‘I’d like to understand whose decision it was to drop the tax raid. Kendall’s, or Ramsey’s? And why did they choose not to go ahead? There’s a funny smell around it.’

I let the silence play out. Ringer tips back his head and blows out a long stream of smoke. ‘Cui bono?’

‘What?’

‘Cui bono? Who benefits?’

‘Well, pensioners might if the tax raid is dead. No?’

Ringer gives me a pitying look. ‘What about the companies that stand behind the funds, which put money into them? Is the tax credit good or bad for them?’

He takes a breath of air, and then of Silk Cut. ‘The dividend credit is worth billions to pension funds, right? There must be funds that can’t afford to lose it.’

‘The majority of pension funds are in surplus,’ I say, parroting what Jess told me.

‘Yes. But just because the average fund is in surplus, it doesn’t mean they all are. I would have thought someone who works on the FC would know that. And someone who works on the FC might have picked up rumours about one or two funds in deep, dark, smelly doo-doo.’

He’s trying to make me feel inadequate and it’s working. I am desperate to make an educated guess but I have nothing to offer.

He blows his lips out, extinguishes the cigarette stub and lights another. ‘Say, for the sake of argument, there’s an important fund that has an enormous black hole. And say that hole got bigger because the tax credit was taken away. There’d be contagion to the company that sponsors the fund. Creditors to that sponsoring company would take a dim view – and if the company was already sitting on a ton of debt, that could be curtains.’

I can’t tell if this is hypothesis, or whether he’s directing me to something he knows. ‘Are you saying that Kendall was leaned on by a powerful business to shelve the tax raid?’

‘I’m not saying anything.’

His riddles are annoying, but par for the course. Ringer’s loyalty to his clients is like that of a double or treble agent in a le Carré novel. It’s never clear who he is working for, or why, and it amazes me his customers don’t clock when he’s playing them off against each other.

On this occasion, he won’t name the company, if there is one. Time to move the conversation to Kendall. ‘When I wanted to write a story about the tax credit fiasco, Kendall was desperate to block me. He tried to bully me, seemed upset. Why would such a technical tax change have got under his skin?’

Ringer tilts his glass from side to side, studying the bubbles in the champagne. His answer sounds like a non sequitur. ‘You know his marriage is on the rocks?’