Page 124 of The Impossible Fortune
Even on a mild August evening the English Channel is choppy. The little cruiser meets each new crest with dread, and each new fall with relief. Lord Townes is glad he isn’t going far.
He’s not bad with boats; once had one of his own down at the Marina in Brighton. Eighty-footer, couple of sleeping cabins, hot tub on the aft deck. He’d taken it as far as Santander once, but at the last minute his proposed companion, a woman he’d got talking to at golf, had come down with flu and he’d made the crossing alone.
His boat was calledBonus 98, because that’s what paid for it.
This current craft belongs to an old pal, Leonard, who made several tens of millions in zinc derivatives and is currently in prison due to a misunderstanding over the tax that was subsequently due. Leonard is learning Mandarin to pass the time in prison, because China’s the future.
Gosh, the future, there’s a funny thought. How important the future is, until the day it isn’t.
Fate, luck, accident, whatever it is that tosses your life around like the Channel is tossing around the little cruiser. They say you can’t control it, but Robert must politely disagree. He knows a way.
The box Robert took from The Compound is safelystowed in the cabin of this little cruiser. His insurance has always been there.
The night is cloudless, which is a nice touch. The sky is a blue granite, and the sea a blood black. It is streaked with moonlight, twisting like a ribbon on the waves.
It was just the latest in a long line of fortune, the Bitcoin. When Holly and Nick had taken him into their confidence, Robert had kept a straight face and a professional air, but he felt saved. He could have screamed for joy. Something always turned up.
Just the commission on a deal of that size would have kept the hall running for years to come. Would have repopulated the place with cooks and gardeners and drivers. Would have seen Robert nicely through the next twenty years, and he could have popped his clogs in peace and everyone would have agreed what a jolly good chap he was. The portraits would have nodded to him as he walked through the warm house. ‘Skin of your teeth, old boy!’ they’d have said. ‘The Townes magic strikes again!’
He was born into an impossible fortune; all he had had to do was not waste it.
Something has always cropped up when Robert needed it most; he has grown used to it. The Bitcoin bonanza was simply the last cab on the rank. A place opening up at Oxford at the last minute, despite his appalling A-level results. The bank that wasn’t recruiting suddenly needing an extra pair of hands. His father dying young. A string of good fortune, upon which Holly and Nick’s visit was just the latest pearl to be threaded.
He became reacquainted with his old friend, optimism, read up all he could on Bitcoin, just to ensure he wouldn’t come across as a complete buffoon. Then he’d paid a visit to some old chums of his up in town, and they all seemed jolly pleased to see him, as well they might, with three hundred and fifty million under his watchful command. All seemed well with the world again. Lunch at someone’s club, little snooze on the train home and a taxi from the station, because why not?
And of course he checked the prices, checked and rechecked what his three per cent transaction fee might be worth. When he had last checked, it had been worth, and he had written this down, ten point five million. He went to bed smiling, and woke up to the news of Holly Lewis’s murder. He then rang Nick Silver, but to no avail. The man had gone missing, and so, it seemed, had the opportunity.
Robert goes into the cabin and switches off the engine. This is as good a place as any. He is far from shore, but Robert has been far from shore for a long time now. He takes the wooden box from the cabin and brings it out onto the deck. He sits on the bare boards and, with his feet dangling from the side of the boat, opens it. He thinks back again to the events of the last few weeks.
When all had seemed lost, Robert did what he was best at: he crossed his fingers and hoped for the best. Perhaps Nick Silver would reappear and all would be well? Perhaps Nick Silver wouldn’t reappear, and Robert might be the only person with the knowledge of what wasin that cold storage unit? Perhaps the whole lot might be his if the cards fell in the right way, which they had done so often for Robert before. What would the family portraits say aboutthat? Robert sauntering around with almost a cool half a billion?
But Nick Silver never reappeared.
Even now, bobbing alone, far out to sea, Robert looks around to see if salvation might be at hand. A stately white galleon welcoming him aboard with fine news from home. There was a galleon in Robert’s favourite book as a child. His mother read it to him before he had to leave. It was laden with treasure from the East Indies, and Robert would dream about it at night. You can’t help the habit of a lifetime, can you? Was that the last time he was happy? No, that’s not right, there had been plenty of happiness over the years, trips and friends and golf, but perhaps sitting on his mother’s knee at the age of seven was the last time he was truly himself.
He has led a charmed life, but he can’t say that he has enjoyed it. Who loved him? Robert can’t think of a soul. His mother perhaps, but wasn’t that a very long time ago? Life for Robert was just an endless succession of seeing what might happen next. He was incapable of making anything actually happen. You have to be real to make things happen, and Robert has known for a very long time that he is not real.
He never made anything but money. And then he lost that too.
He thinks again what life might have been like in an ordinary house in an ordinary town with ordinaryparents. He will never know, but he wishes he could have found out.
Aut neca aut necare.Kill or be killed. Take a bit of initiative was probably the basic point, wasn’t it? Don’t always let life happen to you.
Robert opens the box and takes out the gun. It was his father’s; Robert had never been allowed to touch it. ‘I wouldn’t trust you with a gun,’ his father had said. ‘You’d probably blow your own head off.’
His father, who had bent the world to his will his whole life, had died of a heart attack in a sauna in Marrakesh. They had found him fat and naked, and it had taken four paramedics to move him. The sauna closed a few weeks later. Even in death he demanded attention.
Robert pushes himself to his feet and perches on the top railing of the deck. If he shoots himself from this angle, his body will topple backwards into the sea. No one will have to clear anything up and he won’t be any trouble.
He can just float away, and it will be like he was never here at all.
Or he could just ride the waves to France? Start a new life. Leave the house and the debts behind and trust in his luck? Luck? He’s probably had quite enough of that for one lifetime.
Robert raises the gun. His tongue finds a little crack in one of his upper teeth. It’s been there a while and he really should have gone to the dentist. He won’t need to now. No more cracks in his teeth, no more holes in the roof, no more bills on the mat.
He angles the gun towards his head and looks down the barrel. He smiles – his father would be furious.
As his finger puts pressure on the trigger, Robert’s eye catches something in the distance. He has to check again to make sure, but he sees it.
