Sir Richard Brook was a very accomplished individual. A happy family man with a beautiful wife and three children. He was at the top of his game in the civil service. He was a great sportsman at school and university. No slouch academically either. He left with a double first in Philosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE) from Oxford. He had played hockey, cricket and rugby for the first teams at school. He gained a blue in both hockey and boxing. Then came top of his year in the notoriously tricky civil service exams on leaving Oxford. Many of his contemporaries thought he might end up as a diplomat, or an ambassador somewhere. Some even suggested he would have made a great spy and should have joined the security services. The general view was that he would have excelled at any career he chose.
He had worked at various departments during his ascent to revered, senior mandarin status, with the requisite knighthood. But had settled at the Department of Trade and Industry which was then renamed the Department of Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform (BERR), subsequently the Department for Business, Innovation & Skills before recently being rebranded Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS). Cross thought these meaningless changes, presumably wrought out of the desire to look as though progress was being made in some way, must have cost millions in stationery alone. Brook was well respected and had had the ears of several prime ministers over the years. It seemed to Cross that he had hardly put a foot wrong in a long career. Evidenced by the fact that he had disappeared almost completely from the general public eye in the corridors of Whitehall for decades, before reappearing at the top of the civil service pyramid. He had been in the news recently because of the Moreton inquiry of which he appeared to be the main architect. Although it had been carried out by an eminent KC it was Brook who had commissioned it. He felt that Moreton’s behaviour as a junior minister was simply inexcusable. Cross noted that the civil servant had talked about an institution-wide systemic culture of intimidation and bullying which was no longer acceptable or fit for purpose. He stated his desire to eradicate this culture once and for all.
Cross thought this was interesting from a man who had kept his head firmly below the parapet, and taking on the ministerial club was a risky move. But in the end, it had paid off. Cross had been aware of the inquiry before the Moreton murder and had read that if the inquiry came up empty-handed, it would be the end of Brook’s career. Resignation would have been inevitable. An illustrious career would come to a quick end through a self-inflicted wound, many political commentators adjudged.
Cross then began a painstaking process of going through Brook’s career and life since he left Oxford. There were huge gaps as he pulled the strings of government under his mandarin’s cloak of invisibility. What Cross was interested in was if and when his and Sandy Moreton’s paths crossed. This took hours of cross-referencing with little success to show for it. This never worried Cross because in his mind the less he found, the more significant what he did find would prove to be.
After All Saints, the two men went on to attend the same senior school, Downside. All Saints was a feeder for it. But Cross then noticed that Moreton was in the year below Brook at Oxford. It was possible that Moreton had taken a year off to travel, a gap year. But he hadn’t spoken about it anywhere. He did say how his GCSEs had been disastrous but that everything had turned round in the sixth form where he blossomed to such an extent that he got into Oxford. Cross highlighted this in his file.
Another thing that interested him was that Brook hadn’t taken up boxing until his second year at Oxford. He’d already got a hockey blue, but seemed to have dropped that for boxing. Sandy Moreton had been a boxer at school and joined the Oxford University boxing club in his first year. Cross searched for photographs of the boxing teams at the time but found nothing online. He got in touch with Gillman and Soame, an Oxford-based photographers who seemed to do all the college and sports teams photographs. He gave them the years he was looking at and half an hour later three photographs of the university boxing teams of the time came through.
They all looked so young and fit, smartly dressed in their blazers and ties. One of them had a black eye. But Brook and Moreton were together in two of them. In the first, Brook’s second year, they were both in the team, standing at either end of the back row as if they’d had to have distance put between them. In the second photograph Brook was now captain, sitting in the centre of the front row. To his right on the end was Moreton. In the final photograph Brook had now left university and Moreton had taken his place as captain of the boxing team.
Cross made a note of the coach of the team. He looked like he would have been in his forties at the time of the photographs so there was every chance he might still be alive. A former professional boxer himself and part of the Olympic squad in the Munich Olympics of nineteen seventy-two, his name was Bob Richmond.
‘Of course, I remember them two,’ the old coach laughed hoarsely on the other end of the phone. ‘I remember all of my captains. Keep in touch with most of them.’
‘Are you in touch with Brook and Moreton?’
‘Not so much. I mean, they’re busy people. Richard more so than Sandy. Lovely man. Always keeps tabs on what’s happening with the club. Helps in any way he can, does Sir Richard,’ said Richmond, dropping Brook’s title with a chuckle of pride. ‘We have reunions now and then which they sometimes come to. Not too often, you understand. We think the less frequent the better the attendance, if you know what I mean.’
‘Do they get along socially?’ Cross asked, causing another cackle of laughter.
‘No. I don’t know what it was with them two. Always at each other’s throats.’
‘Did they ever box each other?’ Cross asked.
‘Did they ever! Sparred, if you can call it that. It got so full-on at times we had to step in and stop them. They were the same weight, so often were put together sparring. But more often than not technique would go flying out of the window and they went at it hammer and tongs. It became pointless after a while, so we had to stop them sparring with each other altogether.’
‘No love lost between them then,’ commented Cross.
‘It went back to their schooldays, someone told me. But I don’t know if that’s true.’
‘I noticed Brook didn’t box in his first year.’
‘No, he was a hockey blue. He was one of those people who could just turn their hand to any sport and excel at it, I reckon,’ said the old coach.
‘But Moreton boxed at school. Is that correct?’
‘Yes. Brook once told me, after he’d left, and he’d had a glass or two it had to be said, the only reason he took up boxing at Oxford was so that he could have a pop at Moreton on a regular basis. Legitimately. Maybe he was joking. And, of course, there was all that nonsense with the girl. That didn’t help,’ added Hazell.
‘What girl would that be?’ asked Cross.
‘Richard Brook’s wife. She was Moreton’s girlfriend at Oxford. Completely besotted, he was. She was an absolute beauty. Everyone knew who she was. If you’d had to put money on any two students getting married it would’ve been those two.’
‘What happened?’
‘Richard Brook happened. I mean, you couldn’t blame him. People used to say she was out of Sandy’s league. But he was heartbroken. I’m not sure he ever got over it. Boxed in a completely different way in his third year after she’d left him. Ruthless, he was. And of course she was in his year so he kept seeing her around – when she wasn’t in London, that is.’
‘You seem to know an awful lot about it. Did Moreton talk to you about her?’
‘A little. It was the other lads who filled me in.’
‘And they’re still married?’ Cross observed.
‘Yep. And Moreton never married himself. That tells you quite a lot. Maybe he never got over it. But that’s probably just the romantic in me.’
*
Sandy Moreton left Oxford and became a manager in a well-known hedge fund, Kendall, Bowes and Crisp (KBC), where, apparently, he continued to box in City charity boxing nights. He left just under a decade later by ‘mutual agreement’ to pursue other opportunities. As Cross knew full well, separations by ‘mutual agreement’ were almost always anything but. Someone was pushed or someone jumped. He made a note of the date and started a major trawl through the business pages of the time. He finally came across a parliamentary report on hedge funds misreporting returns to cover up losses. It was a widespread practice, the report concluded, but one firm in particular came into the report’s sights: Kendall, Bowes and Crisp. Their reporting was found to be systematically at fault. Large swathes of data were unearthed to show that they regularly misreported. The company held up its hands and said systems had been put in place to ensure this never happened again. Changes were also being made in their corporate offices. This meant that a number of people were sacked. Sandy Moreton himself left four weeks after the publication of the report. Obviously no coincidence. But what was of more importance to Cross was buried in one of the appendices. It was a list of the contributors to the report alongside the main authors. There, in the middle of a long list, was Richard Brook, a middling civil servant at the time.
It seemed to Cross that the next time these two men’s paths crossed again was at the BEIS where Brook was the leading civil servant and Moreton became a junior minister. This meant that he was, in effect, working for Moreton and reported to him. Cross could imagine how little this would have appealed to Brook. It was this final connection with his old rival that seemed to have led to Moreton’s current problematic situation. It really did seem that his political career had come to an end thanks to Brook’s inquiry. On the balance of his research thus far Cross did wonder whether Moreton’s claim that the inquiry had been a witch hunt with a personal agenda might have more than an element of truth about it.