Borrowed Light Read Free Page A

the
Financial Times
lying on the kitchen table in Sandown Road.
    ‘Shouldn’t someone be holding his hand? Keeping him out of trouble? Some of these people are brighter than they look.’
    ‘My thoughts entirely. Marie’s worried sick. I don’t think she’s got over Christmas yet.’
    ‘Yeah? You’re telling me all that came as a
surprise
?’
    ‘So she says.’
    ‘She’s playing games, Stu. She sussed him from the start. She knew he was serious all along. She told me so back in May.’
    Winter remembered the conversation word for word, a lunchtime meal in a Southsea brasserie the day Pompey returned from Wembley
     with the FA Cup. The news that her husband had political ambitions came hand in hand with Marie’s realisation that Ezzie,
     her daughter, was having an affair. The events that followed, in Stu’s phrase, had stretched the family to breaking point,
     and even now the cracks still showed.
    ‘So he’s going ahead with this interview?’ Winter wanted to know more.
    ‘Big time. He’s invited this woman down for lunch at the hotel. Full look-at-me treatment. You know how subtle he can be.’
    Winter laughed. Bazza’s pride and joy was a hotel on the seafront, the Royal Trafalgar. Its recent elevation to four-star
     status had prompted a celebratory knees-up that had lasted until dawn. For Baz, the fourth star was the clinching evidence
     that ten busy years in the cocaine trade could buy you anything – even the launch of a campaign to install himself as the
     city’s first elected mayor, announced at a gleeful press conference two days before Christmas.
    ‘The
Guardian
eat people like Baz for breakfast. Someone should have told him that.’
    ‘I did.’
    ‘And?’
    ‘He says he can handle it, told me to fuck off. So …’ Stu flashed the car ahead and accelerated onto the M23 ‘… here
     I am.’
    Winter settled down for the journey south. When Stu wanted the full debrief on Dubai, he obliged. As far as he was concerned,
     the family business was three quarters of a million quid in the hole. As Stu, above all, would know.
    Norcliffe winced. ‘It gets worse,’ he said. ‘I’ve just done an audit on the rest of the portfolio. France is horrible, the
     UK’s collapsing, those new places in Montenegro are still half built, and Spain’s a basket case. Rely on the Arabs to make
     the thing come good, as Baz seems to have done, and you’re looking at meltdown.’
    Until recently Stu had been running a successful hedge fund. Premises in Mayfair, multi-billion-dollar turnover, black Porsche
     Carrera, the lot. The fact that he’d sold out for a decent price only weeks before Lehman went bust told Winter he knew a
     thing or two about the workings of big business. Putting your trust in the markets, like putting your trust in marriage, could
     take you to a very ugly place.
    ‘So how bad is it?’
    ‘You want the truth?’
    ‘That’s a silly fucking question.’
    ‘OK, here’s the way it is …’
    At moments of stress, or high excitement, Stu affected an American accent. Winter had often wondered whether it was a defence
     mechanism, a form of temporary disguise, trying to kid himself he was someone else.
    ‘Number one, most of the properties abroad are secured on loans of various kinds, mainly fixed-rate mortgages. As long as
     the earnings service the mortgages,
no problema.
When they don’t, huge fucking
problema.
’
    ‘And they don’t?’
    ‘No way. People are skint. They’re not going on holiday. They can’t stretch to a couple of grand a week for that nice hacienda
     by the beach. So the likes of my father-in-law have to start thinking long lets, semi-permanent tenancies, but that’s no answer
     either because the hot money, the vacation premium, that’s all gone. Rents just don’t cut it, not the way Baz has structured
     the property holdings.’
    This was news to Winter. He’d always assumed Bazza had simply swapped hookey cocaine dosh for all those bricks and