Stone's Fall (12 page)

The flash in her eyes clearly demonstrated that, however much she might have been chastened, the situation was very far from permanent. I pressed on while there was still time.

“Mr. Cort,” I said.

“What about him?”

“Henry Cort is in charge of government espionage. He has been described to me as the most powerful and dangerous man in the country.”

“Henry?” she said. “Oh, I don’t think…”

“You have known him for years, so you told me. I do not believe you could be unaware that there is more to him than meets the eye.”

She considered for a moment. “I think you also have been less than open with me,” she replied. “If I remember, I asked what your interest in Henry was, and you replied merely that someone had mentioned his name. I do not see why I should be open with you, if you dissimulate with me.”

A fair point. “Very well. Let me summarise. Henry Cort visited the police within hours of your husband’s death, and was quite possibly the man responsible for suppressing news of it for nearly three days. In the meantime, Barings Bank was brought in to support the price of the Rialto Investment Trust, which was your husband’s financial instrument for controlling a large part of British industry.”

“I know what Rialto is.”

“Cort also used to work for Barings,” I continued. “Barings, we now know, pays Signora Vincotti’s annuity. I refuse to believe that an old friend, whom you have known for twenty years or more, would conceal all of this from you.”

She smiled quietly. “Of course. You are quite correct. I didn’t mention it because I did not know of his involvement when John died. Besides, Mr. Cort and I are not close.”

“That means you do not like each other?”

“If you like.”

“Why not?”

“That is none of your business. John necessarily had dealings with him, but I insisted that they be conducted away from me.”

I brooded over this. It didn’t help me at all. “Why? I mean, what dealings?”

“John made weapons, the Government bought them. Naturally they had common interests. Don’t ask me more; I do not know.”

“How did you meet your husband? What was he like?”

She smiled, recalling a fond memory. “He was the kindest man you could meet, the best I ever knew,” she began. “That was not his reputation, perhaps, and I sense that it is not the opinion you have formed of him, but you are wrong. The man of money and power, and the man who shared my life, had little in common.”

She paused and looked across the square, at all the normal, poor people strolling to and fro, or hurrying across. Some looked as though they were taking a break from the reading desks of the British Museum, others came from the shops and offices of Holborn. I even hoped—again, this was a sign to which I should have given more attention—that perhaps an old colleague from Fleet Street might appear, and see me. See me with her, in fact.

“I met him on a train,” she went on, as this pleasant and dangerous fantasy flickered through my mind. “On the Orient Express.”

“Is it true he had his own carriage?”

She laughed, more easily now. “No, of course not. I’ve told you—he was a simple man in his tastes. He had his own compartment, of course. There is no particular pleasure in sharing with total strangers unless you have to. Ostentation would have been detrimental to his business; often on these trips he liked to travel as quietly as possible so as not to be noticed.”

Maybe she had really loved him; she smiled as memories flitted past, the very idea of her husband brought her pleasure, and the thought of his death caused her grief. I had anticipated a marriage of convenience and companionship at most. A rich man seeks a beautiful young woman in the same way that such people might desire a racehorse, or an expensive painting. Is that not true? And the beautiful young woman desires security and luxury. But they expect no gratification, and little affection; these (so I understood) they must find elsewhere. Perhaps this had been different.

“The thing about John, you see, is that he was quite simple in his affections as well. He thought of himself as a sophisticated man of the world, and in business matters no doubt he was. But he was not a man for gallantry, had no idea how to seduce, or flatter or be anything other than he was. I found his uncomplicated nature beguiling.”

She looked at me, and smiled. “I can see I am surprising you,” she said. “You think I would want an elegant man of sophistication. Hand some, athletic, worldly.”

“I suppose.”

“You know nothing, I’m afraid, Mr. Braddock. Nothing of me, nothing of women at all.” She said it gently, as a matter of fact, but I still blushed hotly.

“Someone said that both of you met their match in the other.”

She laughed. “Who on earth said that?”

“Mr. Xanthos. Do you know him?”

She nodded. “Not well. But we have met often.”

“So is his opinion true?”

“I would hardly claim to be John’s match. What else did he tell you?”

“Oh, that you were once one of the most influential women in France, or something like that.”

Here she let out a burst of laughter, and almost choked on her tea. Her eyes sparkled with merriment as she put down her cup carefully and looked at me. “Good heavens,” she said after a while. “What an extraordinary idea. How on earth did he come up with that?”

“He said you ran a salon, or something.”

“And that made me the most influential woman in France?”

“Apparently.”

“Well, no,” she said, still smiling broadly. I think it was the first time I had seen her laugh, genuinely and without restraint. It transformed her. “No, I’m afraid not. A young girl from Hungary would stand no chance whatsoever of establishing herself like that in Paris. Not if she was respectable.”

“Pardon?”

“Some of the most famous
salonnières
are—or were, I do not know what it is like now—courtesans. Very expensive ones, but still… I hope you do not think…”

“No, no. Of course not. I mean…” I was red in the face, blushing deeply; I could even feel the roots of my hair burning with embarrassment. She looked at me, enjoying my confusion, but then kindly looked away across the square until I recovered myself. I could see her mouth still twitching, though.

“Is Mr. Bartoli being helpful?” she asked, to change the subject.

“Mr. Bartoli does not approve of me. He has indicated he will give me as little assistance as possible.”

She raised an eyebrow. “Let me deal with that” was her only reply and I realised Mr. Bartoli was not going to be happy about it.

“I asked about your husband’s concerns.”

“I do not know what they were. Just that he had been quite busy in the months before his death; I reproached him for it, and said that he really should be working less hard at his age, not more. But he said that this was the way of business, and if something important came up, you could not postpone it simply because you were getting old. Besides, he always maintained that working kept him young, and I think there was something in that. His mind was absolutely undiminished, and he was in no way frail.”

“And this something important…?”

“Tell me, Mr. Braddock, why do you ask so many questions about my husband’s death?”

“I think you know perfectly well,” I said. “Those papers disappeared when he died. I have two ways forward. Either to look for the child, or to look for the papers which will do the work for me. As I am naturally lazy, I think I should exhaust the latter option first of all. Besides, I don’t even know when this boy—or girl—was born, or even in what country. Clearly if it was last year that requires one approach. If it was ten or twenty years ago, then it is different. Do you really have no idea at all…?”

“No,” she said softly and a little sadly. “None whatsoever. I really do not.”

CHAPTER
14

I realise that I have said little about my own life in my account. Partly this is because I wish to tell the story of Lord Ravenscliff, but mainly because I have little enough to say. Life as a reporter involved long hours; often enough I failed even to get back to my lodgings for dinner, and I frequently had to be up and out before Mrs. Morrison had even begun to prepare breakfast. Lunch and dinner were eaten in pubs or taverns; my circle of acquaintanceship, outside my fellow lodgers and reporters, was limited. I briefly attended a reading group of worthy socialists, who would get together to discuss texts on the evils of capitalism, but I missed so many of the meetings, and so rarely had the time to read the books we were meant to be talking about, that I gradually let this drop.

I had no family nearby; my parents lived in the Midlands and I was the only member of the family to leave the town of my birth. I think I was the first of innumerable generations to stray more than ten miles from the centre of Coventry. We were not close; my wish to try my luck in London was perfectly incomprehensible to them. So it had been to me; I did not know why I wanted to leave so much. All I knew was that, if I stayed, I would end up like my father, working as a clerk in an office, or like my brothers, spending their lives in the factories and workshops of that city because they did not dare to do anything else. I do not relish adventure, but that prospect so terrified me that I was willing to swallow my fears. When I left school I worked for a year or so on the local newspaper and convinced myself that I was good at it; better still, I convinced others for long enough to get a reference. Armed with this and five pounds given to me by my father—who understood better than I why I did not wish to be like him—I caught the train to London.

It took two months and nearly all my money to get my first job, working on the social announcements page of the
Chronicle.
I later moved to football, the obituaries and after nearly two years finally had my piece of luck. The crime reporter was more of a drunk than was average, and he was entirely unconscious on the pavement outside the Duck when the first of the Marylebone murders took place. I volunteered to stand in for him, and McEwen agreed. In my desperation—such chances come very infrequently—I nearly said, “Let me go, Cox is drunk again.” That would have damned me. Instead, I robustly denied all knowledge of the poor man’s whereabouts, and said that I was sure he was out on a story. I would fill in until he returned.

And so I did, as he never did return. McEwen did not need me to tell tales. He knew perfectly well what Cox was working on and his patience finally snapped.

I did a good job; a very good job, dare I say it, considering my inexperience. I was told to continue until a proper replacement was found, but one never was. Eventually editorial interest faded, and I continued as acting crime reporter for another year until someone remembered that I was not supposed to be doing the job at all. Then I was promoted, given a proper position, and told to keep going.

That had been five years previously. I had dreamed of being a reporter on a London newspaper and I was one. My ambitions for life should have been satisfied. But, however splendid a job may seem when one does not have it, it rarely stands up to close acquaintanceship. I was beginning to get bored with the life, and even to find murder most foul just a little tedious. But I had not yet fixed on a new goal to fire my ambitions once more. That, quite apart from the money, was why I had taken up Lady Ravenscliff ’s offer with so little hesitation.

As far as the matter of Ravenscliff was concerned, I needed to look through his office with care. Perhaps the papers were there after all. Perhaps some diary or letter would provide all the information I needed, and solve the matter in a few seconds. I doubted it; his widow wasn’t so helpless that she couldn’t find that herself, and she had good reason to look carefully. I knew already that most of the papers were financial in nature and that I could spend days looking at them, with every possibility that I would miss the vital clue even if it was there. So I decided to recruit Franklin.

This wasn’t easy, not because he wasn’t willing, but because he had so little time off from work. He was at the bank from eight in the morning to seven in the evening every day, six days a week. And on Sunday he spent much of his time in church. I thought initially this was calculated; Franklin attended a church frequented by the great bankers of the City and travelled a couple of miles to do his singing and praying when he could have walked a hundred yards round the corner to St. Mary’s, Chelsea. But that was attended only by shopkeepers and landladies. Eventually I realised I did him an injustice. Many people choose a church they find inspiring. Some go for ancient and beautiful buildings, some choose a church with fine music, some prefer an eloquent vicar who can deliver a good sermon. Franklin found that being enveloped in an aura of money incited religious awe in him. To sit around individuals who controlled tens of millions of pounds brought home to him the infinite possibilities of God’s benevolence, and the intricacy of his Creation.

It sounds like a fundamental misunderstanding of Christianity. Eye of a needle, and all that. But it was Franklin’s nature; he could do no other. Just as some people simply are incapable of loving a woman who is not beautiful, so Franklin could only think of the divine in terms of the endless flow of capital. His piety was no less for being so strange in origin, just as a man’s love for a woman is no less passionate merely because it may require a decent inheritance to make it flower. He believed that the rich were better people than the poor, and that to be around them made him better as well. Wealth was both the indication of God’s favour, and provided the means to carry out His wishes on earth.

Harry Franklin, you will understand, had no trouble whatsoever in reconciling God, Darwin and Mammon; indeed, each depended on the others. The survival of the fittest meant the triumph of the richest, which was part of His plan for mankind. Accumulation was divinely ordained, both a mark of God’s favour and a way of earning more benevolence. True, Christ was a carpenter but, had He been living at the start of the twentieth century, Franklin was sure that the Messiah would have paid good attention to His stock levels, steadily expanded His business into the manufacture of fine furniture, while also investing in the latest methods of mass production by means of a stock market flotation to raise the additional capital. Then He would have brought in a manager to free Himself to go about His ministry.

Inevitably, I suppose, the idea of being allowed into the hallowed halls where once trod the feet of the supreme capitalist of the age gave him pause. In fact, the mere idea of Ravenscliff terrified him, and when he arrived at the house in St. James’s Square on the following Sunday morning he was more nervous than I had ever seen him. He seemed to shrink as we were let in, gazed around with reverence as we walked up the stairs, tiptoed past the doors which led to the reception rooms on the first floor, and said not a word until I had firmly shut the door to Ravenscliff ’s study.

“I don’t want to disturb your reverie,” I remarked, “but can we get started?”

He nodded, and looked anxiously at the chair—the very chair—on which the divine bottom had once rested as its owner perused his books. I made him sit on it, by the desk. Just to torment him a little.

“I will read the letters, if you take care of anything with numbers on it.”

“So what am I looking for?”

He had asked me this before. Several times, in fact. But so far I had avoided answering him. While I had Lady Ravenscliff ’s permission to use him, I was not allowed to tell him exactly what all this was about.

“I want you to look for interesting payments,” I said lamely. “Nothing to do with his business interests, although you may look through that if you wish. I want to get an idea of how he spent his own money, in the hope that it will tell me what he was like. Did he buy paintings? Bet on horses? How much on wine? Did he give money to charities, or to hospitals or to friends? Did he have an expensive tailor? Bootmaker? A French chef? Paint me a financial portrait of the man. I need all the information I can get, as everyone I have talked to so far has given me nothing but generalities. I meanwhile will read through everything else, and see what there is.”

Franklin found the idea of columns of money reassuring, although the thought of prying into Ravenscliff ’s private papers made him apprehensive. As it did me. But somewhere in those huge piles of paper might lie the little nugget that would answer all my questions. I had searched the room again the previous day and still found nothing.

So we set to work, each in our different way. I worked like a reporter: spending ten minutes reading, then jumping up and staring out the window, humming to myself. Picking up this pile, then the next, more or less at random, hoping that luck would give me something of interest. Franklin, in contrast, worked like a banker; starting at the top of the first sheet, working his way steadily down through the pile, then on to the next. Number after number, column after column, file after file. He sat still and impassively, only his eyes flickering across the tallies, his pen occasionally jotting a brief note on a pad of paper before him. He made no noise; he seemed almost to be in a dream—and a happy dream at that.

“Well?” I asked after about an hour and a half, when I could stand it no longer. “Have you found anything? I haven’t.”

Franklin held up a hand for quiet, and he continued reading, then jotted down another note. “What did you say?”

“I said, What have you got so far?”

“I’ve only just started,” he began. “You can’t expect…”

“I don’t. But I want a break. Do you have any idea how bad his handwriting was? Each word is a torture. I want a diversion for a few moments so my eyes can recover.”

“I’ll look at them myself another time,” he offered. “This stuff, in contrast, is fascinating. Absolutely fascinating. But I suspect of no earthly use to you at all.”

I groaned. The worst of both worlds. Franklin was going to tell me more about stock prices.

He did. I absented myself mentally from the room after a few minutes, as he waxed lyrical about debenture stocks and dividend payouts, and operations in the market.

“Not as sound as everyone thought, you see,” he concluded some time later. How long—ten minutes or an hour I could not say.

“What isn’t?”

Franklin frowned. “Have you been paying attention?”

“Of course,” I replied robustly. “I’ve been hanging on every word. I’d just like a useful summary. I’m a journalist, remember. I don’t like detail.”

“Very well. A summary. Ravenscliff ’s enterprises in England have been burning up cash. He has been sucking money out of the operation at a quite phenomenal rate for almost a year.”

I stared hopefully at him. This was more my line. I could understand this. Hand in the till to pay for wine, women and song. Gambling debts. Racehorses. Jump out of the window to avoid the shame of ruin. How very disappointing. “How much?”

“About three million pounds.”

I looked at him aghast. That was a lot of racehorses. “Are you sure?”

“Pretty sure. That is, I’ve looked back at the past seven years’ accounts. They are very complicated, but he had a private set prepared every year, which summarised his total operations. I imagine no one else ever saw them. Without those, I doubt I could ever have noticed what he was up to. But these are quite clear. Do you want me to show you?” He brandished a thick folder of complicated-looking papers in my direction.

“No. Just tell me.”

“Very well. If you take the amount of cash at the start of the year, add on the cash received, subtract the cost of operations and other expenses, then you get the amount of cash at the end of the year. Do you understand that?”

I nodded cautiously.

“The official accounts use one figure. These,” again he waved the file in the air, “use another which is very different. All the shareholders, except for Ravenscliff, who evidently knew better, believe that the businesses have considerably more money than, in fact, they do. Three million, as I say.”

“And that means?”

“That means that if anyone ever found out, then not only Rialto but all the companies it owns shares in would drop like a stone. If you’ll forgive me.” Franklin seemed momentarily alarmed that he could be frivolous on such a subject, even accidentally. “The companies are not bankrupt, but they are worth nowhere near as much as people think. Including these people.”

I looked. It was a list of names, with figures on them. The Prime Minister, the Chancellor, the Foreign Secretary. Their opposite numbers in the Conservative party. And many other MPs, judges and bishops.

“What are these numbers?”

“Their shareholdings in Rialto. Multiply by the price. The Prime Minister in the case of a total collapse would lose nearly £11,000. The Leader of the Opposition £8,000.”

“Enough reason to get Barings in to prop up the share price?”

“More than enough, I’d say.”

“So what do I do about this?”

“You keep your mouth firmly closed. If you must do something, try to find out if any of the people on this list have been selling their shares. I have savings of £75, and £35 of these are in the Rialto Investment Trust. I intend to sell them first thing on Monday morning. It has taken me four years to save that much, and I don’t intend to lose it. I imagine anyone else who knew about this would have the same reaction.”

He looked protective as he thought of his nest egg. For my part, I had not a penny saved in the world, as yet. But I could imagine how I would feel at the prospect of losing the result of several years’ parsimony.

“Where has this money gone, then?”

He shrugged. “No idea.”

“There is nothing else to say? I can’t imagine that such a quantity of money could just vanish.”

“I quite agree. But it’s not here, or at least I haven’t found it. I told you I wasn’t finished. And there are some files missing. I only found this one because it was in the wrong place.”