Excerpt: Ghost Of A Chance

“You really are an unconscionable little shit, Douglas Moring.” Candace swung round to face me, her face flushed, her blue eyes narrowed in an expression I could only assume was hatred. She spun round, and I was treated to the sight of my newly ex-girlfriend’s back as she stormed away from me.
“Candy!” Her name was barely a croak past my lips. If I’m being brutally honest, and I usually am, that was the best view of her I’d had all night. Candace’s demands were getting very wearying.
Ah, but she was coming back. Yes, old Dougey’s still got it.
“And another thing....” But here, she was telegraphing her intention, so I ducked. This earned a muted roar of approval from my pack rats around me. She swung and missed; I grinned. So she huffed and stamped her foot in frustration, then stormed off again. III
I’ve always prided myself on my self-control. I’d risen to the top of the pack because I had the wit to realise that you couldn’t party every night, sniff your salary up your left nostril and still hope to make a killing in the boardroom. So when she stamped and the Christian Louboutin six-inch neck-breaking dagger with which she was shod came down and nailed my left foot, I didn’t howl in agony, fall to the floor to examine the damage and cry for my mummy. As was my impulse. No, I kept right on smiling.
“Doougey!” A hand the size of a meat plate landed on my shoulder. “I love you, man.” Dave Ainsley was drunk as shit. One does get a sense of these things. He was also as high as a kite. The give-away was this sudden outpouring of love me-wards; he was two years older than me, no better than average on any given day and he hated my guts. He got by on the strength of being the chairman’s nephew and his uncanny ability to brown-nose it with the best of them.
What he actually meant was that he hated my guts, but he was prepared to ride my wave all the way to the top, and if there was any way he could screw me on the way up without wrecking the deal, he would. Well, that was fine. I didn’t need the rats to love me, just to do as they were told and make us all (but me, most especially) an obscene amount of money.
“Dave...mate,” I carefully disengaged myself from his loathsome embrace and slapped him heartily on the back, “you’re completely pissed.”
“Sho?” Without me to hang onto, he was wobbling. Dave the Weeble. He wobbled but he refused to fall down. Fuck. It was definitely time to get out of here, I was ascribing a fondness for a childhood toy to the office weasel.
“Tomorrow... mate. Tomorrow is another day.” I decided to remain enigmatic. “Goodnight, rats!” I made for the lift, aware that no one really cared I was going. Again, fine by me. I was concentrating fully on not limping. A display of weakness in front of the rats would never do. I didn’t know how much damage Candy had done with those evil heels of hers, but my foot was killing me.
There was a definite wet feeling about my sock, but stopping to examine it in the lift on the way down to the car park was also a no-no. Any necessary wound-licking would be done in private. I arrived at car park level, and my car arrived in front of me almost the second I stepped out of the elevator.
One of the perks of my position is to have my every whim anticipated. And my rats would have anticipated nicely. They may have ignored my leaving, but the chances were that Ainsley would have been on the blower to the garage the instant the lift doors had shut. He hated my guts, but his brown-nosing was instinctive.
The valet stepped out, and I stepped in, melting into the driver’s seat. The Aston Martin DBS Volante was the favourite of my collection; wickedly expensive, it oozed style and class. Let the lesser mortals drive their Porsches and Mercs, the DBS was effortless class.
It was when I put my foot down on the clutch that I realised that even though I had known this was going to hurt, I had just underestimated the word hurt. The pain which shot up the inside of my left leg when I put the clutch down was like a lightning strike. The car almost kangarooed as I threw her into first. How I managed to save grace and not stall I’ll never know. Thank fuck for Touchtronic. The semi-automatic system was the save. I eased her quietly out into the night air, the six-litre engine responding to my lightest touch. I fought down the feeling which overtook me every time I got behind the wheel: to turn her out on the motorway and just keep going.
I pulled into the garage of my block and rode the elevator up to the penthouse. Inserted the key in the door, the code of the alarm dancing beneath my fingertips as my front door swung slowly shut behind me.
Then I closed my eyes, my hearing tuned to the sound of that solid-sounding double click of the door shutting itself behind me. Thunk, thunk.
Now, to tend to the casualties of war. I bent and pulled my shoelace undone, stripped off my shoe. Next, my sock.
Blood gushed out. All over my formerly spotless, polished wood floor. “Shit!” Realising my tactical error too late, I tried to wrap my sock round the hideously-deep gash in my foot, and hobbled in the direction of my bathroom.
Shrugging out of my suit jacket I lobbed it at the bed as I passed, missing badly. And Savile Row’s finest tailoring slid off the end of the bed to pool in a swirl of pinstripe and purple silk lining on the floor. “Damn.” My foot was killing me, so all such petty irritations were instantly magnified.
The Christian Louboutin dagger had done a lot of damage, piercing the side of my instep and leaving a deep gash in its wake. The wound probably needed stitches, but the last thing I wanted or needed at this time of night was to take myself off to the local A&E, and wait amongst the drunk and incompetent to be seen by an exhausted Junior Doctor.
I perched on the pink marble of the sink top and stuck my bleeding foot underneath the flow of the cold tap. As the cool water washed away the blood and eased the throbbing a little, I watched the swirl of pink eddying down the plug hole.
“Shit,” I said, apropos of nothing. It just seemed to cover everything at the time.
I dried off my foot, performed a patch-up job which seemed to do the trick, and then worked my way back along the drip trail I had bled across the bedroom, along the landing, down the stairs and across the living space until I reached the point where I’d pulled my shoe off.
The living room was in gloom, as I hadn’t switched on the lights, which is why the red light winking at me from the ansaphone illuminated a disproportionate amount of space. Wondering with some irritation who the hell had called me--I live off my PDA, as everyone knows--I swatted the play message button.
“Douglas? It’s your father.” Oh god. I glared at the thing. “Don’t forget to go and see your mother on Sunday. And for god’s sake, this time take a present which makes some sense.” I forgot her birthday last year, and had it not been for Gina, my PA, I would have turned up empty-handed. Owing to Gina’s taste and my mother’s being wildly divergent, empty-handed might have been preferable. As it was, the pink silk and lace teddy which flowed out of the box into my mother’s startled hands was a faux-pas which earned me some sorrowful glances and the un-ending triumph of my little sister.
Joanna is gossip girl personified. She lives on her mobile, chattering and texting and occasionally turning up to write simpering articles about London’s finest movers and shakers, of which I am one. We hold an uneasy truce, do Joanna and I. She’s three years younger; earns an obscene amount of money for simpering in print; has a faithful fiancé, Drew, who follows her about like a dog; she’s an ardent flirt; and an IT-Girl. She also knows all my ex-girlfriends intimately, which is why her printed barbs are often particularly sharp and sometimes even accurate, and as a result she’s managed, much to her chagrin, to launch my social standing ever higher up the ladder.
All of which is extremely useful as I climb the corporate tree.
I dragged my mind back from contemplation of Joanna’s triumphant smirks and concentrated on the end of the message. There came a two-second pause. “Doug. Take care of your mother.”
Well, that creeped me out. Firstly, Grey Moring does not call his son by the popular diminutive. Ever. I was named Douglas after my grandfather, and whilst my mother’s preferred greeting was “Darling” and my sister’s “Duggie” (a sore point which still festered), my father had never shortened my name. Not once.
Grey Moring is a multi-millionaire corporate raider who lives and breathes the chase. He’s cold, arrogant, ruthless, and highly-intelligent. I’ve been working my whole life to measure up to him. So to hear the man known as the Grey Shark speak in such familiar, even endearing, terms threw me entirely.
I hit the stop button and pressed play again. And again. There was something in his tone that sent a chill wind shivering down my spine.
It was nearly one am. I had to be up and in the office for seven. The very last thing I needed was to have an attack of the willies over a message which was vague in the extreme. Resolving to revisit again when I had the time to ponder the imponderable, I saved the message. Then I hobbled back upstairs, retrieved my suit jacket from the floor, stripped off the rest of my clothes, put everything away and crawled into bed.

A shrill ring sounded in my ear. For a few seconds my brain refused to function. It was the alarm, surely. My hand made its way to my PDA and paused. Something wasn’t quite right.
My body clock knows exactly what time it is at any point during a day or night. My body knew it couldn’t be the alarm. I reached for my PDA. “Hallo?” Silence. Then a click as the receiver went down. I squinted at the time clock on the PDA as I groped around to put it back on the bedside table. 0347.
I sank back into dreams.
The shrill insistent beep of the alarm beneath my left cheek jerked me into wakefulness. I pushed myself up and climbed out of bed. I had half an hour. My body and mind were not rested, strange, confused images having haunted my dreams. I found myself jerking awake for no conscious reason.
But that was then; this is now.
I headed for the shower, selected my clothes, and was down in the garage fifteen minutes later. Even though operating the clutch hurt like hell, I decided to take the Aston out again. As I drove to work, I put the night’s weird events, and my physical tiredness, behind me. Compartmentalising is one of my great strengths. That was then; this is now.

I slotted the Aston into my space; as I crossed the polished marble foyer floor of our special steel and glass monument to daring and nerve, I breathed in the aroma of success and rode the elevator up to the twenty-seventh floor. I stole the merest glance of myself in the mirror to ensure the unimpeachable rightness of my attire (bold, but perfectly cut): a navy-blue pinstripe suit with a purple silk lining, lilac shirt with white collar and cuffs, and the purple tie. I carefully shot the cuffs, so that the requisite half-inch of crisply-starched, immaculate white showed at the end of my suit jacket’s sleeves. Now the diamond cufflinks glinted in the light. It wasn’t subtle, but since I had it, there was little point in not flaunting it. Looking good. I stepped off the lift, headed straight for my office, scooped up my telephone headset and hooked it into my ear.
Now I was ready for the kill.
I moved into position onto the floor. Gina spotted me the countdown as I got on with the business of prepping the team. “Good morning, rats.” The chorus of mornings broke over my head like a wave, and I turned to face the board: five, four, three, two, one.
The line on the board started to arch up, and I watched it race heavenwards like a rocket launch. “Douglas, now...” Ainsley, wobbling already.
“No.” I lounged against the bank of desks. I could feel Ainsley and Peters and Smart, even Khan quivering behind me. A mass of nerves, the lot of them. I leaned my hips back against the desk and crossed my ankles, waiting. I lived for this moment. Riding the wave. I didn’t need Bolivia’s finest; I could feel the adrenaline surge through my veins.
The line continued to rise, and I watched. To the outsider, I seemed unconcerned, disinterested. Only I knew what I was looking for: that golden moment. That second’s hesitation. The tiniest wobble in the system.
“Dump the lot. Now.”
The rat pack launched themselves, starving, hungry for the chase. The board continued upwards for a few seconds, then turned in a perfect swan drive and started to plummet. Behind me came the baying of the pack as they offloaded tons of shares. I turned and gazed out of the window across the rooftops of London.
I counted slowly to ten, and then turned back to the board, which was still falling. The dive was even steeper now, as my rivals struggled to match me. Old Latham, I could just see his face, nearly scarlet with rage, as he struggled to catch my tail wind. “Buy.”
The entire team went into instant reverse, the baying re-doubling as they scooped back. We were raking it in, hand over fist, as our rivals thrashed and floundered.
“Mr Latham, line three.” Gina’s voice in my ear. I pressed the button to answer the call.
“Pauly... long time no speak. How’s tricks?”
There was a strangling, snorting noise on the other end of the phone, and I grinned. I could see him plain as day, his blue eyes bulging, his receding hair standing on end, his face a strange defuse mixture of scarlet and purple, his ill-fitting off-the-rack suit and some frantic tie which clashed vilely with his complexion. “Moring.... you bastard. I... I... I...” More snorting and strangling, which I pantomimed for my team. “I’ll get you, Moring, I’ll... I’ll... I’ll...” By this time, my triumphant rats had swept the board, we’d picked up probably twenty million and they were punch-drunk with success.
Latham must have heard the raucous calls from the guys behind me, because after some more incoherent shouting he just rang off.
I turned to my rats. “It would appear that Mr Paul Latham is a trifle annoyed with us.”
They were ready and waiting.
I cupped my hands around my mouth in a clarion call as they joined in the chorus. “BECAUSE WE JUST WIPED THE FLOOR WITH HIS ARSE.” Catcalls, as I swept a low bow. So? I’m a showman and everyone loves a winner.
I turned away for a second, closed my eyes and sucked in air through my clenched teeth. There is no sin, no pleasure, no exquisite rapture greater than a fresh kill on the stock market. And it was all mine. I lived for this rush.
Gina’s voice interrupted my moment of beautiful triumph. “Your mother on two.”
Suddenly my father’s message exploded like a time-bomb in my head. I turned away from my triumphant team, and my index finger hovered near the answer button of my headset. I closed my eyes and pushed the button.
“Mum.”
“Darling, have you seen Grey?” These were the first words out of her mouth, and my knees started to shake. I moved with deliberation back to my office chair and sat down, trying to control the shivering which suddenly washed through me.
“No, mum. I haven’t. I heard from him about your birthday though.” My mind spun, as I desperately tried to disconnect my father’s strangely intimate message with the sinister early morning wake-up call.
She sounded more puzzled than panicked and I started to relax. I chatted idly with her for a few minutes, although whether it was to allay her fears, or to get mine out of my head, I couldn’t have said.

The rest of the day we were on a roll, nothing topped our opening coup, but I didn’t expect anything to come close. I was just winding down for the evening and after a hard day’s trading I was experiencing the inevitable downer. Rattling around at the back of my mind was that silent call, and Grey’s strange message. I was just dismissing these two events as being unconnected and trying to drive them out of my head, when Gina’s voice sounded in my ear again. “Doug, it’s Kenneth on line two.”
Crap, what the fuck did he want? I sighed, the downer was pouring through my veins like molasses on a cold day, we had scored big, so he had nothing to complain about. I needed the big rush right now, not the somewhat sour toned his master’s voice. I pressed the button. “Kenneth...” I poured it on, like treacle over cream.
“Moring.” His curiously flat vowels always surprised me, I couldn’t think why, “What have you done this time. I have Paul Latham screaming the odds.”
I shrugged, mentally and physically. “He was slow off the mark, we made £20 million on the deal.” I tried to keep the grin out of my voice. “He lost and now he’s crying foul. It’s no big problem, Kenneth. Honestly.”
“I hope so, young Moring.” There was a certain oily pluminess to his voice. Just for a second I knew how Latham might have felt. Kenneth Wilde’s smug self-satisfaction on the back of the deal that I had made him, made me feel a rage that made no sense.
“Goodnight.” He rang off.
Shit. It was time I was out of there. I had deals to put together and a night alone suddenly appealed. I turned off my headset, put my suit jacket on, passed on another fruitless night getting semi-plastered with the rats, and headed back to the car park.
I ignored the pain in my foot, and turned the Aston out onto the streets, the restlessness building within me. I tried to rationalise the anxiety. It was that term of endearment. Something had prompted my father to use that term. Nothing good was going to come of it.
Perhaps if I’d had an inkling of what was to come, of events that had already started, I would have given in to that impulse and just kept driving.