Harry Bingham - The Money Makers

‘How much longer you keep us waiting for cappuccino?’

Autumn in England, and nothing to report. Leaves are just starting to give up their greens in favour of a sickly yellow, which will soon give way to a matt and uninteresting brown. After this brief show of what is politely known as colour, the leaves will fall to make a slimy brown carpet beneath the bare trees and boys will fight for the shiniest conkers. Meanwhile, after a sodden August bank holiday, the usual parade of crying children and stationary traffic, the skies have turned an iron grey.

Bid farewell to the sun. It is 1 September 1998, and there are 1046 days to go until Bernard Gradley’s deadline.

‘Good morning, sir.’

The red-coated doorman held the door open. Zack walked through with a shudder. In an age of automatic doors, revolving doors, doors you could just push through, Coburg’s had to employ some ancient flunkey in a red tail coat to do the job. That said it all. Coburg’s is one of Britain’s biggest merchant banks, but its glory days are long gone. The big American banks – Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, Madison, Weinstein Lukes – bestride the globe, while Coburg’s, a village beauty in a world of supermodels, clings to its past and tries not to look.

Zack knew this. He knew that Coburg’s wouldn’t make his fortune. But it was a doorway into international finance, the only industry in the world where millionaires aren’t rare, they’re commonplace. Even amidst Coburg’s dilapidated glories, Zack could smell the money and he loved it.

His boss was a posh nonentity called Fabian Slater, who collected him from reception and took him on a quick tour of the bank. Zack shook hands, exchanged greetings, and avoided saying anything he felt. Slater said, ‘In my opinion, the best way to get ahead is to lie low for a couple of years, soak up as much as you can.’ Zack smiled and said nothing. He had other ideas. He shook more hands, met more people in more departments: mergers and acquisitions, equity capital markets, debt capital markets, credit.

There wasn’t much to see. On a trading floor, you can smell the marketplace. On a busy day, when the markets are roaring, a well-run trading floor looks and sounds like barely organised mayhem. You can hear the flood of money pouring through the room. But that’s Matthew’s world, not Zack’s.

Zack belongs to the quieter world of corporate finance. To its unremarkable offices, the world’s biggest businesses come to sort out their financial needs. Some come to raise money, in the hundreds of millions, billions even. Some come to play safe, to protect against the risks that a difficult world is full of. Others come to play fast and loose, taking dangerous bets concealed from their shareholders by a paragraph of flim-flam in an annual report. Best of all, this is where companies come when they’re in the mood for attack. Scared of your competitor? Buy him. Noticed an outfit with faster growth? Grab it. Think you could run that guy’s business better than him? Buy him up, push him out, rip up his company and flog it.

Traders think testosterone is all about how loud you can shout, and how big are the risks you take with other people’s cash. Zack knew different. The quiet world of corporate finance, where bankers and company executives talk in whispers, has its own testosterone load. It doesn’t shout. It isn’t flashy. But it’s just as greedy, just as ruthless, just as hard.

‘Just one more person you ought to meet,’ drawled Slater. ‘Girl called Sarah Havercoombe. D’you know her by any chance? You must have overlapped at Oxford, I think.’

‘Sarah? Sarah Havercoombe? Yes. I know her.’

By God, he knew her. At Oxford, he and Sarah had had a stormy on-and-off relationship for three years. She was blisteringly well-connected and rich with it. Her father was a viscount with an ancestral seat in Devon. Unlike most aristocratic families, the Havercoombes had nurtured their wealth prudently and amassed it buccaneeringly. The family stake in a Hong Kong company, Hatherleigh Pacific, made them one of the two hundred or so wealthiest families in the country.

‘Sarah,’ called Slater, as he walked up to a young woman, faced away from them, mannishly dressed in a pink cotton shirt and a plain navy skirt, ‘I think you know our latest recruit. I’ll leave you together, shall I?’

Slater left them, while Sarah Havercoombe looked round and started in surprise. She hadn’t changed. Short brown hair, nearly blonde, worn with the inevitable hairband. Wide, strong face, clear-complexioned, but a bit too solid to count as beautiful. Minimal make-up, but plenty of confidence. Her widely spaced eyes lit up in surprise.

‘Sarah! Hi!’ said Zack, ‘I didn’t know you worked here.’

‘Well, I do.’

‘So I see. I’ve just joined. Less than an hour ago, actually.’

‘Welcome aboard, I suppose.’

Zack could feel the electricity already starting to rise behind this inane exchange, and wondered if she felt it too. Their relationship had been the most passionate either of them had ever known. It had been passionate in a sexual sense for sure. Scarcely a day had passed without their making love at least once and usually two or three times or more. But it had also been passionate in a worse sense. They had argued incessantly. They were strong-willed and had nothing in common. She loved balls, parties, horses, country houses. He loved philosophy, cynicism, and hating the things she liked. They had argued, stormed, and made love. Their friends had told them they didn’t belong together. Their heads had agreed but were powerless in the teeth of their bodies’ overwhelming mutual longing. Only when Sarah had finally left Oxford did distance allow the inevitable to happen.

‘What’s new?’ asked Zack.

‘I’m engaged,’ she said, ‘to a chap you might know. Robert Leighton.’

Sarah sounded like she expected Zack to know who she meant, but he didn’t. He raised his eyebrows.

‘He was at Eton while you were there, but I wouldn’t expect you to remember him … He’s nice and kind, he likes what I like, he loves me very much.’

Zack hadn’t meant anything by his question. He just asked it to say something and to defuse the electricity rising in the air. But her answer told him something. She felt the crackle of static too and she thrust her engagement at him as a defence.

‘That’s great news. I’m delighted. I hope everything works out really well for you both. I’m sure it will.’

‘Yes, I’m sure it will. And thanks.’ Their eyes met briefly then moved away. ‘Here, have you met the equity origination group yet?’

Zack walked off to shake more hands and grin at another set of people whose jobs he didn’t understand. Their voices were firm with each other now, just pleasant, nothing too familiar. But all along his right-hand side, where she walked beside him, he felt a prickle beneath his skin. Careful as he was to remind himself to keep guard, to step back, to break contact, two thoughts persisted.

First, he remembered just how good their sex had been. It had puzzled both of them that their sex could be quite so good when their relationship was such a disaster. It was almost as though their bodies understood something the rest of them had yet to grasp.

Second, it occurred to him for the first time that the future husband of Miss Sarah Havercoombe would step right into one of England’s richest families. For Miss Sarah Havercoombe, a million pounds would be small change indeed.

The sign must have been painted thirty years ago. ‘The Gissings Modern Furniture Company (Ltd)’, it boasted in giant pink lettering. ‘Our modern furniture means modern style but modest prices!’ The feeble pun was complemented by a picture of a secretary, complete with miniskirt and beehive hairdo, gesturing inanely at a suite of office furniture. No doubt it had looked cool in 1963, but in the late 1990s prices would have to be very modest indeed to tempt the average buyer.