Chapter 11

The day after Yasmine and Manon left Andrew took his Grandma over to an appointment at the Liberton Hospital. She was vague about what exactly she was going there for and Andrew didn’t pry. He found parking and escorted her into the hospital. A friendly nurse said that the tests would take a minimum of two hours and so he was free until at least noon. With his home being 30 minutes away it made no sense to head all the way back there just to turn round and return to the hospital. He also had not brought any swimming gear with him, so he was at a bit of a loose end.

So he just drove around the area. The hospital was in the south east quadrant of the city, not an area Andrew knew well. Now Edinburgh is not a large city but in that particular area Andrew knew only the main arteries heading in and out of town. So he drove about, totally killing time. But as he drove up and over a small hill he discovered Craigmiller Castle at the top. He had heard the name, even seen the signs but this was the first time he had driven past it. On a whim he pulled into the tiny carpark. There was space for 10 cars, not much more than that, and it looked like that was eight spaces too many. It wasn’t clear how the site was run, there was no ticket office or anything like that. It seemed to run on the same idea as a church, there was a donation box at the start of the path from the carpark. There was one gate giving access to the whole site and Andrew carefully climbed up the extant sections of the ruined Castle. There were large panels detailing the history of the site but Andrew was looking at it as a location for Monica to model. He guessed first thing in the morning there would be no one there at all. When he got back to the gate he noticed that there was a small sign indicating that the Castle and grounds opened at 9.00 in the morning. Randomly he had found another location to shoot.

It was nearer 12.30 when his Grandma was finished at the hospital but Andrew collected her and took her out to lunch. For the first 14 years of his life he had been her only grandson and he was close to his Grandma. She had two grandsons now with Scott but she and Andrew were still very close. Of all her grandchildren Andrew was the one that visited the most often and the most regularly. So their chat was full of tales of the last month. Andrew had been more than half way through the degree before he told his Grandma. She knew it was the one of several things that wasn’t to be talked about. The degree and the businesses were not to be crowed about with her fellow parishioners on a Sunday morning. He never gave any indication of how successful the companies had been. Between his exam success, his trips through the CCF and his Duke of Edinburgh Award, she still had plenty to brag about. But that lunchtime he did tell her that he had been awarded his degree. After lunch he went to the off-licence to buy a couple of bottles of sherry for her, while she went into the bookies and placed some bets for the weekend. He carried the booze up the three flights of stairs for her and left her and Auntie Vi ensconced in front of the television for an afternoon of horse racing and drinking.

The weekend was a huge laugh. On the Friday afternoon he had gone a very long way home and stopped down at Cramond to see if there was any indication of the times of the tide. At the start of the causeway there was a sheet of paper pinned to a noticeboard with high and low tide times for the week. Clearly the Coastguard didn’t want to have to constantly rescue tourists stranded on the small island. Low tide was at 7.00 in the morning and the board stated that it was safe to cross to the island for two hours either side of low tide. 5.00 was an ungodly hour even for Andrew but it was sunrise as well so when he phoned Tony later they agreed to meet down at Cramond at 4.30 in the morning.

The most wide-awake person was Maggie already fully into her Monica persona. She looked hilarious, ridiculous and yet surprisingly sexy all at the same time. She was wearing long knee-length socks, wellies and a coat that stopped above her knee. In the pre-dawn morning light she was flashing Andrew and Tony in the empty car park. The little remaining water on the causeway wasn’t even ankle height, it was like splashing through a long endless puddle. They didn’t run but didn’t dawdle either. But once on the island Monica handed Tony her coat and the socks and boots and posed round the island completely naked. She used flip flops to get into position across rough ground but would then throw them over to Tony and pose for Andrew bare-foot.

The shoot was a collection of contrasts. The centre of the island was a modest mound and when Monica stood there Andrew could focus on her, ignoring the immediate surroundings and then play with the composition of the background. Back towards Cramond, out over the river, looking east to the city and the sun rising over the horizon. But the island was also covered in left over, now-abandoned buildings from the Second World War. It had been part of the defences of the Rosyth Naval Base further up the river. So this wasn’t an unspoiled natural little island, it was the exact opposite. There were lots of old concrete structures, all long since abandoned, several of them extensively covered in graffiti. Andrew got a whole series of shots of Monica doing peek-a-boo in the buildings. He used the fact he was in wellies to stand out in the sea and get shots back onto shore with Monica standing on the rocky beach. In little more than an hour Andrew took five rolls, 120 shots, of Monica and the most she was wearing in any of them was her wellies. Andrew directed her for a roll of film then Tony took over, and they just alternated back and forth.

One of things that Tony had shown Andrew from some of the other models he had shot over the years was the different expressions. The two most common expressions were feigned ecstasy, where feigned clearly meant fake, and the haughty, bored expression. Yes I am gorgeous, yes I have a great body, and sure you get to look at it, to look at me, but don’t think you have a chance. You are an insignificant troll. Alright, those were some of Andrew’s prejudices showing through but neither look appealed to him. The overwhelming characteristic of his shoots with Monica was fun. His favourite look of hers was the ‘I can’t believe you have talked me into this, again’ look. But her eyes always sparkled, her smile was wide and constant and even just the body language, tough to capture in still photography, was positive. The actual poses, the shots themselves, they took care of themselves almost. Monica was about to turn 25, pretty, with a great body and was naked. Andrew had to work hard to take a bad shot.

Once the five rolls were finished, Andrew packed up his gear while Tony helped Monica get dressed and return to being Maggie. Tony’s bag was packed with clothes so by the time they walked back to the mainland Maggie was in jeans and a jumper looking no different than anyone else out for an early morning walk. They were almost back to the shore before they saw another person, a man letting two crazy Labs out of the back of his Volvo. He was a living cliché. The two dogs came bounding over and it was a perfectly normal interaction with someone first thing in the morning. As the man headed off to the island with his dogs Maggie got the giggles at the sheer absurdity of it all.

“If he had got out of bed an hour earlier he would have had some stories to tell at the golf club.”

She wasn’t wrong. Andrew had spoken to Tony about doing a second shoot at Craigmiller Castle the next day as a surprise for Maggie and so they headed home giving no indication they would all be meeting the next morning. Maggie looked surprised for one second when she saw Andrew drive up but her smile was bright and wide and dazzling. The Castle was administered by the Ancient Monuments Commission and they watched as their Ranger left in his LandRover having unlocked the gate. He had barely turned onto the road when the three of them were through the gate and up the path to the castle. Tony directed the first roll of film and Monica had changed into suspenders, fishnets and heels for their first set of shots. The juxtaposition of the tartily dressed model posing atop the ruined castle had been done many times before and would be done many times again. But this was Andrew and Tony’s version of it, with Monica happily hamming it up for them. It was another five rolls that morning, again all done in 90 minutes to two hours. Tony had a can-can costume at the studio which he brought along so Monica flounced around the castle constantly falling out of the costume and clearly having a whale of a time. The same as the day before, when the shoot was over she redressed normally while Andrew packed up. There had been not one soul there the whole time. There hadn’t even been very much traffic on the road past the castle. It was this forgotten gem buried within the city. Maggie didn’t hide her disappointment that there hadn’t been anyone else around on either of the days.

“It was always going to be empty at 5.00 in the morning but I thought there might have been one or two people here at this time.”

What was left unsaid was whether or not Maggie wanted an audience for her shoot. She had enjoyed hearing the golfers just behind the bushes when they were at Torphin. Andrew figured that was for her and Tony to discuss and decide. They agreed to meet at the shop at the end of the day each day the following week. Andrew would develop all the rolls on the Monday night and then each subsequent night print out two or three of the rolls. Maggie was keen to be part of the review process and the three of them were going to look through the ten rolls of film.

Leslie, Julian and Andrew spent a lot of time during the day that week with Doug Somers, the guy who guided them through setting up their Venture Fund. The three of them listened as he gave them the benefit of years of experience, talking about investments, tips to evaluate proposals, how to discount everything someone said, cut through the hyperbole to get to the underlying business and its potential profitability. During the week one of the key things was learning about the percentage of the business to take. Doug was dispassionate about it, talking about taking stakes of 10 to 25% as their stake in the business. Leslie and he had hit it off and they were getting more of his time than they deserved.

“This is not charity, you have to understand that. You will take a stake in the business, and you want that business to grow. You also know that not every investment will work out, will succeed. More than half will not, maybe three quarters. Which means that the ones that do work out have to do really well. You are a small fund, more likely to fund a business as it starts out rather than when it is already growing. I know that there are reasons other than financial for this business and that is fine, but you need to think about the finances of the fund. Three million pounds generating a 10% return, which is low by the way, still results in nearly eight million pounds after 10 years; that is just maths, you can’t hide from it. If more than half your investments are a bust then the pressure is on the rest of them to make even more money for you. If you don’t do this right, you will end up carefully investing all this money, have a busy few years and then realise that there is no more money for the next set of inventors or people that you want to support. This is not the government where they can tax everyone every year and then decide where to spend or invest the money. This is your one time pot of gold and if you piss it away there will nothing left in three, five or ten years when you want to support someone else. So take as large a stake as you can negotiate, because if the business succeeds, one of the few remember, then that success means you can do this again.”

They were shell-shocked by the end of the week, Doug had been relentless. But he had got the message across. In the end they had to accept that they had created an investment business not a charity and that they were out to make money from these investments, not as much as others would, but still plan to make a profit. If they did not have that mindset then it was just a fancy and unnecessary way of giving to charity.

Doug also sat with Andrew and talked about the individual fund that they had set up first, the five of them each investing £50,000 to support individuals. Doug shocked him even more with his attitude on this one.

“50% stake at the minimum Andrew, probably more. Don’t look so shocked, we will invest in 25 people for £10,000 each. Taking your idea of supporting someone for four years. How many of them are going to succeed? We let them develop an idea, set up a business, whatever they want to do. But at the end of the four years what will we as the investors have? I doubt more than one or two of these 25 will make something of the investment. It isn’t going to stop us trying with the other 23 but we have to be realistic, we are funding their dream. Think about your own example, you and Julian spent months and years thinking about, and building part of, the next great computer game. Did anything come of it? Or is it still sitting on some disks somewhere, untouched in years? When the two of you teamed up with Leslie then you started to make a success of it. The amount of money you made from doing simple things well, and right now as opposed to some unknown time in the future, is fantastic. It is a much underreported story and I know that is intentional, but you are the 1 in 25 I am talking about, probably even rarer than that. Think about the next you, or the next Julian. We don’t provide funds and support and that business never takes off, always pipped at the post by a rival piece of software. Or you accept that you only have 30% or 50% of the business but at the end of the four years you sell your business for £10m, nice round number, makes the maths easy. After four years you have £3m and are set for life. Now it is not £10m but nobody is forcing you to take our money. If you can do it on your own, just like you three did, then you reap the rewards. If you want support, additional funds, whatever, then that is the cost of doing business.”

Doug had a way of explaining tough concepts, and harsh realities, in a way that made it clear. He was rapidly becoming as much of a business mentor as Brian Campbell. Andrew was never going to be the business leader of the group, that was clearly Leslie, and he and Julian relied on her for that, but at least he was starting to build a framework of understanding and knowledge about what he wanted to achieve. Without this guidance Doug was right, it would just have been charity.