April 1971
It had always been an article of faith with Conrad that his luck would eventually change. It had not been consistently bad. There had been some ebb and flow, and there had been nights when he had come out ahead. But the one or two spectacular wins he had enjoyed in the early days had remained elusive, like lightning reluctant to strike in the same place again.
His luck was not the whole story; he knew that. The ability to watch and track the energy around the table had left him, too. He sensed that this was not random. In the beginning he had been focused on the game and the players, concentrating on the table, and nothing but the table. He could go for hours without being aware of anything else. But then, he had not been worrying about the money. He had been free to focus on the game. Now he was worrying about the money a great deal.
His visits to the Clermont Club were no longer a game; they had become a battle for survival. His losses were no longer simply the cost of a night’s entertainment; they represented serious damage to family assets that should never have been at risk, that Deborah did not know to be at risk; and the circumstances in which they had been exposed to risk had his fingerprints all over them. He was smoking at the table now, too – another distraction he had never imposed on himself before. Things were critical. He was due to be appointed a High Court judge in a matter of weeks. The Queen’s decision had been made, and was about to be made public. He couldn’t afford skeletons in the closet, as Jeremy Sawyer had put it. If his luck didn’t change soon, there was every chance that things would start to fall apart.
With so much to worry him, he was concentrating on the result instead of the game, the money instead of the energy; and when you focused on the money, the energy became invisible to you. If anyone was seeing the energy now, it was Ian Maxwell-Scott, who in recent weeks had played with such insight and precision that even Lucan and Goldsmith were nervous of him. He had asked Susie one night how such a transformation had come about. ‘He has nothing left to lose,’ she replied. ‘He’s way beyond worrying. He communes with death – in the gaming sense, you understand – every night, and he has no more fear of it.’ Well, I’m very afraid of it, Conrad reflected, and I still have a lot to lose; which explained his state of mind, but offered no way out.
He had calculated as precisely as he could the amount of money he needed from his two sources of funding. He needed a prolonged winning streak to make good his losses, and a prolonged winning streak did not, could not, involve winning every hand. It involved having enough resources to allow his luck time to work; to let it materialise, hand by hand, night after night, with the wins outstripping the losses gradually and consistently over a period of time. For that purpose, in the high-stakes world of the Clermont Club, he estimated the minimum funding required at £30,000. If he could have put all the distractions out of his mind, kept his focus on the game; if he could have lost the fear of death, he might even have done it. When the table caught fire and the wagers escalated steadily up to half the house limit, a player who could see the energy clearly might walk away with most of what he needed to recoup his losses in a single night. Even if there was still some shortfall, he might be able to walk away happy.
But the fear had robbed him of the ability to see clearly; it had robbed him of his confidence; and he had begun to make mistakes. His worst mistake was to raid his two sources separately. He raised £20,000 from his first source, Deborah’s trust fund, hoping – against his own calculations – that it might be enough; and putting himself under more pressure worrying that it might not be enough; leaving himself uncertain and vulnerable as his losses mounted. By the time he was forced to raise £10,000 from the second source, the house, by means of a mortgage, his fear had more or less wiped out his ability to play a table.
He had become easy prey. Even Dominick Elwes was able to keep pace with him. As banker, his betting was erratic. Instead of starting small and encouraging others to cover, upping the stakes gradually as they did so, he bid high and low without any pattern, and frightened the other players off until they saw the chance to pounce. As a player he offered the mirror image, alternating between recklessly covering the bank and offering only minimum stakes against a banker whose run was obviously coming to an end. He was rudderless in the midst of a chartless sea. He tried to look to Ian for inspiration, but Ian the Fearless was on another level now, on a planet of his own, with a manic Susie cheering him on, and Conrad could no longer read him. Periodically, he made a real effort to see the energy, and sometimes he thought he did, but he could not keep his mind from leaping in excitement at the thought of a win, and once his mind went there, the energy vanished as quickly as it had appeared. When the table was on fire, he was losing instead of winning; the amount of his resources merely postponing the inevitable, and making the inevitable worse when it came.
As the last remnants of his resources dwindled away, he tried to confide in Greta, but hers was a world in which there was always more money, and she seemed to have no understanding of his plight. He contemplated raiding his resources again, but if he did that, the amount he would have to chase would need luck of a different order, and his bankers would ask questions they had not asked so far. He started to float away into a melancholy fog in which the endless round of losses was all that remained visible to the human eye.
Then one day, by appointment, he went into his chambers for almost the last time, to make the necessary arrangements for his departure for the Bench. As chance would have it, he found himself alone in the clerk’s room for some minutes, and looking serendipitously around, he suddenly saw a third source, an opportunity to fund one last despairing chase of his brutal losses. Putting his judgement aside, he seized this final opportunity with both hands, and tonight, he had brought it to the Clermont Club. But now, he no longer had time to wait for a prolonged, gradual run of luck. The third source was one he could not conceal for long. He was holding a hand grenade, and the pin was halfway out. He needed to win now.