Though he scarcely knew the man, Malcolm Rausing assumed he’d acquired both his affinity for the sea and his taste for violence from his father. Angus Rausing had been discharged from the Royal Navy in 1942 after a diving accident nearly paralyzed him. He was awarded a hardship pension and sent back to Scotland where, after lying low for a few years, he founded a salvage and diving operation, eventually acquiring a fleet of ships that he based in Aberdeen.

Angus was an unforgiving, brutal man, who rewarded loyalty, but punished incompetence, often by medieval means. Once, a long-time employee of Rausing Oceanic, who was suspected of floating a paycheck to pay gambling debts, was found naked in Aberdeen harbor, hypothermic and missing his right hand. Nothing was ever proven about the circumstances of his situation, and the man never spoke of it. He even continued to work for Rausing, rising to the rank of financial controller. But everyone noticed he never looked Angus Rausing in the eye again.

Malcolm was born to a Portuguese mother, Andréa, with whom Angus had spent a month while overseeing a dredging project in the harbor at Cascais. Andréa was an Iberian beauty, with parchment-colored skin and short black hair that framed high cheekbones and dark brown eyes. Malcolm remembered numerous men passing through the house with regularity, their hands probing and faces hungry, leaving a crumpled wad of cash on his mother’s nightstand. He assumed his father had been one of these men, but Andréa told him he was not. “Your father is a very important and powerful man,” she would say, which made Malcolm grow to hate him even more.

Though he had no soft spot for children, Angus did possess a sense of responsibility and sent Malcolm’s mother a healthy stipend every month until Malcolm turned 18. About once a year he would return, ostensibly on business, and visit the tidy apartment he rented for mother and bastard son. To Malcolm, the man’s face was ugly and broad, his eyes piercing, his limp a gruesome remnant of a final dive years before.

On one of these visits, when Malcolm was 12, Angus pulled him down onto a chair and told him he had a secret, one that had almost cost him his life but also could make him rich. His father’s breath was laced with whisky, his grip strong. When Malcolm asked him what it was, his father angrily pushed him away. “Why would I tell a bastard like you?” he said, and laughed.

Angus insisted that his son be educated in England, and, when Malcolm turned 14, he was sent to boarding school at Ipswich. By this time, his inherited cruel streak had surfaced, and he was disciplined for fighting four times until the school threw him out after his second year for the particularly vicious beating of a younger boy who simply looked at Malcolm a bit too long.