For The Love Of Money - Brian Doswell (speed reading book .TXT) 📗

as the hook would let her, until she found the first financial summary. The market was expecting a strong set of numbers. Everyone in the chemical industries was due to benefit to some degree from the surge in global oil prices. The wire services were reporting $67 per barrel but Gary had told her in Starbucks that overnight prices in the Far East had hit $75 before falling back in the early hours.
Chrissie paged down the numbers, looking for the bottom line.
This was undoubtedly the information that she had been chasing but where did this site get it from. Could she trust the Pirate?
She hit her home number hoping to ask James, but when she eventually got through, Stephanie answered. James was out in the park with James junior.
Chrissie wished that she had bothered to open James’ email when it arrived. She could have asked him about it last night, but it was too late now. She went back to the figures. They certainly looked genuine. Some of the numbers were common knowledge, rolling on from quarterly reports, exactly as expected. She turned another page and another. The hook was beginning to get on her nerves, it was so slow.
At last she found the table that she needed. Somewhere in here would be the net profit figures with all the caveats and hedges listed. The market was expecting a high number but the market was a fickle thing. If the number was below expectation, the market would be disappointed. If the number was too high, the market would be suspicious and offload shares in case there was a skeleton in the cupboard. Whoever got in first would clean up in arbitrage.
Finally, there it was. If she believed this pirate flag web site, the bottom line was a huge number, well above all the analysts’ expectations. Chrissie drew breath in over clenched teeth making a prolonged hissing noise. It was her way of expressing amazement, something that she had done at school and ever since.
She desperately wanted to share this with her team who would start to assess the figures and attempt to out-guess the imminent market reaction. Instead she called Gary.
Gary leaned over her shoulder while she dragged the hook around the pirate web site. There were no obvious clues but the report looked genuine. The screen image was not a normal document but a photograph of an original paper copy. It seemed as though someone had photographed each page of the report with something simple like a mobile phone and then tied all the separate images together with hyperlinks. The hook was probably just a way to activate the hyperlinks.
They both searched each page desperate for some clue that would lend credibility to the information. Right or wrong, this was dynamite. If Chrissie went ahead on the assumptions in this paper she was either in line for a partnership or the grand order of the boot. There was no middle ground. There was no time for indecision.
Suddenly Gary turned back to a previous page. The light falling on the page was slightly different from the others and it was just possible to determine a BASF watermark behind the typed text. It was almost nothing but it was just better than nothing, enough to sway the pair that this was the genuine article.
Chrissie called in her team and gave them the numbers.
‘Don’t ask, just get on with it.’
While they worked on the details Chrissie called George and passed on the news. The numbers were so far beyond all expectations; George would need to be in on this one himself.
The meeting convened in Chrissie’s office, George in Chrissie’s chair and she leaning over his shoulder. The size of the numbers could be why the wraps had been so tightly drawn over this report. If this were true then the market would be a real mess this afternoon.
The clock hit and passed ten.
Bit by bit, the assessment reports landed on Chrissie’s desk and she fed them to George.
In thirty minutes the report would be on all the screens in London and everywhere else in the world. There were pros and cons to the internet.
‘Feint heart never won fair lady.’ George whispered quietly into Chrissie’s ear. She thought it an odd thing to say, so out of context with such a high profile decision in hand.
‘You’ve been right so far Chrissie, I’m going to go with this. Get me Mack at the dealer desk.’
By noon London time it was clear that Wilkinson’s had somehow scooped the pool again. Buy and sell orders had flashed across a hundred Wilkinson’s screens just ahead of the mob, and the net gain on the afternoon, still to be confirmed by the back office, looked like exceeding £28,000,000.
The screens on the fifth floor were all on the same display. No red boxes only green. Green glorious green and all down to Chrissie.
Five o’clock came and went, closely followed by the whole team with George at the head. Balls Brothers may have sawdust on the floor but their Champagne is the best, and it flowed. Oh! how it flowed.
It was just a touch before 7.30 when Chrissie fired up the BMW and headed for Hampshire. She probably should not have been driving after the champagne but there was very little traffic on the road at this hour. ‘Strange’ she thought, the roads were empty this morning too, I must have missed it all.
The M4 was empty. Heathrow came and went as the air-conditioned cabin of the BMW virtually found its own way home.
A few minutes before nine, Chrissie turned into her neatly manicured drive. There were no lights on in the house and James’ old 4x4 was not in its usual place. Chrissie opened the door and made her way to the kitchen, no sign of Naomi or James junior. No sign of gamine, leggy Stephanie. Her friends had joked about her leaving James alone in the house with an attractive young French au pair all day. She had always laughed it off, but now, their flippant comments hit a panic button in her mind. “Where could they all be?”
She checked the nursery - nothing.
Not a sound in the dark empty house.
Chrissie returned to the lounge and, for the first time, noticed an envelope propped against the clock on the mantle piece. Her heart sank as she opened the envelope and pulled out the note. Tears welled in her eyes as she read the hastily written words.

‘Shame you could not make it home in time for Naomi’s birthday party. We have all gone to the pictures. Love you, James’

AN EXTRA BEDROOM

Crisp morning sunlight, filtering through the shop window, fell on Jean Ellis’s desk in a chequerboard pattern mirroring the arrangement of display sheets hung from almost invisible wires. She loved the magical way these flimsy sheets were all it took to draw people into her agency.
‘Acherson & Co’
The name over the door was not Jean’s. The name belonged to Bill Acherson. At least technically it used to belong to Bill until he died, quite suddenly, after a nasty bout of flu, just after Christmas.
Acherson & Co, Estate Agents of Station Road, Harrow, had been a fixture in Station Road for close to thirty years and Jean had worked there most of that time. Bill had literally lived above the shop which was the front ground floor of a house that he owned outright. Most people thought Bill was gay, he was certainly single but in truth, and Jean knew the truth, there had been no one in his life since his mother died in 1983. Bill liked his own company, his mother’s armchair and Coronation Street. Beyond that, Bill had lived and died selling houses. He had a knack for knowing what people liked and matching people to properties. He always knew when the seller would be prepared to drop the price or when the buyer could squeeze a few more pounds on the mortgage. More importantly Bill knew every conveyance solicitor and mortgage broker in Harrow and its surrounding towns. Bill’s reputation rested on his ability to arrange a sale and completion in less time than anyone else in Harrow. To him it was a puzzle that needed solving, a chess game that he could win if he got all the pieces exactly where he wanted them. Over the years, Bill had accumulated a list of special clients, people who came back time after time as their families grew. Bill was always the one to find that extra bedroom at a price they could afford.
Jean joined the agency after leaving school in that same year and she sometimes thought that, over the years, Bill had come to see her as a bit like his dearly departed mother. Bill had no other relatives that Jean knew of and so it was no real surprise that he chose to leave the house and the business to her.
At forty-five, Jean was still single, ‘A spinster of the parish’, her mother called her, but she didn’t mind. Jean had never enjoyed school. In more enlightened times she would have been classified as a slow learner but back in those days, she was just slow. Jean often thought about the tall, plain looking, gangly and drastically under confident girl that had walked out of the school gates for the last time in July 1983. She had failed everything except art and had nothing to offer a prospective employer, nor any idea of what she might do for a living. She remembered walking home clutching a bag of part-full exercise books, liberally punctuated with red correcting ink, the sum total of her fifteen years of education. On impulse, she stopped at the waste basket in Station Road and tore each book apart page by page before dumping it into the bin. The only thought in her mind was to rid herself of all her past school things and start again, somewhere.
Bill had watched her from his chair at the same desk Jean now called her own. On impulse, he opened the shop door and called her over.
Bill needed a clerk, Jean needed a job, and they took an instant liking to each other. The rest, as they say, is history.
No one was more surprised than Jean’s parents when she arrived home that day. “She left home in the morning, a school-girl and came home a proper estate agent.” Her mother told the neighbours and anyone else who stopped long enough to listen, over and over until there was no one left to tell.
At first, Jean found the work challenging and had it not been for Bill’s enthusiasm and her mother’s incessant mantra, she might have walked away from Acherson & Co a dozen times. However, that all changed the day she sold her first house.
Bill was out doing an evaluation on a house in Borrowdale Avenue and Jean was alone in the shop. A young couple paused in front of the shop window and Jean watched them as they picked their way through the selection of property leaflets displayed there. They appeared to be choosing between two small houses, both in the maze of side streets off the Uxbridge Road. They burst through the shop door engrossed in loud, animated conversation that Jean found intimidating. There being no one else in the place, they pulled the customer’s chairs from Bill’s desk and plonked themselves in front of hers.
“We’d like to know more about these two places.” The woman bubbled as she spoke. “We’re getting married in November and the bank has just agreed a mortgage limit for us to get our first house.”
Jane smiled back at the woman who was now clutching her fiancé’s arm