Read Online Due Diligence by Grant Sutherland - Free Book Online Page B

laughs again and pushes me away. My hand slides over her back, an instinctive movement, nothing remains now but the one small scar. Beyond the walled garden the churchbells begin to toll. ‘What’s that?’ she says.
    But before I can answer, Theresa calls from the doorway. ‘Annie. Come and put your shoes on.’ Annie stomps, making patterns again, and I scoop her into my arms and she wriggles and shrieks with laughter as I carry her inside. It feels wrong.
     
    Theresa and I enter the church together, Annie clinging shyly to Theresa’s left hand. Scores of people have come, friends of my mother’s I haven’t seen for years, every pew in the small church is taken. There’s a low murmur of conversation, and the heads turn our way when we pass. As we slide into the family pew near the pulpit I wonder what these others see when they look at the three of us. A family? Only my father, who enters behind us, knows something is wrong. He knows Theresa has spent many weeks down in Hampshire lately, and he knows that I don’t bring Annie, as I always used to, when I visit him in St James’s. My excuse, Annie’s cancer, has become rather worn. But even he doesn’t know that for the past three months Theresa and I have barely spoken, nor that we no longer share the same bed.
    The churchbells ring out, and through the stained- glass cross of St George the refracted light shines down on the altar. Theresa hands me a prayer book and the Order of Service without looking up. Amidst the many troubles of our lives, we must try now to remember the dead.
     
     
    3
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    ‘S o that’s it, they agreed to raise the bid to 180.’ Vance has been pacing his office, a bundle of nervous energy, and filling me in on his meeting with the Meyers. Now he pauses. ‘I did call you. No answer the first time.’ He flicks through another file then puts it aside. I’ve never seen him this worked-up before.
    ‘Stephen, if you’ve got any worries about this, I’d like to hear them now.’
    ‘Worries? Raef, we’re almost there.’
    It was three o’clock before he got through to me at Boddington; lunch over, my father had just suggested a walk with Theresa and Gifford. Vance’s call was timely, I got in the car and came straight here.
    Now he opens his hands. ‘What can we lose?’
    ‘If we get it wrong? How about our reputation?’
    He shrugs off this feeble platitude. Our reputation, as we both know, will be shattered anyway if our Corporate Finance people decamp en masse. Scrambled, cobbled together, hurried, whatever way we can manage it now, we have to win this bid. I lean across his desk and punch up last week’s closings on the Reuters. He starts in about David Meyer, but I interrupt him, tapping the screen. ‘You saw this?’
    On Thursday the Parnells’ price took an unusual jump, not dramatic, but quite noticeable against the background of a sliding market.
    ‘More buyers than sellers,’ he says. ‘So what?’
    I point to the Thursday closing on the Footsie, the Stock Exchange’s primary index: thirty points down.
    ‘Parnells weren’t the only ones up,’ Vance protests.
    ‘Some up, some down, it’s a market.’
    ‘Who’s worked on the new offer documents?’
    ‘Haywood and Cawley.’ Two hotshot MBAs.
    ‘You warned them?’
    ‘They both know the rules.’
    The rules are that insider knowledge is untradeable; but there are degrees of knowledge, and wide grey areas where fortunes are made each year. Parnells is in our Red Book right now, the in-house list of companies no Carltons employee can dabble in. Definitely off-limits.
    I look out through the window, into the evening. Only a few lights burn in the buildings on the far side of the river. It is Sunday: all the sensible men are at home with their families. And here am I with Stephen Vance, talking business.
    ‘How are the boys?’
    He glances up from his reading. ‘Fine. Jennifer’s bringing them up next weekend.’ Jenniifer his ex-wife, they’ve been