It was intolerable. Thomas had caught a glimpse of the beautiful Shirley Eaton in her dressing-gown as he came from the restaurant, and he could not bear the thought of such loveliness now being unveiled away from his greedy gaze. Hard-hearted, cool-headed businessman that he was, so used to presiding impassively over the building and wrecking of huge financial fortunes, it made him want to cry. The situation was desperate. Something had to be done.

As he prowled around the outskirts of the studio floor in semi-darkness, salvation presented itself in the form of a stepladder propped up against the back of some scenery. Cocking his ear against the plasterboard, Thomas could hear the actors’ voices on the other side as they attempted take two of the bedroom scene. He glanced up and noticed two small pinpoints of light drilled into the wood, just where the ladder was resting. Could it possibly be that they would look out on to the set? (As he later discovered, they were cut out of an oil painting, a gruesome family portrait hanging on the bedroom wall, behind which the watchful eyes of the murderer would sometimes make a chilling appearance.) Silently he climbed the ladder and found that the drillholes were exactly positioned to accommodate a pair of human eyes. They might almost have been designed for that purpose. After taking a few seconds to accustom himself to the glare of the lights, Thomas looked down and found that he now had an uninterrupted view of the forbidden bedroom.

It wasn’t immediately clear what was going on, although the scene appeared to revolve around Kenneth, Shirley and a mirror. Kenneth had his back to Shirley while she took most of her clothes off, but he could still see her reflection in the mirror, which was on a hinge and which he was doing his best to keep tilted, for the sake of her modesty. Shirley stood by the side of the bed, facing the portrait through which Thomas’s widened eyes were now staring out, unnoticed. He seemed to have arrived during a lull in the proceedings. Kenneth was in conversation with the director while two young assistants made small adjustments to the angle of the mirror in response to shouted instructions from the cameraman. Finally the director called out, ‘OK, positions, everyone!’, and Kenneth went over to the door to make his entrance. The set went quiet.

Kenneth opened the door, walked in, and looked startled to see Shirley, wearing only her slip and about to put on a nightgown.

He said: ‘I say, what are you doing in my room?’

Shirley said: ‘This isn’t your room. I mean, that isn’t your luggage, is it?’

She clutched the nightgown modestly to her bosom.

Kenneth said: ‘Oh, blimey. No. Wait a minute, that’s not my bed, either. I must have got lost. I’m sorry. I’ll – I’ll push off.’

He started to leave, but paused after only a few steps. He turned and saw that Shirley was still holding on to her nightgown, unsure of his intentions.

Thomas stirred excitedly on the ladder.

Kenneth said: ‘Miss, you don’t happen to know where my bedroom is, do you?’

Shirley shook her head sadly and said: ‘No, I’m afraid I don’t.’

Kenneth said: ‘Oh,’ and paused. ‘I’m sorry. I’ll go now.’

Shirley hesitated, a resolve forming within her: ‘No. Hang on.’ She gestured with her hand, urgently. ‘Turn your back a minute.’

Kenneth turned and found himself staring into the mirror, in which he could see his own reflection, and beyond that, Shirley’s. Her back was to him, and she was wriggling out of her slip, pulling it over her head.

He said: ‘J– just a minute, miss.’

Thomas heard a movement behind him.

Kenneth hastily lowered the mirror.

Shirley turned to him and said: ‘You’re sweet.’ She finished pulling her slip over her head, and started to unfasten her bra.

Thomas felt his ankles suddenly gripped by a strong pair of hands. He gasped and nearly fell off the ladder, and then looked down. He was confronted by the grizzled features of Sid James, who flashed him a menacing smile, and whispered: ‘Come on, laughing boy. I think it’s time you and I went for a walk.’

Pinning Thomas’s arm firmly behind his back, Sid frogmarched him out into a corridor, ignoring the illustrious banker’s garbled protestations.

‘Now I know this looks bad,’ he was saying, ‘but I was really just checking on the soundness of the construction materials. It’s absolutely essential that we know our investment is being –’

‘Look, mate, I’ve read about people like you in the papers. There are words for people like you: not very nice words, most of them.’

‘Perhaps this isn’t the best moment,’ said Thomas, ‘but I really am a huge fan of yours. I don’t suppose you could manage an autograph at all …?’

‘You’ve really slipped up this time, matey. The thing about Shirley, you see, she’s a lovely girl. Very popular round here. Young, too. So you’re in big trouble if you ever get caught doing this sort of thing again.’

‘I do hope we’ll be seeing you back on the television soon,’ said Thomas desperately, wincing from the pressure on his arm. ‘Another series of Hancock’s Half Hour, perhaps?’

They had reached a door to the outside world. Sid pushed it open and let go of Thomas, who breathed a heavy sigh of relief and started brushing down his trousers. When he turned to look at Sid, he was surprised to see his face now contorted with fury.

‘Don’t you read the papers, you ignorant pillock? Me and Tony are history. Finished. Kaput.’

‘I’m sorry, I hadn’t heard.’

And it was at this point that Sid James took a deep breath, pointed a wagging finger at Thomas, and sent him on his way with the parting words which were still fresh in the old man’s mind nearly thirty years later, as he sat chuckling over the incident with his brother Henry by the warm, homely fireside of the Heartland Club.

∗

Perhaps inspired by his visit to Twickenham Studios, Thomas had a number of peepholes installed in various key locations at the Stewards offices when he became chairman of the bank. He liked to know that he could spy on his juniors’ meetings whenever he wanted, and to feel that he had an advantage over everyone else who visited or worked in the building. It was for this same reason that he considered the chairman’s office itself to be such a masterpiece of design: for the oak panelling on the walls was, to all appearances, unbroken, and any visitor trying to leave at the end of an unsuccessful interview might spend several fumbling minutes looking for the door before Thomas would rise to his assistance with an air of tired expertise.

This feature was itself symptomatic of the secrecy in which all of Stewards’ business was habitually cloaked. It was not until the 1980s that merchant banking began to lose its gentlemanly, recreational image and take on a sort of glamour which threatened to encourage a tiny (though still, in Thomas’s view, profoundly unhealthy) flicker of public interest. To some extent he brought it upon himself. Recognizing the huge profits which were to be made from advising the government on its privatization programme, he took aggressive steps to ensure that Stewards secured itself a substantial share of this well-publicized business. He thoroughly enjoyed snatching these huge state-owned companies from the taxpayers’ hands and carving them up among a minority of profit-hungry shareholders: the knowledge that he was helping to deny ownership to many and concentrate it in the hands of a few filled him with a deep and calming sense of rightness. It satisfied something primeval in him. The only place Thomas could find even greater, more lasting fulfilment, perhaps, was in the area of mergers and takeovers.

For a while Stewards led the way in the upsurge of takeover business which swept through the City during the first half of Mrs Thatcher’s reign. It rapidly became clear that if a bank could prove itself capable, against the odds, of helping its clients to swallow up other, more profitable companies (not necessarily smaller ones), then there was no limit to the kind of services it would be able to sell them in the future. Competition between the banks intensified. New terms such as ‘bid fees’ and ‘success fees’ were introduced into City parlance, and it became an increasingly important part of Thomas’s job to mobilize ‘bid teams’ made up of banks, brokers, accountants, lawyers and PR advisers. New methods of financing the bids were devised – using the bank’s own money, for instance, to buy shares in the target companies, or underwriting generous cash alternatives to share offers – which were benignly waved through by the City’s self-regulating watch-dogs. By comparison, the series of largely uncontested mergers which Thomas had negotiated on behalf of his cousin Dorothy and her Brunwin group during the 1960s and 1970s now seemed very modest.