Chapter 10

It wouldn't be fair to say that all hell was let loose; rather the opposite.

As the man walked slowly and steadily towards the front of the room, there was absolute silence. Not a cough, not a rustle, just the sound of nearly a hundred people collectively holding their breath.

And you could smell the fear. Or maybe that's not actually true – the bloke might have brought his pet gorillas but he was hardly about to start beating people up – but that's how it felt at that moment. Certainly, Steve and I just stood there, failed to react at all, watching his progress while sweat began to trickle down the small of my back. And, when he reached out for the single mike, Steve just gave it to him, without a word.

Not that he needed to bother – it wasn't that big a room and no-one was making a sound – but it was a bloody effective gesture. Simply by taking a trivial and unnecessary piece of kit from us, he took the room, too.

Not that he was in any hurry to exploit his advantage, pausing for long enough to make eye contact with – or stare at, at any rate – every single person in the audience. And then he tapped the microphone like some newbie karaoke singer and ... began.

"I think you all know me," he said, impassively, "as I certainly know all of you."

He paused for effect, clearly not anticipating – or receiving – and sort of response. And then he went on.

"I know you because at various times and," he grinned, suddenly serpentine, "in various guises, I have offered virtually all of you substantial financial and similar assistance. Not because I thought you were nice people and certainly not out of altruism.

"No. Because, despite appearances, you, collectively, have some very interesting technology. Technology which none of you, frankly, have a hope in hell of bringing to market. This, it seems to me, is not a problem. Well, not a problem for me, because I understand business and I know how to take the sort of stuff you're faffing around with and make it work.

"Not, I should make clear, in any sort of technical sense – I can buy people to do that shit – but in the sense of 'making it work' that means 'making it make money'. For me, obviously – I'm really not an altruist – but siome of which might even have trickled down to some of you.

"The operative term being, of course, might have."

He paused to glare at everyone again – well, not Steve and me, we were cowering behind him – and I found myself wishing, absurdly, for a pin. Just so I could drop it. And – you know – see.

Not that Simon had finished.

Oh, no.

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Quite a lot later, and without any sort of premeditation, we all ended up in a pub. Well, not all of us – strangely the people we'd been paying such attention to earlier chose to go elsewhere, quite possibly with Simon. Not that I cared at that point – the revelation that a couple of our largely shared funders had been Simon's tools almost from the start was only one of the bombshells the wanker had dropped – but ... well, I'm human, you know? I wanted to walk away, I wanted to hide, but I felt ... I don't know, call it a responsibility.

We might be paddleless up that famous creek but somehow the 'we' bit seemed important. And so I stayed, huddled in a corner with my peers and – however briefly – co-conspirators. All of us huddled in the corner of a pub. Even if there were enough of us to take over most of the bar ... we still huddled. People were, you could see, shell shocked, none more so than Steve and, I suspect ... me. Frankly, I was on autopilot at the time, trying hard to keep up with the minimal conversations stuttering and failing around me; contributing, if memory serves me well, in monosyllables if at all.

It was Maggie, I think, who kept the show even vaguely on the road. I have quite vivid memories – how reliable I couldn't say – of various people succumbing to tears, someone clenching a pint glass so hard that it shattered in his hand, someone else literally banging their head on a table. And, in each of these images, there was Maggie. Giving a hug, patting a hand, finding a bandage – the guy with the glass – from god knew where. And because she was there, people stayed. God knows, we had little enough to talk about, our corporate futures having been rather brutally removed and it being – by unspoken agreement – too early for post mortems.

Although they arrived soon enough, possibly after only a couple of drinks – there being amateur drinkers present. And, needless to say, Steve and I got the brunt of it. If we hadn't organised our idiot meeting, none of this would have happened. If the two of us hadn't tried to kick back, we'd never have been trampled. Or gouged. Or a variety of other metaphors, of which fucked was only the most prevalent.