Джеффри Арчер - And Thereby Hangs a Tale

‘Why?’ asked Liam innocently.

‘We’re about to enter a boom period,’ said O’Donovan. ‘An ageing population with disposable incomes and an awareness of their own mortality are migrating here like a flock of starlings searching for warmer climes.’

By the fifth Guinness, Liam had only one or two more questions left to ask. Not that it mattered, as O’Donovan was no longer capable of answering them.

The next morning, and every morning for the following week, Liam did not join Maggie on the overcrowded beaches but took the bus that was heading into Palma. He had some serious research to carry out before he met up with Patrick O’Donovan again.

During the day, he made appointments with several estate agents to view apartments and other properties. What he was shown confirmed O’Donovan’s opinion — Majorca was about to enter a period of rapid growth.

On the final morning of his holiday, having not once returned to the beach in the past ten days, even though his red Majorca skin had faded back to Irish white, Liam boarded the bus to Palma for the last time.

Once he’d been dropped off in the city centre, he headed straight for the Paseo Maritimo and didn’t stop walking until he reached the offices of Patrick O’Donovan, International Real Estate Co. He had only one more question to ask his fellow countryman. ‘Would you consider taking me on as a junior partner?’

‘Certainly not,’ said O’Donovan. ‘But I would consider taking you on as a partner.’

Maggie McBride flew back to Ireland, virgo intacta, while the tinker from Cork remained in Majorca.

Liam’s first year in Majorca didn’t turn out to be quite the bonanza his new partner had promised, despite his working night and day and making full use of the skills he’d honed in Cork. While he spent most of his days in the office or showing clients around properties, O’Donovan spent more and more of his time in the Flanagan Arms, drinking away the company’s dwindling profits.

By the end of his second year, Liam was considering returning to Ireland, which was experiencing its own economic boom, fuelled by massive grants from the European Union. And then, without warning, the decision was taken out of his hands. O’Donovan failed to return to work after the pub had closed for the afternoon siesta. He’d dropped dead in the street a hundred yards from the office.

Liam organized Patrick’s funeral, held a wake at the Flanagan Arms and was the last to leave the pub that night. By the time he crawled into bed at three in the morning, he’d made a decision.

The first person he called after arriving at the office the next day was a sign-writer he’d found in the Yellow Pages. By twelve o’clock, the name above the door read ‘Casey & Co, International Estate Agents’.

The second phone call Liam made was to Pepe Miro, a young man who worked for a rival company and had beaten him to several deals in the past two years. They agreed to meet in a tapas bar that evening, and after another late night, during which a José Ferrer L. Rosado replaced Guinness, Liam was able to convince Pepe they would both be better off working together as partners.

A month later, a Spanish flag was raised beside the Irish one, and the sign-writer returned. When he left, the name above the door read, ‘Casey, Miro & Co.’ While Pepe handled the natives, Liam took care of any foreign intruders; a genuine partnership.

The new company’s profits grew slowly to begin with, but at least the graph was now heading in the right direction. But it wasn’t until Pepe told his new partner about an old local custom that their fortunes began to change.

Majorca is a small island with a large, fertile, central plain where vineyards, almond and olive trees thrive. Traditionally, when a Majorcan farmer dies, he leaves any property in the fertile heartland to his eldest son, while any daughters end up with small pieces of craggy coastline. Liam’s Irish charm and good looks did no harm when he advised these daughters how they could benefit from this chauvinistic injustice.

He purchased his first plot of land in 1991, from a middle-aged lady who was short of cash and boyfriends: a tiny strip of infertile coastline with uninterrupted views of the Mediterranean. A bulldozer levelled the ground, and within a few weeks, after a bunch of itinerant workers had cleaned up the site, a developer purchased the plot for almost double Liam’s original outlay.

Liam bought his second piece of land from a grieving widow. It had splendid panoramic views all the way to Barcelona. Once again he flattened the plot, and this time he built a path wide enough to allow a car to reach it from the main road. On this occasion he made an even larger return, which he used to build a small house on a piece of land Pepe had purchased from a lady who spoke only Spanish. A year later they sold the property for triple their original investment.

By the time Liam had purchased their fourth piece of coastal land, which was large enough to divide into three plots, he realized he was no longer an estate agent but had unwittingly become a property developer. While Pepe continued to woo an endless stream of Spanish daughters and widows, Liam converted their scraggy inheritances into saleable properties. As time went by and the company’s profits increased, it became clear to Liam that the only obstacle preventing him from progressing at an even more rapid pace was a lack of capital. He decided to make one of his rare trips back to Ireland.

The property manager of the Allied Irish Bank in Dublin — Liam avoided Cork — listened with interest to the proposals put forward by his fellow countryman, and eventually agreed to advance him a hundred thousand pounds with which to purchase two new sites. When Liam delivered a profit of over 40 per cent the following year, the bank agreed to double its investment.

Liam closed his first million-pound deal in 1997, and his success might have continued unabated, if only he’d recalled his father’s sound advice. While a wise man can spend all day making a few bob, a foolish one can lose them in a few minutes.

On the evening of 31 December 1999, Liam and Pepe held a party for their friends and clients at the Palace Hotel in Palma to celebrate their good fortune. As they were now both millionaires, they had every reason to look forward to the new millennium with confidence, especially as Pepe announced, just before the sun rose on 1 January 2000, that he had come across the deal of a lifetime. Liam had to wait two more days before Pepe had recovered sufficiently to tell him the details.

A Majorcan from one of the oldest families on the island had recently died intestate. After some considerable legal wrangling, the court had decided that his wife was entitled to inherit his entire estate — an area of land in Valldemossa that stretched for several kilometres, from the slopes of the Sierra de Tramuntana all the way down to the coast.

Liam spent a week in Dublin trying to convince the Allied Irish that it should put up the largest property loan in its history. Once the bank had agreed terms, which included personal guarantees from both Liam and Pepe, something Liam’s tinker father would never have advised, he returned to Majorca and began to conduct negotiations with the widow. She finally agreed to sell her two-thousand-hectare site for twenty-three million euros.

Within days, Liam had hired a leading architect from Barcelona, a highly respected surveyor from Madrid and a well-connected lawyer in Palma, and began to prepare the necessary documents to ensure that outline planning permission would be granted by the local council. They divided the land into 360 individual plots that included roads with broad pavements, street lighting, electricity, drainage and sewerage, an eighteen-hole golf course, a shopping centre, a cinema, eleven restaurants and a sports complex. Every home would have its own swimming pool, while some of the larger plots would even have their own tennis courts. But the feature that made the development unique was that whichever house a customer purchased, from the top of the mountain all the way down to the coast, they were guaranteed an uninterrupted view of the ocean.