For The Love Of Money, Brian Doswell [books for students to read .txt] 📗

FOR THE LOVE OF MONEY

a collection of short stories
by
Brian Doswell

“Such is the motivation to succeed,
When one is
Spurred on by greed”

(anon 2009)

TO HAVE IT ALL OR NOT

Chrissie took a last look in the hall mirror before quietly closing the front door on the sleeping household behind her. She walked down the five chalk-white steps to the pathway and to the drive where her dark blue BMW 535 sat waiting to take her into the City and her air-conditioned office. The big engine purred into life and the red glowing numbers on the dashboard told her that it was still only 6.30. Chrissie allowed herself a moment to enjoy the comfort of the black leather seats before sliding the gear lever into drive and easing the highly polished machine forward and out onto the tree-lined avenue. Black heels sat in the passenger foot well; she would change into them when she arrived in her reserved parking space in the underground car park.
There was not much traffic at this hour but Chrissie knew that that would change when she hit the motorway. She hooked her Bluetooth into her ear as a matter of habit although she knew that the next forty minutes would probably pass in silence. Chrissie wore her dark blonde hair loose at shoulder length which hid the plastic earpiece but she knew, as did everyone else, that walking around the office apparently talking to yourself, was a mark of being an exec, and she liked everyone to know that she was an exec.
At 7.10 she rolled down the slipway onto the M4 and headed east into the rising sun. Now the lottery began. If she was lucky, she would get past Heathrow and into London before the real rush started. If not, then she had another forty minutes before she could thumb the button on her personal remote to open the electronic doors to the firm’s private car park. Within minutes she was sandwiched between a pale green Jaguar and a silver Mercedes. All high achievers on the road at this hour, the denizens would follow on in an hour or so. She would just have to settle for cruising along with the hordes of commuters who collectively made up the City of London. Of course it would be nice to have the road to oneself, but then the City would not be the City without the excitement generated by the people who worked there.
Chrissie liked to recall her first visit to the City as a fifth-former on a school trip. She and her team had won the Hampshire, inter-school, investment competition. Each team had been allocated a notional £10,000 to invest and the winners were the ones who showed the best profit after a full year of trading. Their prize was awarded on a special edition of the BBC Money Programme where Chrissie met Professor Adrian Schmitt a visiting lecturer at Christ’s College Cambridge. Chrissie fell in love with Professor Schmitt and the following year won a scholarship to Christ’s College. Sadly for her Professor Schmitt had moved on but she did meet and eventually marry James. He had a good degree in computing sciences but the job opportunities had not materialised so, by joint agreement, he worked from home on the internet while she went from strength to strength in EC2. The arrangement suited them both and when the children came along James had proved to be an excellent house father. They both knew that James would never get the chance to make a top salary in such a crowded field and Chrissie’s annual bonus schemes were just unbeatable. The house in the New Forest would never have been possible without Chrissie’s salary. Last year, the annual bonus had paid for a paddock and a pony for Naomi. This year, her promotion to exec status, albeit still a junior exec, had ramped the home budget up to the ‘au pair’ level.
The au pair, what a god send, especially now that James junior was almost three years old. Stephanie had answered their advert in ‘The Lady’. They interviewed seven girls but Stephanie had stood out well above the rest. Typically French, gamin, urchin haircut and legs. James had particularly liked the legs and Chrissie had decided that she would have to learn to trust James, legs or not. Six months on, her decision had not been found wanting. Stephanie’s English had improved enormously and the house ran like clockwork, exactly as Chrissie liked it.
‘Turn right into Old Street’, the metallic voice of the sat-nav system on the dashboard brought Chrissie back to the land of the living. Time for her morning game; if she was parked before 8 o’clock she rewarded herself with a mocha latté from Starbucks, if it was after eight, then it would be an espresso from the machine in the corridor outside her office.
Today it was Starbucks - by seconds.
Gary joined the queue behind her and their day began in the coffee shop. She had joined Wilkinson’s at almost the same time as Gary and they were both good friends and fierce competitors. As a senior analyst, Chrissie, with her team, was responsible for formulating the firm’s policy on pharmaceutical stocks, while Gary and his team covered petrochemical industries. There was a fair degree of overlap between the two teams and titbits of information were jealously guarded, although neither was secretive enough to prejudice a board report.
Today was the day for the release of the major pan-European pharmaceutical trading figures. Normally these figures were leaked all over the place by the internal corporate analysts. Chrissie had been on the phone to her contacts in Geneva for hours every day this week trying to piece together the story so that she could anticipate the release and brief her team accordingly. The little bio-tech companies had been their normally cooperative selves but the big boys had been unusually quiet. There was nothing to hang a hat on anywhere in the market. Gary’s team would be going through the same process next month when the petrochemical figures came out, but even though it was early yet, he was also getting a cold shoulder.
They walked across the road to the office building together, both carrying the distinctive Styrofoam cups in one hand and a super slim-line laptop case with the Wilkinson’s crest embossed in the leather, in the other. The lack of information coming into both teams had been a hot topic for several days and occupied their conversation now. The cool marble floored reception hall boasted large, over stuffed leather sofas and they opted to spend a few more precious moments to share ideas and speculation as to why the trail was so unusually cold. There had been no unusual reports or regulatory bulletins so there had to be something in the air. Something big enough to put a lid on all the major companies. At times like this, all thoughts of competition were put to one side and every tiny scrap of information was trawled over and over again in an attempt to find the pearl and extract it from its oyster. Someone must know something, but no one was telling.
The execs’ meeting at 8.30 was similarly grim. George Padworth sat in the big chair at the end of the rosewood table, as he did every morning, except when he was away tending the vines on his estate in the Loire valley. Chrissie and Gary sat much further down the pecking order, but at least they were at the table and not outside in the main hall.
George opened with a list of companies due to report during the day and asked for a brief on each from the respective team leaders. When it came to Chrissie, she had nothing new to say. The room was quiet. Everyone felt a smidgen of sympathy because they had all been there. Gary especially, could see it coming to him when it was his turn in the next few days.
BASF were due to report first at 12.00 CET, which was 11 o’clock in London. The trading desks were open and waiting to get in on the action but what was the call from the top? Some traders liked to fly on their own but that was not George’s way. George liked to control a tight ship and, to date, his way had made Wilkinson’s a very successful firm and their staff very rich. Chrissie had less than two hours to come up with something useful.
8.35 and the meeting was over. There was no point in lingering when there was nothing to say. Chrissie perched on her deputy team leader’s desk in the open plan area of the fifth floor office and her team gathered round.
‘Any new ideas? . . . OK, one more time round the contact list and report back to me directly, by 10.00 latest.’ was all she had to say.
The last of the mocha latté sat on her desk as cold as the trail of information. Chrissie stared at her terminal paging up and down her contact-dialler looking for anything that she might have missed. Chrissie was not the sort of person to get cross but she was close to tearing her hair out with frustration, this did not happen to her. She was a top analyst with a finger in every pie, there had to be a plum somewhere, probably staring her in the face.
Nine o’clock came and went. It was unheard of that there should be nothing on the wires this close to release time. There was always a spare copy of the figures left in the photo copying room and always an unusually highly paid cleaner who would rescue it ahead of disclosure time. Where was he or she hiding, and why?
Chrissie flicked open her mail box merely to change the screen in front of her. There were no new messages, but she knew that anyway. Idly she paged down the 87 messages received yesterday, none were even remotely helpful. They were almost all from her contacts who were having the same trouble; nothing to report. Her right index finger bashed repeatedly on the down arrow until she reached the bottom of the list and then did the same on the up arrow just for the hell of it. Somewhere in mid-list she paused on an email from James that she had not bothered to open. He probably just wanted to let her know that James junior had done something mind numbingly boring, for the very first time. This time she opened it.
The message was short and sweet. ‘try this web site. J.’
Chrissie lined up the curser on the URL and double clicked.
Seconds later an image of a pirate flag appeared looking for all the world like a clip from ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’.
‘I do not have time for this’, echoed in Chrissie’s head, but she rolled the curser over the waving flag and clicked on the ever pointing hand when it appeared. The image changed to a puff of smoke and when the smoke cleared, the screen filled with what appeared to be the cover page of a financial report. The BASF financial report.
It took a few seconds more to realise that the curser had changed to Captain Hook’s hook and that the hook would turn the pages, achingly, one page at a time.
Chrissie hit screen print, but the function did not work. She would have to read this one page at a time and make notes by hand. She turned the pages as quickly