dubai more discreet than Switzerland and as secure as Singapore – as well as much nearer than either. The banks there would open an account for a large amount of currency passed across the counter with the minimum of questioning or paperwork. The architecture, the heat and the vulgarity of the shopping were minor inconveniences compared with the helpfulness of the financial institutions.

Ajit, dejected by the appalling British weather, had jumped at the idea of a brief break in Dubai, and was touched when Alois packed for him. It almost made up for his steerage-class ticket – Alois, as always, travelled first class. But when Ajit discovered, while delving in his rucksack for his washbag at Dubai International Airport, that he had just unwittingly carried a vast sum of sterling through customs, while Alois had brought only a few T-shirts and a credit card, the couple had their first big row.

‘But you got away with it,’ Alois had defended himself.

‘That’s not the point. You deceived me. You did it coldly, and you put me in danger. You behaved like a shit.’

‘For God’s sake, Ajit. Nobody travelling in steerage with a rucksack is going to be checked for currency. You get past the dope-sniffer dogs and you’re home free. It would have been much more risky if I’d had it in my luggage. And if I’d told you about it you’d have been pathetic – all camp and sweaty and scared – and you’d certainly have been caught.’

‘Don’t call me pathetic. And don’t you dare call me camp. I’m not “camp”. I’m not “gay”. I’m not “queer”. I’m just an old-fashioned, straightforward bugger. And I’m damned proud to be a bugger. All I ask, Alois …’

Their voices had been raised enough to attract the attention of the businessmen and white-robed taxi drivers standing around the arrivals hall. The country was full of proud buggers, but they didn’t often talk about it in loud voices in public places.

The argument fizzled out, but it left Ajit in a terrible mood, and spoiled the holiday for both of them. Alois had taken the money off to the bank recommended to him by his wealth manager at Raworth & Reid in London and opened a new and untraceable account, the ultimate insurance, which even in Dubai took an entire morning. Ajit was left to sun himself by the hotel pool, which proved to be greasy with tanning lotion and full of writhing, screaming Arab teenagers throwing footballs and splashing each other. And the sun was far too hot. He decided that he hated Dubai, and retreated indoors to the fitness suite to work off his bad temper on some kettle bells and the treadmill.

A wiry, tousle-headed man, dressed only in a pair of shorts, was grunting away on the rowing machine. Both of them did a hard forty minutes in the gym before starting to talk under the refreshingly cold showers. The rower introduced himself as Charmian Locke, a ‘sort of banker’ from London, and added nastily, ‘You musht be the only Indian staying in a fuck-off place like thish.’

The speech impediment – made all the more noticeable by his huge teeth, like gleaming white tombstones – bothered Ajit. It seemed to come and go. Could it be an affectation? Nevertheless, he explained that his partner had come to invest some money here, and said that Dubai struck him as a bit of a hole.

‘It’sh not so bad. The trouble ish, it isn’t Arab and it isn’t Western,’ said Charmian. ‘It ish a hole, I shpose – the hole between the two.’ He and Ajit talked about why so much money was being made in this surreal, gritty little country. Ajit, as a writer, both respected money and was frightened by it. But Charmian’s evident greed and cleverness were catching, and Ajit began to find his new acquaintance’s conversation as interesting as his teeth were alarming.

However, by the time he and Haydn, both of whom were still disgruntled with one another, returned to the airport a few days later, he had forgotten Charmian. But then they bumped into each other in the queue. Ajit introduced him to Alois as the brilliant money man he’d met in the hotel gym. Naturally, Charmian was travelling at the front of the plane, and he and Alois talked non-stop all the way to London. One of the great things about first-class air travel is that it puts all the crooks together.

Charmian Locke had worked for one of the biggest investment banks in the world before his blog about life in the City after the financial crash was tracked to his trading computer and he was fired for breaking the firm’s confidentiality clauses. The truth was, he had been bored. His deserved reputation as one of the shrewdest brains on the trading floor meant that he was soon contacted by a friend of his father’s, Sir Solomon Dundas, a flamboyant former private banker now with a company called PLS, with a proposal concerning his future employment. The money wasn’t great, but the job was.

‘He’s a damn clever fellow. New generation. Perfectly respectable – just don’t let him smile at you,’ was the judgement of Solomon. And so it was that Alois Haydn came to have yet another link with Professional Logistical Services.