Chapter Thirty
ADRIAN
I rang Gideon Farrell at ten past four in the afternoon from the back of a car on the Milan ring road.
He has been my personal solicitor for fifteen years and he has never once telephoned me first, and he answered on the second ring, and I could hear a room behind him with people in it, and I heard him walk out of that room and shut a door.
“Adrian.”
“I want to settle my entire personal holding in Kastellanos Maritime into an irrevocable trust,” I said. “Sole beneficiary a minor. Absolute. No conditions, no reversion, no protector’s power to revoke, no clause of any kind that depends on the conduct of any person living.”
There was a silence on the line of about six seconds.
“Are you unwell,” Gideon said.
“No.”
“Are you being made to do this.”
“No.”
“Is this an asset protection exercise. Because if it is, and the takeover is the reason, I will tell you now that a court will unpick it in a morning and I will not put my name on it.”
“It is not that.”
“Then tell me what it is, because I have known you since you were twenty five and I have never heard your voice do that.”
I looked out of the window. There is a stretch of that road where you go past a chemical works and nine cranes and a field with one horse in it, and I have gone past it forty times and never seen it, and I saw it that afternoon.
“There is a child,” I said.
Gideon did not say anything.
“She is four years old and she lives in Milan and she is mine, and I have not asked for a test and I am not going to ask for one, and I want that on your file in exactly those words.”
“Adrian.”
“Write it down.”
“I am writing it down,” he said. And then, because he is a good man, and because he has sat opposite me in eleven rooms, “Does the mother know you are doing this?”
“No.”
“Adrian, you cannot.”
“Say the rest of it.”
“You cannot do a thing like this to a woman without her consent, it is not a gift, it is a weight, it will land on her kitchen table in an envelope and it will be the size of a house.”
“If I ask her,” I said, “I have made her choose. If I ask her, she has to say yes or no to the man who did what I did, on a doorstep, in front of her child, and either answer costs her something. So I am not going to ask her. I am going to do it, and it is going to be irrevocable, and she can hate it for nothing. It will not require one thing from her. Not a signature. Not a word. Not an hour.”
“And if she never lets you near the girl?”
“Then she never lets me near the girl.”
“You understand that once this is executed you cannot undo it. Not in five years, not on your deathbed, not if she takes the child to another continent and changes her name.”
“Yes.”
“Say it back to me.”
“If she takes my daughter to another continent and changes her name,” I said, “the shares stay where they are.”
The car went under a bridge and the line broke and came back.
Gideon Farrell is fifty nine years old and he charges more per hour than I paid for my first flat and he is worth every pound of it, because for the next twenty minutes he did his job, which is to stand in front of a man and make him look at the bill.
“Then hear the cost,” he said. “All of it. Do not interrupt me.”
“Go on.”
“You hold eighteen point two percent personally. That is not the family trust, that is yours, it is the block your father put in your hand at twenty nine, and it is currently the only reason the Kastellanos family votes as a family, because you and your mother together are above the line and neither of you is above it alone.” He was walking.
I could hear the corridor. “You are ninety days from a hostile bid. If you settle that block into a trust with an independent trustee, you do not vote it. A professional trustee in Jersey votes it, and a professional trustee has one duty in the world and it is not to you, it is to a four year old girl, and if the bid is good for the girl the trustee will take the bid. Do you understand what I am telling you? You are handing the sword to a man in an office in St Helier who has never met you and who is legally forbidden to care what you want.”
“Yes.”
“Second. The tax. It is a chargeable transfer at the moment of settlement and the bill is very large and you will have to fund it in cash, which means the house in Holland Park stays your mother’s, the flat goes, the boat goes, and I will need to sell your father’s paintings, and the Revenue will want it in nine months whatever the market does. ”
“Sell them.”
“Third.” He stopped walking. “It is not confidential. A change in a substantial holding is notifiable. It goes to the register, and the register is read by every analyst in London on a Friday afternoon, and the family office administers your affairs and your mother has used the same trustee company since 1987. She will know inside three days. Adrian, listen to me. There is no version of this document that does not announce the existence of that child to the one person on this earth who should never hear of her.”
“There is a sensible version of this,” Gideon said.
“I want to put it on the table because I would be negligent not to. You settle four million into a education and maintenance trust, you keep your block, you defend the company, you engage a firm in Milan, and in eighteen months, when everybody has calmed down, we open a conversation about contact. That is what I would advise any man alive. That is what I advised a duke in March.”
“Say the rest of that advice.”
“I do not follow you.”
“You have left the second half out, Gideon, and you have left it out because you are fond of me.” I watched a lorry go by with a hull section on it, badly chocked, and I could not stop looking at the chocks.
"The second half is that I keep the block, and I keep the leverage, and in eighteen months I sit down opposite the mother of my child at a table with a lawyer at my shoulder and eighteen point two percent of a shipping company behind me, and she looks across that table and she sees exactly what her husband is, which is a man who kept a card in his hand.
“I have already done that once. I did it in an anteroom in thirty seconds and I have had four years to think about it. I am not going to sit at a table with anything in my hand ever again.”
“Then instruct me on custody,” he said. “If you are giving her everything, at least ask for something. A schedule. A right of contact. One weekend in four.”
“No.”
“Adrian, it is the most ordinary request in family law.”
“I am not instructing you about custody,” I said.
“Not today, and not in eighteen months, and not when she is nine, and not when she is twenty. Put that on the file too. If I ever telephone you and ask for a schedule, you may tell me what I said in the back of a car on a ring road in Milan, and then you may resign.”
Gideon Farrell did not answer for a moment.
“You will regret that,” he said.
“Almost certainly.”
The car came off the ring road.
I sat in the back of it with the phone against my ear and I looked at a chemical works and nine cranes and one horse in a field, and I thought about a woman on a landing with a tea towel in her hand, shaking.
“How long to draft it,” I said.
“Adrian.”
“How long.”
“You have not heard one word I have said.”
“I have heard every word,” I said. “I have written that memorandum. I have written it a hundred times and given it to a hundred men and I have watched them do the sensible thing, and I did the sensible thing myself, once, in an anteroom, in thirty seconds, and I have been living in the answer ever since. So write it, and do not put a condition in it, and do not put my name anywhere near the trustee’s, and do not build me a door. ”
“You are giving away everything you own,” Gideon said, “for a child who does not know your name, to a woman who will very likely spend it on nothing, and you may get absolutely nothing back for the rest of your life.”
“Yes.”
“For nothing.”
“Yes,” I said.
He was quiet for a long moment, and I could hear London through a window somewhere behind him, and I have never in my life wanted so badly for a man to shout at me.
“Then I need particulars,” he said.
He took me through it. Full name, date of birth, place of birth, all of which I did not have, and I sat in the back of a car and gave him one word and told him to leave the rest of the boxes empty until they could be filled in properly by somebody with the right to fill them in.
“Sophia,” I said.
“Sophia what?”
“Lindqvist.”
“You are certain.”
“She has her mother’s name,” I said. “She will keep her mother’s name. Put it in the deed. Put it in the deed that no instrument, no trustee, and no beneficiary of any Kastellanos entity may ever require her to change it.”
Gideon wrote that down. I heard the pen.
“There is one more box,” he said, “and then I will let you go, and I want you to think before you answer it, because this document will be read in a courtroom one day by people who do not like you.”
“Ask.”
“Relationship of the settlor to the beneficiary.”
The car stopped at a light on Viale Umbria. There was a woman crossing with a folding pushchair over one shoulder and a bag of oranges in the other hand and she was arguing with somebody on a telephone she was holding with her chin, and she got across before it changed.
I have signed for a hundred and ten million euros with a steady hand.
“Father,” I said.
And that was the first time in my life I had ever said the word out loud.