Майкл Ридпат - The Predator

‘He might have a gun.’

‘I haven’t got a gun,’ Chris said.

‘Frisk him. I can’t. I want to keep him covered.’

‘OK.’ Angie gently ran her hands over Chris’s legs and then inside his coat. She checked his pockets. ‘Nothing,’ she said.

‘Check the car!’

Angie looked at Marcus, and then at Chris. ‘Keys?’

‘It’s unlocked,’ Chris said.

Chris sat down again. He and Marcus waited for Angie, staring at each other, Marcus’s brown eyes simmering with anger.

‘You look like him, you know,’ Chris said.

‘No, I don’t.’

‘I think you do.’

‘He’s dead.’

‘Oh, come on,’ said Chris in frustration. ‘You know what I mean.’

‘I don’t know how you guys could do it,’ said Marcus. ‘Lie about him. You all say he was a friend of yours. Why don’t you act like it?’

Chris felt a surge of anger rise in his chest. ‘What do you mean, “why don’t we act like it”? You have no idea how we felt about Alex’s death. We’d all become good friends that summer. We all liked Alex, and with reason. He was a good person in a place where good people were thin on the ground. He lightened the whole place up a bit. He was fun.’

Marcus was listening grudgingly. The door shut as Angie returned from the car, shaking her head.

‘It just about destroyed Duncan,’ Chris continued in a lower voice. ‘And Lenka, although she did a better job of getting over it. That evening comes back to me all the time, even now. Especially now. I’m sure it must be bad to lose a brother. But it’s not much fun to lose a friend, especially when it happens right in front of your eyes and there’s nothing you can do about it.’

‘You know,’ Marcus said. ‘I was so disappointed when he became an investment banker. He was a good artist. See that painting over there?’ He pointed over Chris’s shoulder to a painting of a petrochemical plant at night: looming metal curves, orange glows, and bright halogen flashes. It wasn’t one Chris recognized. It was out of the line of sight of the doorway, so Chris hadn’t noticed it when he came in. It looked totally out of place in that room, but it had obviously been hung with pride.

‘He did that. It won him a prize at college. He’d begun to sell some of his work, and then he gave it all up to go on Wall Street. It’s good, isn’t it?’

Chris nodded, and was surprised to feel the prick of tears in his eyes at such a tangible sign of Alex. He blinked, and looked directly at Marcus. ‘Did you ever forgive him?’

‘What? What do you mean?’

‘Sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.’ But Chris could tell from Marcus’s suspicious glance that he had guessed correctly.

‘You’re right: I didn’t forgive him. I was a couple of years older than him. It was the end of the eighties, all anybody wanted to do was get a big job and make big money. It made me sick. I wanted to travel. See the world. Stay in touch with myself. Develop into a creative human being. Alex was my kid brother, and he thought the same way I did.’

Chris sensed that a powerful urge to talk about his brother was bottled up within Marcus, and now he had the opportunity to release it, it was overcoming his distrust. Chris tried to encourage it.

‘What about your mother?’

‘She didn’t understand any of this. Since our dad died, she had become obsessed with us both getting a good job. Nothing exciting, just something that would guarantee us a pay cheque for the rest of our lives. And when I left college, it got worse. You see, I didn’t even apply for any jobs; I just went bumming around the Caribbean, crewing on sailboats. Mom couldn’t stand it. So I took off completely. Went to Europe. Australia. The Philippines.’

‘And you lost touch with Alex?’

‘Not at first. I came back, occasionally; spent time with both of them. But it was an ugly time, especially with my mother. I remember I came home one Christmas and she said she’d contracted breast cancer. Of course that shook me up, but then it turned out she had it beat. Or at least that’s what she thought. Then Alex took his job at Bloomfield Weiss, and I thought, screw them, and I stayed out of touch for nearly a year.’

He sighed. ‘The cancer came back. Later, I think I discovered the reason Alex took the job.’

‘What was that?’

Marcus took a moment to answer. He was breathing heavily, trying to control himself. Chris saw the concerned look on Angie’s face as she watched him.

‘Mom wasn’t properly covered. For healthcare. After Alex died, I found out he’d taken out some large loans. And I found Mom’s healthcare bills. They were pretty big.’

‘Alex did spend quite a lot of time with her,’ Chris said. ‘He got a couple of warnings for it. He looked after her.’

‘Yeah. And I guess I’m grateful. Although sometimes it makes me so angry. I get angry with him and her for not telling me what was going on. But of course I realize it’s me that I’m really angry with. I was so stupid, so selfish.’ Marcus shook his head. ‘You know, I only found out two months after Mom died. I kept calling her and getting no reply, and then I called my aunt and found out what had happened to the two of them. I missed their funerals, everything.

‘I came right home. Sorted through all their stuff, tidied up, and moved up to Vermont.’ He looked around at the small cabin. ‘I like it here. It’s quiet. Sometimes here I can feel peace. And finally I’m beginning to make some money out of the furniture. But I still miss Alex. Mom, too, sometimes, but it’s mostly Alex.’ He took a deep breath. ‘And believe me if I find that someone, one of your friends, did kill him on purpose, did murder him, I’ll, I’ll...’

Chris kept quiet. He didn’t want to know what Marcus would do. But Marcus told him anyway.

‘I’ll kill him.’

Chris was not prepared for what confronted him at the office. He had arrived straight from Heathrow after a lousy night with no sleep. The German stock market had wobbled the night before, and was now in full retreat. There were doubts about the strength of the German recovery, which meant that there were severe doubts about the prospects for Eastern Europe, which meant that most of Carpathian’s government bond holdings had fallen. Ironically, German and other euro zone countries’ bond prices had actually risen on the expectation of lower interest rates. This was the worst possible combination for Chris’s positions. And, of course, Bloomfield Weiss had taken the opportunity to mark Eureka Telecom down by another five points.

Ollie was despondent. The Slovakian bonds he had bought had fallen with the rest of the market, and he seemed to blame himself for Germany’s economic jitters. Chris tried to be supportive, as he knew he must, but it was difficult. He knew that in a month or two things would sort themselves out, but he didn’t have a month or two. Rudy Moss would want his money back in two weeks, and Chris would be faced with either trying to sell his Eureka Telecom bonds at a huge loss, or unwinding his fundamentally strong government bond positions at exactly the wrong moment. Carpathian’s performance would be severely damaged either way, possibly terminally.

And there was no message from Melville Capital. Chris had been half-hoping that Dr Zizka would change his mind. But he hadn’t.

Chris spent the day with Ollie ineffectually wrestling with the markets. There was really nothing they could do. They didn’t want to sell yet if they could possibly help it. Although there were bonds out there worth buying, they had no spare cash with which to buy them. All they could do was listen to the doom and gloom of a bearish market on a cold grey Friday afternoon.