Johnny looked behind him. A group of people had gathered round a table at the other end of the room. The table was set out with rows of glasses and cut-glass jugs of water.
“Charlie’s about to begin,” he said. “He’s sniffing the air.”
Isabel glanced in the direction of the whisky noser, a well-built man in a comfortable tweed suit and sporting a large mous-tache. She watched as he poured a glass of whisky and held it up against the light.
“I know him,” she said.
“Everybody does,” said Johnny. “Charlie Maclean. He can smell whisky from fifty yards. Amazing nose.”
Isabel looked down at her modest malt and took a small sip of the liquid. “Tell me what you found out about Minty.”
Johnny shook his head. “Nothing. All I said was that she was greedy, which she undoubtedly is. What I did find out was rather more interesting than that. I found out about what her young friend Ian Cameron has been doing. I knew some of it already, of course, but I gathered quite a bit more from my friends among the discontented in McDowell’s.”
Isabel said nothing, waiting for him to continue. At the other end of the room, Charlie Maclean was pointing out some quality in the whisky to his attentive audience, one or two of whom were nodding eagerly.
“But first, you should have a bit of background,” Johnny said.
“Firms like McDowell’s are not all that old. They’ve only recently celebrated their twentieth birthday, I think. And they didn’t start with vast resources either—fifty thousand or so would have been T H E S U N D A Y P H I L O S O P H Y C L U B
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all that the original two partners would have brought in. Nowa-days, fifty thousand would be small change for them.”
Isabel watched Johnny as he spoke. He was looking at his whisky glass, turning it gently to drive a thin meniscus of liquid up the sides, exactly as Charlie Maclean was now doing for his audience at the other end of the room.
“We grew very quickly,” Johnny went on. “We took in pension funds and invested them carefully in solid stocks. The market, of course, was doing well and everything looked very good. By the end of the eighties we were managing more than two billion, and even if our fee was slipping slightly below the half percent we had been taking for our services, you can still imagine what that meant in terms of profit.
“We took on lots of bright people. We watched what was happening in the Far East and in developing countries. We moved in and out fairly successfully, but of course we had our fingers burned with Internet stocks, as just about everybody did.
That was probably the first time we had a fright. I was there then and I remember how the atmosphere changed. I remember Gordon McDowell at one meeting looking as if he’d just seen a ghost.
Quite white.
“But it didn’t bring us down—it just meant that we had to be quicker on our feet. And we also had to work a bit harder to keep our clients, who were very nervous about what was happening to their funds in general and were beginning to wonder whether they would be safer in the City of London. After all, the reason why one went to Edinburgh in the first place was to get solidity and reliability. If Edinburgh started to look shaky, one might as well throw in one’s lot with the riskier side of things in London.
“It’s about this time that we looked around for some new people. We picked up this Cameron character and a few others 2 0 2
A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h like him. He started watching new stocks, which seemed to be about the only place where one could make a decent bit of money. But of course these new issues were subscribed to by the large people in London and New York, and Edinburgh usually wouldn’t get much of a look-in. This was pretty sickening when you saw them go up in value by two or three hundred percent within a few months of issue. And all this profit went to those who were in a cosy relationship with the issuing houses in London and who were given a good allocation.
“Cameron started to get his hands on to some of these issues.
He also started to take charge of one or two other things, moving funds slowly out of stocks that were not going to do so well. He’s very good at that, our friend Cameron. Quite a few stocks were quietly disposed of a month or so ahead of a profit warning. Nothing very obvious, but it was happening. I didn’t know about that until I spoke to my friends who had been working with him—I was in a different department. But they told me of two big sales that had taken place in the last six months, both of them before a profit warning.”
Isabel had been listening intently. This was the flesh that her skeletal theory needed. “And would there be any concrete evidence of insider knowledge in these two cases? Anything one could put one’s finger on?”
Johnny smiled. “The very question. But I’m afraid that you won’t like the answer. The fact of the matter is that both of these sales were of stocks in companies in which Minty Auchterlonie’s bank was involved as adviser. So she might well have had inside knowledge which she passed on to him. But then, on the other hand, she might not. And there is, in my view, no way in which we could possibly prove it. In each case, I gather, there’s a minute T H E S U N D A Y P H I L O S O P H Y C L U B
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of the meeting at which Cameron raised the possibility of selling the stocks. In both cases he came up with a perfectly cogent reason for doing so.”
“And yet the real reason may well have been what Minty said to him?”
“Yes.”
“And there’s no chance of proving that money changed hands between Cameron and Minty?”
Johnny looked surprised. “I don’t think that money would necessarily change hands—unless he was sharing his bonus with her. No, I think it more likely that they were doing this for mixed motives. She was involved with him sexually and wanted to keep him. That’s perfectly possible. People give their lovers things because they’re their
