Silence enveloped the room. It was Jean-Pierre who broke it again:
‘So what do you suggest, Professor,’ he said sarcastically. ‘Do we hold an annual dinner to remind us what fools we’ve been?’
‘No, that was not what I had in mind.’ Stephen hesitated, realizing that what he was about to suggest was bound to cause even more commotion. Once again he rose to his feet, and said quietly and deliberately:
‘We have had our money stolen by a very clever man who has proved to be an expert in share fraud. None of us is knowledgeable about stocks and shares, but we are all experts in our own fields. Gentlemen, I therefore suggest we steal it back.
A few seconds’ silence was followed by uproar.
‘Just walk up and take it I suppose?’ said Robin.
‘Kidnap him,’ mused James.
‘Why don’t we just kill him and claim the life insurance?’ said Jean-Pierre.
Several moments passed. Stephen waited until he had complete silence again, and then he handed around the four dossiers marked ‘Harvey Metcalfe’ with each of their names below. A green dossier for Robin, a blue one for James and a yellow for Jean-Pierre. The red master copy Stephen kept for himself. They were all impressed. While they had been wringing their hands in unproductive dismay, it was obvious that Stephen Bradley had been hard at work.
Stephen continued:
‘Please read your dossier carefully. It will brief you on everything that is known about Harvey Metcalfe. Each of you must take the document away and study the information, and then return with a plan of how we are, between us, to extract $1,000,000 from him without his ever being aware of it. All four of us must come up with a separate plan. Each may involve the other three in his own operation. We will return here in fourteen days’ time and present our conclusions. Each member of the team will put $10,000 into the kitty as a float and I, as the mathematician, will keep a running account. All expenses incurred in retrieving our money will be added to Mr Metcalfe’s bill, starting with your journey down here this evening and the cost of the dinner tonight.’
Jean-Pierre and Robin began to protest again, but it was James who stopped the proceedings, by simply saying:
‘I agree. What have we got to lose? On our own we’ve no chance at alclass="underline" together we might just tweak the bastard.’
Robin and Jean-Pierre looked at each other, shrugged and nodded.
The four of them settled down to discuss in detail the material Stephen had acquired over the past few days. They left the college a little after midnight, each agreeing to have a plan ready for the Team’s consideration in fourteen days’ time. None of them was quite sure where it all might end, but each was relieved to know he was no longer on his own.
Stephen decided that the first part of the Team versus Harvey Metcalfe had gone as well as he could have wished. He only hoped his conspirators would now get down to work. He sat in his armchair, stared at the ceiling and continued thinking.
6
Robin retrieved his car from the High Street, not for the first time in his life being thankful for the ‘Doctor on Call’ sticker which always gave him an extra degree of freedom when parking. He headed back toward his home in Berkshire. There was no doubt about it, Stephen Bradley was a very impressive man; Robin was determined to come up with something that would ensure that he played his full part.
Robin let his mind linger a little on the delightful prospect of recovering the money he had so ill-advisedly entrusted to Prospecta Oil and Harvey Metcalfe. It must be worth a try: after all, he might as well be struck off the register of the General Medical Council for attempted robbery as for bankruptcy. He wound the window of the car down a little way to dispel the last delicious effects of the claret and considered Stephen’s challenge more carefully.
The journey between Oxford and his country house passed very quickly. His mind was so preoccupied with Harvey Metcalfe that when he arrived home to his wife there were large sections of the journey that he could not even remember. Robin had only one talent to offer, apart from his natural charm, and he hoped that he was right in thinking that particular talent was the strength in his armor and a weakness in Harvey Metcalfe’s. He began to repeat aloud something that was written on page 16 of Stephen’s dossier, ‘One of Harvey Metcalfe’s recurrent worries is...’
‘What was it all about, darling?’
His wife’s voice brought Robin quickly to his senses and he locked the briefcase containing the green Metcalfe dossier.
‘You still awake, Mary?’
‘Well, I’m not talking in my sleep, love.’
Robin had to think quickly. He had not yet steeled himself to tell Mary the details of his foolish investment, but he had let her know about the dinner in Oxford, not at that time realizing it was in any way connected with Prospecta Oil.
‘It was a tease, sweetheart. An old friend of mine from Cambridge has been appointed a lecturer at Oxford, so he dragged a few of his contemporaries down for dinner and we had a damn good evening. Jim and Fred from my old college were there, but I don’t expect you remember them.’
A bit weak, thought Robin, but the best he could do at 1.15 in the morning.
‘Sure it wasn’t some beautiful girl?’ said Mary.
‘I’m afraid Jim and Fred could hardly be described as beautiful, even by their loving wives.’
‘Do lower your voice, Robin, or you’ll wake the children.’
‘I’m going down again in two weeks’ time to...’
‘Oh, come to bed and tell me about it at breakfast.’
Robin was relieved to be let off the hook until the morning. He clambered in beside his fragrant silk-clad wife and ran his finger hopefully down her vertebral column to her coccyx.
‘You’ll be lucky, at this time of night,’ she mumbled.
They both slept.
Jean-Pierre had booked himself in at the Eastgate Hotel in the High. There was to be an undergraduate exhibition the next day at the Christ Church Art Gallery. Jean-Pierre was always on the lookout for new young talent which he could contract to the Lamanns Gallery. It was the Marlborough Gallery, a few doors away from him in Bond Street, that had taught the London art world the astuteness of buying up young artists and being closely identified with their careers. But for the moment, the artistic future of his gallery was not uppermost in Jean-Pierre’s mind: its very survival was threatened, and the quiet American don from Magdalen had offered him the chance of redress. He settled down in his comfortable hotel bedroom, oblivious of the late hour, reading his dossier and working out where he could fit into the jigsaw. He was not going to allow two Englishmen and a Yank to beat him. His father had been relieved at Rochefort by the British in 1918 and released from a prisoner-of-war camp near Frankfurt by the Americans in 1945. Nothing was going to stop him being a full participant in this operation. He read his yellow dossier late into the night: the germ of an idea was beginning to form in his mind.
James made the last train from Oxford and looked for an empty carriage where he could settle down to study the blue dossier. He was a worried man: he was sure the other three would each come up with a brilliant plan and, as had always seemed to be the case in the past, he would be found lacking. He had never been under any real pressure before — everything had come to him so easily; now it had all gone just as easily. A foolproof scheme for relieving Harvey Metcalfe of some of his excess profits was not James’s idea of an amusing pastime. Still, the awful vision of his father discovering that the Hampshire farm was mortgaged up to the hilt was always there to keep his mind on the job. But fourteen days was such a short time: where on earth should he begin? He was not a professional man like the other three and had no particular skills to offer. He could only hope that his stage experience might come in useful at some point.