Sweet Talking Money. Harry Bingham
the last of his coffee round his cup. It was stone cold, but he drank it anyway. For the past forty minutes, the sun had shone like a pale disc through cloud, and the day was too cold for long periods on top of dank and festering barges. If he was a parrot, he’d stay indoors. He stood up to go.
‘Thanks for the brainwave, Meg. The Schoolroom works on rats. How about we charge them …’ As his voice tapered off, he suddenly froze. ‘By God, though, you never know …’ His posture changed; became charged with energy. At the end of the barge, there was a dried-out tin of paint left by one of Dai’s workmen. Bryn repositioned the tin with care, and took a few paces backwards. ‘That pleasure boat, there. One minute to go, two points needed for victory. Bryn Hughes to take the kick.’
Meg looked at the launch making its way upriver, twenty yards distant, its roof dotted with passengers. ‘What are you–?’
But Bryn ignored her. He checked his pacing and settled his eye on the distant boat. Taking a quick run up, he gave the tin an enormous kick and watched it sail in a huge arc into the air, narrowly clearing the upper deck of the startled boat. The splash into the water on the other side was hidden from view. A couple of passengers who’d been watching cheered and waved. In an imaginary stadium somewhere, fifty thousand Welshmen stood and applauded.
‘Is he Bryn Hughes, or is he Neil bloody Jenkins?’
‘Neil who?’
But he was off, leaping off the boat, on to the bits of planking which acted as a jetty, and on into the boathouse yard.
‘Cameron!’ he roared. ‘Cameron, Kati!’
Meg stood up. The wind was chilly. Her boss was mad. She tipped her coffee away and began to thread her way through the surrounding wharves towards the willow tree, watched by its exotic resident. ‘Hello, parrot,’ she said.
2
When Meg caught up, Cameron and Kati were already jammed into a pair of seats, watching Bryn as he strode around. Meg caught sight of the handsomest of Dai’s workmen, winked at him and sat down.
‘So that’s the whole idea,’ said Bryn. ‘We’re going to use your know-how to make some money, right here, right now. We pop the research and development outfit under the wing of a parent company, and use the parent company to generate cash. We’ll use the cash to fund our research, and once we’re making some serious money, we’ll go out looking for some loans as well. All we need is a way of putting your existing knowledge to commercial use.’
Ten minutes earlier, Cameron and Kati had been involved in a deep conversation about new methods of peptide fractionation. Since Bryn had whirled in like a storm demon, shoving them into chairs and haranguing them, they had understood virtually nothing. They exchanged glances.
‘You want us to sell something?’ asked Kati.
‘Yes. No. Well, OK, yes and no.’ Bryn took a deep breath and another step backwards into the realm of the intelligible. ‘Look, between the two of you, you know an awful lot about viruses and an awful lot about viral illness. Stuff which no one else knows.’
‘Loads of people know parts of it, but maybe no one knows all of it. No one except us. Right,’ said Kati.
Cameron sat imprisoned in her chair, writing chemical equations in biro on her white labcoat, and waited for something that Bryn said to make sense.
‘Good.’ said Bryn. ‘Exactly. Now I know for a certain fact that you can put that knowledge to use. I went to Cameron with flu and she cured me, no messing.’ Cameron groaned in pleasure, as she found what she was looking for in her chemical equations, then looked up to find everyone looking at her. ‘Flu, did you say? Sure, but that was easy. You were an easy case. We couldn’t begin to guarantee those kinds of results.’
‘No, I know that, but patients don’t need guarantees, they just need the best treatment available. That’s you. You and Kati. You two, plus other doctors who we’ll hire and train in your techniques. Obviously, we wouldn’t be doing the full Immune Reprogramming at this stage, we’d use conventional drug treatment, supplemented by everything else you guys thought was useful. As time goes by, and your research matures, your treatment methods will improve too. We won’t just have research papers to prove our results, we’ll have patients. Hundreds of them.’
Cameron wasn’t looking at her equations now, she was staring at Bryn. ‘You think I ought to spend time with patients?’
‘Yes. You spend time on them. They spend money on you. That’s business.’
‘But my research? Isn’t that more –’
‘More important? Yes. But we need to pay for it. This is a way to pay for it.’
‘And when you think about it,’ said Kati, ‘we’ve always wanted to have better access to patients. That way we can watch the clinical progress of disease, not just its blood chemistry.’
‘Uh, ‘s’true,’ said Cameron, still amazed. ‘But you know, Bryn, can you see me with patients? I mean, when you came to see me, I hit you.’
‘Did you?’ said Meg. ‘Good for you.’
Bryn ignored her. ‘OK, no hitting. No assaults of any kind. No doodling on your labcoat while your patient is telling you their life story. And we’ll make sure Kati or someone is there with you, so if you do accidentally lay into someone, there’s someone to say sorry.’
‘Uh, OK,’ said Cameron, still bemused. ‘Patients? Sure. Why not?’
3
And finally that week, a minor incident, hardly worth the mention.
Cameron’s father, a mathematician at Illinois State University, was extremely fond of Lewis Carroll. Following a suggestion of Bryn’s, Cameron bought him an expensive but special birthday gift: some early editions of Alice in Wonderland and Alice Through the Looking Glass. Sending them special delivery, she dispatched them in good time for his birthday, but when the day arrived, the books had not. Another week or two passed, the gift was still mislaid, and Cameron ended up claiming compensation for the full amount from the Post Office. She didn’t mention the loss to Bryn or anyone else, not liking to appear naive or incompetent in her dealings with the outside world.
And that was all. A minor incident, hardly worth the mention.
1
For businesses as for people, childhood is meant to be a time of happiness and freedom from care. The funding is meant to be in plentiful supply, the business concept is still untarnished by excessive contact with reality, moods are good and tempers are sunny.
Meant to. The emphasis is on meant to. That’s not always how it works.
2
The boathouse was finished off. It looked glorious – better than glorious. The white-painted interior turned the palest spring light into a glory of watery fire, with ripples from the Thames reflected upwards through huge waterside windows on to the beams and trusses of the vaulted ceiling. A horseshoe of consulting rooms hung like a mediaeval minstrels’ gallery around the former boathouse, connected by a sweeping spiral staircase of natural oak. Round the back, Cameron had her laboratory, her library, her office up in the tower, her storeroom, and all the other requisites of a serious research programme. The building was a joy to look at and a joy to use.
Ordinarily, Dai and his crew would have been exhilarated at the end of a job. But as it turned out, the grandstand tickets supplied by Bryn had magnified a dismal Welsh performance in the Six Nations rugby to a disaster of such epic proportions that one of Dai’s men