Майкл Ридпат - The Predator

We’ll keep it, Chris decided.

Chris gazed at Lenka’s desk. Dramatic orange and purple flowers leaned out of a tall crystal vase. ‘Birds of paradise’ she had said they were called. She bought a new bunch of exotic flowers every week from the florist round the corner. Chris hesitated, and then dumped them into the bin. It seemed wrong that they should be so bright and alive, as though they hadn’t heard the news. But he left the vase there, empty. Under her desk were four pairs of scuffed shoes. Lenka said she thought best in bare feet, and she would even occasionally meet visitors shoeless. It had taken Chris a couple of months to work out how she had accumulated so many pairs at work; surely even Lenka wouldn’t go home in bare feet. The answer was, of course, that when the markets were going against her she would nip out to Bond Street and buy a new pair, which she promptly took off when she returned to the office.

But Chris couldn’t afford to waste the day wallowing in thoughts of Lenka. He checked the prices of their portfolio. The market was weak. The Russian Finance Minister had resigned in the midst of a corruption scandal, and Eastern Europe was looking jittery. The big Eureka Telecom position was down five points. Chris would have to work out what Lenka had had in mind when she bought that. But that, too, could wait. He didn’t intend to trade at all if he could avoid it over the next few days.

He spoke briefly on the phone to Ian Darwent. Ian was still at Bloomfield Weiss; he was now a European high-yield bond salesman. It was from him that Lenka had bought the Eureka Telecom bonds.

The conversation was awkward. Ian had turned his back on Chris when Chris had left Bloomfield Weiss, and Chris couldn’t quite bring himself to forgive him. Ian clearly felt just as uncomfortable with Chris, especially since Carpathian was now a purchaser of European high-yield bonds. So they had come to an unspoken agreement that Ian would speak to Lenka. That would have to change. Tina had told Ian about Lenka the day before, so for now they exchanged shallow commiserations about her death. Chris was sure Ian was genuinely sorry about what had happened, but he wasn’t about to help Ian overcome his public-school reticence to discuss it. They rang off with a promise to talk about Eureka Telecom the next day.

Chris also spoke to Duncan at the sales desk of Honshu Bank, the second-tier Japanese firm where he now worked. Chris had called him from Prague to tell him about Lenka. The conversation had been brief; Duncan had been too stunned to say much of anything. Now he had lots of questions. Chris agreed to meet him in a pub after work to answer them.

The next task was to inform the investors in Carpathian’s fund. There were eight of them and they had invested a total of fifty-five million euros. They were mostly based in the US, and they were nearly all Lenka’s contacts from her days at Bloomfield Weiss in New York. The largest was Amalgamated Veterans Life, where Lenka’s contact was none other than Rudy Moss. He was the only investor Chris really knew. The rest had met Chris, but it was Lenka they trusted. Still, he and Lenka had managed to provide them with a twenty-nine per cent return in the first nine months, so they ought to be happy.

Chris decided to send them all an e-mail, which would be ready for their opening, and follow it up with a phone call in the afternoon. They were difficult calls to make. Everyone was shocked by the news. Most of them seemed to think of Lenka as a personal friend. None of them mentioned rethinking their investment in Carpathian, much to Chris’s relief. The only person he couldn’t get through to was Rudy, who didn’t return his call. Chris wasn’t concerned by this: not returning calls was a macho thing with people like Rudy, and since they knew each other, he was the investor Chris was least worried about.

Ollie seemed to pull himself together as the day wore on. Chris had him talking to the market to find out if there was any risk of the latest Russian crisis spreading in a serious way to the Central European countries in which Carpathian invested. This was the kind of thing that was usually left to Lenka and Chris, but Ollie didn’t do a bad job. Chris left the office at eight that evening feeling that perhaps they could keep Carpathian going after all.

By the time Chris arrived at Williams, Duncan had already sunk a pint or two. Williams was a dark pub in a small lane off Bishopsgate. They had first drunk there ten years before. It was close enough to Bloomfield Weiss to be convenient, but far enough away to avoid colleagues or bosses. So far, it had managed to escape the frantic redevelopment that had overtaken the area, and it had become the natural place for them to meet over the years.

Chris bought himself a pint and Duncan a refill and joined him at a small table in a corner. The pub was full of sleek men in their twenties unwinding. The pissed, overweight old farts in their baggy double-breasted suits who had inhabited the place ten years before had moved on. Chris sometimes wondered what they were doing now they had been elbowed out by his generation. Perhaps he’d find out himself in ten years’ time.

‘Thanks,’ said Duncan, draining his previous pint and pushing it to one side to make room for the new one. ‘Cheers,’ he said without much conviction.

‘Cheers.’

‘I can’t believe it,’ said Duncan. ‘I just can’t believe it. What happened?’

‘Someone came up behind her and slit her throat,’ Chris said, as matter-of-factly as he could. He didn’t like going into the details of that evening.

‘And you were there?’

Chris nodded.

‘Who was it?’

‘I have no idea. I couldn’t see much of him — he was wearing a dark jacket and a hat.’

What about the Czech police? What do they think?’

‘Well, their first guess was a mugger, a drug-addict desperate for cash. That’s an increasing problem in Prague, apparently. But by the way it was done, they think the killer was a professional. He knew how to use a knife.’

‘But who the hell would want to kill Lenka?’

Chris sighed. ‘I have no idea.’

‘I suppose it must have been some kind of mafia hit,’ said Duncan. ‘There’s all kinds of organized crime in Eastern Europe, isn’t there? Didn’t I read about some American banker being shot in Russia last week?’

‘I don’t think the Czech Republic is quite as dangerous as Russia. Although the police say there is a Ukrainian-run mafia. That’s their best guess at the moment. But I can’t see how the kind of companies we invest in would be involved in that sort of stuff.’

‘You never know,’ said Duncan. ‘I mean, it’s all junk over there, isn’t it?’

‘It’s technically junk, yes, but that just means that the bond issuers are rated below investment grade. It doesn’t mean they’re crooks.’

‘Yeah, but you can’t always be sure who’s behind them, can you?’

Chris drank his beer thoughtfully. ‘No, you can’t,’ he admitted. It was true that by the time Carpathian invested in a company it had been sanitized for Western consumption. In the anarchy that had marked the transition from communism to capitalism in all of these countries, there had been greed, corruption and violence. Even Lenka couldn’t always get to the bottom of it. That was one of the reasons why she had been so keen to open offices in places like Prague. ‘Maybe it was something to do with one of our investments.’

‘It doesn’t much matter, anyway,’ said Duncan.

They sat in silence, thinking of Lenka.

‘You know she was the only woman I really loved,’ said Duncan.

‘What about Pippa?’ asked Chris. Pippa was Duncan’s wife. They had been married three years and separated for six months.