Death of a Financier Read online

  The whole region was now threatened with encroaching tea and spice plantations and in addition had become a centre for both the national and international tourist industry with its ever expanding plans for new hotel complexes.

  The encroachment on the natural forest not only threatened the unique and diverse wildlife of the region; it also denuded the hills and was responsible for ecological destruction wreaked on the coast line only fifty or sixty kilometres to the west. The rains ran off the region's deforested mountain ranges during the monsoon swelling the numerous torrents that rushed directly down to the sea, making the wet season wetter and the dry season drier, thus aggravating the contamination of the insufficiently replenished ground water system that supplied the coastal towns with drinking water.

  Sarah and Ryan could not help but disapprove of the indiscriminate killing of game by their great grandfather and his friends; though they felt a sneaking admiration for sahibs and their tiger hunts, the memsahibs drinking afternoon tea with their lady friends, living the good life, a way of life that had disappeared for ever when the men and woman who had ruled Britain's vast imperial possession quit India in 1947 with sixty thousand of their compatriots, administrators, plantation owners, teachers, clergymen, doctors and nurses, never to return.

  The cold, damp, weather persisted and after a trip on a worn out pleasure boat across the lake to visit what was described as one of India's finest wild life sanctuaries, they decided enough was enough. The much vaunted wild life seemed scarce or hidden from view and after lunch at the Lake Palace, they did not protest when Sarah suggested they head back to the sunshine and warmth of the coast.

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  Chapter 23

  Whilst Emma sunbathed by the pool Parkly was confined to their suite with a violent attack of turista. At first he had refused Emma calling in a doctor, but when he started to develop a fever there was no choice and a local doctor was called in by the hotel. Dr. Swami was a not only a medical doctor but also a specialist in traditional Ayurvedic medicine, he was only too familiar with tourists and their stomach upsets and prescribed a good dose of antibiotics.

  Swami recognised Parkly as a wealthy man and in order to curry his favour he returned to the hotel late the same afternoon to check his patient's temperature. The fever had subsided slightly, but Parkly was feeling the effects of nausea and Swami suggested a twenty four hour period of rest and observation at his small but luxurious clinic on the outskirts of Kovalam.

  Parkly immediately bucked at the idea, from what he had seen of India he had serious doubts as to the kind of clinic Dr Swami ran. On the other hand Emma concerned for his health immediately agreed to check out the clinic and left with Swami.

  The clinic was barely three kilometres from the hotel, it was small and modern, catering for the usual minor complaints holiday makers ran into, accidents, infections, sunburn, intestinal and general health problems, equipped with all the kind of facilities a Westerner could have hoped for far from home.

  Within the hour Parkly was tucked into starched white sheets in one of the clinics well appointed rooms with a mild sedative to help him sleep.

  It was 6.30pm in India and 1.30am in London, January 3, when Parkly felt the effects of the sedative and drifted off into an uneasy sleep. Back at the Maharaja Palace his Blueberry, capturing a weak signal, vibrated as an urgent mail arrived from London. Paul Guthrie, his managing director, was trying to contact him to prepare a statement for the press after the shares of West Mercian Finance had fallen almost twenty five percent in morning trading on the London Stock Exchange.

  *

  As Emma made her way to the dining room, her feelings were mixed, she of course sympathised with her husband's condition, but at the same time was irritated if not a little annoyed that her holiday was being spoilt. Fortunately it was a buffet diner and the movement provided a distraction.

  Barton arrived and was being shown to a table when he spotted Emma sitting alone, he had exchanged hellos with her at the pool earlier that day.

  'All alone for diner?'

  'Unfortunately yes, my husband is not well.'

  'Oh, I'm sorry to hear that,' replied Barton thinking the opposite. 'Nothing serious I hope?'

  'Tummy upset.'

  'Would you mind if I joined you?'

  'Not at all,' she said waving her hand to the empty chairs at her table.

  'My name is Tom Barton,' he said holding out his hand.

  'Emma Parkly.'

  'Parkly, that rings a bell.'

  She simply smiled; 'I ordered a bottle of Chablis, a bit too much for me, would you like a glass?'

  'Marvellous, yes.'

  'When did you arrive?'

  'In Kovalam? Yesterday. But we saw the New Year in with friends from Kochi on the Backwaters. That's where Stephen must have picked up his bug.'

  'Stephen Parkly of West Mercian?'

  'Yes.'

  He paused absorbing the information, then deciding to avoid any talk related to business he continued: 'In seems its something fairly common in India.'

  'What about you, you seemed to have been here longer from your tan,' she said smiling.

  'I've been here for a few days, stopped off in Dubai for a couple of days.'

  'You're planning to stay longer?'

  'I'm not fixed on any definite plan, I'm going to look at some property tomorrow, it depends.'

  'Oh, not just a holiday!'

  Not exactly,' he said evasively.

  *

  Stephen Parkly was one of Britain's new class of super rich, a fraction of a percent of the population earning over ?350,000 per year. He was amongst the fortunate one in a thousand Britons whose income averaged ?780,000 a year. A mind boggling sum compared to the average hard put wage earner whose annual income did not exceed ?25,000 a year.

  Thanks to his young wife, Parkly was slumming it in Kovalam in a hotel with the lower echelons of the Russian nouveau riche and better off middle income Brits. He had not complained, after all his thirty two year old wife needed to breathe, get away from the rarefied atmosphere of London society dinner parties she had grown to hate.

  Emma's family had emerged from a relatively conventional middle class background, they were far from being part of the old rich, but rather belonged to a new entrepreneurial class, families that had risen to their enviable positions through work and good fortune.

  Good fortune? Yes, in reality they were not harder workers or more talented than their contempories at the outset of their respective careers, but at each bifurcation on the road to success, they had made the right choice, or had simply been in the right place at the right time.

  Parkly had grown up in Pimlico on a post-war housing estate, which had been partly privatised in the seventies and had since become prohibitively expensive for those for whom it had been originally built for, due to its prime location in the very heart of London.

  He was sixteen when his grandparents retired and moved to Brighton and his father, employed in the Westminster City Council accounts department, took over their three bedroom council flat, bought under the then government's 'right to buy' policy, thus getting a foot on the housing ladder. The flat, constructed only fifteen years previously at that point in time, was a considerable change from their older Milbank Housing Estate flat built at the beginning of the century.

  Parkly, obtained a BSc in Accounting and Business Management at the Central London Polytechnic and qualified as a Chartered Accountant. He commenced his career at Price Waterhouse then joined the West Mercian Permanent in 1987.

  Compared to that of Parkly's, Emma's family was several rungs further up the class ladder. She had grown up near Haywards Heath, Sussex, where she attended a private school and was a member of the local pony and tennis clubs. She had studied journalism and after flirting with fashion modelling she joined Tattler magazine, a 'stylish and indispensable society guide' according to its own description.

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  Chapter 24

&n
bsp; Sid Judge was an East Ender and proud of it. During his multifaceted life he had discovered many ways to make money, but never had he found a way of doing so with as little risk as flipping.

  His problem was he had always spent money as quick as it came in, graduating from strip clubs and sex shops to video rentals then double glazing, central heating and home extensions.

  Things had gone well until he made a foray into a market where he underestimated the competition; mobile telephones. When his chain of phone shops went down the drain Sid was forced to make himself scarce and headed for Florida, a popular destination for Brits who did not want to be confronted with foreign languages, though a few words in Spanish were useful.

  The first time he heard the word 'flip' used in a real estate context it was on a golf course in Miami, when he was playing eighteen holes with a fellow Londoner who had made good promoting condos. Not long after, with the American immigration authorities breathing down his neck, Sid headed back to London full of new ideas.

  After almost three years in the USA, interrupted by forced trips to the Bahamas to comply with US visa requirements and immigration laws, Sid returned home to Romford where the property boom with easy mortgages was taking off. He was introduced to Tom Barton by a Romford mortgage broker, who advertised 'mortgages even if you have credit problems'. Sid was a special case, having just returned home from abroad with a little cash in hand, he was in need of some creative skills to complete his mortgage application form as he was self employed, not an existing home owner, and had no credit commitments, hire purchase loans or overdrafts.

  Barton had the ready made solution, which came under a heading marked 'Self Certification: Employed Self Cert applicants do not need to provide proof of income'.

  It had become a simple formality in such cases and Sid with a ?15,000 deposit became the owner of a small flat in need of decoration in Hornchurch, Essex, with a mortgage of ?105,000.

  He moved in and a month later, after a quick paint job and a new knock down price kitchen, put it on sale for twenty grand more than he had paid for it. Within two weeks he found a buyer and pocketed his original deposit plus the twenty grand less expenses. Never had he made so much money so easily and so quickly, and even more surprisingly legally.

  The truth of the matter was there were many other Tom Bartons and Sid Judges on the loose at the height of the great housing boom. These replicated their easy deals contributing to building the huge bubble of hot air that was to eventually explode, bringing down many of those who had worked to create it.

  The Barton's were admired by all, as models of the successful entrepreneur, but when they failed they were trodden into the dirt by the tabloids and decried as thieves and swindlers by those whose greed had made them willing accomplices.

  Barton's betting shop, with its legions of flippers, Sid Judge look-a-likes, greedy and overambitious BTL owners, estate agents, brokers, banks and lenders, including many ordinary home owners, now threatened the entire British economy.

  The disarray, caused in part by Barton and millions of home owners, had gotten out of hand. Hard strapped first time owners, BTL owners, those who had traded up and those who had made unwise equity withdrawals would be faced with repossession and insolvency the instant their over stretched budgets reached tipping point.

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  Chapter 25

  Ryan took a seat in a beachfront bar called Beatles and watched the passers-by, holiday makers like himself. It seemed incongruous to him that here in India, ten thousand miles from home, so many middle age Brits sporting tattoos, shaven heads with their overweight wives, had congregated together. The men, if it wasn't for their dark glasses, sunburn and cheerful voices, could have been confused with the fugitives from Prison Break. It looks more like Southend on a sunny bank holiday he thought - not that he had ever been there - recognising the coarse Estuary accents sprinkled with one or two northern tones. All that was missing were the fish and chips, but of course the favourite national dish was the beachfront restaurant menus too.

  It was curious to observe this microcosm of British society, a foreign observer, looking a little closer, could have been excused for daring to ask the question: where was the multiculturalism of modern British society? It certainly wasn't in Kovalam, or in Phukit, or in almost any other favoured British holiday resort for that matter.

  Admittedly there was a handful of Caribbean Blacks, the partners of mixed marriages, it was something that could be easily understood as the West Indies shared a cultural affinity close to that of Britain, the populations of the Caribbean islands spoke English as their mother tongue, be it with some variations, they were Christians and had longer historical links with the British Isles than practically any other Commonwealth nation.

  As to the UK Indians, once arrived on subcontinent they were home - in their own cultural sphere - a cultural environment they did not share with their root British neighbours in the UK. As to the others originating from the subcontinent, they of course went to their respective countries. The rest were absent, whether they were from South or East Asia or from the Middle East or Africa.

  It was a paradox that the root British were more at home abroad than at home; at home they were forced to pay lip service to multi-culturism, deprecating their own history and culture, the Archbishop of Canterbury even preaching for the sharia, the media, with a few notable exceptions, bending over backwards to conform with a politically correct point of view.

  They even seemed to enjoy and exude their Britishness abroad; it was their only way of saying we're British with the pride and conviction that had once been a sign of the civilization their not very distant forefathers had accidentally exported.

  It was also a return to sources, where families sat together to enjoy meals in each others company, instead of sticking a ready made meal into the microwave and eating it in front of the television.

  Every man and his brother had become tourists, there was no nook or cranny on the planet that could escape Homo turisticus, thought Ryan, remembering a colleague who was on a Christmas cruise in Antarctica.

  A cripple made his way past, scuttering along on his rump, dragging his lifeless legs behind him, his handsome face smiling, his hand held out. A teenage boy selling drums passed and then another selling cigarettes - cigarettes he would never be able to afford himself. A few moments later an old beggar held out his hand, dressed more typically like a simple Indian with an off-white turban and his dhoti pulled up between his thin legs.

  The Court of Miracles was full of sights and surprises: tall thin young men from Germany or Sweden, their blond hair hanging in knots or their heads shaven but for a curious small circle of hair on the crown, dressed oddly in Indian clothes, Russians in the latest flashy fashions strolled amongst East Enders sporting beer bellies. Pale newly arrived girls strolled past, fresh and attractive, one stopped, surprised by Beatles, she raised her arms and inexplicably made a pirouette like a ballet dancer and then continued. Women fruit sellers passed by with their baskets of mangos, pineapples and papayas, brandishing their insalubrious knives and tin plates, accosting the afternoon strollers.

  It was certainly different from Kings Road, thought Ryan, as he sipped his newly discovered Masala coffee, enjoying the weird and wonderful procession.

  After a while he became bored and turned his attention to his more immediate surroundings spotting a copy of The Hindustan Times lying on the table to his left, more diverting than the engrained grime and old coffee spillings on his own table. A headline announced the police had smashed a ring of human organ traffickers.

  It was no secret, even for the casual visitor, all were not equal in India when it came to medical care, far from it, the local press and television regularly carried stories of poor labourers and villagers arriving Delhi in search of work, ending up in illegal clinics where a kidney was removed for wealthy Indians and foreigners. Clinics run by ruthless doctors, whose kidney transplant operations earned them five or six thous
and pounds for each patient.

  The poor in need of money to buy food and to support their large families became unwilling donors and victims of the illegal traffic in organs run by doctors. Doctors who had sworn by Apollo the physician, by ?sculapius, Hygeia, and Panacea, taking as witness all the gods and goddesses, to keep according to their ability and judgement, the oath, which included the words never do harm to anyone.

  A man sat down next to him, he looked around, then Ryan realised it was his newspaper.

  'Oh, I'm sorry! Is this yours?'

  'Yes, never mind.'

  Ryan handed back the newspaper.

  'Thanks.'

  'I was looking at the story about human kidneys.'

  'Oh yes, anything goes here. They call it the great organ bazaar, one of the largest centres for kidney transplants in the world.'

  'Do you live here?'

  'No, I'm here for a few months.'

  'On holiday?'

  'No, I'm doing some research work.'

  'Oh, science? or medicine perhaps?'

  'No,' he laughed. 'I'm a writer?research for my latest novel. My name is John?John Francis.'

  'Oh yes I've read one of your books. Nice to meet you,' said Ryan who then introduced himself.

  'Ah, that explains your interest in the story.'

  'Yes, I'm a doctor, but that's not the reason, it's the first newspaper I've seen since I've been here.'

  'I see, your first time in India?'

  'Yes.'

  'How do you like it?'

  'Well, it's okay,' he laughed shrugging at the same time, the adding more seriously: 'I wouldn't come here for a kidney transplant.'

  'It's a business here. The other day CNN reported a kidney scandal in the Tamil Nadu. It's not the first time, after the tsunami one hundred fifty women were caught up in a similar scandal. Before that villagers were selling kidneys in Singapore, the donors got four hundred pounds and the middle men pocketed twenty thousand. It goes on all the time.'