‘We need to look through the document you have kindly prepared.’
The guy sitting opposite me was an estate agent or, rather, he owned a string of estate agencies. He was aged 51, wore a designer sports jacket, a designer shirt, designer shoes… everything about him was designer, even his haircut. He also wore designer trousers, no doubt of the type that he had been unable to keep on when he committed the many acts of adultery that his wife had cited in her first draft petition for divorce. I had negotiated the petition down with his wife’s solicitor to one based on a single act of adultery but was left wondering how his grossly overweight carcass had ever managed to perform any sexual act, let alone repeated acts of infidelity. I couldn’t imagine how any woman could have even found his necessary dangly bits under the layers of wobbling flab or found him attractive enough to do the business. It must have been like having sex under a steamroller, not that I have ever tried that.
‘Mr Hamley-Smith, can I just make sure? Have you checked through the document carefully, please?’
‘Of course.’ He shifted in his seat. I had already explained to him that it must contain a full and frank account of all his capital and income. He had to swear that it was true, as to which there were two hopes. Bob Hope and no hope.
Mr Hamley-Smith, or Peregrine as I was asked to call him, was a liar. He had a really irritating habit of sweeping his straight, grey hair back with his hand while throwing his head backwards or pointing with the arm of his designer glasses when he was lying. I knew that, if it ever came to it, he was going to make a lousy witness. But he paid his bills on time and wanted me to pretend that, as decent chaps, we would pull together in his moment of adversity where his wife of fifteen years wanted to make a grasping assault, as he saw it, on his money. Now, when he left the room I really did struggle not to use antiseptic hand-wash.
‘So, you say that the house is worth £1.5 million?’ I asked. His wife was running an argument that she should stay in the family home, so he wanted to respond to that by plainly overvaluing it. I knew it was probably worth no more than about £1.3 million and had a mortgage of £300,000 on it. Peregrine wanted it sold and thought he could get a percentage of the sale proceeds by wheeling and dealing through the divorce case. I touched, once, on the possibility that she might stay there with their two horrid children – the result was spectacular. He shifted in his chair, swept his hair back, pointed at me with the arm of his glasses and lied so much that I found myself looking to see if smoke was pouring out of his underwear.
I had felt compelled to go to the house once for a carnivorous dinner party after the commercial partners had wrapped up a deal for him, my note that I was vegetarian totally ignored. Everything in the house was bright, white, modern and tasteless. We were served canapés by their two spoilt brat daughters who wore fairy dresses and subjected the guests to their under-practised piano pieces during the only lull in the piped boogie-woogie music that played constantly through the ceiling speakers for the rest of the evening.
‘Shoot me. And do it quietly,’ I had muttered to my wife after one of the spotty girls, who had the inapposite name of a Greek goddess, had murdered a simplified version of ‘Air on a G String’.
‘They’ve renamed that piece,’ my wife giggled, out of control. ‘It’s called Air on a Dirty Pair of Knickers, now.’
‘Bet there are skid marks on the piano stool.’
‘Stool on stool, then.’ My wife then laughed so much that a spray of champagne came shooting out of her mouth and she had to pretend she was choking.
‘Now you really are taking the piss.’
‘Stop!’ she told me and went to the loo.
Also at the dinner party had been Peregrine’s elderly mother who looked like a scrawny goat. To signal that we were amongst the least valued guests we were sitting next to her at dinner. Her only conversation had been to say that she preferred dogs to people – not the best way to get other people to warm to you – and didn’t like vegetables.
‘Why don’t you like vegetables?’ Susan, my wife, had asked. What do you say to someone as miserable as that? Met any trolls recently?
‘Because I don’t,’ she had bleated with her clipped Essex tongue and had then carried on chewing the steak and forking bits of it out of her mouth when she found her false teeth could not grind them down.
When we had got back home that night we had sunk a bottle of Prosecco together and both groaned, ‘Never again.’ And we stuck to that.
‘Guess what the gossip is about what Peregrine uses as birth control?’ I said to Susan before the alcohol finally cast us both into booze-ridden sleep.
‘Give up.’
‘His personality.’
‘Can’t take any more,’ Susan said and fell asleep.
Oh well, back to his bloody document of lies. There are lies, damn lies and then there are the utterances of Peregrine.
‘We’d better look at what you’ve said about the company,’ I said, realising that it meant that I was putting his underwear well beyond combustion point.
Peregrine did a multiple lying manoeuvre. Skilful, definitely, but it left me thinking he would fall out of the chair before adopting his prep school manner of fibbing school bully.
‘I don’t see why it’s anything to do with her.’
‘Come on, Peregrine, you know the score. You’ve been married to her for fifteen years. You’ve got two kids.’
‘So what? She had nothing when I married her.’ Peregrine thought he had been a big catch. Big? Yes. Catch? I couldn’t see it.
‘Peregrine, once we have got all the documents sorted, we’ll get counsel’s advice. Ducks in a row first, though, that kind of thing. So, for now, we need to get this document right. I know it’s a pain.’ I flipped the work of fiction that he had prepared – it’s called a Form E, the ‘E’ in this case stood for evasion. He understood about ducks, though; he shot them.
‘Well, I’ve put my share of the company down at the value suggested by our accountant.’ Peregrine, his brother (Bertram) and his mother (Gladys) each had a one-third share in the company which owned the estate agencies. The value of Peregrine’s share had been worked out by their bent accountant looking at the net asset value of the company as shown in the balance sheet of accounts that were two years out of date and then applying a discount of 30% to Peregrine’s share because he only had a minority interest.
‘We may have a few problems with the figure you’ve given,’ I tried.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, the assets of the company include the freehold of all the business premises. When were they last valued for the accounts?’ I could see from the historical accounts that they had not been revalued for years.
‘Whose side are you on?’
‘I’m on your side. But we do need to get this right.’
‘OK, Jon…’
‘Jonathan.’ I was not getting friendly with him again. He was a client. I wasn’t going within a million miles of another dinner party like the last one. Susan would have refused to go anyway. Point-blank.
‘Jonathan. But I would like you to use the figure I’ve given, please. I’m not giving her anything on a plate.’ He tried to put on an ‘I’m the boss’ tone that just made him sound like a complete arse.
‘That’s your choice, I accept. But I will write to you to record that we may have problems with this later.’
‘Just so long as you don’t charge me for the letter.’