I knew the moment the steering on my car went funny that I was done for. It was Christmas Eve and in a moment of extreme foolishness, I’d gone out for a drive.

I know what you are thinking. “Silly fool” and worse. It was Christmas and I wanted to be myself for a few hours at least.

By myself, I mean Joanne rather than my given name of John.

After Maureen and Luke had left, I sat at my desk and went through everything that I might well be asked about if I was deposed by the SEC.

Early the next morning a text confirming that I was to be deposed arrived from my Lawyer.

“SEC Deposition at 11. Meet at my Office 9.”

I replied.

“Ok.”

I put down my phone and thought… ‘That’s my day gone up in smoke’.

The next morning and thanks to a delay on the subway, I arrived in the office only 5 minutes after the Wall St Market had opened.
As I walked across the floor and people started to stand up and applaud me. I stopped by the desk of one of the other traders and said,

“What is this for?”

“Don’t you know?”

“Know what? If I knew I’d hardly be asking you, now would I?”

“Your book is already up sixteen and a half.”

I was flabbergasted. It meant that my trading book was already up sixteen point five million. It must have been the trades I executed on Tokyo the previous day.

Sometimes life takes an unexpected twist. In my business, I am paid an awful lot of money to forecast the unexpected, take the ‘un’ out of uncertainty and at the same time make a shed load of money as a result. Even so there are times when even my crystal ball gazing misses something. The prospect of that is what makes me get out of bed each day and come into work.

Over dinner that evening, I said to Ma,
“I think it is entirely possible that Walt has gone over to the dark side. Kelly and I observed him doing something that was obviously illegal but we don’t know what yet.”

Ma didn’t flinch. She carried on eating as normal. When she’d finished her plate of food, she put down her fork and said,

“Stands to reason if you ask me. How else could he afford that Car? It looks expensive and a bright yellow one at that? That’s what Vegas does to people. I went there once. It rained so Jimmy and me got back into our car and headed for the coast. Other people get sucked in to places like that and like a whirlpool you can’t get out.”

One of my least favourite duties as Sheriff, was notifying people that one of their loved ones had died. It is was local then they’d often already know of a death and my arrival would be the confirmation. Occasionally, the death may have happened on the other side of the world and it was down to local law enforcement to do the deed.

Normally I’d go on this task accompanied by a female deputy but on this particular day, Sue-Ellen and Kelly were away helping the State Police on an operation in a neighbouring county so it was left to me to head out to the Wilson Farm to give them the bad news. The other bit of a downer for me was that their home was on the far edge of the county and the last ten miles of the journey is along a dirt road that hasn’t seen a grader for fifty years. Such is the lot of a County Sheriff.

[October 1931]

The three occupants of the home near Troy in upstate New York listened avidly to the daily reports of the trial for Tax Evasion of their one-time client, Al Capone. They knew more than most about the goings on of the Chicago Mob of the 1920’s. As transporters of illegal beer, they knew all the where and when and how much stuff was moved around. They knew to keep their mouths shut in the event of them being apprehended by one of the many arms of US Law Enforcement. They did have some information that might be used to broker a deal but otherwise, they would keep silent. They hoped that as a fairly minor cog in the big wheel of Prohibition Busting operations that went on in 1920's Chicago they'd slip through the net that the Feds were casting around.

[Autumn/Fall 1929]

The Girls didn’t get to hear about the happenings on Wall Street for a well over a week after the first big fall in stock prices. It was only when they went into Albany to do some Grocery shopping did they see the newspaper headlines. Both of them stopped dead and swore.

“That’s going to hit a lot of people very hard,” said Ethel.

“Including us. We had a good amount of dough in the bank just to look respectable. Those headlines were all about the run on the banks and banks going bust including ours.”

The couple didn’t get much done that afternoon other than clearing a bit of the seed beds as it came onto rain after about half an hour. After a while if got a lot heavier so they retreated into the house where Liam got the log fire going.

The previous owner had left a woodshed full of logs so making the place nice and warm was not that difficult if you knew how. Liam didn’t but, after a lot of swearing and frustration, the fire was burning brightly.

Liam went off the following morning in search of some stout fence posts, chicken netting and a host of other things that would allow them to build a fence that might deter the boars in future. It was soon painfully obvious that his car was not the right vehicle for life in that part of the world. Carrying rolls on Chicken wire in a saloon car was not going to work in the long run.

[This is an oldie from late September 2010.]

“Stay where you are love. I’ll call for an ambulance,” said the tall man.

“Fuck off and leave me alone,” replied the woman who was obviously injured.

“Nonsense. I can see that you need medical attention. That blow to the head needs some stitches.”

“What are you a fucking doctor or something? Get the hell out of here and leave me alone.”

He laughed.
“No, you don’t understand. I’m a special constable. Just on my way home from a shift.”

[One month after Maxine had received that letter upon their return from France]

“Hello, I’m Maxine Saunders. I have an appointment with Dr Hillier at 2:30,” said Maxine.
She was the offices of a doctor just off of Harley St. Adrian had insisted that she do her transition properly but privately. Today was her first visit to the Psychologist who would supposedly help her transition.

“Dr Hillier is a little behind schedule today. Please take a seat. She should be ready to see you in ten minutes. Please take a seat,” said the receptionist.

One of the many businesses that Adrian had fingers in was a 40% stake in a Vineyard in the Languedoc region of France. Maxine was still getting to grips with the affairs of the hotel in Devon when he said that it was time for them to visit it.

She looked up the location on the map and it was clear that it wasn’t the easiest of places to get to. A quick internet search revealed that one airline flew direct from London to Carcassonne a few times a week.

“Shall I book us some flights? They go from Stanstead,” asked Maxine.

Adrian laughed.

“Already booked for next Tuesday,” he replied grinning.

Maxine continued her task of trying to understand the business and how Adrian worked. A lot of it seemed like magic to her but slowly his approach to doing business became clear.

All the time, the bid to buy the Hotel in Devon was on the table. Adrian’s lawyers tried to get a decision about the bid but for a while, they were fobbed off by the phalanx of Amercian Lawyers and Accountants that seemed to be pouring over every aspect of the UK Company’s operations. Adrian was perplexed as this should have been done as part of the ‘due diligence’ before the deal was signed. He wondered more than once if there was something in the books that was very dodgy.

Six weeks after the bid had been put on the table, the reason for the delays became obvious. Two of the former UK company directors were arrested on suspicion of money laundering and employing illegal immigrants. Jon Lord was also implicated in the wrongdoing.

My job in Chichester was with an existing four-person research team. This was very much an ‘on the quiet’ part of Sally’s group of companies. My task was to add a wider perspective of views to reports that the others were compiling for her. She’d told me that once I’d gotten my feet under the table so to speak, I’d be given my own projects to work on. This made me feel both proud and slightly scared at the same time. Sally had put a lot of faith in me so it was now up to me to not let her down.

On the way down to Sussex, Sally briefed me about the other members of the team. They had all been poached from large financial institutions in London or from Academia. They were enticed by London sized salaries and being able to live in the Sussex countryside.

Forsythe Saga – Prologue

The story begins in late 2008, at the time of the Banking crisis. Leman Brothers had gone belly up and the financial world was in meltdown.
It is the AGM of a family owned company, Forsythe Brothers. It was being held at the family home that could have come straight from the time of Cadfael. The ancient stone building is even on the outskirts of Shrewsbury close to the River Severn.

Present at the meeting were the four siblings, David, Stephanie, Dorothy and Adrian, that owned the company and the company secretary, a cousin of the family. It is a family owned company after all...

As usual, the main topic for discussion was about the lack of profitability of the business. Adrian as Chairman was addressing the meeting.

“As you all know, Dad put me in control of the company and yet you all seem to think that I’m unconcerned about the profits that the business is generating.”

My small workshop was quiet for once. I’d recently finished and delivered a large order and was cleaning up when I noticed someone standing in the doorway.

I looked up and saw silhouetted against the later afternoon sun, a very shapely young woman. As I looked at her, she flicked her long hair. For half a second, I wondered if I was going to have a heart attack.

I didn’t so I walked towards this vision of beauty.

Bill’s mind was not really on work the following week. One of his colleagues John Arbuthnot noticed it.
“Ok Bill. Who is she and do we know her or more importantly, have I known her?”

“Eh?”

“You are clearly going through the motions this week. You messed up a trade yesterday. It was lucky that I spotted it otherwise your position would have been down by a mere trifle of three million quid. So, once again, who is she and do we, your partners in crime know her?”

“Sorry to disappoint you John, it is not a she. It is a thing and I have to decide by the end of the week.”

Bryony Vincent was in the thick of it as usual. She was a true ‘BBBBBB’ which meant that there was never any shortage of men wanting to be with her. By ‘BBBBBB’ I mean, Beautiful, Buxom, Brainy, Bonkers, Blonde (a natural) and at times Brainless. As any truly genuine 6B person can testify, they could be all 6 at the same time.

The worst trait was the last, ‘Brainless’. Despite an I.Q. of 175 and several degrees including a PhD after her name, she would always fall for the oldest, most stupid chat-up lines in the business. All a man needed to do was flutter his eyelashes (why to the most drop dead gorgeous men always have lashes to die for?) in her direction and she was hooked.

“Exactly where have you heard that name before?” I said as I wiped the sleep from my eyes.

“Savernake Forest,” exclaimed Jemma.

The trouble with my partner was that when she was overly tired or woken up in the middle of the night, sometimes she spoke total gibberish. I’d learned to handle it but many people we had to work with couldn’t handle her without losing their patience pretty quickly.

My brain was slowly starting to work and as I tried to remember the last time I’d or rather we’d been to Savernake Forest. This is an area of ancient woodland to the South East of the town of Marlborough in Wiltshire. Then it came to me.

“Oh, you must mean Farthings home?”

“Yes, that’s it. He left his home very much in a hurry, didn’t he?” reasoned Jemma.

“Yeah, we stopped him as he left in his Porsche. If I recall you lit him up with your target light and his face turned to ash. But what else did you remember?”