The Money Makers (44 page)

‘I am sort of seeing someone. A Hungarian chap at work.’

‘Sounds good. Gypsy blood. Passionate temper and all that.’

‘Not exactly. He hates gypsies.’

‘Do I get to meet him?’

‘I don’t know. He’s quite interesting, but ... well, he’s not very house-trained. I’m not sure how serious I am.’

Josephine isn’t keen to pursue the subject, and George is sensitive enough to let it drop. ‘Isn’t it Mum’s bedtime?’ he asks.

They put Helen to bed. She wears incontinence pants these days, and George finds the whole business dis­ agreeable, but he helps anyway. Helen says something, which George interprets as ‘Sorry I’m so difficult’, but it’s the end of the day and her speech is quite badly slurred, so it’s hard to be sure.

George and Josie go back down, watch more telly, and drink instant decaf coffee.

‘How’s your work and everything, Josie?’

‘Not bad. I’m switching jobs in the New Year. I’m moving into the money transfer department. I’m going to be a settlements clerk.’

‘More money?’

‘No, less money actually, but I prefer the job. The bank advertised the vacancy internally. I applied for it and got it.’

George is a mite surprised. Josephine always complained about not having enough money and here she was taking a less well-paid job. Still, it was her life, and she was right to think that Zack and Matthew could easily pay for the care that Helen needed. Why should Josie make all the sacrifices?

‘Good for you. What’s a settlements clerk?’

‘You know, sorting out money transfers and all that sort of stuff. It’s admin work, quite dull really, but it needs to be done.’

‘Could you see your way to transferring a few hundred grand into the Gissings’ account? We could do with a leg-up.’

‘I’ll see what I can do.’

They finish watching the film, wash the coffee mugs, and go to bed.

There are 571 days to go until Bernard Gradley’s deadline. That’s half-way or near enough.

4

Zack left the canteen with a brown paper bag holding a croissant, a cup of black coffee and two bottles of freshly squeezed orange juice. Beneath his arm he carried a copy of that morning’s
Financial Times,
and in his jacket pocket, a quarter bottle of vodka. He marched along the corridor, stepped inside the men’s loo, closed the cubicle door, and sat down. He opened one of the two bottles of orange juice and swigged a couple of mouthfuls from it. He poured the vodka inside and shook it up. Vodka and orange is a nearly invisible alcoholic drink. You can’t really smell it. You can’t taste it. You might notice the slight dilution of the orange juice, but not if you were Hal Gillingham, and not if you’d been drinking gradually increasing amounts of the stuff for the past few months.

Zack was satisfied. Today was the day. He was dis­ appointed that Gillingham hadn’t cut his own throat. Many addicts only need a single touch of the ancient poison for all their addictive passion to come flooding unstoppably back. Not so with Gillingham. Zack had eagerly watched the developing contest, and came to have increasing respect for the older man. Gillingham was not only the most brilliant mind he had come across in Weinstein Lukes, he was a tough and persistent fighter too. It was a shame he had to go.

Zack left the loo and rode the lift upstairs. He bit into his croissant and walked to his desk. His route took him past Gillingham’s office, and Zack walked in.

‘Morning.’

‘Morning, Zack,’ said Gillingham waving a tax book.

‘I had a great idea at my AA meeting last night. Great place to think. Want to hear it?’

‘Sure. Here’s your juice.’

‘OK. Our Hong Kong tax scam is great but restrictive, right? It only really works for property companies and that sort of thing. To make real money out of the idea, we need something that every Tom, Dick and Harry can get his hands on. Preferably something where we don’t need to spend ages tailoring the deal to the client, where we just have a standard product that we flog over the counter. With me?’

‘Uh-huh. You’re describing the Holy Grail, right? What every tax scammer in the world dreams of at night?’

‘You got it.’ Hal grinned. He liked working with Zack. Zack didn’t have the originality to make it really big-time in the world of tax, the way he had. But the young man was brilliant with detail, quick on the uptake and very hard-working. He was a nice guy too. What a team! He swigged his orange juice. He felt zestful this morning and the juice slid down like nectar. Lovely stuff. He finished the bottle and continued talking. ‘And to sell this miracle product, we don’t want to create a whole sales team just for the job, we want to use a sales team which the bank already has. Right? And what could be better than our derivatives sales team?’

Derivatives sound flash, but they’re not too complex. If you think, say, that the Hong Kong dollar is going to rise against the yen, you could do one of two things. You could buy some Hong Kong dollars and watch them rise. Or you could make a bet that the Hong Kong dollar will rise. If you’re right, you might double your money. If you’re wrong, you lose your money. Compared with buying Hong Kong dollars, you’re taking a bigger risk, but the rewards are bigger too. It sounds scary, but it’s a scary world. Everybody does it. The bank which looks after your savings does it.

‘You want to use our derivatives sales force to sell a tax dodge?’ Zack wasn’t questioning Hal’s wisdom. He was almost breathless with admiration.

‘You got it. And what’s the dodge, you ask? Simple. It’s our old friend the Hong Kong property tax scam, but with an extra twist to make it work for the whole range of derivatives.’

Hal talked on. It was complex, technical stuff, which even Zack was hard-pressed to follow. But he got there in the end and he was astounded. Gillingham was right. This was the Holy Grail indeed. And the real glory of it was that, on initial inspection, the idea looked like it would work right across East Asia. Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, Malaysia, maybe even further afield too. What a concept!

They talked some more, until Gillingham started to fret. He should be feeling great, but he felt terrible. Addiction bit him harder than it had gnawed any time these last few difficult months. He felt ill. He felt drunk, for heaven’s sake. What was wrong with him?

‘Want me to get you some more juice?’ asked Zack. ‘Hey, that’d be grand. You’re a pal.’

Gillingham looked gratefully after Zack, as his poisoner went to get more poison.

5

Mr Evans, proprietor of Brynmawr Furnishings, looked dubious.

‘If you ask me, the Aspertons deserve their reputation for quality. They’ve never let me down and I haven’t seen anything to make me change my mind.’

‘That’s the point, isn’t it?’ said George. ‘You don’t see anything. But ask yourself this. Why are the prices as little as half of what you would expect? Eh? The Aspertons have never been cut-price merchants before now, have they?’

True. But it’s a straight copy of your stuff . Can’t tell it apart.’

‘Oh, there’s a difference alright. I’ll show you. You have to admire the way they’ve done it. If we wanted to get into that end of the market ourselves, we could learn a lot from them.’

George escorted the reluctant Mr Evans to the revamped Gissings showroom.

‘We’ll see about that. To be perfectly frank, after I’d seen the Aspertons’ prices I almost placed my order then and there. It was only because you acted decently over the peeling varnish fiasco that I - hello! Am I seeing double?’

George laughed at his visitor’s reaction. ‘Eye-catching, isn’t it?’

It was like seeing double. An aisle ran down the centre of the former museum, ending at the foot of a broad velvet curtain. The Bright and Beautiful range was displayed on the left, the Asperton Brilliants on the right. For every Gissings item, the matching Asperton twin stood in the same place opposite. The effect was remarkable, but it only emphasised that the two ranges were virtually indistinguishable. Indistinguishable, except for one thing. The Asperton range was half the price of the other.

‘Eye-catching, I’ll say,’ said Evans. ‘I normally only see that kind of thing after a few too many pints.’

‘Their stuff certainly looks like ours. That’s the point.

They want the cachet we’ve built up, which we consider a compliment. But if you look closely at their products, you find everything is second-rate. See here, look at this paintwork.’

George took a cigarette lighter from his pocket, held it close to the brightly painted surface of an Asperton office desk, and lit the flame. After eight seconds the paint began to bubble and crack.

‘Now that just won’t happen with ours. Look at this.’

George held the lighter up against the identical Gissings product, and counted slowly to fifteen. He switched the lighter off. They’d done a hundred tests. On ninety-seven of those, the Gissings paint had lasted more than fifteen seconds. In none of them had the paint lasted more than twenty-five.

‘They’ve used cheap paint which only just squeaks through the safety rules. And you can bet that it’ll be chipping off before the year’s out. That’s why we always pay the extra for quality. But let me give you another example.’

George went to an Asperton cupboard and unscrewed the screws from the hinge. The screws were five eighths of an inch long. He repeated the experiment with a Gissings cupboard. The screws were a full inch long.

‘The difference may look trivial, but believe me, the difference is between hinges which last a few months and ones that last for ever. We’ve never even thought about cutting the length of the screw to save money, but their range is all about cutting comers. Or look at their hinge compared to ours. Ours is strong. You’d never be able to distort it.’ George twisted it around in his thick fingers to make the point, then picked up the lighter Asperton hinge for contrast. ‘This tinny little thing will buckle the first time you put any weight on it. Fine for the showroom, terrible for life.’

George moved further along. He stopped at an Asperton chair, whose back legs had split from the seat.

‘I’d ask you, to guess what’s wrong with this chair, except I’ve already given the game away. How come the legs split off? Answer: I made the mistake of leaning back when I sat down.’

This was true, although he omitted to mention that he had had Darren on his lap at the time, and Darren had had Dave on his lap, and all three of them had been bouncing up and down and laughing.

‘Why did it break? I’ll tell you. They haven’t jointed the join properly, so all you need to do is tip back, and if you’re any weight at all’ - George patted his stomach - ‘you’ll end up on the floor. Compare that with our construction . ..’ and George began to talk his guest through the elements of good chair design.

George continued his patter. Evans was absorbed. In reality, the Asperton products were a bit worse than the Gissings stuff, but the difference wasn’t huge. The way George told it though, the Asperton Brilliants were just waiting to fall apart.

‘What I don’t understand is why the Aspertons would do this,’ said Evans after a while. ‘They’ve got a good name in the market. Why would they ruin it by selling rubbish?’

‘Ha! The million dollar question. Let me ask you this:

have you heard the rumour about the Aspertons floating on the stockmarket?’

The rumour had been circulating for as long as anyone could remember, but Aspertons was still a hundred percent family-owned firm.

‘That old chestnut. Sure I’ve heard it.’

‘Well, ask yourself this. If you were getting ready to go to the stockmarket, not today perhaps, but in a year or so, what would you do?’

Evans looked blank.

‘I’ll tell you what you’d do. You’d bump up your profits as high as you could first. Then when you come to sell your shares, you get a great price, because people only bother to read your last set of accounts. And when profits hit the wall the year after, you don’t give a damn, because you’ve sold out and it’s some other poor sod who’ll pay the price.’

Evans nodded sagely, looking as though he’d seen right through the Aspertons all along. George reeled him in further.

‘The Aspertons have built up a reputation for quality over the last twenty years or more. Now they’re cashing it in, to sell a range of nice-looking but trashy furniture. People wonder about the price, but think the stuff must be OK because of where it comes from. So sales go up. Profits go up. The Aspertons sell out. A year later, a load of dissatisfied customers are taking their business elsewhere or trying to get their money back. Profits are up the spout, and the company’s reputation will take years to recover. But Mike and Eileen Asperton are in the Bahamas enjoying their well-earned rest, and they couldn’t give a damn. Like I say, you’ve got to admire them.

‘What I don’t like so much is what they do to our business in the meantime. Or,’ added George as a seeming afterthought, ‘more to the point what they do to
your
business. If you start selling shoddy furniture to your customers, you’re going to get the blame, no matter where the fault really lies.’

Evans was persuaded. It was time for the grand finale.

‘Now, if you’re interested in ordering more of our Bright and Beautiful range, we’d be happy to help you with whatever you want. We’ll give priority to your order, so don’t worry about delivery times.’ This was an easy promise to make. Gissings was still running well under capacity. ‘But since you’re here, let me show you something really special.’