Help! I’m being held to ransom

How to deal with "bad" people

I am currently being held to ransom. I don’t want to give any details about this. It’s not likely that the people who are doing this will read this newsletter, but the odds, though very low, are not zero. And I don’t want to make things worse than they are.

Please don’t worry. No one’s life is in danger. What the people are doing is not illegal, but it’s very unpleasant. I have had many sleepless nights over it. None of the routes out of the situation are appealing and so I/we (it’s not just me who’s affected) will just have to pick one of them and hope it turns out to be better than I/we expect.

Let me say, first of all, that we have not done anything wrong. We have acted in good faith. We have assumed the best of the people involved and that assumption has been proved to be wrong.

Let me put it more succinctly. We were mugs.

And then, last week, when I was feeling really depressed about it all, I was scammed.

I had promised Anthony a trip to Madrid as a very late birthday present. His to me was a trip to Stockholm in December, which was wonderful. (You can read about it here.) It’s a newish ruse, this birthday-present-city-break thing. It makes us both look fantastically generous while allowing us to treat ourselves to mini breaks twice a year.

Madrid would not have been top of my bucket list, but the rule is your birthday, your choice. And, in this case, my slightly sinking stomach. I have been to Madrid twice. Both times were nearly twenty years ago. The first time I went with a man I had met online called Juan. Juan, I think it’s probably clear, was Spanish. On our first date, we went to Brindisa in Borough market. We ate delicious tapas. We drank delicious wine. After a few years in the trenches of online dating, I was pleased to meet a man with his own hair, teeth and brain.

Juan seemed civilised. Juan was civilised. He was also very clear indeed about how things should be done. Over a dinner I had spent hours cooking, he explained to me, in slightly testy tones, why it was unacceptable to serve vegetables on the same plate as meat or fish. I told him it was just a cultural difference, but he told me, as calmly as he could, that the Spanish way was correct and the British way was incorrect. And things that were incorrect seemed to make his lip curl.

He was living in London but had a flat in Madrid. I spent a weekend at that flat. You couldn’t really describe it as cosy. Juan had a schedule. We followed that schedule. We saw art. Lots of art. I was intrigued to see that many of the men in Velasquez’s paintings had Juan’s nose and lips. My mother later told me that she thought his face looked “cruel”. None of us can help the shape of our noses or lips and I don’t think that was fair. Juan was not cruel. What he was was very precise and precision can be quite tiring.

Juan’s flat was not like this

By the time we were due to go on our next weekend in Madrid, we had split up. In other circumstances I would have cancelled the trip, but I had agreed to interview the great Spanish novelist, then tipped as a Nobel laureate, Javier Marias. Juan decided to take full advantage of the air tickets he had booked. We had seats next to each other. Let’s just say it was extremely awkward.

I went to see Marias at his apartment in Madrid’s oldest square, next to a medieval tower which was once a prison for King Francis I of France. Sales of his books worldwide had by then topped five and a half million. "Nothing will stop me from devouring all Marias's previous books," said Antony Beevor after reading his novel, Fever and Spear and I knew how he felt. Marias’s books are a mesmerising mix of fantasy, meditation and memory.

Javier Marias was one of the most brilliant men I have ever met. His company was like champagne. He chain-smoked throughout the interview (no wonder he died of lung disease in 2022) and I emerged into that square in a daze. It was a great privilege to have met and interviewed him (you can read the interview here) but what I remember most about that trip to Madrid was the flight back, sitting next to Juan.

Still, if Madrid was Anthony’s city-break of choice, then Madrid it would be. I spent hours trawling through over-priced hotels and beige apartments and finally found a flat that looked as if it could accommodate human beings. I clicked the “request to book” button and got a message to say my request had been sent.

After my request was accepted, I got an email from Beatriz, the owner, asking me to confirm the booking on WhatsApp. She had, I could see from her photo, long blonde hair. She sounded friendly. She looked nice. She sent me a link for two-factor card authentication and that’s where it all started to go wrong. Every time I tapped in the code I’d been texted, I got the whirling pizza. I told Beatriz that there seemed to be a problem. She told me that Booking.com had recently updated their system and sometimes there were “glitches”. I tried again. And again. Beatriz told me to “follow the instructions”. By this time, her tone was slightly frosty.

When I called my bank, I discovered that several payments had been racked up on my credit card. Since I had replied with a “Y” to the text from my bank asking whether the initial figure was correct, which it was, they said they couldn’t stop them. After many hours on the phone, over two days, a kind Glaswegian told me that, on this occasion, the bank wouldn’t charge me for the payments. The quid pro quo was a very long lecture about fraud awareness, of which I caught about one word in four.

Meanwhile, a man I had done a week’s work for refused to pay my invoice. Our agreement had been made on the phone because I was doing the work through a mutual acquaintance on what I understood to be a gentleman’s agreement. The man is thirty years older than me and he didn’t behave like a gentleman. He assumed, in fact, that I was the one whose memory had failed. Even after I set out a factual account of what was said and agreed, he doubled down. He is, by the way, very, very, very, very rich.

I now have a clearer idea of how rich people become rich.

I am not an idiot. I read and watch the news. I can watch an American president shake hands with a man whose henchmen chopped up a journalist with bone saws. (Friends of mine met that journalist just a few months before.) I can hear the president tell that man that his country has “proved the critics totally wrong”. I can see him smile at the man. “I like him a lot,” he told a gathering of the world’s business elite. “I like him,” he added intriguingly, “too much.”

So yes, I know there are, to put it kindly, people in the world who don’t share my values. There are people who think it’s fine to kill more than 50,000 Palestinians who are essentially held hostage by their leaders. There are people who think it’s fine to invade a democracy and claim it’s a Nazi regime.

There are people who think it’s fine to chop up journalists with bone saws. Great chunks of the world are run by those people.

What shocks me, what winds me, what makes me feel sick to my stomach, is when I come across people who do “bad things” in what I suppose I might call my real life.

We all have a story in our heads about what we do and why. I suppose Putin’s will have something to do with his place in history. The Hamas leaders’ will have something to do with restoring a lost homeland. Netanyahu’s will have something to do with the Holocaust. Trump’s… Nope, sorry I can’t figure out Trump’s. Maybe a kind of soup of crypto-coin and gold bullion?

Perhaps the rich man who wouldn’t pay me thinks everyone is out to screw him. Perhaps the fraudsters on Booking.com think they deserve the money they extort. And the people who are holding me to ransom? Sorry, but I don’t want to give a single damn thing away.

Javier Marias told me that his novel Dance and Dream was based on his father's betrayal by a close friend in the Spanish Civil War. “We think we know people's faces,” he told me. “We think we know more or less what we can expect from them. My father,” he continued, “suffered a tremendous disappointment, but we have all had disappointments. Sometimes, afterwards, we think, yes, I did see this coming - or yes, I did see it, but I didn't want to see it.”

I didn’t want to see it. I didn’t want to see any of it. I have been open and trusting. Mostly, it has served me. Occasionally, it doesn’t. I still believe it’s important to try to stay calm, clear and civil. But I have resolved to keep my eyes a little more open and try to find a little more steel.

Marias's novel, Dance and Dream, was the second in a trilogy with the overall title Your Face Tomorrow. It’s partly about the work of a group of people who study other people's character to predict their future behaviour. To predict, in fact, their “face tomorrow”. If we want a shot at making the world better, we probably all need to get better at this, while also reminding ourselves that the only “face tomorrow” we have any real chance of controlling is our own.

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Have you had to toughen up and find more steel? If so, I’d love to hear more about how you’ve done it.

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