The Fear Index

12





… varieties are species in the process of formation, or are, as I have called them, incipient species.




CHARLES DARWIN, On the Origin of Species (1859)




IT WAS WELL after three o’clock by the time Hugo Quarry got back to the office. He had left several messages on Hoffmann’s mobile phone, which had not been answered, and he felt a slight prickle of unease about where his partner might be: Hoffmann’s so-called bodyguard he had found chatting up a girl in reception, unaware that his charge had even left the hotel. Quarry had fired him on the spot.

Still, for all that, the Englishman’s mood was good. He now believed they were likely to mop up double his initial estimate of new investment – $2 billion – which meant an extra $40 million a year simply in management fees. He had drunk several truly excellent glasses of wine. On the drive back from the restaurant he celebrated by putting a call through to Benetti’s and commissioning a helicopter pad for the back of his yacht.

He was smiling so much the facial-recognition scanner failed to match his geometry to its database and he had to try a second time when he had composed himself. He passed under the bland but watchful eyes of the security cameras in the lobby, cheerfully called out, ‘Five,’ to the elevator and hummed to himself all the way up the glass tube. It was the old school song, or as much of it as he could remember – sonent voces omnium, tum-tee tum-tee tum-tee-tum – and when the doors opened he tipped an imaginary hat to his frowning fellow passengers, the dull drones from DigiSyst or EcoTec or whatever the hell they were called. He even managed to maintain his smile when the glass partition to Hoffmann Investment Technologies slid back to reveal Inspector Jean-Philippe Leclerc of the Geneva Police Department waiting for him in reception. He examined his visitor’s ID and then compared it to the rumpled figure in front of him. The American markets would be opening in ten minutes. This he could do without.

‘It wouldn’t be possible, Inspector, would it, for us to have this meeting some other time? I only say this because we really are feeling pretty frazzled here today.’

‘I am very sorry to disturb you, monsieur. I had hoped to catch a word with Dr Hoffmann, but in his absence there are some matters I would like to discuss with you. I promise you it will only take ten minutes.’

There was something in the way the old boy planted his feet slightly apart that warned Quarry he had better make the best of it. ‘Of course,’ he said, switching on his trademark smile, ‘you shall have as long as you like. We’ll go to my office.’ He extended his hand and ushered the policeman in front of him. ‘Keep right on to the end.’ He felt as if he had been smiling solidly for about fifteen hours that day already. His face ached with bonhomie. As soon as Leclerc had his back to him, he treated himself to a scowl.

Leclerc walked slowly past the trading floor, examining his surroundings with interest. The big open room with its screens and time-zone clocks was more or less what he would have expected in a financial company: he had seen this on the television. But the employees were a surprise – all young, and not a tie between them, let alone a suit – and also the silence, with everyone at his desk, and the air so still and heavy with concentration. The whole place reminded him of an examination hall in an all-male college. Or a seminary, perhaps: yes, a seminary of Mammon. The image pleased him. On several of the screens he noticed a slogan, red on white, as in the old Soviet Union:



THE COMPANY OF THE FUTURE WILL HAVE NO PAPER


THE COMPANY OF THE FUTURE WILL CARRY NO INVENTORY


THE COMPANY OF THE FUTURE WILL BE ENTIRELY DIGITAL


THE COMPANY OF THE FUTURE HAS ARRIVED




‘Now,’ said Quarry, smiling again, ‘what can I offer you, Inspector? Tea, coffee, water?’

‘I think tea, as I am with an Englishman. Thank you.’

‘Two teas, Amber, sweetheart, please. English breakfast.’

She said, ‘You have a lot of calls, Hugo.’

‘Yes, I bet I bloody do.’ He opened his office door and stood aside to let Leclerc go in first, then went straight to his desk. ‘Please, take a seat, will you, Inspector? Excuse me. I won’t be a second.’ He checked his screen. The European markets were all heading south fairly quickly now. The DAX was off one per cent, the CAC two, the FTSE one and a half. The euro was down more than a cent against the dollar. He didn’t have time to check all their positions, but the P&L showed VIXAL-4 already up $68 million on the day. Still, there was something about it all he found vaguely ominous, despite his good mood; he sensed a storm about to break. ‘Great. That’s fine.’ He sat down cheerfully behind his desk. ‘So then, have you caught this maniac?’

‘Not yet. You and Dr Hoffmann have worked together for eight years, I understand.’

‘That’s right. We set up shop in 2002.’

Leclerc extracted his notebook and pen. He held them up. ‘You don’t object if I …?’

‘I don’t, although Alex would.’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘We’re not allowed to use carbon-based data-retrieval systems on the premises – that’s notebooks and newspapers to you and me. The company is supposed to be entirely digital. But Alex isn’t here, so don’t worry about it. Go ahead.’

‘That sounds a little eccentric.’ Leclerc made a careful note.

‘Eccentric is one way of putting it. Another would be stark raving bloody bonkers. But there you are. That’s Alex. He’s a genius, and they don’t tend to see the world the same way we do. Quite a large part of my life is spent explaining his behaviour to lesser mortals. Like John the Baptist, I go before him. Or after him.’

He was thinking of their lunch at the Beau-Rivage, when he had been obliged to interpret Hoffmann’s actions to mere Earthlings twice – first when he didn’t show up for half an hour (‘He sends his apologies, he’s working on a very complex theorem’), and then when he abruptly sped away from the table midway through the entrée (‘Well, there goes Alex, folks – I guess he’s having another of his eureka moments’). But although there had been some grumbling and eye-rolling, they were willing to put up with it. At the end of the day, Hoffmann could swing naked from the rafters playing the ukulele as far as they were concerned, as long as he made them a return of eighty-three per cent.

Leclerc said, ‘Can you tell me how you two met?’

‘Sure, when we started working together.’

‘And how did that come about?’

‘What, you want the whole love story?’ Quarry put his hands behind his head and leaned back in his favourite position, feet up on his desk, always happy to tell a tale he had recounted a hundred times, maybe a thousand, polishing it into a corporate legend: when Sears met Roebuck, Rolls met Royce and Quarry met Hoffmann. ‘It was around Christmas 2001. I was in London, working for a big American bank. I wanted to have a crack at starting my own fund. I knew I could raise the money – I had the contacts: that was no problem – but I didn’t have a game plan that would sustain over the long term. You’ve got to have a strategy in this business – did you know the average life expectancy of a hedge fund is three years?’

Leclerc said politely, ‘No.’

‘Well it’s true. That’s the lifespan of the average hamster. Anyway, a guy in our Geneva office mentioned this science nerd at CERN he’d heard about who apparently had some quite interesting ideas on the algorithmic side. We thought we might hire him as a quant, but he just wouldn’t play ball at all – wouldn’t meet us, didn’t want to know: mad as a hatter, apparently, total recluse. We had a laugh about it – quants! I mean, what could you do? But there was just something about the sound of this one that got me interested: I don’t know – a pricking of my thumbs. As it happened, I was planning to go skiing over the holidays, so I thought I’d look him up …’





HE’D DECIDED TO make contact on New Year’s Eve: he had figured even a recluse might be forced to put up with company on New Year’s Eve. So he had left Sally and the kids in the chalet in Chamonix – which they had rented together with the Bakers, their perfectly ghastly neighbours in Wimbledon – and, ignoring their reproaches, had driven down the valley alone to Geneva, glad of an excuse to get away. The mountains had been a luminous blue under a three-quarters moon, the roads empty. There was no satellite navigation in the hire car, not in those days, and when he got close to Geneva Airport he had had to pull off the road and look at the Hertz map. Saint-Genis-Pouilly was straight ahead, just past CERN, in flat arable land that glistened in the frost – a small French town, a café in its cobbled centre, rows of neat houses with red roofs, and finally a few modern apartment blocks built of concrete in the last couple of years and painted ochre, their balconies festooned with wind chimes, folded-up metal chairs and dead window boxes. Quarry had rung Hoffmann’s doorbell for a long time without getting a response, even though there was a pale strip of light beneath the door and he sensed that someone was inside. Eventually a neighbour had come out and told him that tout le monde par le CERN was at a party in a house near the sports stadium. He had stopped off at a bar on the way and picked up a bottle of cognac, and had driven around the darkened streets until he found it.

More than eight years later he could still remember his excitement as the car locked with its cheerful electronic squawk and he set off down the pavement towards the multicoloured Christmas lights and the thumping music. In the darkness other people, singly and in laughing couples, were converging on the same spot, and he could somehow sense that this was going to be it: that the stars above this dreary little European town were in alignment and some extraordinary event was about to occur. The host and hostess were standing at the door to greet their guests – Bob and Maggie Walton, English couple, older than their guests, dreary. They had looked mystified to see him, and even more so when he told them he was a friend of Alex Hoffmann’s: he got the impression no one had ever said that before. Walton had refused his offer of the bottle of cognac as if it were a bribe: ‘You can take it with you when you leave.’ Not very friendly, but then in fairness he was crashing their party, and he must have looked a misfit in his expensive skiing jacket surrounded by all these nerds on a government salary. He had asked where he might find Hoffmann, to which Walton had replied, with a shrewd look, that he wasn’t quite sure but that presumably Quarry would recognise him when he saw him, ‘if you two are such good friends’.

Leclerc said, ‘And did you? Recognise him?’

‘Oh yes. You can always spot an American, don’t you think? He was on his own in the centre of a downstairs room and the party was kind of lapping around him – he was a handsome guy, stood out in a crowd – but he wasn’t taking any notice of it. He had this look on his face of being somewhere else entirely. Not hostile, you understand – just not there. I’ve pretty much got used to it since then.’

‘And that was the first time you spoke to him?’

‘It was.’

‘What did you say?’

‘“Dr Hoffmann, I presume.”’

He had flourished the bottle of cognac and offered to go and find two glasses, but Hoffmann had said he didn’t drink, to which Quarry had said, ‘In that case why did you come to a New Year’s Eve party?’ to which Hoffmann had replied that several very kind but overprotective colleagues had thought it was best if he was not left on his own on this particular night. But they were quite wrong, he added – he was perfectly happy to be on his own. And so saying he had moved off into another room, obliging Quarry, after a short interval, to follow him. That was his first taste of the legendary Hoffmann charm. He had felt pretty pissed off. ‘I’ve come sixty miles to see you,’ he said, chasing after him. ‘I’ve left my wife and children crying in a hut on a freezing mountainside and driven through the ice and snow to get here. The least you can do is talk to me.’

‘Why are you so interested in me?’

‘Because I gather you’re developing some very interesting software. A colleague of mine at AmCor said he’d spoken to you.’

‘Yeah, and I told him I’m not interested in working for a bank.’

‘Neither am I.’

For the first time Hoffmann had glanced at him with a hint of interest. ‘So what do you want to do instead?’

‘I want to set up a hedge fund.’

‘What’s a hedge fund?’

Sitting opposite Leclerc, Quarry threw back his head and laughed. Here they were today with ten billion dollars – soon to be twelve billion dollars – in assets under management, yet only eight years ago Hoffmann had not even known what a hedge fund was! And although a crowded, noisy New Year’s Eve party was probably not the best place to attempt an explanation, Quarry had had no choice. He had shouted the definition into Hoffmann’s ear. ‘It’s a way of maximising returns at the same time as minimising risks. Needs a lot of mathematics to make it work. Computers.’

Hoffmann had nodded. ‘Okay. Go on.’

‘Right.’ Quarry had glanced around, searching for inspiration. ‘Right, you see that girl over there, the one in that group with the short dark hair who keeps looking at you?’ Quarry had raised the cognac bottle to her and smiled. ‘Right, let’s say I’m convinced she’s wearing black knickers – she looks like a black-knickers kind of a gal to me – and I’m so sure that that’s what she’s wearing, so positive of that one sartorial fact, I want to bet a million dollars on it. The trouble is, if I’m wrong, I’m wiped out. So I also bet she’s wearing knickers that aren’t black, but are any one of a whole basket of colours – let’s say I put nine hundred and fifty thousand dollars on that possibility: that’s the rest of the market; that’s the hedge. This is a crude example, okay, in every sense, but hear me out. Now if I’m right, I make fifty K, but even if I’m wrong I’m only going to lose fifty K, because I’m hedged. And because ninety-five per cent of my million dollars is not in use – I’m never going to be called on to show it: the only risk is in the spread – I can make similar bets with other people. Or I can bet it on something else entirely. And the beauty of it is I don’t have to be right all the time – if I can just get the colour of her underwear right fifty-five per cent of the time I’m going to wind up very rich. She really is looking at you, you know.’

She had called across the room, ‘Are you guys talking about me?’ Without waiting for a reply, she had detached herself from her friends and come over to them, smiling. ‘Gabby,’ she had said, sticking out her hand to Hoffmann.

‘Alex.’

‘And I’m Hugo.’

‘Yes, you look like a Hugo.’

Her presence had irritated Quarry, and not only because she so obviously had eyes only for Hoffmann and no interest in him. He was still mid-pitch, and as far as he was concerned her role in this conversation was strictly as illustration, not participant. ‘We were just making a bet,’ he said sweetly, ‘on the colour of your knickers.’

Quarry had made very few social mistakes in his life, but this was, as he freely acknowledged, a beaut. ‘She’s hated me ever since.’

Leclerc smiled and made a note. ‘But your relationship with Dr Hoffmann was established that night?’

‘Oh yes. Now I look back on it, I’d say he was waiting for someone like me just as much as I was looking for someone like him.’

At midnight the guests had gone out into the garden and lit small candles – ‘you know, those tea-light things’ – and put them into paper balloons. Dozens of softly glowing lanterns had lifted off, rising quickly in the cold still air like yellow moons. Someone had called out, ‘Make a wish!’ and Quarry, Hoffmann and Gabrielle had all stood together silently with their faces upturned, misty-breathed, until the lights had dwindled to the size of stars and disappeared. Afterwards Quarry had offered to drive Hoffmann home, whereupon Gabrielle, to his irritation, had tagged along, sitting in the back seat and giving them her life story without being asked for it – some kind of joint degree in art and French from a northern university Quarry had never heard of, a masters at the Royal College of Art, secretarial college, temp jobs, the UN. But even she had shut up when they got inside Hoffmann’s apartment.

He had not wanted to let them in, but Quarry had pretended he needed to use the loo – ‘honestly, it was like trying to get off with a girl at the end of a bad evening’ – and so reluctantly Hoffmann had led them up to the landing and unlocked his door on to a vivarium of noise and tropical heat: motherboards whirring everywhere, red and green eyes winking out from under the sofa, behind the table, stacked on the bookshelves, bunches of black cables festooned from the walls like vines. It reminded Quarry of a story he had read just before Christmas about a man in Maidenhead who kept a crocodile in his garage. In the corner was a Bloomberg terminal for online home traders. On his return from the bathroom, Quarry had looked in at the bedroom – more computers taking up half the bed.

He had come back into the living room to find that Gabrielle had made room for herself on the sofa and kicked off her shoes. He said, ‘So what’s the deal here, Alex? It looks like Mission Control.’

At first Hoffmann had not wanted to talk about it, but gradually he had begun to open up. The object, he said, was autonomous machine-learning – to create an algorithm which, once given a task, would be able to operate independently and teach itself at a rate far beyond the capacity of human beings. Hoffmann was leaving CERN to pursue his research alone, which meant he would no longer have access to the experimental data emanating from the Large Electron–Positron Collider. For the past six months, therefore, he had been using data streams from the financial markets instead. Quarry had said it looked an expensive business. Hoffmann had agreed, although the main cost to him was not in microprocessors – many of which he had been able to salvage from scrap – or the cost of the Bloomberg service, so much as in electricity: he was having to find two thousand francs a week simply to bring in sufficient power; he had twice blacked out the neighbourhood. The other problem, of course, was bandwidth.

Quarry had said cautiously, ‘I could help you out with the cost, if you’d let me.’

‘No need. I’m using the algorithm to pay for itself.’

It had taken an effort for Quarry to stifle his gasp of excitement. ‘Really? That’s a neat concept. And is it?’

‘Sure. It’s just a bunch of extrapolations drawn from basic pattern analysis.’ Hoffmann had shown him the screen. ‘These are the stocks it’s suggested since December first, based on price comparisons using data from the past five years. Then I just email a broker and tell him to buy or sell.’

Quarry had studied the trades. They were good, if small: nickel-and-dime stuff. ‘Could it do more than cover costs? Could it make a profit?’

‘Yeah, in theory, but that would need a lot of investment.’

‘Maybe I could get you the investment.’

‘You know what? I’m not actually interested in making money. No offence, but I don’t see the point of it.’

Quarry couldn’t believe what he was hearing: he didn’t see the point!

Hoffmann had not offered him a drink, or even a seat – not that there was room to sit now that Gabrielle had taken the only available space. Quarry was left standing sweating in his ski jacket.

He said, ‘But surely if you did make money then you could use the profits to pay for more research? It would be what you’re trying to do now, only on a vastly bigger scale. I don’t want to be rude, man, but look around. You need to get some proper premises, more reliable utilities, fibre optics …’

‘Perhaps a cleaner?’ Gabrielle had added.

‘She’s right, you know – a cleaner wouldn’t hurt. Look, Alex – here’s my card. I’m going to be in the area for the next week or so. Why don’t we meet up and talk this through?’

Hoffmann had taken the card and put it in his pocket without looking at it. ‘Maybe.’

At the door Quarry had bent down and whispered to Gabrielle, ‘Do you need a ride? I’m driving back to Chamonix. I can drop you in town somewhere.’

‘It’s all right, thanks.’ A smile as sweet as acid. ‘I thought I might stay here for a while and settle your bet.’

‘Suit yourself, darling, but have you seen the bedroom? Best of bloody luck.’





QUARRY HAD PUT up the seed money himself, used his annual bonus to move Hoffmann and his computers into an office in Geneva: he needed a place where he could bring prospective clients and impress them with the hardware. His wife had complained. Why couldn’t his long-discussed start-up be based in London? Wasn’t he always telling her that the City was the hedge-fund capital of the world? But Geneva was part of the attraction to Quarry: not just the lower tax, but the chance for a clean break. He had never had any intention of moving his family to Switzerland – not that he told them that, or even acknowledged it to himself. But the truth was, domesticity was a stock that no longer suited his portfolio. He was bored with it. It was time to sell up and move on.

He decided they should call themselves Hoffmann Investment Technologies in a nod to Jim Simons’s legendary quant shop, Renaissance Technologies, over in Long Island: the daddy of all algorithmic hedge funds. Hoffmann had objected strongly – the first time Quarry had encountered his mania for anonymity – but Quarry was insistent: he saw from the start that Hoffmann’s mystique as a mathematics genius, like that of Jim Simons, would be an important part of selling the product. AmCor agreed to act as prime brokers and to let Quarry take some of his old clients with him in return for a reduced management fee and ten per cent of the action. Then Quarry had hit the road of investors’ conferences, moving from city to city in the US and across Europe, pulling his wheeled suitcase through fifty different airports. He had loved this part – loved being a salesman, he who travels alone, walking in cold to an air-conditioned conference room in a strange hotel overlooking some sweltering freeway and charming a sceptical audience. His method was to show them the independently back-tested results of Hoffmann’s algorithm and the mouth-watering projections of future returns, then break it to them that the fund was already closed: he had only fulfilled his engagement to speak in order to be polite but they didn’t need any more money, sorry. Afterwards the investors would come looking for him in the hotel bar; it worked nearly every time.

Quarry had hired a guy from BNP Paribas to oversee the back office, a receptionist, a secretary, and a French fixed-income trader from AmCor who had run into some regulatory issues and needed to get out of London fast. On the technical side, Hoffmann had recruited an astrophysicist from CERN and a Polish mathematics professor to serve as quants. They had run simulations throughout the summer and had gone live in October 2002 with $107 million in assets under management. They had made a profit in the first month and had gone on doing so ever since.

Quarry paused in his tale to let Leclerc’s cheap ballpoint catch up with his flow of words.

And to answer his other questions: no, he was not sure exactly when Gabrielle had moved in with Hoffmann: he and Alex had never seen one another much socially; besides, he had been travelling a lot that first year. No, he had not attended their wedding: it had been one of those solipsistic ceremonies conducted at sunset on a Pacific beach somewhere, with two hotel employees as witnesses and no family or friends in attendance. And no, he had not been told that Hoffmann had had a mental breakdown at CERN, although he had guessed it: when he went to the loo in his apartment that first night, he had rummaged through Hoffmann’s bathroom cabinet (as one does) and found a veritable mini-pharmacy of antidepressants – mirtazapine, lithium, fluvoxamine – he couldn’t remember them all exactly, but it had looked pretty serious.

‘That didn’t put you off going into business with him?’

‘What? The fact he wasn’t “normal”? Good Lord, no. To quote Bill Clinton – not necessarily a fount of wisdom in all circumstances, I grant you, but right in this one – “normalcy is overrated: most normal people are a*sholes”.’

‘And you have no idea where Dr Hoffmann is at this moment?’

‘No, I do not.’

‘When did you last see him?’

‘At lunch. The Beau-Rivage.’

‘So he left without explanation?’

‘That’s Alex.’

‘Did he seem agitated?’

‘Not especially.’ Quarry swung his feet off the desk and buzzed his assistant. ‘Is Alex back yet, do we know?’

‘No, Hugo. Sorry. Incidentally, Gana just called. The Risk Committee is waiting for you in his office. He’s trying to get hold of Alex urgently. There’s a problem, apparently.’

‘You surprise me. What is it now?’

‘He said to tell you that “VIXAL is lifting the delta hedge”. He said you’d know what that meant.’

‘Okay, thanks. Tell them I’m on my way.’ Quarry released the switch and looked thoughtfully at the intercom. ‘I’m going to have to leave you, I’m afraid.’ For the first time he felt a definite spasm of anxiety in the pit of his stomach. He glanced across the desk at Leclerc, who was regarding him intently, and suddenly he realised he had been gabbling away much too freely: the copper didn’t seem to be investigating the break-in any more so much as investigating Hoffmann.

‘Is that important?’ Leclerc nodded at the intercom. ‘The delta hedge?’

‘It is rather. Will you excuse me? My assistant will show you out.’

He left abruptly without shaking hands, and soon afterwards Leclerc found himself being conducted back across the trading floor, preceded by Quarry’s glamorous red-headed gatekeeper in her low-cut sweater. She seemed in a hurry to get him out of there, which naturally made him slow his pace. He noticed how the atmosphere had changed. Here and there around the room several groups of three or four were gathered in anxious tableaux around a screen, with one person seated, clicking on a mouse, and the others leaning over his shoulders; occasionally someone would point to a graph or a column of figures. And now Leclerc was reminded much less of a seminary and more of doctors assembled at the bedside of a patient displaying grave and baffling symptoms. On one of the big TV screens a network was showing pictures of an aircraft crashing. Standing beneath the TV was a man in a dark suit and tie. He was preoccupied, sending a text message on his mobile phone, and it took Leclerc a moment to recollect who it was.

‘Genoud,’ he muttered to himself, and then more loudly, moving towards him, ‘Maurice Genoud!’ at which Genoud looked up from his texting – and was it Leclerc’s imagination, or did his narrow features tense slightly at the sight of this figure bearing down on him from his past?

He said warily, ‘Jean-Philippe.’ They shook hands.

‘Maurice Genoud. You’ve put on weight.’ Leclerc turned to Quarry’s assistant. ‘Would you excuse us a moment, mademoiselle? We’re old friends. You’ll see me out, won’t you, Maurice? Let me look at you, lad. Quite the prosperous civilian nowadays, I see.’

Smiles did not come naturally to Genoud; it was a pity he bothered, thought Leclerc.

‘And you? I’d heard you’d retired, Jean-Philippe.’

Leclerc said, ‘Next year. I can’t wait. Tell me, what on earth do they do here?’ He gestured to the trading floor. ‘Presumably you can understand it. I’m too old to get my head around it.’

‘I don’t know either. I’m just paid to keep them safe.’

‘Well you’re not doing a very good job of it!’ Leclerc clapped him on the shoulder. Genoud scowled. ‘I’m only joking. But seriously, what do you make of this business? A bit odd, wouldn’t you say, having all that security and then allowing a complete stranger to wander in off the street and attack you? Did you install it, I wonder?’

Genoud moistened his lips before replying, and Leclerc thought, he’s playing for time; that’s what he used to do back in the Boulevard Carl-Vogt when he was trying to think up some story. He’d distrusted the younger man ever since the days when Genoud was a rookie under his command. There was, in his opinion, nothing that his former colleague would not do – no principle he wouldn’t betray, no deal he wouldn’t cut, no blind eye he wouldn’t turn – if he could make sufficient money and stay just within the law.

Genoud said, ‘Yes, I installed it. What of it?’

‘There’s no need to get all defensive. I’m not blaming you. We both know you can surround someone with the best security in the world, but if they forget to use it there’s nothing you can do.’

‘That’s true. Now if you don’t mind, I ought to get on with my work. This isn’t the public sector, you know – I can’t stand here gossiping.’

‘You can learn a lot by gossiping.’

They moved towards reception. Leclerc said, man-to-man, ‘So what’s he like, then, this Dr Hoffmann?’

‘I hardly know him.’

‘Enemies?’

‘You’d have to ask him.’

‘So there’s no one here dislikes him that you’ve heard about? No one he’s fired?’

Genoud didn’t even pretend to think about it. ‘No. Enjoy your retirement, Jean-Philippe. You deserve it.’