Stone's Fall (6 page)

“So back I went,” Hozwicki continued, “and was given a dressing down by the day editor. I was not to waste my time on the death of someone so stupid that he had fallen out of a window.”

He paused and looked at me. I didn’t respond, so he went on. “How did he know he had fallen out of a window, eh? Someone had talked to him about it.”

“Do you know who?”

“All I could find out was that a very proper-looking man had arrived in the office a couple of hours previously, and talked to him for about half an hour. Even my short account of Ravenscliff’s death was then removed from the paper, and ten minutes after he left, the runner was sent off. The story was squashed, and when it did appear, it wasn’t written by me.”

“Who did write it?”

He shook his head. “Not someone who works for the
Telegraph,
” he said. “I did ask the editor later, but he brushed it aside. ‘Sometimes you just do as you are told,’ he said. But I think he was referring to himself, as much as to me.”

I finished my beer and thought about that. I was sure that Hozwicki was telling me the truth; he seemed positively pleased to share his indignation. Obviously editors are wayward people; everyone knows that. They drop stories on a whim, or to do personal favours, or because of the owners. It happens all the time. But normally you can see why, even if you don’t approve. Why sit on a fairly straightforward story?

“Wait a minute,” Hozwicki said. “What do I get in return for this?”

“Nothing yet,” I said cheerfully. “Except my thanks.”

He scowled.

“And my promise that when I have something to give in return, you will have it. Think of it as an investment,” I said. “It may diminish to nothing; it may pay rich rewards in due course.”

I saluted him, and left, walking up the fug-filled steps into the open air of Fleet Street, so fresh after that dingy basement it made me feel dizzy for a few moments.

CHAPTER
8

I would have liked to have hopped onto an omnibus and gone straight to St. James’s Square to ask questions of Lady Ravenscliff. I had quite a few to put to her. But it was six o’clock and I had an appointment with Franklin. I was back in Chelsea by seven, and ready to go. Franklin, unfortunately, was a slow and methodical eater. Normally this did not bother me, but that evening the habit drove me to distraction.

Our evening routine was invariable. At around seven-thirty all four of Mrs. Morrison’s boys would assemble in the little dining room, dark and gloomy, lit only by spluttering gaslight, and waited while the clank of pans rose to the climax that heralded the arrival of our evening feast. Conversation varied at these meals, sometimes animated, sometimes nonexistent. Occasionally we would dine
en grand seigneur,
and dally over our tea afterwards. I could always win an audience by describing the latest murder; Brock would compete for attention with an account of a meeting with the artists he didn’t really know. Mulready could clear the table by reciting some verse of an experimental hue. Only Franklin said little, for no one was really interested in the movements of the markets or the reception of a South American bond issue, even though the coupon might have been set substantially below par. He spoke a language far more foreign than criminals or artists or poets, one which few cared to learn.

Dinner that evening was a mutton chop apiece, potatoes and (a particular treat) Brussels sprouts rather than cabbage, although it was difficult to tell the difference by the time they were served. Next there was tapioca pudding, which produced a chorus of applause from the artistic types, whose childish tastes were, perhaps, an essential part of their lives. The conversation was not animated. Brock wished to begin a discussion on whether there was going to be a war with Germany or not, and seemed to think that I, as a newspaper man, would have a special insight into the thinking of the Foreign Office on the subject.

His was not an abstract concern in the fate of nations, although as it turned out he was right to be interested. For the war was the making of him when it came. He became a war artist, and what he saw so changed the way he painted that it thrust him to the forefront of the new generation which came to prominence when it ended. The bleakness which made him unpalatable in those sunny days before the conflict started was perfectly attuned to the mood that prevailed during it, and gave him a clarity that eluded him when he lived with us in Chelsea.

No, he had come up with this project for a gigantic portrait of the crowned heads of Europe, a scheme for which he was so totally unsuited that I did not know whether to wonder at his impudence or at his lack of reality. He wished—he, John Praxiteles Brock—to summon every monarch, from Tsar Nicholas to the Kaiser, from King Edward to the Emperor of Austria, and every last kinglet of Scandinavia and the Balkans, to sit together to be painted by him. Presumably not in the dining room of 17 Paradise Walk, Chelsea.

It was a scheme so lunatic in conception that, naturally, we all encouraged him enthusiastically and he spent days doing little sketches, using photographs from newspapers in lieu of the real thing. It kept him busy and happy, and I still don’t know whether there was really any grain of seriousness about it. I think not, for although he was unrealistic, he was not totally insane. But the project took on a life of its own, and everything that happened in the world would be related back to it. He became a great supporter of the French monarchists, as he did not see how he could fit a republican president into a portrait of kings. He profoundly disapproved of Russian revolutionaries, and was outraged when the King of Portugal was assassinated, thus robbing him of a subject who had been noted (until his unfortunate death) for his handsome figure.

The dream of glory swept over Brock like a wave as he contemplated his forthcoming knighthood when the project was shown at the Royal Academy. Then he came back to earth as Mulready collapsed into gales of giggles. The dinner came to its end on rather a poor note. Brock stumped off, Mulready began to feel a little guilty and Franklin watched impassively. Eventually we went upstairs to the little sitting room, kept for special occasions only. It was dark, chilly and thoroughly uncomfortable, but Franklin never allowed anyone into his room. He tossed the file from Seyd’s back towards me.

“Did you read it?”

“Of course I did. An accomplished summary, but little detail.”

“So? Can you explain it all to me?”

While Brock and Mulready were all gaiety even when discussing weighty matters, Franklin was all seriousness, even in his frivolity. He had no sense of humour whatsoever; it made him a good employee and a dull, though kindly, companion. At the dinner table he kept strictly to pronouncements of fact, on which he could be highly pedantic. Was the Battle of Waterloo in June or July of 1815? Mulready did not even care what year it was in; to Franklin it became a matter of the utmost importance, and if he could not pin it down he would become restless. Sooner or later he would disappear upstairs to check, and reassure himself that the world was still capable of being reduced to numerical order.

The file of Seyd’s triggered an almighty outburst of this peculiar form of madness; in many cases, Franklin explained, it hinted but did not elaborate. It asserted but provided no evidence. It sketched out, but gave no background detail.

“It is incomplete, I know,” I said, sorry that I had introduced the poor man to such a source of annoyance, but feeling at the same time that if his bloodhound-like desire to hunt down the detail could be properly harnessed it might prove highly useful. “Could you tell me what it’s all about?”

I will not set it down word for word. That would be intolerable, and do little except highlight how little, even with his expert tutelage, I really understood at that stage. Ravenscliff, he said, was a new breed. Not an industrialist, not a banker, but a capitalist of the most modern sort…

Here he had lost me. He began again. In the last few decades companies have sold themselves on the Stock Exchange. People buy shares in them; if a company is successful, its profits increase, more people want the shares, so the price rises.

Easy. I nodded.

In the day-to-day, he went on, settling into his stride now, the managers of a company—let us say a steel factory—run the business. There is also a board of directors which keeps an eye on the managers on behalf of the shareholders. As they own the business, the shareholders can tell the management what to do, if enough of them agree. Often there are so many shareholders and they are so scattered they can never agree on anything. And this is where Ravenscliff saw his opportunity.

Back in the 1870s he realised that you do not have to own a company to control it. So, in 1878, he sold his torpedo company to Beswick, but, rather than being paid in cash, Beswick gave him shares instead. In fact, he ended up with nearly a third of the total. Armed with this, he called a meeting which voted that he should become chairman.

And so it went on. Through careful experimentation, Ravenscliff discovered that really he needed no more than about 25 per cent of its shares in order to control an entire company. And why should the other shareholders object? The companies he ended up controlling performed well; they paid their dividends, the value of the shares constantly rose. And so Ravenscliff ’s power extended.

“Well, that’s very fine. Everyone is happy, then,” I said. “Not much for me to go on there. And, although I can see you find all this fascinating, it is difficult to see how it is going to be made so for the reader of his biography. Is that all the report contains? I must say I find it all a little disappointing.”

Franklin scowled. “Personally I find it remarkable. But, as you say, few are interested. Fortunately, there is a little more for you.

“When he established the Gosport Torpedo Company in 1868, he had a great deal of difficulty persuading the Royal Navy to buy. Either it would not work, which made it useless, or it would work all too well, which meant that a small dinghy, in theory, could sink a battleship. Naturally this made the navy reluctant to support him. So he gave the machines to them.”

“I thought the idea was to make a profit.”

“It is. But Ravenscliff realised that an order from the Royal Navy was the best advertisement in the world. What it had, every other navy wanted. Before he had delivered a single machine, he had gone around the world, talking of the British Admiralty’s confidence in him. Naturally, everyone else determined to have them as well, even though the cost was formidable. Within five years, he had armed every enemy and potential enemy we had with the weaponry to sink our fleets.

“What could he do? That was his argument. He claimed he had been more than happy to give the navy an exclusive right to purchase his machines, but they had refused. And, by the time the navies of the world realised that their ships needed more protection, Ravenscliff had taken control of Gleeson Steel, which made some of the best armour plating in the world, and the Beswick Shipyard, which could turn out brand-new warships. And so it went on. By 1902 every aspect of the production of ships and weapons was under Ravenscliff ’s control. His factories produced the engines, the ships, the guns, the shells. Earlier than most he saw the potential of steam turbines, so bought control of a company that explored for and extracted oil in Mesopotamia.”

“That was very clever of him.”

Franklin did not reply. “Do you know what a trust is?”

I considered replying that whatever it was, in the world of finance it was likely to be a contradiction in terms. But I rested content with shaking my head instead.

“These were invented by the Scots, some twenty years ago. It is a company, quoted on the Stock Exchange, except that it doesn’t do anything except own shares in other companies. Now what Ravenscliff did was put all his holdings—in Gleeson’s, Gosport, Beswick and so on, into the Rialto Investment Trust, and sold shares in it, keeping only a controlling stake. Do you understand the implications of that?”

“No.”

“I am truly glad that in your daily life you have no contact with money whatsoever,” he said vehemently. “You clearly have no instincts for it at all.”

“I am quite prepared to admit it,” I said.

“It is nothing to be proud of. Very well. Think of this. A quarter stake in the Trust means Ravenscliff controls it, correct?”

“If you say so.”

“I do. And the quarter stake the Trust holds in Beswick means it controls that. Correct?”

I nodded.

“So Ravenscliff controls Beswick with a quarter stake of a quarter stake. That is, six and one-quarter per cent. The same goes for another dozen or so companies which make up the main holdings of the Trust. To put it another way, he controls companies capitalised at nearly seventy million pounds with a holding of a little more than four and a quarter million.”

Finally I understood, although the size of the figures astonished me. Four and a quarter million was such a vast amount of money it made my head spin. Seventy million was almost beyond comprehension. My landlady’s house, I knew, had cost her two hundred pounds.

“So,” Franklin continued, “your characterisation of Ravenscliff as ’some sort of moneyman’ needs to be revised a little. He was, in fact, the most powerful armaments manufacturer in the world. And also perhaps the most ingenious financier in the world as well.

“And,” Franklin went on, “there is the founding mystery of his life, which might entertain your readers if you can solve it.”

I brightened up.

“Where did the Gosport Torpedo Company come from?”

“What do you mean?”

“Torpedoes are complicated things. Ravenscliff was a financier, not an engineer. But all of a sudden he pops up out of nowhere with a fully operational torpedo. Where did it come from?”

“Are you going to tell me?”

“I haven’t a clue; nor, it seems, does your man at Seyd’s. It’s a cunning document, this. It goes on at great length about what it does know—which is little; and artfully buries what it doesn’t, which is a great deal. It’s only when you think about it that you realise this document is a confession of ignorance.”

That was the essence of my long conversation with Mr. Franklin who, bless him, presented all his information in a way which was almost understandable. Even better, he clearly enjoyed it, and ended by saying that if I had any more questions, I should not hesitate…

I wouldn’t. I now had some inkling of how little I knew, and how little everyone else knew. I wasn’t alone, but no one else but me had the problem of finding anything out. Ravenscliff ’s way of life was intricate and veiled, almost deliberately so. He had successfully hidden the vastness of his wealth from the world, to the point where he scarcely figured in the public mind.

The thought also occurred to me that, if he could do that, how easy it would have been for him to hide a child where no one could find it.