It's coming... Chapter One Taster.

From: mark.harris69@gmail.com

To: emily.faulkner@financialtimes.com

Subject: Impossible Maths

Date: Wednesday, 24 June 2026, 06:02

Dear E Faulkner,

You don’t know me. I hope that may change.

I have been reading your financial columns for some time with great interest and in the kindest sense, some amusement.

I am going to die soon. I mention this not for sympathy but for context. A man consigned to death has little patience for preamble.

I would like to share my story. I believe you are the right person to hear it.

I will begin where it began. My first day at Clacton County High School. September 1980. I was eleven years old, and it was the day I first experimented with impossible maths.

On my way to school I went into the local sweet shop. I purchased six Mars Bars. They were fifteen pence each. Ninety pence for six Mars Bars. Bloody hell, you couldn’t buy one for that nowadays. Plus, they’re smaller now. What do they call it? Shrinkflation. Sleight of hand. That’s what I call it. In your face, sleight of hand. I gave Mrs Rowlings two fifty-pence coins and she gave me ten pence change. She also gave me a warning about tooth decay and getting fat. She said James O’Shea had fillings already from eating too many Texan Bars and he was only eleven.

I liked Mrs Rowlings, but she did like to gossip. I decided never to purchase anything from her shop again. Instead, I bought the shop itself a few years later. I wonder now if some of the things I have gathered over the years are akin to a magpie’s need for shiny things

.

When I got to school, I sold all the Mars Bars for ten pence each. As you can imagine, the kids that bought them were delighted. I was selling cheaper than any of their local shops. By the time the final bell rang ending the day, I was in business.

Home was ‘The Chase’. Before that it was ‘The Corner House’ in Wash Lane. The Corner House was full of disabled kids on their holidays. I don’t know why I was placed there. A lack of local provision in the care system or something. The Chase was a lot smaller. Just six bedrooms. Mine was in the eaves space. You couldn’t stand up straight unless you stayed in the middle, and I’d cracked my head on that ceiling more times in two months than in the whole of my life before. I didn’t care. It was mine. At The Corner House I’d shared my room with wheelchairs, crutches and lifting aids. A room of my own in an attic felt like a promotion.

Two small windows looked out over the sea wall to the water. On a windy night you could hear the masts clinking down at the sailing club.

There wasn’t much in the room. A bed, a wardrobe with a door that swung open on its own, a chest of drawers that smelled of mothballs. On the top sat my radio-cassette player and a shoe box of C90 cassette tapes. The skill involved in seamlessly recording the Top 40 off Radio 1 each Sunday is something lost on today’s generation.

There was no telly up there, of course. Not that it mattered. Grange Hill wasn’t back until January. January! A whole term of school before I’d find out what Tucker Jenkins and his lot were up to. It felt like a life sentence.

I sat on my bed, opened my hand and let the coins drop onto the blanket.

Seventy pence.

Sixty pence from sales and ten pence change from Mrs Rowlings.

I’d done what Mr Wheeler told me to do. Lose money to make a profit.

The predicted profit for my first day was exactly as he said it would be.

I know it doesn’t look like a profit. The untrained eye will see a thirty pence loss.

But believe me.

It was a profit.

It’s how I built a billion-pound company.

It’s how the markets work.

Your financial columns suggest you suspect this.

I will write again shortly.

Yours,

Mark Harris