There is a price for arrogance, but Gilles Asselin could afford to pay it. In his alpaca evening jacket with a blue velvet lapel, he exuded the burnt-rubber smell of deals that had left nations scorched. In colonial Brazil he would have been a bandeirante, hunting for gold and precious stones, rounding up Indians and crushing the uprisings of black slaves, bringing them back in chains. In the twenty-first century, he ruled as a banqueiro, on the hunt for insider knowledge that would leapfrog him ahead of the game. He had lived his life in accordance with a complete lack of conviction and no ideology other than to make money. His mantra, he told Dyer during one of their touchline chats, ‘How do I shove my way into immediate profit?’

Dyer never concealed from Gilles that he considered him to be a moral hunchback, yet his voice with its undertones of French was listened to with respect in boardrooms from the City to Seattle. Wherever in the financial world you looked, Gilles dominated, he dazzled and bewildered. One of his specialities was debt: ‘No assets or personnel to worry about.’ He was rumoured to have brokered the deal which had caused Greece to default, then the deal that secured Greece’s bail-out. He had bought Argentina’s debt and taken her Tall Ships as collateral. The Ukrainian debt, so that he could advise the finance minister in Kiev on how to restructure his economy in a way calculated to benefit Gilles’s investors. Governments were among his clients.

At the heart of his operations, nourishing them, lay a colossal vacuum. ‘There’s three times more debt than equity out there. If you set up all the financial assets in the world, there is $120 trillion GDP and $400 trillion debt.’ In this black hole Gilles flourished. He derived a sizeable portion of his company’s profits from betting on the volatility indices. With noteworthy patience, Gilles had tried to explain his method to Dyer. ‘Let’s say I think the BP share price, currently at £6, is going to collapse on some news. I call my prime broker in New York, borrow BP shares and place an order to sell them forward at £6. All I care about is that I have enough margin collateral to cover my bet that BP is heading south fast. If the shares go up, I have to buy the shares to cover the short. But if the share price goes below £6 on the news, I’m in the money … if they hit £3, I buy them back at that level and make multiples, because my only cost is what the broker charges me to borrow the shares.’

To Gilles, this was the way the world had always worked. To Dyer, it was gobbledygook.