that I’ve stared into so many times—across the kitchen table as we eat, when we share a knowing glance at parties, when we make love—lock intently onto mine.
“I did not,” he says quietly.
But really, what can you tell from someone’s eyes? Presumably every one of those nurses I listed had gazes as clear and untroubled as his.
And I still can’t shake off the sense that there’s something he’s not telling me.
“Do you believe me?” he adds.
“Of course,” I say, although I don’t suppose either of us really thinks I mean it.
77
PETE
I FOUND MURDO MCALLISTER through LinkedIn. I simply set my profile to incognito and browsed Miles’s contacts. About a dozen were ex-Hardings. I chose Murdo because his dates showed he’d left the bank around the same time as Miles, and also because under INTERESTS he’d listed “Mayfair Mayflies,” the rugby team Lucy said Miles used to play for.
Contacting him was a risk, of course. Murdo might simply forward my email to Miles. But I was betting that Maddie was right, and that what Miles was doing to us was part of a consistent pattern of behavior.
And besides, Maddie was definitely right in saying we had to do something. If nothing else, I had to show her that I was just as committed as she was to clearing my name.
Murdo suggested meeting in a pub in Shepherd Market, off Piccadilly. It wasn’t an area I knew—a maze of tiny streets and alleyways where wine merchants and bookshops rubbed shoulders with embassies and pricey antiques dealers. But the traditional Victorian pub he’d chosen could have been in any market town in England. As I walked in he stood up and greeted me, a pleasant, burly man with thinning curly hair and a faint Scottish accent.
He allowed me to buy him a beer, but only a half. “I don’t have long—I’ve got a call at one thirty. You said you wanted to talk about Miles Lambert. You’re not about to offer him a job, are you?”
I shook my head. “It’s a bit more complicated than that.”
I gave him the short version. When I’d finished, he said flatly, “What you describe doesn’t surprise me in the least.”
I pulled out my notebook. “Can you be a bit more specific?”
Just for a moment, Murdo looked anxious. “This is off the record, right?”
“If you like.”
He nodded. “I met Miles when he joined Hardings. He was headed for the top—a golden boy. A few people thought it odd he’d moved jobs every couple of years before coming to us, but since he’d always moved to more senior positions or for a bigger salary, you could read it as smart career planning. This wasn’t long after the crash, and everything was changing—the regulators were insisting on banks setting up internal compliance departments, risk assessment experts were getting seats on the board, that kind of stuff.” Murdo took a pull of his beer. “The traders all hated it, but we could see why it was necessary. Miles’s specialty was spotting gaps in the new regulations and gaming them. Nothing wrong with that, of course—it was what we were paid to do. And ultimately, if Compliance was happy, fine.”
“But Miles went further?”
Murdo nodded. “In that environment, it was all too easy to start thinking, How do I package this so Compliance approves it, even though I know it’s actually against the rules? At the end of the day, they were just another bunch of muppets you had to outsmart. And Miles was good at it. He was a bloody professional banker—focused, driven, with an unbelievable work ethic, but he never got stressed or shouted at people. And believe me, that’s unusual—trading’s a high-pressure environment. He was put in charge of a team, and although he drove them pretty hard, they all seemed to like him.”
“So what happened?”
“Rogue trading,” Murdo said shortly. “We were both working with complex equity derivatives that most people in the bank couldn’t even spell, let alone understand. But essentially, if you made a bet on a particular asset rising, you had to hedge it by making a bet on another asset that could be counted on to move in the opposite direction. That way, you limited the bank’s risk, so you were allowed to make a bigger initial bet. It’s a bit like taking out an insurance policy against your house burning down—it means you can risk buying a bigger house than you otherwise could. Miles had found a way to make the risky trade