It hadn’t occurred to me at the time to bring back a flower or a pebble or something – I’d been too fucking freaked out, I suppose. Not that that would have proved anything anyway. I knew something bizarre had happened but I didn’t know exactly what. I had the use of the room and the run of the place for the afternoon, until the staff arrived in the early evening to make the club ready for the night’s fun, and I had a good look round the room, the rooms on either side and even the cellar underneath and the little private bar directly above but it all looked plain and kosher, just slightly seedy in the cold strip light of day and I couldn’t see how the trick, assuming it was a trick, obviously, had been pulled. Drugs, I supposed. Or hypnosis. Suggestion and all that, know what I mean?

No, I didn’t know what I meant either. It had just been too fucking real. I left the place no wiser than when I’d arrived and even turned down the offer of VIP entry, a nice table and a free bottle of bubbles from my new friend Kliment. Tired, I said. Some other time. Flew straight back to dear old fuck-off Blighty that night.

I looked into travelling back to the Zone, around Chernobyl, but it was properly difficult to arrange and I never really felt happy with the whole idea. The more I thought about it the more sure I was I’d go back, at some risk to my future health, find the place where Mrs M had been hanging out and discover, oh wow, it was empty and deserted and it was as if it had all never been. No office, just an old supermarket or warehouse or whatever the fuck.

Tried asking Ed about it but he claimed he knew nothing. Never met or heard of a Mrs Mulverhill. Connie S was just a woman he’d vaguely heard of recently at the time when she asked to be introduced to me. He swore he’d never heard of anything called the Concern and he certainly wasn’t getting any mysterious dosh every month, eight and a half K or otherwise. I’d have pushed further but he was just on the edge of getting annoyed with me, I could tell, and I was pretty sure I knew when Mr N was telling the truth by now. I hadn’t told him any more than I’d needed to but he was obviously intrigued just from the little I had said and started asking me questions. I stonewalled him, told him he didn’t want to know any more.

Connie herself seemed to have disappeared off the face of the fucking Earth. Phones disconnected, business address a briefly rented office in Paris, unheard of by anybody who might have known somebody in her line of work.

Checked the account, saw the money, waited for the call that never came. All that happened was that a couriered letter arrived from a C. Sequorin in Tashkent, Uzbekistan with a bunch of weird-looking names that were codes, apparently. I was to commit them to memory if I could, otherwise just keep the letter safe for future reference. I put it in my safe. (I hired a private eye in Tashkent, because you can do that sort of thing these days in the wonderful new globalised world, providing only that you have access to piles of dosh. Nothing. Another deserted office. No joy tracing the source of the funds in the Cayman Islands either. Well, of course not. If governments can’t trace anything in tax havens, how the fuck was I supposed to? When I thought about this it was actually highly fucking reassuring.)

A week after the letter with the codes, a padded envelope arrived with something the size and weight of a brick inside. It was a black box of thick plastic and inside that was a steel box with a sort of dial on the top made of seven concentric rings of different metals arranged around a very slightly concave button in the centre. These rings circled round and back with a sort of smooth clickiness, if you know what I mean, and if you looked carefully they had lots of little patterns of dots on them but they didn’t seem to do anything. There was a thinner-than-hair fine line around the middle of the box, like it was meant to open, maybe if you got the dials on the top arranged just right, like a combination lock on a safe, I suppose, but with the box came a note from Mrs Mulverhill saying I was to keep this metal box safe, guard it with my life and only give it to somebody who knew the codes from the letter.

I tried having it X-rayed via a pal who works in airport security at City, but the box wasn’t having it. In fact, my mate thought his machine must be broken cos the thing didn’t show up at all. How fucking weird is that? If you could make a gun out of this stuff you could saunter onto any plane in the world totally tooled up. My guy pointed this out and I told him it’d be very unhealthy indeed for both of us if he breathed so much as a syllable about it. I’d barely finished telling him this when I got a very terse text message on my mobile telling me never to X-ray the box again or even think about trying any other method of looking inside.

Keep it hidden, keep it safe. That was all.

How the fuck had they known?

Anyway, I lobbed the fucker into the back of the safe with the letter and did my best to forget about both of them, quite successfully.

Months, years passed. Left Mr N’s firm when he retired in 2000, became a hedgie working out of an ultra-smart property in Mayfair with another dozen or so guys, left NYC the day before the towers came down and was never sure if I’d had a narrow escape or had missed something it would have been worth being there for, despite all the nastiness of it, just to be able to say I’d been there, know what I mean? Anyway, I was on a beach in Trinidad so it didn’t matter. Didn’t see much of the Noyces after Ed retired, though they kept inviting me to Spetley Hall for years afterwards.

Made more money. Lost some of it opening a restaurant with a couple of mates when each of us thought one of the others must be the one who actually knew what he was doing. Still, live and learn, eh? Me and half a dozen other guys broke away from Tangible Topiary (that was the name of the hedge fund) and started up a new one a few doors down from our old office. We called it FMS. It was registered at Companies House and in the Cayman Islands as just FMS Ltd with no further detail though we told people who insisted on knowing that the letters stood for Financial Merchant Securities or Future Market Superstars or some such tosh, but really it stood for Fuck Me Sideways. As in Fuck Me Sideways, Look At The Amount Of Money We’re Making.

Our Mayfair office was even grander than TT’s, deliberately. We had a pool put in in the basement, a gym in the attic, and a games room with wraparound monitors for driving and shoot-’em-up games. Oh, and a flotation pod each. All tax-deductible, as you’d expect. Even the computer games were there to help us work off all that testosterone and aggression, weren’t they? The place usually contained more people there to advise us or tutor us on stuff than it did us actual hedgies. We had personal trainers, an in-house masseur, fine-wine advisers, bespoke personal-scent consultants, grooming and presentational experts, lifestyle and diet gurus, yacht brokers, fencing instructors and personal shoppers arriving from Harrods or Jermyn Street every couple of hours or so with stuff they thought would suit us (no time or inclination to actually go to the shops or mix with the plebs).

Not to mention an account with a very discreet top-of-the-range escort service based a couple of streets away for when all that testosterone needed another sort of outlet. We had a special room for that too that we called the canteen, though the joke was some guys took it at their desk. I was slow to start using that particular service. Never paid for it before, so it was like a pride thing? Only there’d be times when you’d be sitting there in front of the screens and feeling suddenly horny and knowing a fabulous-looking girl who needed absolutely no chatting up or dining or alcoholic lubrication or talk of Where do we think this is going? or even cuddling was only a phone call and maybe ten minutes away and even though it was a week’s wages for some wanker it was only petty cash given what we were making. Daft not to really, know what I mean? Like fast food, only really quality fast food.