IT IS April 2005 and I am sitting in a Los Angeles hotel with Detective Rodriguez from the Cold Case Unit of the LAPD. He has arrived in full cop uniform with a big shiny badge and a fat gun at his hip and the staff in the lobby are giving us a wide berth. On the table in front of me is the autopsy of a professor who was murdered in Beverly Hills in 1971 and I am telling Rodriguez I've found something that could be a clue to this unsolved case.
He listens politely, but it's clear from his silence and the fact that he's not taking notes that he thinks I'm midway between crazy and annoying. I am not a detective. I am not related to the murder victim. I am a writer and the dead professor is a character in my novel.
Five years earlier I was raking it in as an investment banker in London. As I writer I can expect to average less than a shelf-stacker at Tesco's. But I'm doing exactly what I have always wanted and I have never been happier. So far, so follow-your-dream. But that is the carefully edited version of my career-shift story. The real truth goes something like this.
It is 1970 and I'm sitting on the floor of the Pembroke library in Dublin in tears yet again over the story of the Happy Prince. I have decided I am going to be a writer but although I scribble away over the years, it all remains tucked away in a case under my bed.
It is 1985 and my first day on the Convertible Bond Trading desk at Morgan Stanley in London. I am a linguistics graduate who knows nothing about finance, but the bank is looking for clever, ambitious raw material. Beside me is a huge Californian who can rip apart a phone directory with his bare hands and bark like a Yorkshire terrier. To my right is a guy who once woke up in an empty apartment in Paris after a three-day blackout on Port. Another guy opposite says he's seen a snuff movie.
Across the way is a line of Japanese warrant traders screaming into phones and making a killing in a bull market. I am thrilled by all this excitement. It's a long way from the nuns telling me not to have any career ideas above my station. Within weeks I am hooked. And because I am fiercely competitive and don't mind getting up at 5.45am, I'm not going to let a small matter like being a woman in a man's world stand in my way. I decide that I will be the best.
A decade passes while I am on the phone.
It is November 5th, 1998, and I am chairing a conference call with the management of the equity division. Two hours later I'm in the Portland having an epidural for the planned Caesarean delivery of my son. Five days later I'm working from home in between feeds. Four weeks later I become the first woman managing director on the trading floor. I am back in the office in January. But I know something is very wrong in February. It is the last day of a business trip to New York and I am standing in the Four Seasons hotel demanding that the concierge book me a one-way escape to somewhere, anywhere, while my driver waits outside to take me to JFK and a flight back home to London.
By April, I am on a psychiatric ward being treated for severe post-natal depression. At least that is the diagnosis. I might have ignored some early warning signals. Like 3am in Tokyo, staring at my reflection in the black windows of the Westin hotel and wondering if it's possible that I might never sleep again. Like the day I find myself trembling on top of a telegraph pole with all my staff below me shouting encouragement. This macho, team-bonding day out was all my idea and all I have to do is jump, prove that I can do it. I have done much worse than this, but I am suddenly heartbroken at the realisation that I might spend the rest of my days as a performing seal.
Easy to be wise in hindsight. But despite all the drugs and the therapy and the self-recrimination, I am still no closer to understanding what happened. Maybe, finally, I just had to learn how to fail.
Last night in London I met an ex-colleague for dinner on Threadneedle Street. We talked about subprime, wondered if anyone we knew might have been buried in the credit derivatives fallout. He asked me if I missed the markets and the money. I told him my publisher could hate my next book.
But I am making up this new life as I go along and I am having a ball.
Aifric Campbell's novel The Semantics of Murder will be published by Serpent's Tail on April 24th. www.thesemanticsofmurder.com