East of the City Read Free Page A

plate-glass. ‘First time up. Can you believe it?’
    I couldn’t, not really. Or maybe I just didn’t want to. And maybe I should have been thinking a bit more about Sebastian just then too, but I wasn’t, not at first. What I was thinking was that if this really was a K and R, and we had to pay out, I could forget about my promotion. Because it was me who'd talked Allen and Angela into writing K and R business in the first place. So far Sebastian Ward was our one and only policy. Five million quid. I was starting to feel quite sick.
    Then Angela burst in with Max just behind, she gave the note to Allen.
    ‘What now?’ Max said, turning a frantic half-circle. ‘It’s your responsibility, isn’t it?’ Allen told him to settle down. Max threw up a hand. ‘He’s been kidnapped, for fucksake. Settle down? You crazy?’
    ‘When did you get the note?’
    ‘Just now.’ Max turned left then right. ‘Fifteen minutes, I don’t know I came straight over.'
    ‘No phone call?’
    ‘Just the note.'
    Angela asked her husband if he’d called Bill Tyler yet. He went to his desk now and made the call. Max kept asking stupid questions, I thought Angela was going to hit him.
    Backing over to a chair by the wall, I sat down. I bent forward, elbows on my knees, head in hands, and stared at the little red triangles in the carpet. Bill Tyler. Not just our security expert on the Ottoman case, he ran the specialist K and R rescue team, the guys we’d told him we were never going to need. And now, suddenly, we needed them.
    ‘Ian?’
    When I lifted my head I found the three of them looking at me.
    ‘Take the note to Tyler,’ Allen said, hanging up. ‘He needs to see it. He’s leaving his office right now. He’ll meet you at the other place.' Then he saw I was lost. ‘Snap out of it, Ian. The safe-house.’
    ‘Allen-’
    ‘What?’ he barked.
    No, I thought. This definitely was not the time. Shaking my head, I told him, Nothing. Then I grabbed the note and headed for the door.
    Max said, ‘I’ll come too.’
    I glanced back at Allen. He gave a quick flick of the hand. 'Take him. Get going.'

    Sebastian Ward was a face in the market. There are plenty who think they are, and even more who want to be, but Sebastian was it, the real thing. When he came into the Room, people noticed. After ten minutes there’d be a cluster of senior underwriters around him, Sebastian chatting and smiling and generally charming them. Partly it was business, his company WardSure was a fair-sized broker so he could send plenty of premiums their way; but it wasn’t just that. He had boxes at the opera and Ascot, he entertained on a grand scale, but it wasn’t even that either. Allen Mortlake used to call these underwriters Sebastian’s ‘free caviar’ friends, but that wasn’t true. Sebastian was genuinely liked. As a broker you don’t go from being a one-man-band to owning and managing a company like WardSure without having some special gift. And Sebastian’s gift was charm, an instinct for putting people at ease, somehow making even acquaintances think they were his friends. I sometimes wondered if Allen didn’t envy Sebastian that. They were both big men at Lloyd’s, but whenever I saw them walk into the Room together it was Allen Mortlake who ended up standing on the edge of the group that formed. It wasn’t Allen’s opinions on the market anybody wanted to hear, not while Sebastian was delivering the latest jokes he’d picked up from God knows where.
    And even before Sebastian got seriously rich he had the charm. I know that, because I was there. It was Sebastian I had to thank for rescuing me from the dogs and my old man. But now Sebastian Ward had been kidnapped and his house had burnt down, it was a bloody strange turn.
    The safe-house was in that no-man’s-land between Docklands and the City, the taxi dropped us in the next street. Max tagged along beside me, we turned into a lane, walked fifty yards, then turned again. He