Chapter 1

I'd made the mistake of going to Edinburgh during the Festival. A mistake, because I was there to work and the place pretty much grinds to a halt with the number of visitors – and then compounded the error by getting the train back to London on a Saturday. Not that there were engineering delays, for once, but the tourists and their screaming kids were out in force, so it was quickly apparent that I wasn't going to be able to get any work done on the journey. Until, that is, they offered a 'weekend upgrade' to first class – £15 extra for a seat with legroom, constant free coffee and no toddler tantrums: I was off like a shot.

That done, I found myself sitting across the carriage from a fifty something bloke wearing a suit like it was a uniform – which it probably was, for him – and not looking too impressed with my torn jeans and fifteen year old t-shirt. Which was fair enough, so I ignored him and opened my laptop, finally got a wi-fi connection via the train and started to e-mail my partner in crime, Tim, updating him on my adventures with the Scottish Government.

There wasn't actually a lot to say – my negotiations had been inconclusive to say the least – but we were in this together so I thought it was only fair to keep him up to date. Also, it gave me something to do. Until, that is, the guy on the other side of the aisle took more of an interest and – eventually introducing himself as Simon something or the other– started to engage me in conversation. Well, actually he asked me to help him get his wi-fi working but, that done, we got to talking. He'd noticed some of the drawings I'd had open on the screen of my PC – CAD wireframes of the 'product' – and seemed intrigued. So we chatted for the remainder of the journey and a fairly pleasant conversation it was. I mean, I was a bit wary about going into too many technical details of our work with a complete stranger – we had patents, but only in the EU, to date – but he seemed interested enough in the things I was telling him. And he knew a fair amount about the market we were trying to get into, too, as it turned out that he'd invested in a couple of start ups in related fields.

And, yeah, I did think about tapping him for money but I didn't – partly because I knew Tim would want to be consulted before I did anything of the sort, partly because our funding wasn't actually in meltdown for the moment and I didn't want to piss of the people who'd already contributed. Nonetheless, arriving at Kings Cross, I took a business card off him and gave him one of mine. And then I went home and thought no more about it.

Monday morning I dragged myself into the combined office/machine shop we rented – just a unit in an anonymous business park in North London – for a verbal update and planning meeting. Not that Tim was actually on time, of course – I was greeted instead by Maggie, our general assistant/gopher, who was (i) irredeemably cheerful, (ii) stunningly beautiful and (iii) Tim's girlfriend. Which probably explained why she was willing to work for the pittance we paid her. Or maybe she just had a vocation for green energy and Tim was merely a means to an end. I certainly couldn't see what other attraction there could possibly be...

Oh, yeah, incidentally – that's what we do – or what we're trying to do, at least: develop a singe machine capable of extracting both wave and tide energy ... and with a minimal ecological footprint. In which pursuit Mag was exceptionally useful – both for her morale sustaining optimism and the fact that ... well, we dealt mainly with engineers. Male engineers. Having a curvaceous Irish beauty around the place was not exactly a disadvantage in the circumstances.

Nor, I had to admit to myself as the man himself shambled in, was having Tim on board, most of the time. OK, he had the social skills of a three year old – and don't get me started on his personal hygiene – but he also had a degree and a doctorate in mechanical and hydraulic engineering and, despite that, also knew one end of a spanner from the other. Which is to say that he was pretty good at designing and building things. Well – detailed design, anyway. The broad concept stuff, the modelling, the theory – that was my job.

I'd been up north trying to tap the Scots for a grant, of course, but also to talk to them about sites where we might go onto our next stage: Deploying a fifth scale model of The Design in an actual bay, preferably a West facing fjord or – better yet – ria, would allow us to do the sort of testing that was virtually impossible in any sort of controlled environment. Water is a viscous liquid and consequently acts differently on small scale models than it does on bigger ones. We had experimented with low viscosity fluids on the dinky toy versions we'd produced so far – and we had reams of output from the computer simulations I'd been running – but now we really needed something a bit more concrete. Or liquid. Or, maybe, just more real.

Problem was, Her Majesty's Government (Scotland Division) had made it fairly clear that they needed to see the results of such a 'real world' test before they'd even consider giving us large quantities of cash – and we sort of needed large quantities of cash to run the experiment. Even at fifth scale our little invention would weigh in at a fair few tonnes of steel and currently we didn't have the cash to even pay for it to be anchored to the seabed – hell, even for it to be transported to the bloody seashore – never mind actually building the thing.

And that seemed to be everyone else's take on the situation, too. So, reluctantly, we agreed that I'd take it back to our existing investors, try and convince them that what they really needed to do with their cash was risk even more of it on us. Luckily we had an update meeting arranged with the most significant of them early the next week – I'd been hoping to present good news from Edinburgh – so we left it at that for the moment, Tim going back into the shop to bang bits of metal together while Maggie watered the pot plants and sang – cheerfully – to herself.

I took the rest of the day off.

I did meet the funders the next week and as expected got nothing concrete out of them. People said nice things about the progress we'd made so far, complemented us on our cash flow control (Tim and I were paying ourselves bugger all, too) and generally expressed great optimism for the future of the project. What they didn't do, conspicuously, was reach for their collective cheque books – or whatever people do in these post cheque days.