Read Online The First Novels: Pay Off, the Fireman by Stephen Leather - Free Book Online

profit, a healthy management fee from the company and a boost to the value of his shareholding, which he would sell soon after the bid went through.
            He was doing the same at Young’s and had just got his seat on the board and had a West Midlands electronics company all ready to reverse into it when I came onto the scene. By then the share price was already on the way up, partly because the market was well aware of Walker’s reputation and also because you can’t do anything in this business without making ripples and the brokers knew there was a battle in the offing. My only chance was to put together an agreed bid, a package that all the directors would accept and recommend to the rest of the shareholders.
            My tack was to appeal to their chauvinism and play on the Scottish roots of my client, ‘Wouldn’t it be a terrible shame to let this proud Scottish name be taken over by a crowd of heathen Sassenachs, remember Culloden’, and so on. My pleas fell on deaf ears and glazed eyes while Tony was out wining and dining the sixty-eight-year-old matriarch of the Young’s clan and playing golf with the rest of the board at a level well below his seven handicap.
            I was fighting an uphill battle and the City watchers of the Glasgow Herald and Scotsman had just about given up on me when I decided to take Shona for a meal in one of Edinburgh’s plusher restaurants.
            We’d planned to overhaul our strategy in a bid to snatch victory from the jaws of this wide-mouthed London predator, but as it turned out we saw Tony Walker shoving smoked salmon and shrimps into his mouth in a secluded booth with the chairman who had hired me to spearhead his offer for Young’s. Shona and I turned on the spot and drove back to our office in Charlotte Square without speaking.
            Not until we had walked through the door did she say, ‘Bastard, bastard, bastard’ with a venom that was not completely out of character. She flung herself into her dark green leather chair and put her feet on her desk, knocking the blotter to one side. ‘Bastard, bastard, bastard.’
            There were any number of reasons why Tony could be having a quiet tête-à-tête with our client: a shared interest in good food was one, a chance meeting was another, but they were both about as likely as scoring a hole in one on the Old Course at St  Andrews by teeing off at Bearsden Golf Club.
            If it had been above board and Tony was offering to sell his stake or switch his allegiance then Shona and I would be involved, so what was going on was obviously not the sort of behaviour likely to win Brownie points from the Takeover Panel.
            The reason why the two so-called adversaries were dining together had flashed into our minds at the same moment – our bid was nothing more than a red herring to boost the share price so that Tony and the directors could make an even bigger profit on the deal when his electronics company eventually gained control, a profit which would no doubt be shared by our client.
            Which was great news for everybody except the West Midlands firm, which would be paying over the odds, and Shona and me. A failed takeover bid wouldn’t do much for our reputations – or our fees.
            We spent the rest of that evening putting away the best part of a bottle of Tamdhu and planning what we’d do to Mr  Tony Walker. He’d booked himself a suite on the fifth floor of the North British Hotel and the following day I went to see him.
            To this day I’m not sure how it happened but I walked into his room fuming and ready to take a swing at him but within half an hour we were the best of friends. It just happened. It wasn’t personal with Tony, it was always business, just business, and when it came to making money there wasn’t a stroke he wouldn’t pull. He admitted that quite openly, he didn’t apologize, he just smiled and said I wasn’t to