37. What goes Around

What goes around

Detective Inspector Graeme Beaumont worked in Scotland Yard’s Financial Fraud Division and he did so with an evangelical zeal. He liked chasing white-col ar criminals. In his opinion, far too much press attention was paid to hoodies on street corners and not nearly enough to those who stole via columns of numbers on screens and mountains of paperwork spread across continents.

‘You’re mugging old ladies every bit as much if you pinch their pension fund,’ he was fond of pointing out to the squad of bookish constables and civilian accountants who worked under him, ‘as you are if you assault them at a bus shelter. Stealing is stealing and it doesn’t matter if the crook ies rst class and sits in the House of Lords. If he’s a crook, he’s a crook.’

Beaumont had been working hard at his desk al morning. And working, on this particular morning, with a growing sense of purpose. His was a tough and often thankless eld of operations. Results were agonizingly slow to come by and months of meticulous work would often yield nothing. is morning, however, Beaumont felt he was getting somewhere.

Nonetheless, when the clock struck eleven he rose from his desk, crossed what was grandly cal ed his operations room and inspected the contents of the smal fridge that stood in the corner. Beaumont valued routine. He believed it disciplined and focused the mind. He felt that he was a better detective for strictly observing his eleven o’clock break.

Everything in the fridge was in order.

His milk had not been tampered with. His Twix lay unopened and the circular box of Laughing Cow Cheese Triangles with three remaining triangles in it was exactly how he had left it.

e constables and accountants who worked under Graeme Beaumont knew better than to tamper with Beaumont’s section of the fridge. His milk was sacrosanct. His elevenses untouchable. Let them share a communal carton of milk for their tea if they wished. Let them organize an honesty tin in order to pay for tea and a packet of Penguin biscuits if that was their desire. But that

way was not Beaumont’s way. Beaumont knew a little too much about human nature to believe that such arrangements could ever lead to anything but tears.

It wasn’t that Beaumont lacked generosity. If somebody had asked him for a splash of milk for their tea he would have given it. Gladly. It was simply that a lifetime of experience had led Beaumont to conclude that in communal fridges, as in most cooperative ventures, there would always be somebody who, through either sloth or greed, would ruin things for everyone.

Beaumont made himself a cup of tea, took a cheese triangle and one nger from his Twix and returned with them to his desk.

He was excited and anxious to get on but also somewhat vexed. e case on which he was working had given rise to a moral question. Should he declare a vested interest? e thought had been on his mind al morning. Sipping his tea and toying with the foil wrapping of the cheese triangle, he decided that it was al right. at there was in fact no con ict of interest and that he had no need to trouble his superiors with it.

e fact that he had in his sights two men with whom he had brie y shared a house some seventeen years before hardly represented a difficulty. Yes, it was true that those men had chucked him out of that house. Perfunctorily. at those two con dent, wel -established second-year students had rendered a vulnerable fresher homeless and distressed. at was undeniable. It was also true that he, Inspector Beaumont, had never forgotten the incident, feeling to this day that he had been appal ingly treated.

But these things did not represent a con ict of interest. Beaumont’s reputation was spotless, he had applied the law equal y and fairly, without fear, favour or prejudice, throughout his career. e fact that he had a passing acquaintance with Lord Rupert Bennett and a certain Jimmy Corby was utterly irrelevant.

Beaumont had not sought out these men as objects of an investigation into insider trading. He had of course always been aware of them in a general sense.

Of Bennett certainly. Bennett could not be avoided; his extraordinary success in banking meant that his name was known to anyone with even a vague interest in the nancial world. And the almost equal y enormous success of the other occupants of that extraordinarily lucky house of which he had brie y been a tenant was not unknown to Beaumont either. No single group of people could have done better in life. He had never been able to get away from the bastards.

e celebrated catering woman who had taken the room which Beaumont had thought was his.

e architect whose name sometimes came up when Prince Charles objected to a building.

Henry Baker, the axen-haired New Labour golden boy.

And Jimmy Corby. So rich. So successful. A man whose charmed life, although not in the public domain, was known to Beaumont via the old university grapevine.

Of course, Beaumont assured himself, he wasn’t envious of these people. He did not like them, particularly Bennett and Corby, but he wasn’t envious of them.

He had not, after al , done so badly in life himself and had no complaints on that score. He had a nice little house which he shared with his partner, a sergeant and another stalwart of the Gay Police Association. He had a number of citations to his credit. He was one of the most respected officers in the Financial Fraud Division.

And now he had a recently ennobled peer of the realm in his sights. A con dant of not one but two prime ministers. Quite a scalp to add to the growing col ection of fraudsters, cheats and charlatans who imagined that the law was written for other people and did not apply to them. Until they met Detective Inspector Graeme Beaumont, that is. After which they thought differently.

Lord Rupert Bennett would soon be thinking differently.

Beaumont found his mind drifting back to that cold autumn night in 1991.

He’d been a student at Sussex for only two months but he was already heartily sick of the hal of residence in which he’d been placed. e corridor on which he lived was ful of hearty, noisy, sporty blokes who didn’t wash up the communal dishes, didn’t respect the fridge rules and from whom one’s milk was not safe.

erefore, when Beaumont had seen a room in a shared house advertised on the accommodation noticeboard in the Student Union, he had gone round to the address immediately and to his delight had been invited to move straight in.‘We need the money big time,’ the charming, kind-looking man who had introduced himself as Jimmy Corby had said. Also present at the interview was

a pleasant curly-headed man in a shapeless jumper and Bennett in tweeds and brogues, smoking a pipe.

Beaumont had been hugely attered that such sophisticated second-years would consider living with a nervous young newbie like himself. His personal con dence, which had been somewhat shaken by his experience with the rugger buggers in the hal of residence, grew accordingly.

Beaumont therefore gave notice at his hal . He applied for a half-term’s refund, which was his due, and moved into his new room that week. He built shelves from planks and bricks for his books and hung his Gay Pride poster up on the wal . He put his clearly marked cereal boxes and rice jar in the kitchen and his toothpaste with his name on it in the bathroom. His loo rol he kept in his bedroom and took with him when he visited the lavatory.

Beaumont was very happy. He lived in that house for eight days and was unaware of any problems or tensions. It was true that he had faced strong resistance when he had suggested that he be al owed his own speci c sixth of the fridge. But although that particular issue remained unresolved, nothing prepared him for the moment when he returned home from col ege one evening to be faced by Corby, Bennett, the architect and the bumbling one in the jumper to be told that it wasn’t working out and he would have to leave.

ey had of course assured him that he could stay until he found somewhere else (a day or two should be enough, he recal ed Bennett suggesting very rmly), but pride and hurt had driven Beaumont from the house that very evening. An evening that was cold and stormy.

After wandering the streets in tears for an hour, he had spent a miserable, lonely night in a smal hotel which he certainly could not afford. is was fol owed by a miserable, lonely entire rst year in a grim bedsit, the only accommodation he could nd. It cost him twice as much as the hal of residence, which he wished he had never left.

It hadn’t been the worst experience that could befal a rst-year student but it had been a painful one for Beaumont. Very painful. To be summarily rejected by such wel -integrated students had shaken him badly. He had imagined himself a marked man. A pariah. He worried that word would spread that he was impossible to live with and people would avoid him throughout his three years. He thought people were staring at him in the corridors of the Union building.

Despite his fears, it did not work out quite that badly. Beaumont eventual y found his feet and made one or two friends. But it took a long time for him to get his con dence back and he never forgot the loneliness of the night he’d spent crying in the little hotel and the year in that horrible bedsit.

And then quite recently Rupert Bennett had come back into his life.

Rupert Bennett, the man who had advised the Treasury on the Caledonian Granite rescue package. e man Inspector Beaumont had become convinced had made huge personal pro ts from trading on the information he had gained during that process.

Beaumont had been on Bennett’s trail for months, but it was a labyrinthine trail left by a man who did not wish to be fol owed. Rupert Bennett had been very careful. He had made his share purchases from overseas accounts and he had laundered the pro ts through various third parties and tax havens. Try as he might, Detective Inspector Beaumont could not gather together enough concrete evidence to arrest his old housemate for insider trading. So he had instructed his team to look at the actions of his friends. To nd out who was in his inner circle and see what, if anything, they had been up to in those heady days when the business of money had passed almost unnoticed beyond the law and into an unregulated, amoral free-for-al .

‘After al ,’ Beaumont told his officers, ‘the nature of insider trading is that it depends on the passing and receiving of information. It’s just possible that we can get to Bennett via someone he knew. Somebody who was less careful than him. An old university friend, perhaps. A valued and trusted con dant.’

Beaumont sent his people to look for anyone who could be identi ed as a regular gure at the many social functions which Lord and Lady Bennett had organized. A list had been drawn up which featured a number of names that Beaumont recognized from his past. e team had then looked into the nancial records of the people on the list to see if any of them had traded in Caledonian Granite shares at the same time as Bennett had himself.

One name ticked al the boxes.

Jimmy Corby.

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