Were Sir Gilbert and Madiana satisfied with the progress she was making with their children? It was hard to tell. For one thing, she could never be entirely sure when they were even at home: if, indeed, their London residence was their ‘home’ in any meaningful sense. On her side of the house, there were CCTV cameras everywhere: not in her bedroom, thankfully, and not in the bathroom as far as she could tell, but certainly in the kitchen, and all the stairways and landings. The images from these cameras could be streamed to Sir Gilbert’s or Madiana’s smartphones and tablets wherever they were in the world, so they always knew when Rachel was in the house and when she had gone out. But the arrangement was not reciprocal. Her employers kept her informed about their own movements on a need-to-know basis, which meant, in practice, that Rachel had no way of knowing where they were at all. When they were at home, they made very little noise, and the presence of lights in the windows meant nothing, since for security reasons the lights were programmed to come on automatically at random, whether the house was occupied or not.
One evening in late November, then, it was a surprise for Rachel to catch a glimpse of Sir Gilbert as she left the house by the back door (as always) and picked her way through the abandoned builders’ materials on her way to the front entrance and a date with Jamie. Her employer was standing between the Grecian columns at the top of the steps, saying goodbye to another man and shaking his hand. As the door was closed and the man descended the steps to catch up with her, she saw that it was Frederick Francis.
‘Well, hello,’ he said, stretching the word again in that annoyingly flirtatious way. They hadn’t seen each other since the trip to the Kruger national park.
‘Hello, Frederick,’ said Rachel, stopping short of using the friendly abbreviation.
‘Something of a mess, isn’t it?’ he said, surveying the jumble of ladders, drills, masonry, ironware and cement mixers that the builders had left behind.
‘I find I’m getting used to it,’ said Rachel, pushing the temporary door open and stepping out into the street through the hoarding.
‘Of course,’ said Freddie, hurrying to keep up with her, ‘you’ve become quite the fixture around here, I understand.’
‘Well, it was nice seeing you again,’ she said, preparing to head off down the street.
‘Wait a minute. Where are you going?’ said Freddie.
‘I’ve got a date.’
‘Heading for the West End?’
‘Soho.’
‘Well, Jules is going to drive me that way. We can give you a lift.’
‘I’d rather not.’
‘Oh, come on. It’s a free ride. Don’t be so puritanical.’
In truth, Rachel needed to save the money, even if it was only a few pounds on her Oyster card. She accepted the lift, and settled with an involuntary sigh of pleasure into the deeply cushioned leather seat at the rear of the Mercedes. The leather was heated, she could not help noticing, a feature which itself was extremely welcome on this chilly winter night.
‘I mustn’t get too comfortable, must I?’ she said. ‘It’d be a mistake to get used to this level of luxury.’
‘On the contrary,’ said Freddie, ‘I think it would be very good for you to get used to it. Everyone should experience a ride in a car like this at least once. Then they’d have something to aspire to.’
‘Yeah, right,’ said Rachel.
She stared out of the window as the car purred north, through The Boltons and across the Brompton Road. She was surprised by how clearly she could see: from the outside, the window had looked completely opaque.
‘And who’s the lucky man you’re meeting tonight?’ Freddie asked.
‘Do you come to the house often?’ Rachel said, not shifting her gaze from the passing houses. ‘Only I’ve never seen you there before.’
‘I’m very discreet,’ said Freddie. ‘Now you see me, now you don’t.’ When this remark failed to have any effect, he added: ‘So … you’re curious about me. I’m flattered.’
‘Don’t be. This job gives me a lot of time to myself. I’ve got to think about something.’
Discouraged by this response, Freddie fell silent.
‘I did Google you, though,’ said Rachel, as flatly as she could.
‘Really? And what did you find?’
‘Mostly, stuff about a British film director. As for you — well, very little, actually.’
‘Just as it should be.’
‘I found the name of the firm you work for. But I didn’t find out much about what you do.’
‘It’s not really in the public domain.’
‘I did notice something, though. It said you used to work for a private bank called Stewards’. And so did Sir Gilbert, according to Wikipedia.’
‘Well, well. We have a real cyber-detective in our midst. That’s how we met, of course. On the trading floor of Stewards’. Back in the late eighties.’ He sighed. ‘Ah, happy times.’ The car was paused at traffic lights, waiting to turn left into the Cromwell Road. Jules was listening to Magic FM, turned down to an unobtrusive volume. ‘The boss of Stewards’ in those days was a man called Thomas Winshaw. A legendary figure. He treated the traders as if we were his favourite sons. The sons he never had. Gil was the outstanding one, of course. I was good, but I didn’t have his flair, his nerves of steel. Currency trading was his thing. His deals started getting bolder and bolder — I mean, if we’d stopped to think about it (which we never did), he was really putting the whole of the bank’s funds at serious risk, sometimes — but Thomas trusted him, he let him get on with it, and then in 1992 he put a huge bet — and I mean a really, really huge one — on the pound crashing out of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism. Which is what happened, of course. It was called Black Wednesday, because it was a bad day, for most people, a terrible day. But not for Gilbert. My God, how we all celebrated that night! We must have spent about thirty grand on champagne alone. We drank one toast after another to Thomas, who of course was no longer with us, by then. He had … passed on, the year before, in horrible circumstances. But that hadn’t stopped us. It had just made us more reckless than ever, in fact: more determined.
‘After a couple more years,’ said Freddie, as the car eased its way through the Knightsbridge traffic, gliding past slower, less powerful vehicles with no apparent effort, ‘we were both getting tired of the money markets. You burn out, in that world, pretty quickly. Gilbert formed Gunnery Holdings, and started buying and selling companies. He moved into property development. Started expanding, diversifying. He had a big fortune to play with, by now, a massive fortune. I was still at Stewards’, stagnating a bit, getting more and more restless. And one night I met him for a drink, at some private members’ club. We got pretty pissed, talked about this and that. And I realized that, even though things were going so well for him, he wasn’t happy.’
‘Perhaps he was developing a conscience,’ said Rachel.
Freddie smiled. ‘Guess again.’
‘I don’t know,’ said Rachel. ‘What could possibly have been making him unhappy?’
If there was any irony underpinning the question, Freddie missed it. ‘Well, it was quite simple. He felt that he was paying too much tax.’
Rachel snorted.
‘Oh, it shouldn’t surprise you. It doesn’t matter how generous the government is, however much they lower the top rate. If you’re bringing home ten million a year, you’re writing an annual cheque to the Inland Revenue for four million pounds. It’s not a question of how rich you are. That feels like a lot of money. It hurts.’
‘My heart bleeds for him,’ said Rachel.
‘It wasn’t just him. I realized that plenty of people in his position — not that there were many Brits in London who were as wealthy as Gilbert, by this stage — were feeling the same way. So I decided that was where the future lay. My future, anyway.’