Quintin Jardine - Fallen Gods

The detective stared back; it was his turn to be taken by surprise.

"Neither. Why?"

"Because when you called me and asked for this meeting, I was on the point of telephoning Sir James Proud and asking him to send a senior officer to see me."

"Am I senior enough then?"

"For the moment you are. You can decide whether to refer what I'm going to tell you up your chain of command. But first, maybe you'd like to tell me why you wanted to see me."

"Certainly," Steele replied. "I'm investigating the outbreak of fire at the Royal Scottish Academy on Saturday. It's being treated as a case of arson."

"As a witness," Dolan exclaimed, "I have to tell you that that was self-evident at the time."

"Can you describe what happened?"

"I described it to one of your officers in the aftermath."

"I know, but I'd be grateful if you'd do it again; it's not uncommon for things to be recalled that might have been overlooked in the panic after the outbreak."

The lean, tanned businessman shrugged, swinging to and fro in his swivel chair. "Very well, but there's still not much to tell. David

Candela was halfway through his speech when there was a whoosh, and the picture burst into flames."

"What happened next?"

Dolan smiled. "I suppose you might call it David's finest hour. For all his army background, I've always thought of him as a dry, lackadaisical character, but he took command on the spot and ordered everyone out of the building. "Clear the gallery," I remember him shouting. "Clear the gallery. No time for heroes." We did clear it too, damn quick. David ordered his staff to gather us together at the side of the building and hold us there until the fire engines arrived and the blaze was under control."

"Did it seem out of control?"

"Not at that point, but David was concerned that there might have been more than one device."

Steele nodded. "You can't argue with that thinking," he conceded. "Who called the fire brigade?"

"I'm not certain. It could have been the curator, it could have been David, it could have been anyone; I was legging it out of there by that time. We weren't outside for all that long. The fire was contained pretty quickly, from what I gathered, and the firefighters checked everything else. After that we were allowed back in for the champagne and whatnots, and to be interviewed by your people. Now that I think about it, I remember seeing you there."

"And that's it? Specifically, you don't remember seeing anyone doing anything out of the ordinary at the time the picture went up in flames?"

"No, not a soul. That really is all I can tell you."

"Fair enough. It doesn't take us any further, but to be honest, I doubt if we're going to get any further. So what about your fire, and your problems? At least you're still able to operate, from what I can see."

"On these two floors, yes we are," Dolan agreed. "One thing they get right in modern buildings is the integrity of each level in extreme conditions."

"How has your business been affected?" asked the detective.

"Before I answer that," the other man replied, 'let me explain a little of what we do, and of our structure. We are investment trust managers, pure and simple… more or less. We don't get involved in the unit trust end of the business; never have, never will. We offer services to high net-worth individuals, for whom we believe that ITs are a far more reliable and efficient vehicle. Unit trusts have their place; they're okay for smaller investors, but that's not our market. I have a friend who runs a restaurant, which he describes as strictly for fat people. That's us in a way; we're the fat cats' fund manager.

"Investment trusts are companies which exist purely to make money. The only business they have is buying and selling shares in other companies. As an investor in an investment trust, you're a shareholder in that company, and your shares will rise or fall in value as the investments held by the trust rise or fall. Their beauty as a vehicle is that they allow you to spread risk by holding a very wide portfolio without the hassle of monitoring and trading them all individually.

Their management charges are lower than units, and these days they're tax-effective because you can invest in them through Investment Savings Accounts.

"Tubau Gordon invests in three sectors; the UK, for proven, steady performance, European markets, which are developing rapidly, and the Far East, which may have lost some of its sparkle, but which remains pretty sexy in the long term, if a little riskier than it was. Each of those sectors operates as a separate business within a business. Each has its own staff, its own analysts and its own decision-makers, reporting back to a responsible director, who reports in turn to the main board, of which he or she is a member, and to me. Each business is… or was located on one of our three floors. The fifth floor, where we're sitting now, accommodates Tubau Gordon Europe, and the executive offices. The seventh floor houses our UK business. The sixth floor, which no longer exists, was where our Far East trusts were located." Dolan stopped and looked at Steele. "With me so far?"

The detective nodded. "Yes. I've got some shares in ITs; even though I might not be that fat a cat."

The fund manager smiled. "Good choice, as long as you're not with Tubau Gordon Oriental." He pulled his chair closer to his desk. "In the financial world, confidentiality is everything. We take that to extremes here. We have no cross-over between the staff in each of our divisions. Each operates completely separately, with no interchange of information to avoid the temptation of insider dealing. To ensure this, each division has a completely separate information technology set-up. There's no way you can cut into seventh floor data from this level, and there's no way that I, as a corporate manager, can access any of it directly."

"I'm beginning to guess the consequences of the fire," said Steele.

"I'm sure you are. The damage upstairs was total. The entire IT system of Tubau Gordon Oriental has been destroyed, and with it all of our computer records for its current financial year, which has been running since January the first."

"Don't you back up?"

"We back up on to a separate mainframe, outside the network, but that was also located on the sixth floor. It's gone too."

"Paper records?"

"Yes, and all reduced to muddy ashes. The only paper that survived the fire was in rolls in the staff toilets."

"So what have you lost?"

"As I said, we've lost everything; the current investment position of every one of the clients of Tubau Gordon Oriental. We'd have to go back as best we can and rebuild every transaction to the beginning of the calendar year. That would take God knows how long and even then we'd only have an approximation. We will have to ask every company in which we're invested to issue duplicate share certificates, but with the settlement system we'll never know what was in the pipeline, since we do our own trading. It's impossible; in practice, all that we can do is credit everyone with everything they had at the time of the last audit and take it from there. It's a disaster of unthinkable proportions."

"What about previous years? Has all that gone too?"

Dolan looked up to the ceiling. "No, thank God. Once our audits are all completed we archive the records of each year in a secure data warehouse. On top of that we archive our computer records on a six-monthly basis. Had it not been for the fire, that would have happened on Tuesday."

Steele felt a flutter in the pit of his stomach, but kept it to himself. "How many Far East trusts were there?" he asked.

"Three public; Japanese, Chinese, and new markets."

"Three public, you said?"

"Yes. There was also one private trust located upstairs, and managed under our corporate umbrella. It's a family trust; not a unique situation. This one belongs to the Candela family."