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 lovers. That’s an old story.”
“Or?” prompted Isabel.
“Or Minty was genuinely concerned about Paul Hogg’s department getting into the mire and wanted to give it a boost because Paul Hogg was part of her overall plan to penetrate the heart of the Edinburgh establishment. It was not in her interests as the future Mrs. Paul Hogg to have hitched her star to a has-been.”
Isabel mulled over what she had been told. “So what you’re telling me, then, is that there may well have been insider trading, but that we’re never going to be able to prove it? Is that it?”
Johnny nodded. “I’m sorry,” he said. “That’s about it. You could try to take a closer look at Minty’s financial situation and see if there are any unexplained windfalls, but I don’t see how you’ll get that information. She’ll bank at Adam & Company, I suspect, and they are very discreet and you’d never get round any of their staff—they’re very correct. So what do you do?”
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“Shrug the whole thing off ?”
Johnny sighed. “I suspect that’s all we can do. I don’t like it, but I don’t think that we’ll be able to do anything more.”
Isabel lifted her glass and took a sip of her whisky. She had not wanted to mention her real suspicions to Johnny, but she felt grateful to him for the enquiries that he had made and she wanted to confide in somebody other than Jamie. If Johnny thought that her theory about what had happened in the Usher Hall was far-fetched, then perhaps she should abandon it.
She put her glass down on the table. “Would you mind if I tell you something?” she asked.
Johnny gestured airily. “Anything you wish. I know how to be discreet.”
“A little while ago,” said Isabel, “a young man fell to his death from the gods in the Usher Hall. You probably read about it.”
Johnny thought for a moment before he replied. “I think I remember something like that. Horrible.”
“Yes,” Isabel went on. “It was very distressing. I happened to be there at the time—not that that’s relevant—but what is interesting is that he worked at McDowell’s. He would have gone there after you had left, but he was in Paul Hogg’s department.”
Johnny had raised his glass to his lips and was watching Isabel over the rim. “I see.”
He’s not interested, thought Isabel. “I became involved,” she went on. “I happened to be told by somebody who knew him well that he had discovered something very awkward for somebody in the firm.” She paused. Johnny was looking away, watching Charlie Maclean.
“And so he was pushed over that balcony,” she said quietly.