Kevin refused to take part in the trial, keeping up a stubborn silence in response to Harry’s painstakingly thorough cross-examination. Harry ploughed on regardless, sticking to what appeared to be a prepared list of charges, supported by pages of evidence, which he insisted on reading out in full. He seemed to enjoy playing the role of the great prosecuting barrister. Whenever Kevin failed to respond, Harry would turn to the camera and say: “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, once again, the defendant has nothing to say in response to these accusations. I invite you to draw your own conclusions.”
Kevin felt pretty sure that it wasn’t going to make riveting viewing on YouTube or wherever they planned to post the video. He noticed that the other two exchanged glances from time to time, as if they had misgivings about the whole enterprise, but neither of them dared to interrupt.
As the hours passed and Harry showed no sign of flagging, Kevin’s frustration began to get the better of him. How much longer was he going to have to put up with this crap?
The whole thing reminded him of the hours he had spent with the other directors rehearsing for their appearance before the Select Committee. At one stage there had even been talk of putting him forward as one of the Bank’s representatives. But the PR people had vetoed it, arguing that he had been too abrasive, too unwilling to admit any fault on the part of the Bank. Brilliantly argued, they said, but now’s not really the time for that – we need to strike a note of humility. So they had sent that emollient puffball of a chairman along to soft pedal and sound ever so humble and contrite. What a missed opportunity that had been.
Harry was now in the midst of a long-winded rant about how the Bank’s credit default swaps frequently had explanatory documentation running into thousands of pages. He turned to Kevin: “How could anyone be expected to read all that and work out what those instruments actually contained? I put it to you that this was a deliberate tactic to conceal the toxic content of those products.” He was about to turn to the camera to deliver his usual line when Kevin suddenly burst out:
“I’m fucking sick of this Stalinist show trial.”
Harry froze, momentarily taken aback by Kevin’s unexpected intervention. Kevin pressed on:
“Listen, you can go on all you like about what the Bank did or didn’t do. But at the end of the day, our job was to make money. Nothing we did was illegal. We did everything within the rules. Maybe the rules were wrong – but that’s down to the regulators not us. They’re the ones who ought to be in this chair, because they were the ones who were asleep at the wheel.”
“So none of this is your fault?” said Harry, sounding incredulous. “It’s all the fault of the regulators?”
Kevin shrugged. “That’s pretty much it. Banks were just doing what banks have always done – make money. It’s like that film ‘Heat’ – you know, the scene where Robert De Niro and Al Pacino have a coffee together. De Niro is this master criminal and Pacino is the workaholic cop who’s trying to catch him. Pacino’s trying to persuade De Niro to give it all up, but De Niro’s having none of it and he says something like ‘I do what I do best, I take down scores. You’re a cop. Your job is to take down guys like me. You do what you gotta do and I’ll do what I gotta do.’ Or something like that, anyway.”
Kevin was proud of his De Niro impression, which had been a regular feature of the Bank’s Christmas parties over the years. His current audience, however, was less easily impressed.
“So basically you’re saying that we left bank robbers in charge of the bank,” said Harry, unable to conceal his glee at having scored what he clearly thought was a palpable hit.
Christ, these people were tiresome, thought Kevin. “No, you’re twisting what I’m saying. I’m just trying to explain that regulators and banks have very different roles, requiring different skills. The role of banks is to make money for their shareholders. And to do that, you need to be able to hustle, you need to be a bit of a street fighter. Regulators, on the other hand, are there to make sure that all this money-making is done within the rules – and that the rules themselves are sensible. We did our job – we made money, tons of money. It was the regulators who didn’t do theirs.”
“Hang on a minute,” said Harry, “you said your job was to make money for the Bank. But you’ve lost billions. How can you possibly say you did your job properly?”
“Because I was doing exactly what my shareholders wanted. If I’d said, ‘Hang on a minute, maybe we should do a bit less of this, even though it’s clearly within the rules,’ I’d have had shareholders on the phone saying ‘Why the hell aren’t you doing what all the other banks are doing? Why the hell aren’t you going all out to make as much money as possible for me?’ And I’d have been sacked for underperforming. I was behaving – the Bank was behaving - exactly the way you’d expect us to behave, given our role in the system. We thought we were dividing up risk into smaller and smaller parcels so it couldn’t hurt us. And that’s what the regulators thought too. The credit rating agencies and auditors didn’t question it either, even though it was their job to keep an eye on what we were up to.”
“Let me get this straight,” said Harry. “You’re saying that you had no responsibility to look ahead and think to yourself, maybe we’re about to drive off a cliff? You could just not bother to look out of the window at all, press down on the accelerator and go faster and faster until someone else told you to stop or change direction?”
“It’s not that we weren’t looking out of the window. It’s just that when we did, we saw signs from shareholders, regulators, auditors and credit rating agencies all pointing in the same direction we were travelling in. I mean, we had meetings with them all of the time - they used to come into the office to see us. I suppose you could say that some of them were even in the car with us looking at the map and checking on the condition of the engine.”
“Must’ve been a big car,” muttered Gazzer, his only contribution to the proceedings so far.
Kevin smiled. That snot-nosed kid from the PR agency had used the same ridiculous car analogy at one of the rehearsals for the Select Committee hearing. He had enjoyed wiping the smile off the kid’s face – and he noted with grim satisfaction that his reply appeared to have had much the same effect on Harry, who didn’t seem to know how to respond either.
“Hang on,” said Dave, taking advantage of Harry’s silence to enter the fray. “Just now, you said regulators were asleep at the wheel. But who was meant to be actually driving the car – was it the bank or the regulators? And er…. is the car meant to be the bank or the economy?”
Poor Dave, thought Kevin. Having seen that Harry was floundering, he’d tried to pitch in with what he obviously thought was a clever point – but he’d opened his mouth before he’d worked out where he was going with it. Kevin was about to reply when Harry cut him off:
“Oh, forget the bloody car analogy,” he said irritably, glaring at Dave. He turned to face Kevin. “You say it was all the regulators’ fault,” he said, jabbing his finger at Kevin’s chest. “But before the crisis, you and all the other banks were going around saying there was too much regulation and it was holding you back. You can’t have it both ways.”
“Well, what d’you expect us to say?” said Kevin. “If we didn’t put up a fight they’d regulate us out of existence – we’d never make any money. Look, if I think more money can be made for my bank by getting rid of some rules, I’ll say get rid of the rules. But it’s not for me to decide if that’s the right thing to do – that’s up to the regulators. They didn’t do their job properly. End of story.”
“Rules, rules, rules,” muttered Gazzer. “Sounds like it’s always one rule for you and another rule for the rest of us.”
Harry just ignored Gazzer’s intervention. “But with any normal business that got into financial trouble,” he continued, pushing his glasses back up onto the bridge of his nose, “it would never occur to anyone to put all the blame on the authorities.
Everyone would say it was your responsibility to look after your own business and make sure it didn’t get into trouble in the first place.”
Kevin shrugged. “Banking is different. It puts petrol in the tank of the global economy. It can’t be allowed to fail because if it did, everything goes down the tubes. That’s why we operate in a much more tightly regulated environment than most other businesses. So we aren’t really in charge of our own destiny in the way that other businesses are. Maybe if we’d been allowed a bigger say over what we could and couldn’t do, we’d have had more of an incentive to do the long term, big picture thinking that regulators were supposed to be doing, but didn’t.”
He smiled, then added: “And you know what? I think we’d be a lot better at it, too. The trouble with regulators is that they’re rarely able to attract the brightest and the best to work for them. That’s not a problem we have.”
Harry was now rummaging around in his file of papers. Kevin could see that he was fuming. Things had obviously deviated so far from the script that he didn’t know quite where to go next.
“Surely you’ve got to admit that some of the things your bank did made things worse,” put in Dave, trying to ride to Harry’s rescue again. “I mean, I used to get loads of letters from banks and credit firms offering me cheap loans. I was a real sucker for it – it always seemed like a good idea at the time but the interest rates were sky high. And then I always got stung when I went overdrawn. What really bugged me was the way you bastards would let me go overdrawn, like you were doing me some enormous favour. And then you’d hit me with a massive penalty charge, way more than I’d pay if I’d taken out a normal loan for the same amount.”
Kevin smiled patronisingly. It was going to be easy to hit this one for six.
“Dave, you and your friends here criticise the banks for being irresponsible. But shouldn’t you have been more responsible with your own finances? After all, you could have just said no to all those offers. And if you’d made sure you had enough money in your account, you’d never have gone overdrawn. The Bank was just responding to your demand for credit. I mean, you don’t have a go at betting firms for allowing punters to lose their shirts, do you? Why should banks be any different? Like betting, it was perfectly legal for us to offer you the money if you wanted it. No one was forcing you to take it. That was your decision, not ours.”
Harry shook his head. “I can’t let you get away with that. You said banks were in a special position. That’s got to mean they have a special responsibility too. You can’t just wash your hands of it all.”
Kevin let out an exasperated sigh. “You lot have just got this whole thing out of proportion. Look, everyone accepts that we were due for a market correction – that’s what markets do, they get a bit carried away every so often. But if the fucking regulators hadn’t overreacted and shot Lehmans in the head, we could have had a soft landing – just like we did after Long Term Capital Management, Enron or the dot com bubble. So the banks are really the victims in all this. But from the way you’re carrying on, you’d think we’d been involved in mass murder or something. I mean, it’s not like anyone’s actually died as a result of anything we did or didn’t do.”
Suddenly Gazzer’s shape loomed in front of him. He could move with surprising speed for such a big man. He had seized the arms of the chair and stood once again with his face close to Kevin’s, breathing heavily.
“You think you’re so clever, don’t you? You snivelling little bastard. And you think the others are too scared to hurt you. Well, you’re dead right about that. They’re much too civilised, old Harry and Dave. But I’m not like them. I’m more Old Testament, me. An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, that’s what I say.”
He reached into the pocket of his trousers and pulled out a gun. “Take a good look,” he said, waving it in Kevin’s face. “This isn’t an imitation firearm. It’s the real thing.” He moved around behind the chair and pushed the end of the barrel into the back of Kevin’s neck.
“So what’s it going to be, Kevin? Are you going to apologise? Or am I going to put a bullet through your head? Because believe me, Kevin, I have fantasised about this moment.”
There was a click. “I’ve pulled the safety catch off now. Yes, you’re not as brave as you think, Kevin – I can feel you trembling. Because you know that of the three of us, I’m the only one that’s capable of pulling the trigger. So how about that apology now?”
Kevin’s throat was dry and his whole upper body was shaking, rattling the chair. He looked over at Harry and Dave, who seemed rooted to the spot, unsure how to handle the situation. Then Harry took a step forwards.
“Stay back!” snarled Gazzer. “We’re doing things my way now.”
Harry obediently retreated. “Gazzer,” he said, evenly, “this isn’t the way to do it. We’ve got to keep the public on our side. We can’t allow the banks to make out that they’re the victims in all this.”
Gazzer grunted dismissively. “It’s too late for that now. We’ve tried doing it your way and it’s getting us nowhere. We need to get this fucker to face up to what he’s done.”
Kevin could feel the sweat pouring down his back. Whilst he might have been right about Harry and Dave, it was dawning on him that he might have fatally misjudged Gazzer. The muzzle of the gun felt as if it was boring into the back of his neck.
“Now,” said Gazzer, calmly, “I’m going to tell you a little story, Kevin. When I’ve finished, you need to decide whether you’re going to apologise, or whether I’m going to put a bullet through the back of your head. But listen to my story first.”
Kevin felt the gun being withdrawn from his neck. There was a rustling noise followed by another click. He heard Gazzer exhale deeply and a plume of cigarette smoke drifted into view. Then he felt the muzzle of the gun being pressed against his neck again. Finally, Gazzer began to speak:
“It’s about my brother. He used to have his own business. A removals firm. You’re probably too busy with your fancy financial instruments to bother with ordinary businesses like that. He’d built it up from scratch and he had about thirty staff. That’s thirty families who depended on him for their bread and butter.”
He took another drag on his cigarette and exhaled deeply again, sending another plume of smoke over Kevin’s head into the middle of the room.
“The trouble was, he’d just invested in some new vehicles when you lot made the whole economy go tits up. His order book dried up and he needed more time to pay back to the loan. But your Bank said no. And d’you know what reason they gave him? Do you, Kevin?”
Kevin attempted to shake his head, although he was shaking so much already that it was hard to tell whether the movement was voluntary or not.
“Well, I’ll tell you. They said it was ‘too risky.’ Too risky! Can you believe it? After what you lot did, you had the nerve to tell him it was too fucking risky!”
He paused to take another drag on his cigarette.
“Then they pulled the plug on the whole thing. He lost everything - the business, the house, his marriage, everything. And now he’s dead. Suicide, they told me. But we know who really killed him, don’t we, Kevin?”
There was a noise from outside. “Attention!” said an amplified voice. “You are surrounded by armed police. Come out of the front door with your hands above your heads and you will not be harmed. I repeat, come out with your hands above your heads and we will not harm you.”
“Apologise,” hissed Gazzer, lowering his head so that he was whispering right into Kevin’s ear. “Apologise or I’ll pull the trigger.”
“Gazzer, please stop,” said Dave. “If you kill him, you’re just making yourself as bad as he is. Just give me the gun.” He took a step towards him, his arm outstretched.
“Stay back!” shouted Gazzer, his voice shaking.
“This is the police,” came the amplified voice again. “You are su
rrounded. Come out of the front door slowly with your hands above your heads.”
“Gazzer,” said Dave again, “this isn’t what your brother would’ve wanted. He wasn’t like that. So come on, give me the gun.”
Kevin didn’t think he could stand this much longer. He didn’t want to die. Why didn’t the police just storm the place? Didn’t they realise what danger he was in?
But then he noticed that the muzzle of the gun was no longer pressing into the back of his neck. And Gazzer was walking away from him. He seemed to be wiping tears from his eyes. Dave took the gun from him and gingerly put it down on the table. Gazzer crouched down next to it on the floor, his head in his hands, sobbing. It was pathetic really.
Harry, who had been busily tapping away at the laptop, went over the Gazzer and put his arm round him. “Come on,” he said gently. “We agreed that if we got caught, we’d go quietly. Let’s make a dignified exit. I’ve put the statement up on the website about what we were trying to do. And like I said, our own trial will give us another platform. Think about the injustice of it. After all the misery they’ve caused, guys like him still haven’t gone to prison – but we’re going to be jailed just for asking him to apologise. We can make ourselves into martyrs. Think Nelson Mandela. Think Aung San Suu Kyi. We can do it. We’ll do it for your brother. OK?”
Gazzer stood up, unsteadily. Then he turned and headed towards the front door. Dave and Harry went after him. None of them gave Kevin a second glance.
Somewhat to his surprise, he felt almost affronted at the manner of their exit. He had expected them to leave slowly, heads bowed, like sportsmen after a particularly heavy defeat. But the speed of their departure suggested that they could hardly wait to be out of his presence; it somehow didn’t accord him the measure of respect that he felt he deserved.
In the minutes that followed, all Kevin could hear from outside was a lot of shouting. It sounded as if someone – he guessed it was probably Gazzer – was refusing to kneel down as instructed. Then there was the sound of a shot and he could hear shouts of “Get an ambulance!”
Fuck the ambulance, he thought, what about me? Finally, after what seemed an age to Kevin, several armed police appeared cautiously through the door, guns at the ready. They completely ignored him at first, treating him like a piece of furniture as they worked their way through the rest of the house.
“Hey!” he shouted at them. “Isn’t someone going to untie me? The place is empty, so just bloody well untie me, will you?”
He could hear shouts of “Clear” as they established that the place was indeed empty, just as he had told them. Eventually, one of them came back and untied him.
“Are you alright, Sir?” asked the officer, as he used a knife to release the binding around Kevin’s arms and legs.
“Oh yes, I’m just fine, it’s been great sitting here while you lot play soldiers around the house.”
“Sorry about that, Sir, but we had to check we’d got them all. Can’t be too careful, you know.”
“Well, if you’d bothered to ask, I could have told you there were only three of them,” said Kevin, testily. “What happened out there?”
“Ah well, Sir, I’m afraid one of the kidnappers refused to do as he was instructed. He made a threatening move towards one of our officers. As the officer was concerned that his life was in imminent danger, he had no choice but to return fire.” Kevin wasn’t sure why the man felt the need to justify his colleague’s actions, least of all to him.
Outside, another policeman asked Kevin again:
“Are you alright, Sir?”
Kevin glared at him. “Well, what do you think, officer?” he snapped. “I’ve been kidnapped, assaulted and threatened with execution. It’s been brilliant. I can’t wait to do it again. But what I really want to know is, what took you lot so fucking long?”
“Well sir, it wasn’t easy to track you down.”
“Oh, save your excuses. You’re fucking incompetent, you lot. I could sue you for this.” He paused. The policeman looked as if he couldn’t believe what he was hearing. Perhaps suing them was a bit harsh, in the circumstances. And this guy was obviously just some lowly officer, who probably wasn’t paid enough and badly needed the overtime. With grunts like that on the job, no wonder they had taken so long to find him.
“Alright, I tell you what,” said Kevin, magnanimously. “Here’s the deal. Get your Chief Constable to send me an apology and we’ll say no more about it.”
And with that, he climbed into the waiting ambulance and slammed the door in the astonished policeman’s face.
* * * * * * * *
About the Author
Paul Samael lives in the UK. He is the author of a novel, “In the future this will not be necessary” and writes a blog called “Publishing Waste.” To find out more, go to: https://www.paulsamael.com
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