Chapter Seven
Slamming her apartment door behind her Nick leant against the wall and slid down until her feet were splayed out in front of her. She had done as much as she could preparing the clients and the charity – on Monday she would close down the office for a month but now it was the weekend, and her time was her own. She looked at her newly repaired bike – maybe tomorrow she would go out for a ride. In the past week she hadn’t been for a single run and her body was crying out for some exercise.
All day and all night this week she had pored over her business’s paperwork trying to find an irregularity. So far she had gone back nine months and found nothing untoward, she only had another three or so months to go. Although Nick had been trading for years, she knew that she herself had never made a single transaction that could be misconstrued. It was only following the expansion of her business that she took on other traders to work for her. The irregularity had to be in there somewhere, although not for one minute did Nick think it would have been a deliberate act. Still, if she couldn’t find it, she couldn’t fight her corner. It was this flailing around in the dark that was killing her.
She tried a few games of online bridge but ended up apologising to her usual partners as she made error after error, and eventually she stopped playing altogether. The more she thought about it the more she decided a bike ride was a good idea. Get out of the city, exhaust the body, try to get a decent night’s sleep .
Pulling herself upright she started to wander around the flat, laying out her cycle gear for the morning and preparing a small backpack for the journey. She threw in a handful of energy bars, a repair kit and a spare battery for her phone. She liked to cycle as light as possible, but the portable battery was essential. The idea of being without a phone was an anathema to her. Clem and Paddy both lived in parts of the country where they were regularly out of signal. Nick wondered how they could bear it, to be out of touch with the rest of the world.
Opening her laptop she began to scour the news columns until she had a list of interesting trends and ideas to keep an eye on. She then sent it across to Geoffrey and Simon – she had to be incredibly careful that she wasn’t instructing anyone to do anything, just drawing their attention to certain aspects. Whether or not they acted on her information was entirely up to them. To be certain that she couldn’t be accused of leading anyone, she kept the information vague. For example, she highlighted a weather report that suggested an early monsoon in a particular Asian region. If that monsoon turned out to be as severe as predicted, then the grain crop would be damaged causing an issue on the futures market for animal feed. That was the easy play, though – there would be other knock-on effects, and this was where Nick usually dabbled, guessing what those knock-on aspects would be. There were the micro reactions. Was there another crop that the farmers would turn to? Would there be a demand in labour to harvest the crop early, would that move in labour cause a shortfall elsewhere?
And then there were the macro reactions, if that futures market were knocked off course, which stock funds would have their pension portfolios affected? Which countries were gambling on that money becoming available and without it how would they pivot?
Each and every action had a reaction, the trick was determining what that would be. All Nick could do was send the two men a message linking to a weather report.
Of course it might come to nothing, 95 per cent of the time, the status quo would prevail, and sometimes the biggest impacts would come out of the blue. But a smart girl played the margins and always stayed ahead of the crowd. Even if she couldn’t trade.
No doubt Geoffrey had already spotted the same stuff that she had done, but he was doing her a favour by carrying the Hiverton portfolio and she wanted to show him that she hadn’t given up.
She couldn’t give up. How could she? If she couldn’t do this, what could she do?
Yawning, she saw it was long past midnight and decided to turn in. There was nothing else she could do today except sleep.