Hot Money

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

I flew to New York two days later, still not knowing where to find Malcolm.

The voice at Stamford, Connecticut, always helpful but uninformed, had thought, the previous evening, that the gentlemen might have gone back to Kentucky: they'd been talking of buying a horse that they'd seen there a week earlier. Another horse, not the one they'd bought yesterday.

It was just as well, I thought, that Donald and Helen and Thomas and Berenice and Edwin and Lucy and Vivien and Joyce didn't know. That Gervase, Ursula, Alicia, Ferdinand, Debs and Serena hadn't heard. All fourteen of them would have fallen upon Malcolm and torn him apart.

I chose New York for the twin reasons that Stamford, Connecticut, was barely an hour and a half's drive away (information from the voice) and that everyone should see New York some time. My journeys before that had been only in Europe, to places like Paris, Rome, Athens and Oslo. Beaches and race-meetings and temples. Horses and gods.

I was heading for a hotel on 54th Street, Manhattan, that the voice had recommended: she would tell Mr Pembroke I would be there, as soon as she knew where Mr Pembroke was. It seemed as good an arrangement as any.

Superintendent Yale didn't know I'd left England, nor did any of the family. I sighed with deep relief on the aeroplane and thought about the visits I'd made the day before to Alicia and Vivien. Neither had wanted to see me and both had been abrasive, Alicia in the morning, Vivien in the afternoon.

Alicia's flat outside Windsor was spacious and overlooked the Thames, neither of which pleasures seemed to please her. She did reluctantly let me in, but was un placated by my admiration of her view.

She was, in fact, looking youthfully pretty in a white wool dress and silver beads. Her hair was pulled high in a velvet bow on the crown, and her neat figure spoke of luck or dieting. She had a visitor with her already when I called, a fortyish substantial- looking man introduced coquettishly as Paul, who behaved with unmistakable lordliness, the master in his domain. How long, I wondered, had this been going on?

"You might have said you were coming," Alicia complained. "Ferdinand said you would, some time. I told him to tell you not to."

"it seemed best to see everyone," I said neutrally.

"Then hurry up," she said. "We're going out to lunch."

"Did Ferdinand tell you about Malcolm's new will?"

"He did, and I don't believe a word of it. You've always been Malcolm's wretched little pet. He should have sent you back to Joyce when I left. I told him to. But would he listen? No, he wouldn't."

"That was twenty years ago," I protested. "And nothing's changed. He does what he likes. He's utterly selfish."

Paul listened to the conversation without stirring and with scant apparent interest but he did, it seemed, have his influence. With an arch look at him, Alicia said, "Paul says Gervase should force Malcolm to give him power of attorney."

I couldn't off-hand think of anything less likely to happen. "Have you two known each other long?" I asked.

"No," Alicia said, and the look she gave Paul was that of a flirt of sixteen.

I asked her if she remembered the tree stump.

"Of course. I was furious with Malcolm for letting Fred do anything so ridiculous. The boys might have been hurt."

And did she remember the switches? How could she forget them, she said, they'd been all over the house. Not only that, Thomas had made another one for Serena some time later. It had sat in her room gathering dust. Those clocks had all been a pest.

"You were good to me in those old days," I said.

She stared. There was almost a softening round her eyes, but it was transitory. "I had to be," she said acidly. "Malcolm insisted."

"Weren't you ever happy?" I asked.

"Oh, yes." Her mouth curled in a malicious smile. "When Malcolm came to see me, when he was married to Joyce. Before that weaselly detective spoiled it."

I asked her if she had engaged Norman West to find Malcolm in Cambridge.

She looked at me with wide empty eyes and said blandly, "No, I didn't. Why would I want to? I didn't care where he was."

"Almost everyone wanted to find him to stop him spending his money."

"He's insane," she said. "Paranoid. He should hand control over to Gervase, and make sure that frightful Ursula isn't included. She's the wrong wife for Gervase, as I've frequently told him."

"But you didn't ask Norman West to find Malcolm?"

"No, I didn't," she said very sharply. "Stop asking that stupid question." She turned away from me restlessly. "It's high time you went."

I thought so too, on the whole. I speculated that perhaps the presence of Paul had inhibited her from saying directly to my face the poison she'd been spreading behind my back. They would dissect me when I'd gone. He nodded coolly to me as I left. No friend of mine, I thought.

If my visit to Alicia had been unfruitful, my call on Vivien was less so. Norman West's notes had been minimal: name, address, sorting magazines, no alibis. She wouldn't answer any of my questions either, or discuss any possibilities. She said several times that Malcolm was a fiend who was determined to destroy his children, and that I was the devil incarnate helping him. She hoped we would both rot in hell. (I thought devils and fiends might flourish there, actually.) Meanwhile, I said, had she employed Norman West to find Malcolm in Cambridge? Certainly not. She wanted nothing to do with that terrible little man. If I didn't remove myself from her doorstep she would call in the police.

"It can't be much fun," I said, "living with so much hatred in your head."

She was affronted. "What do you mean?"

"No peace. All anger. Very exhausting. Bad for your health."

"Go away," she said, and I obliged her.

I drove back to Cookham and spent a good deal of the evening on the telephone, talking to Lucy about Thomas and to Ferdinand about Gervase.

"We are all our brothers' keepers," Lucy said, and reported that Thomas was spending most of the time asleep. "Retreating," Lucy said.

Lucy had spoken to Berenice. "Whatever did you say to her, Ian? She sounds quite different. Subdued. Can't see it lasting long, can you? I told her Thomas was all right and she started blubbing."

Lucy said she would keep Thomas for a while, but not for his natural span.

Ferdinand, when he heard my voice, said, "Where the hell have you been? All I get is your answering machine. Did you find out who killed Moira?" There was anxiety, possibly, in his voice.

"I found out a few who didn't," I said.

"That's not what I asked."

"Well," I said, "like you with your computer, I've fed in a lot of data."

"And the result?"

"The wheels are turning."

"Computers don't have wheels. Come to think of it, though, I suppose they do. Anyway, you've left a whole trail of disasters behind you, haven't you? I hear Thomas has left Berenice, and as for Gervase, he wants your guts for taking Ursula out to lunch. Did you do that? Whatever for? You know how possessive he is. There's a hell of a row going on."

"if you want to hang on to Debs," I said, "don't listen to Alicia."

"What the hell's that got to do with Gervase and Ursula having a row?" he demanded.

"Everything."

He was furious. "You've always got it in for Alicia."

"The other way round. She's a dedicated troublemaker who's cost you one wife already."

He didn't immediately answer. I said, "Gervase is knocking back a fortune in scotch."

"What's that got to do with anything?"

"How do you cope so well with illegitimacy?"

"WHAT?"

"Everything's linked. So long, pal. See you."

I put the receiver down with a sigh, and ate dinner and packed.

In the morning, having paid a few bills, I took the hired car to Heathrow and turned it in there and, with a feeling of shackles dropping off, hopped into the air.

I spent four nights in New York before I found Malcolm; or before he found me, to be more precise.

In daily consultations, the Stamford voice assured me that I wasn't forgotten, that the message would one day get through. I had a vision of native bearers beating through jungles, but it wasn't like that, it transpired. Malcolm and Ramsey had simply been moving from horse farm to horse farm through deepest Kentucky, and it was from there he finally phoned at eight-ten in the morning.

"What are you doing in New York?" he demanded.

"Looking at skyscrapers," I said.

"I thought we were meeting in California."

"Well, we are," I said. "When?"

"What's today?"

"Friday."

"Hang on."

I heard him talking in the background, then he returned. "We're just going out to see some horses breeze. Ramsey reserved the rooms from tomorrow through Saturday at the Beverly Wilshire, he says, but he and I are going to spend a few more days here now. You go to California tomorrow and I'll join you, say, on Wednesday."

"Couldn't you please make it sooner? I do need to talk to you."

"Did you find something out?" His voice suddenly changed gear, as if he'd remembered almost with shock the world of terrors he'd left behind.

"A few things."

"Tell me."

"Not on the telephone. Not in a hurry. Go and see the horses breeze and meet me tomorrow." I paused. "There are horses in California. Thousands of them."

He was quiet for a few moments, then he said, "I owe it to you. I'll be there," and disconnected.

I arranged my air ticket and spent the rest of the day as I'd spent all the others in New York, wandering around, filling eyes and ears with the city… thinking painful private thoughts and coming to dreadful conclusions.

Malcolm kept his word and, to my relief, came without Ramsey who had decided Stamford needed him if Connecticut were to survive. Ramsey, Malcolm said, would be over on Wednesday, we would all have three days at the races and go to Australia on Saturday night. He was crackling with energy, the eyes intensely blue. He and Ramsey had bought four more horses in partnership, he said in the first three minutes, and were joining a syndicate to own some others down under.

A forest fire out of control, I thought, and had sympathy for my poor brothers.

The Beverly Wilshire gave us a suite with brilliant red flocked wallpaper in the sitting-room and vivid pink and orange flowers on a turquoise background in the bedrooms. There were ornate crimson curtains, filmy cream inner curtains, a suspicion of lace, an air of Edwardian roguishness brought up to date. Rooms to laugh in, I thought. And with little wrought-iron balconies outside the bowed windows looking down on a pool with a fountain and gardens and orange trees, not much to complain of.

We dined downstairs in a bar that had tables at one end and music, and Malcolm said I looked thinner.

"Tell me about the horses," I said; and heard about them through the smoked salmon, the salad, the veal and the coffee.

"Don't worry," he said, near the beginning. "They're not all as expensive as Blue Clancy and Chrysos. We got all four for under a million dollars, total, and they're two-year-olds ready to run. Good breeding; the best. One's by Alydar, even."

I listened, amused and impressed. He knew the breeding of all his purchases back three generations, and phrases like "won a stakes race" and "his dam's already produced Group I winners" came off his tongue as if he'd been saying them all his life.

"Do you mind if I ask you something?" I said eventually.

"I won't know until you ask."

"No… um… just how rich ARE you?"

He laughed. "Did Joyce put you up to that question?"

"No. I wanted to know for myself."

"Hm." He thought. "I can't tell you to the nearest million. It changes every day. At a rough estimate, about a hundred million pounds. It would grow now of its own accord at the rate of five million a year if I never lifted a finger again, but you know me, that would be boring, I'd be dead in a month."

"After tax?" I said.

"Sure." He smiled. "Capital gains tax usually. I've spent a year's investment income after tax on the horses, that's all. Not as much as that on all those other projects that the family were going bananas about. I'm not raving mad. There'll be plenty for everyone when I pop off. More than there is now. I just have to live longer. You tell them that."

"I told them you'd said in your will that if you were murdered, it would all go to charity."

"Why didn't I think of that?"

"Did you think any more of letting the family have some of the lucre before you… er… pop off?"

"You know my views on that."

"Yes, I do."

"And you don't approve."

"I don't disapprove in theory. The trust funds were generous when they were set up. Many fathers don't do as much. But your children aren't perfect and some of them have got into messes. If someone were bleeding, would you buy them a bandage?"

He sat back in his chair and stared moodily at his coffee. "Have they sent you here to plead for them?" he asked.

"No. I'll tell you what's been happening, then you can do what you like."

"Fair enough," he said, "but not tonight."

"All right." I paused. "I won a race at Kempton, did you know?"

"Did you really?" He was instantly alive with interest, asking for every detail. He didn't want to hear about his squabbling family with its latent murderer. He was tired of being vilified while at the same time badgered to be bountiful. He felt safe in California although he had, I'd been interested to discover, signed us into the hotel as Watson and Watson.

"Well, you never know, do you?" he'd said. "It may say in the British papers that Blue Clancy's coming over and Ramsey says this hotel is the centre for the Breeders' Cup organisers. They're having reception rooms here, and buffets. By Wednesday, he says, this place will be teeming with the international racing crowd. So where, if someone wanted to find me, do you think they'd look first?"

"I think Norman West gave us good advice."

"So do I."

The Watsons, father and son, breakfasted the following morning out in the warm air by the pool, sitting in white chairs beside a white table under a yellow sun umbrella, watching the oranges ripen amid dark green leaves, talking of horrors.

I asked him casually enough if he remembered Fred and the tree roots.

"Of course I do," he said at once. "Bloody fool could have killed himself." He frowned. "What's that got to do with the bomb at Quantum?" "Superintendent Yale thinks it may have given someone the idea."

He considered it. "I suppose it might."

"The superintendent, or some of his men, asked old Fred what he'd used to set off the cordite…" I told Malcolm about the cordite still lying around in the tool shed – "and Fred said he had some detonators, but after that first bang, you came out and took them away."

"Good Lord, I'd forgotten that. Yes, so I did. You were all there, weren't you? Pretty well the whole family?"

"Yes, it was one of those weekends. Helen says it was the first time she met you, she was there too, before she was married to Donald."

He thought back. "I don't remember that. I just remember there being a lot of you."

"The superintendent wonders if you remember what happened to the detonators after you'd taken them away."

He stared. "It's twenty years ago, must be," he protested.

"It might be the sort of thing you wouldn't forget."

He shook his head doubtfully.

"Did you turn them over to the police?"

"No." He was definite about that, anyway. "Old Fred had no business to have them, but I wouldn't have got him into trouble, or the friend he got them from, either. I'll bet they were nicked."

"Do you remember what they looked like?" I asked.

"Well, yes, I suppose so." He frowned, thinking, pouring out more coffee. "There was a row of them in a tin, laid out carefully in cotton wool so that they shouldn't roll about. Small silverish tubes, about two and a half inches long."

"Fred says they had instructions with them."

He laughed. "Did he? A do-it-yourself bomb kit?" He sobered suddenly. "I suppose it was just that. I don't remember the instructions, but I dare say they were there."

"You did realise they were dangerous, didn't you?"

"I probably did, but all those years ago ordinary people didn't know so much about bombs. I mean, not terrorist bombs. We'd been bombed from the air, but that was different. I should think I took the detonators away from Fred so he shouldn't set off any more explosions, not because they were dangerous in themselves, if you see what I mean?"

"Mm. But you did know you shouldn't drop them?"

"You mean if I'd dropped them, I wouldn't be here talking about it?"

"According to the explosives expert working at Quantum, quite likely not."

"I never worked with explosives, being an adjutant." He buttered a piece of croissant, added marmalade and ate it. His service as a young officer in his war had been spent in arranging details of troop movements and as assistant to camp commanders, often near enough to the enemy but not seeing the whites of their eyes. He never spoke of it much: it had been history before I was born.

"I remembered where the cordite was, even after all this time," I said. "If you imagine yourself going into the house with this tin of detonators, where would you be likely to put it? You'd put it where you would think of looking for it first, wouldn't you?"

"Yes," he nodded, "always my system." A faraway unfocused look appeared in his eyes, then he suddenly sat bolt upright.

"I know where they are! I saw the tin not so very long ago, when I was looking for something else. I didn't pay much attention. It didn't even register what was in it, but I'm pretty sure now that that's what it was. It's a sort of sweet tin, not very big, with a picture on top."

"Where was it, and how long ago?"

"Surely," he said, troubled, "they'd be duds by this time?"

"Quite likely not."

"They're in the office." He shrugged self-excusingly. "You know I never tidy that place up. I'd never find anything ever again. I'm always having to stop people tidying it."

"Like Moira?"

"She could hardly bear to keep her hands off."

"Where in the office?" I remembered the jumble in his desk drawer when I'd fetched his passport. The whole place was similar.

"On top of some of the books in the breakfront bookcase. Bottom row, right over on the right-hand side, more or less out of sight when the door's closed. On top of the Dickens." His face suddenly split into a huge grin. "I remember now, by God. I put it there because the picture on the tin's lid was The Old Curiosity Shop." I rubbed my hand over my face, trying not to laugh. Superintendent Yale was going to love it.

"They're safe enough there," Malcolm said reasonably, "behind glass. I mean, no one can pick them up accidentally, can they? That's where they are."

I thought it highly likely that that's where they weren't, but I didn't bother to say so.

"The glass in the breakfront is broken," I said.

He was sorry about that. It had been his mother's, he said, like all the books.

"When did you see the tin there?" I asked.

"Haven't a clue. Not all that long ago, I wouldn't have thought, but time goes so quickly."

"Since Moira died?"

He wrinkled his forehead. "No, probably not. Then, before that, I was away from the house for a week or ten days when I couldn't stand being in the same place with her and she obdurately wouldn't budge. Before that, I was looking for something in a book. Not in Dickens, a shelf or two higher. Can't remember what book, though I suppose I might if I went back and stood in front of them and looked at the titles. Altogether, over three months ago, I should say."

I reflected a bit and drank my coffee. "I suppose the bookcase must have been moved now and then for redecorating. The books taken out…"

"Don't be ridiculous," Malcolm – interrupted with amusement. "It weighs more than a ton. The books stay inside it. Redecorating goes on around it, and not at all if I can help it. Moira tried to make me take everything out so she could paint the whole office dark green. I stuck my toes in. She had the rest of the house. That room is mine."

I nodded lazily. It was pleasant in the sunshine. A few people were sunbathing, a child was swimming, a waiter in a white jacket came along with someone else's breakfast. All a long way away from the ruins of Quantum.

From that quiet Sunday morning and on until Wednesday, Malcolm and I led the same remote existence, being driven round Los Angeles and Hollywood and Beverly Hills in a stretch-limousine Malcolm seemed to have hired by the yard, neck-twisting like tourists, going out to Santa Anita racetrack in the afternoons, dining in restaurants like Le Chardonnay. I gradually told him what was happening in the family, never pressing, never heated, never too much at one time, stopping at once if he started showing impatience.

"Donald and Helen should send their children to state schools," he said moderately.

"Maybe they should. But you sent Donald to Marlborough, and you went there yourself. Donald wants the best for his boys. He's suffering to give them what you gave him effortlessly."

"He's a snob to choose Eton."

"Maybe, but the Marlborough fees aren't much less."

"What if it was Donald and Helen who've been trying to kill me?"

"If they had plenty of money they wouldn't be tempted."

"You've said that before, or something like it."

"Nothing has changed."

Malcolm looked out of the long car's window as we were driven up through the hills of Bel Air on the way to the racetrack.

"Do you see those houses perched on the cliffs, hanging out over space? People must be mad to live like that, on the edge."

I smiled. "You do," I said.

He liked Santa Anita racetrack immediately and so did I; it would have been difficult not to. Royal palms near the entrances stretched a hundred feet upward, all bare trunks except for the crowning tufts, green fronds against the blue sky. The buildings were towered and turreted, sea-green in colour, with metal tracery of stylised palm leaves along the balconies and golden shutters over rear-facing windows. It looked more like a chateau than a racecourse, at first sight.

Ramsey Osborn had given Malcolm fistfuls of instructions and introductions and, as always, Malcolm was welcomed as a kindred spirit upstairs in the Club. He was at home from the first minute, belonging to the scene as if he'd been born there. I envied him his ease and didn't know how to acquire it. Maybe time would do it. Maybe millions. Maybe a sense of achievement.

While he talked easily to almost strangers (soon to be cronies) about the mixing of European and American bloodlines in thoroughbreds, I thought of the phone call I'd made at dawn on Monday morning to Superintendent Yale. Because of the eight-hour time difference, it was already afternoon with him, and I thought it unlikely I would reach him at first try. He was there, however, and came on the line with un stifled annoyance. "It's a week since you telephoned."

"Yes, sorry."

"Where are you?"

"Around," I said. His voice sounded as dear to me as if he were in the next room, and presumably mine to him, as he didn't at all guess I wasn't in England. "I found my father," I said.

"Oh. Good."

I told him where Malcolm had stored the detonators. "On top of The Old Curiosity Shop, as appropriate."

There was a shattered silence. "I don't believe it," he said.

"The books are all old and leather bound classics standing in full editions. Poets, philosophers, novelists, all bought years ago by my grandmother. We were all allowed to borrow a book occasionally to read, but we had to put it back. My father had us well trained."

"Are you saying that anyone who borrowed a book from that bookcase could have seen the detonators?"

"Yes, I suppose so, if they've been there for twenty years."

"Did you know they were there?"

"No. I didn't read those sort of books much. Spent my time riding."

Lucy, I thought, had in her teens plunged into poets as a fish into its native sea, but twenty years ago she had been twenty-two and writing her own immortality. None of the rest of us had been scholars. Some of grandmother's books had never been opened.

"It is incredible that when someone thought of making a bomb, the detonators were to hand," Yale complained.

"Other way round, wouldn't you think?" I said. "The availability of the detonators suggested the bomb."

"The pool of common knowledge in your family is infuriating," he said. "No one can be proved to have special access to explosives. No one has a reliable alibi… except Mrs Ferdinand… Everyone can make a timing device and nearly all of you have a motive."

"Irritating," I agreed.

"That's the wrong word," he said sourly. "Where's your father?"

"Safe."

"You can't stay in hiding for ever." "Don't expect to see us for a week or two. What chance is there of your solving the case?"

Enquiries were proceeding, he said with starch. If I came across any further information, I would please give it to him.

Indeed, I said, I would.

"When I was younger," he said to my surprise, "I used to think I had a nose for a villain, that I could always tell. But since then, I've met embezzlers I would have trusted my savings to, and murderers I'd have let marry my daughter. Murderers can look like harmless ordinary people." He paused. "Does your family know who killed Moira Pembroke?"

"I don't think so."

"Please enlarge," he said.

"One or two may suspect they know, but they're not telling. I went to see everyone. No one was even guessing. No one accusing. They don't want to know, don't want to face it, don't want the misery."

"And you?"

"I don't want the misery either, but I also don't want my father killed, or myself."

"Do you think you're in danger?"

"Oh, yes," I said. "In loco Moira."

"As chief beneficiary?"

"Something like that. Only I'm not chief, I'm equal. My father made a new will saying so. I've told the family but they don't believe it."

"Produce the will. Show it to them."

"Good idea," I said. "Thank you."

"And you," he paused, "do you know, yourself?"

"I don't know."

"Guess, then."

"Guessing is one thing, proof is another."

"I might remind you it's your duty…"

"It's not my duty," I interrupted without heat, "to go off half- cocked. My duty to my family is to get it right or do nothing." I said goodbye to him rather firmly and concluded, from his tone as much as his words, that the police had no more information than I had, and perhaps less: that they hadn't managed (if they'd tried) to find out where the grey plastic clock had come from or who had bought it, which was their only lead as far as I could see and a pretty hopeless proposition. It had been a cheap mass-production clock, probably on sale in droves.

Malcolm said on one of our car journeys, after I'd been telling him about Berenice, "Vivien, you know, had this thing about sons."

"But she had a boy first. She had two."

"Yes, but before Donald was born, she said she wouldn't look at the baby if it was a girl. I couldn't understand it. I'd have liked a girl. Vivien's self-esteem utterly depended on having a boy. She was obsessed with it. You'd have thought she'd come from some dreadful tribe where it really mattered."

"it did matter," I said. "And it matters to Berenice. All obsessions matter because of their results."

"Vivien never loved Lucy, you know," he said thoughtfully. "She shoved her away from her. I always thought that was why Lucy got fat and retreated into poetic fantasies."

"Berenice shoves off her daughters onto her mother as much as she can."

"Do you think Berenice murdered Moira?" he said doubtfully.

"I think she thinks that having more money would make her happier, which it probably would. If you were going to think of any… er… distribution, I'd give it to the wives as well as the husbands. Separately, I mean. So they had independence."

"Why?" he said.

"Gervase might value Ursula more if she didn't need him financially."

"Ursula's a mouse."

"She's desperate."

"They're all desperate," he said with irritation. "It's all their own faults. The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars but in ourselves, that we are underlings."

"I dare say," I said. "The bell captain at the hotel gave me a tip for the fourth race." Back to horses.

Another day, another journey. Malcolm said, "What did Serena say, when you saw her?"

"She said you could stuff your money, or words to that effect."

Malcolm laughed.

"She also said," I went on, "that Alicia told her you'd only tried to get custody of her that time so as to be cruel to Alicia."

"Alicia's a real bitch."

"She's got a lover, did you know?" I said.

He was thunderstruck. "Who is he?"

"Someone else's husband, I should think. That's what she likes, isn't it?"

"Don't be so bloody accurate."

Further down the road we were talking about the time-switch clocks, which had been an unwelcome piece of news to him also.

"Thomas was best at making them, wasn't he?" Malcolm said. "He' could do them in a jiffy. They were his idea originally, I think. Serena brought one over for Robin and Peter which Thomas had made for her years ago."

I nodded. "A Mickey Mouse clock. It's still there in the playroom."

"Serena made them a lighthouse of Lego to go with it, I remember." He sighed deeply. "I miss Coochie still, you know. The crash happened not long after that." He shook his head to rid it of sadness. "What race shall we choose for the Coochie Memorial Trophy? What do you think?"

On another day, I asked why Ferdinand didn't mind being illegitimate when Gervase did, to the brink of breakdown.

"I don't know," Malcolm Said. "Gervase always thinks people are sneering and laughing, even now. Someone rubbed his nose in it when he was young, you know. Told him he was rubbish, a mistake, should have been aborted. Boys can be bloody cruel. Gervase got aggressive to compensate, I suppose. Nothing ever worried Ferdinand very much. He's like me in more than looks."

"Only two wives so far," I said incautiously.

"Why don't you get married?" he asked.

I was flippant. "Haven't met the one and only. Don't want five."

"Don't you trust yourself?" he said.

Christ, I thought " that was sharp, that was penetrating. That was unfair. It was because of him that I didn't trust myself: because in inconstancy, I felt I was very much his son. His imprint, for better or worse, was on us all.