To the Hilt (34 page)

Thoughtfully they each copied out for themselves the whole list, numbers and names. (He wouldn’t trust it to the office copier, the bank man said; the information was so hot it would not be allowed to leave that room.)

Each of them had brought a personal computer that was not connected to anything else and could not be hacked into from outside. Each of them fed into their separate computer a disc recording what each of them, separately, knew. The bank had supplied a fax machine dedicated to this one job.

The room grew silent except for the tapping of keys and the drumming of thoughtful fingers when the solutions didn’t quickly appear.

I waited without fret. They knew their business, and I didn’t.

Tobias and the bank man wore the suits of their trade, dark confidence builders with gravitas. Margaret had come in flowery printed wool, soft and rose-red and disarming, hiding the steel-hard brain. How ridiculous, I thought, that the male mind could often accept a female as equal only if she pretended to be in need of help. Margaret amused me. She caught me looking at her, read my thought and winked. Men were right to be afraid of women, I concluded: the witch lived near the surface in all of them.

They burned witches ... God help them.

I moved stiffly on my chair, leaning forwards, resting my elbows on the table, taking shallow breaths. Body management, learned fast.

At the police station the previous afternoon Inspector Vernon had told me that Ivan’s car (the wheels I’d driven to the party) had been identified by Mrs. Benchmark and towed by the police and was in fact at that moment right outside in the station’s car park.

“Can I take it?” I asked, surprised.

“If you think you’re fit to drive.”

I had the car keys, among other things, in my restored trousers pocket.

Fit or not, I’d driven the car to Lambourn, found Emily’s spare house key on its old familiar nail in the tack room, made inroads into her whisky and spent a disturbed night lying on my side in my clothes on the sofa in her drawing room, lacking energy for anything else, feeling shivery and sick.

In the morning I’ d made it upstairs to the bathroom, found a throwaway razor, combed my hair and rinsed my mouth. Well, I told myself, my physical state was my own stubborn fault: just put up with it. Swallow the tablets and be grateful for mercies.

I’d phoned Chris, who said he’d been trying without success to reach my mobile number.

“The phone’s in the car,” I said. “I expect the battery’s flat.”

“For hell’s sake, charge it.”

“Yes.”

“Are you all right, Al? And where are you?”

“Lambourn. Could you drive to Paignton and then come here?”

“Today? Bring all three ladies?”

“If you can. I’ll phone the hotel.”

“Chauffeur’s togs coming up. Zipped bag nine.” We’d disconnected on a smile. I phoned the Redcliffe and left messages for Emily and my mother. Then I retrieved the Quorn list from the back of the golf picture and drove to Reading.

By lunchtime the experts had got nowhere nearer the end of the rainbow.

They sent out for sandwiches, and we drank more coffee.

“The trouble is,” the bank man explained to me, “that we have here three lots of variables. We have to match the account numbers on the list with a name on the list and with a bank identification number that we already have, and then we have to send that combination to the bank in question and hope to get a response from them to acknowledge that that account exists. We haven’t so far been able to do that. The nearest we have come is matching one of the account numbers to one of the banks, but we supplied the wrong name for the account, and the bank told us by return fax, just now, that as our inquiry is incomplete, they cannot answer it. No one is being helpful. On top of that, the account numbers are the wrong way round.”

I said, “How do you mean, the wrong way round?”

“All the numbers on the list end with two zeros. As a rule account numbers begin with two zeros. We have tried reversing the numbers, so far without success. I am still sure that all of the numbers have been reversed, but if Quorn jumbled them up further, or multiplied them by two, for instance, we are in real trouble.”

Tobias and Margaret nodded in depression.

Tobias said, “Quorn may have sent the money on a circular route involving all of these numbers—like the beach towels on the poolside chairs—or he may have sent it direct from Panama to any one place, but so far we haven’t found a single trace of it. I have been working on the belief that one of these numbers or names must mean something to the Global Credit in Panama, but they will not admit it.”

“All banks are secretive,” the big bank man said. “And so are we.”

“Don’t despair,” Margaret said, “we’ll find the money. It’s just taking longer than we hoped.”

By the end of the afternoon, however, they themselves were looking cast down; they said they would think of a new strategy for the next day. The time change alone was making things difficult. It was already midafternoon in Reading when the bank in Panama opened for business.

They carefully shredded every scrap of used fax and working paper and locked Norman Quom’s list into the manager’s private safe. I drove a shade dispiritedly back to Lamboum and found that Emily, my mother and Audrey Newton had arrived a bare five minutes before me.

C. Y. Uttley was busy unloading suitcases from the trunk.

I gave my mother a minimum hug, kissed Emily and planted an air kiss beside Audrey Newton’s buxom cheek.

“We’ve had a lovely weekend,” she said, beaming. “Thank you ever so much. You’ve bruised your face, dear, did you know?”

“Walked into a door.”

Emily took Audrey and my mother into the house and Chris gave me an assessing inspection.

“You look lousy,” he said. “Worse than Sunday.”

“Thanks.”

“Your bus-stealing Grantchester-immobilizing friend no longer exists,” he assured me. “I dumped her today bit by bit in a succession of trash cans on my way to Devon.”

“So wise.”

“How do blond bubble curls and D-cup knockers grab you?”

“I wouldn’t be seen dead with her.”

“At least the lawyer didn’t cauterize your sense of humor.”

“A close run thing.”

“Do you want anything else done?”

“Just take Audrey Newton home to Bloxham.”

“After that?”

We stared at each other.

“A friend for life,” I suggested.

“I’ll send my bill.”

 

 

Emily proposed that my mother and I stay the night in Lambourn and met with little resistance.

The telephone rang in the kitchen while we were sitting round the big table watching Emily search for supper in the freezer. Emily picked up the receiver and in a moment said with surprise, “Yes, he’s here. So is Vivienne.” She held out the receiver in my direction. “It’s Himself. He’s been looking for you.”

I took the instrument and said, “My lord.”

“Al, where have you been? I’ve had Patsy on the line all day. She sounds practically hysterical. She wants to talk to you. She says you signed yourself out of some hospital she put you in. She won’t tell me why she put you in hospital. What the hell’s happened?”

“Er ... I ran out of wall.”

“Al . . . Talk sense.”

My mother and Emily could both hear what I said. I thought through five seconds of silence and said, “Can I come for a drink with you at about six tomorrow evening?”

“Of course.”

“Well . . . please don’t tell Patsy where I am. Ask her if she’ll meet me at two o’clock tomorrow afternoon in the car park of the brewery’s bank’s head office in Reading. And tell her . . .” I paused. “Tell her thanks for the help.”

Emily said, astounded, as I put the phone down, “Patsy helped you?”

“Mm.”

They would have to know, so I told them as unemotionally as possible that Oliver Grantchester had been trying to lay his hands on the brewery’s missing millions. “He had either conspired with Norman Quorn to steal the money in the first place, or tried to wrest it from him afterwards,” I said. “I’m not yet sure which.”

“Not Oliver!” my mother protested in total disbelief. “We’ve known him for years. He’s always been Ivan’s solicitor, and the brewery’s too ...” Her voice faded. “Ivan trusted him.”

I said, “Ivan trusted Norman Quorn. Quorn and Grantchester ... they were two normal men, good at their jobs, but fatally attracted by what looked like an easy path to a bucket of gold—and I’m not talking about the literal bucket of gold, the King Alfred Gold Cup, which Grantchester thought he could lay his hands on as a consolation when the serious prize slipped through his fingers. Grantchester may have been a good lawyer but he’s an inefficient crook. He hasn’t got the Gold Cup and he hasn’t got the brewery’s money ... and Patsy has woken up to the fact that her dear darling avuncular Oliver had been trying his damnedest to rob her, as she now owns the brewery complete with its losses.”

My mother had her own concern. “You didn’t really walk into a door, did you, Alexander?”

I smiled. “I walked into Grantchester’s fist man. You’d think I’d know better.”

“And no one took hostages,” Emily said thoughtfully, with much understanding.

We went to bed. Emily expected and invited me between her sheets, but I simply had no stamina left for the oldest of games.

She asked what was under the bandages, that was making me sweat.

“The wages of pride,” I said. “Go to sleep.”

 

 

I drove my mother to Reading in the morning and saw her onto the London train, promising to spend the evening and night in Park Crescent after my six o’clock date with Himself.

Frail from grief, my calm and exquisite parent showed me in a single trembling hug on the railway platform how close we both were to being stretched too far: and I understood suddenly that it was from her I had learned the way to hide fear and pain and humiliation, and that if I’d extended that ability into material things like hilts and chalices and dynamite lists, it had been because of her ultra-controlled outer face, that I had all my life taken to be an absence—or at least a deficiency—of emotion.

“Ma,” I said on Reading station, “I adore you.”

The train came, quiet and rapid, slowing to whisk her away.

“Alexander,” she said, “don’t be ridiculous.”

 

 

In the bank Tobias, Margaret and the big financial cheese were gloomily studying the electronic messages on the one machine they had left alive to receive them overnight.

Useful information from around the globe: zero.

The experts had drawn up ways of approaching the problem from so-far-untried angles, but nothing worked. By lunchtime they were saying they couldn’t dedicate more than that afternoon to the search, as they had other unbreakable commitments ahead.

When I asked if I could bring Patsy to the afternoon session they said I could do anything I liked, but Tobias, chewing hard on a toothpick, asked if I remembered what had happened to me four days ago, on the one time I’d believed in her good faith.

I was leaning forwards, elbows on table, the morning’s pills wearing off. I remembered, I said: and I would rely on Tobe to defend me from the maiden.

I could joke, he said, but I should also remember the Sirens, whose seductive songs lured foolish sailors to shipwreck and death.

Not in this bank, I said.

I met her in the car park, as arranged.

“Hello,” I said.

“Alexander...”

She was unsure of herself. Awkward. I’d never seen her like that.

She wore a shirt, a cardigan, long skirt, flat shoes: wholesome, well groomed.

I explained that she should come into the bank with me and listen to the difficulties that had arisen in finding the brewery’s millions.

For someone whose main fears for ten years or more had been that I would somehow manage to rob her, she seemed less than anxious about the success of the search.

“I promise you,” I said, “they are trying everything they know to find your money.”

“My father’s money,” she said. “Everything you have done was for him, wasn’t it?”

“I suppose so.”

“You would never have done it for
me
.”

I said, “His whole life was the brewery. He built it up. It was his pride. The heartless betrayal of Norman Quorn devastated him, and yes, I believe it killed him. And for his sake and for my mother’s sake I would have done anything to put things right. I’ve tried. I haven’t managed it. I want the bank people to tell you that I am not trying to steal from you. I am trying to restore what Ivan built.”

“Alexander . . .”

“I did believe on Saturday,” I said, “that you were sincerely offering a truce. I hope you didn’t know exactly what you were beckoning me into. I know you tried to stop that little lark with the barbecue ... I could hear you. I know you got me help. Anyway,” I finished, running out of impetus, “will you come into the bank?”

She nodded speechlessly and went with me into the conference room, where of course her looks and natural charm immediately enslaved the bank man, who hadn’t encountered her before. He fussed over a chair for her and offered her coffee, and she smiled at him sweetly, as she could.

We all sat down round the table. The bank man obligingly outlined all the measures so far taken to keep the brewery alive, and he explained that they were trying to find the missing millions by using the list.

“That list,” she murmured. “What’s on that list?”

“Don’t let her see it,” Tobe said abruptly.

The bank man asked, “Why ever not?”

“Because of what it cost to bring it here. Al may sit at this table with us hour after hour pretending there’s nothing the matter, but he’s halfway to fainting most of the time . . .”