Odds against

FIVE

Two days later I went back through the porticoed columned doorway of Hunt Radnor Associates, a lot more alive than when I last came out.

I got a big hullo from the girl on the switchboard, went up the curving staircase very nearly whistling, and was greeted by a barrage of ribald remarks from the Racing Section. What most surprised me was the feeling I had of coming home: I had never thought of myself as really belonging to the agency before, even though down at Aynsford I had realised that I very much didn’t want to leave it. A bit late, that discovery. The skids were probably under me already.

Chico grinned widely. ‘So you made it.’

‘Well… Yes.’

‘I mean, back here to the grindstone.’

‘Yeah.’

‘But,’ he cast a rolling eye at the clock, ‘late as usual.’

‘Go stuff yourself,’ I said.

Chico threw out an arm to the smiling department. ‘Our Sid is back, his normal charming bloody self. Work in the agency can now begin.’

‘I see I still haven’t got a desk,’ I observed, looking round. No desk. No roots. No real job. As ever.

‘Sit on Dolly’s, she’s kept it dusted for you.’

Dolly looked at Chico, smiling, the mother-hunger showing too vividly in her great blue eyes. She might be the second best head of department the agency possessed, with a cross-referencing filing-index mind like a computer, she might be a powerful, large, self-assured woman of forty-odd with a couple of marriages behind her and an ever hopeful old bachelor at her heels, but she still counted her life a wasteland because her body couldn’t produce children. Dolly was a terrific worker, overflowing with intensely female vitality, excellent drinking company, and very, very sad.

Chico didn’t want to be mothered. He was prickly about mothers. All of them in general, not just those who abandoned their tots in push-chairs at police stations near Barnes Bridge. He jollied Dolly along and deftly avoided her tentative maternal invitations.

I hitched a hip on to a long accustomed spot on the edge of Dolly’s desk, and swung my leg.

‘Well, Dolly my love, how’s the sleuthing trade?’ I said.

‘What we need,’ she said with mock tartness, ‘is a bit more work from you and a lot less lip.’

‘Give me a job, then.’

‘Ah, now.’ She pondered. ‘You could…’ she began, then stopped. ‘Well, no… perhaps not. And it had better be Chico who goes to Lambourn; some trainer there wants a doubtful lad checked on…’

‘So there’s nothing for me?’

‘Er… well…’ said Dolly. ‘No.’ She had said no a hundred times before. She had never once said yes.

I made a face at her, picked up her telephone, pressed the right button, and got through to Radnor’s secretary.

‘Joanie? This is Sid Halley. Yes… back from Beyond, that’s it. Is the old man busy? I’d like a word with him.’

‘Big deal,’ said Chico.

Joanie’s prim voice said, ‘He’s got a client with him just now. When she’s gone I’ll ask him, and ring you back.’

‘O.K.’ I put down the receiver.

Dolly raised her eyebrows. As head of the department she was my immediate boss, and in asking direct for a session with Radnor I was blowing agency protocol a raspberry. But I was certain that her constant refusal to give me anything useful to do was a direct order from Radnor. If I wanted the drain unblocked I would have to go and pull out the plug. Or go on my knees to stay at all.

‘Dolly, love, I’m tired of kicking my heels. Even against your well-worn desk, though the view from here is ravishing.’ She was wearing, as she often did, a cross-over cream silk shirt: it crossed over at a point which on a young girl would have caused a riot. On Dolly it still looked pretty potent, owing to the generosity of nature and the disposal of her arrangements.

‘Are you chucking it in?’ said Chico, coming to the point.

‘It depends on the old man,’ I said. ‘He may be chucking me out.’

There was a brief, thoughtful silence in the department. They all knew very well how little I did. How little I had been content to do. Dolly looked blank, which wasn’t helpful.

Jones-boy clattered in with a tray of impeccable unchipped tea mugs. He was sixteen; noisy, rude, anarchistic, callous, and probably the most efficient office boy in London. His hair grew robustly nearly down to his shoulders, wavy and fanatically clean, dipping slightly in an expensive styling at the back. From behind he looked like a girl, which never disconcerted him. From in front his bony, acned face proclaimed him unprepossessingly male. He spent half his pay packet and his Sundays in Carnaby Street and the other half on week nights chasing girls. According to him, he caught them. No girls had so far appeared in the office to corroborate his story.

Under the pink shirt beat a stony heart; inside the sprouting head hung a big ‘So What?’ Yet it was because this amusing, ambitious, unsocial creature invariably arrived well before his due hour to get his office arrangements ready for the day that he had found me before I died. There was a moral there, somewhere.

He gave me a look. ‘The corpse has returned, I see.’

‘Thanks to you,’ I said idly, but he knew I meant it. He didn’t care, though.

He said, ‘Your blood and stuff ran through a crack in the linoleum and soaked the wood underneath. The old man was wondering if it would start dry rot or something.’

‘Jones-boy,’ protested Dolly, looking sick. ‘Get the hell out of here, and shut up.’

The telephone rang on her desk. She picked it up and listened, said, ‘All right,’ and disconnected.

‘The old man wants to see you. Right away.’

‘Thanks.’ I stood up.

‘The flipping boot?’ asked Jones-boy interestedly.

‘Keep your snotty nose out,’ said Chico.

‘And balls to you…’

I went out smiling, hearing Dolly start to deal once again with the running dog fight Chico and Jones-boy never tired of. Downstairs, across the hall, into Joanie’s little office and through into Radnor’s.

He was standing by the window, watching the traffic doing its nut in the Cromwell Road. This room, where the clients poured out their troubles, was restfully painted a quiet grey, carpeted and curtained in crimson and furnished with comfortable arm-chairs, handy little tables with ashtrays, pictures on the walls, ornaments, and vases of flowers. Apart from Radnor’s small desk in the corner, it looked like an ordinary sitting-room, and indeed everyone believed that he had bought the room intact with the lease, so much was it what one would expect to find in a graceful, six-storeyed, late Victorian town house. Radnor had a theory that people exaggerated and distorted facts less in such peaceful surroundings than in the formality of a more orthodox office.

‘Come in, Sid,’ he said. He didn’t move from the window, so I joined him there. He shook hands.

‘Are you sure you’re fit enough to be here? You haven’t been as long as I expected. Even knowing you…’ he smiled slightly, with watching eyes.

I said I was all right. He remarked on the weather, the rush-hour and the political situation, and finally worked round to the point we both knew was at issue.

‘So, Sid, I suppose you’ll be looking around a bit now?’

Laid on the line, I thought.

‘If I wanted to stay here…’

‘If? Hm, I don’t know.’ He shook his head very slightly.

‘Not on the same terms, I agree.’

‘I’m sorry it hasn’t worked out.’ He sounded genuinely regretful, but he wasn’t making it easy.

I said with careful calm. ‘You’ve paid me for nothing for two years. Well, give me a chance now to earn what I’ve had. I don’t really want to leave.’

He lifted his head slightly like a pointer to a scent, but he said nothing. I ploughed on.

‘I’ll work for you for nothing, to make up for it. But only if it’s real, decent work. No more sitting around. It would drive me mad.’

He gave me a hard stare and let out a long breath like a sigh.

‘Good God. At last,’ he said. ‘And it took a bullet to do it.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Sid, have you ever seen a zombie wake up?’

‘No,’ I said ruefully, understanding him. ‘It hasn’t been as bad as that?’

He shrugged one shoulder. ‘I saw you racing, don’t forget. You notice when a fire goes out. We’ve had the pleasant, flippant ashes drifting round this office, that’s all.’ He smiled deprecatingly at his flight of fancy: he enjoyed making pictures of words. It wasted a lot of office time, on the whole.

‘Consider me alight again, then,’ I grinned. ‘And I’ve brought a puzzle back with me. I want very much to sort it out.’

‘A long story?’

‘Fairly, yes.’

‘We’d better sit down, then.’

He waved me to an arm-chair, sank into one himself, and prepared to listen with the stillness and concentration which sent him time and time again to the core of a problem.

I told him about Kraye’s dealing in racecourses. Both what I knew and what I guessed. When at length I finished he said calmly, ‘Where did you get hold of this?’

‘My father-in-law, Charles Roland, tossed it at me while I was staying with him last week-end. He had Kraye as a house guest.’ The subtle old fox, I thought, throwing me in at the deep end: making me wake up and swim.

‘And Roland got it from where?’

‘The Clerk of the Course at Seabury told him that the directors were worried about too much share movement, that it was Kraye who got control of Dunstable, and they were afraid he was at it again.’

‘But the rest, what you’ve just told me, is your own supposition?’

‘Yes.’

‘Based on your appraisal of Kraye over one week-end?’

‘Partly on what he showed me of his character, yes. Partly on what I read of his papers…’ With some hesitation I told him about my snooping and the photography. ‘… The rest, I suppose, a hunch.’

‘Hmm. It needs checking… Have you brought the films with you?’

I nodded, took them out of my pocket, and put them on the little table beside me.

‘I’ll get them developed.’ He drummed his fingers lightly on the arm of the chair, thinking. Then, as if having made a decision, said more briskly, ‘Well, the first thing we need is a client.’

‘A client?’ I echoed absent-mindedly.

‘Of course. What else? We are not the police. We work strictly for profit. Ratepayers don’t pay the overheads and salaries in this agency. The clients do.’

‘Oh… yes, of course.’

‘The most likely client in this case is either Seabury Racecourse executive, or perhaps the National Hunt Committee. I think I should sound out the Senior Steward first, in either case. No harm in starting at the top.’

‘He might prefer to try the police,’ I said, ‘free.’

‘My dear Sid, the one thing people want when they employ private investigators is privacy. They pay for privacy. When the police investigate something, everyone knows about it. When we do, they don’t. That’s why we sometimes get criminal cases when it would undoubtedly be cheaper to go to the police.’

‘I see. So you’ll try the Senior Steward…’

‘No,’ he interrupted. ‘You will.’

‘I?’

‘Naturally. It’s your case.’

‘But it’s your agency… he is used to negotiating with you.’

‘You know him too,’ he pointed out.

‘I used to ride for him, and that puts me on a bad footing for this sort of thing. I’m a jockey to him, an ex-jockey. He won’t take me seriously.’

Radnor shrugged a shoulder. ‘If you want to take on Kraye, you need a client. Go and get one.’

I knew very well that he never sent even senior operatives, let alone inexperienced ones, to arrange or angle for an assignment, so that for several moments I couldn’t really believe that he intended me to go. But he said nothing else, and eventually I stood up and went towards the door.

‘Sandown Races are on today,’ I said tentatively. ‘He’s sure to be there.’

‘A good opportunity.’ He looked straight ahead, not at me.

‘I’ll try it, then.’

‘Right.’

He wasn’t letting me off. But then he hadn’t kicked me out either. I went through the door and shut it behind me, and while I was still hesitating in disbelief I heard him inside the room give a sudden guffaw, a short, sharp, loud, triumphant snort of laughter.

I walked back to my flat, collected the car, and drove down to Sandown. It was a pleasant day, dry, sunny, and warm for November, just right for drawing a good crowd for steeple-chasing.

I turned in through the racecourse gates, spirits lifting, parked the car (a Mercedes S.L.230 with automatic gears, power assisted steering, and a strip on the back saying NO HAND SIGNALS), and walked round to join the crowd outside the weighing room door. I could no longer go through it. It had been one of the hardest things to get used to, the fact that all the changing rooms and weighing rooms which had been my second homes for fourteen years were completely barred to me from the day I rode my last race. You didn’t lose just a job when you handed in your jockey’s licence, you lost a way of life.

There were a lot of people to talk to at Sandown, and as I hadn’t been racing for six weeks I had a good deal of gossip to catch up on. No one seemed to know about the shooting, which was fine by me, and I didn’t tell them. I immersed myself very happily in the racecourse atmosphere and for an hour Kraye retreated slightly into the background.

Not that I didn’t keep an eye on my purpose, but until the third race the Senior Steward, Viscount Hagbourne, was never out of a conversation long enough for me to catch him.

Although I had ridden for him for years and had found him undemanding and fair, he was in most respects still a stranger. An aloof, distant man, he seemed to find it difficult to make ordinary human contacts, and unfortunately he had not proved a great success as Senior Steward. He gave the impression, not of power in himself, but of looking over his shoulder at power behind: I’d have said he was afraid of incurring the disapproval of the little knot of rigidly determined men who in fact ruled racing themselves, regardless of who might be in office at the time. Lord Hagbourne postponed making decisions until it was almost too late to make them, and there was still a danger after that that he would change his mind. But all the same he was the front man until his year of office ended, and with him I had to deal.

At length I fielded him neatly as he turned away from the Clerk of the Course and forestalled a trainer who was advancing upon him with a grievance. Lord Hagbourne, with one of his rare moments of humour, deliberately turned his back on the grievance and consequently greeted me with more warmth than usual.

‘Sid, nice to see you. Where have you been lately?’

‘Holidays,’ I explained succinctly. ‘Look, sir, can I have a talk with you after the races? There’s something I want to discuss urgently.’

‘No time like the present,’ he said, one eye on the grievance. ‘Fire away.’

‘No, sir. It needs time and all your attention.’

‘Hm?’ The grievance was turning away. ‘Not today, Sid, I have to get home. What is it? Tell me now.’

‘I want to talk to you about the takeover bid for Seabury Racecourse.’

He looked at me, startled. ‘You want…?’

‘That’s right. It can’t be said out here where you will be needed at any moment by someone else. If you could just manage twenty minutes at the end of the afternoon…?’

‘Er… what is your connection with Seabury?’

‘None in particular, sir. I don’t know if you remember, but I’ve been connected’ (a precise way of putting it) ‘with Hunt Radnor Associates for the last two years. Various… er… facts about Seabury have come our way and Mr Radnor thought you might be interested. I am here as his representative.’

‘Oh, I see. Very well, Sid, come to the Stewards’ tea room after the last. If I’m not there, wait for me. Right?’

‘Yes. Thank you.’

I walked down the slope and then up the iron staircase to the jockeys’ box in the stand, smiling at myself. Representative. A nice big important word. It covered anything from an ambassador down. Commercial travellers had rechristened themselves with its rolling syllables years ago… they had done it because of the jokes, of course. It didn’t sound the same, somehow, starting off with ‘Did you hear the one about the representative who stopped at a lonely farmhouse…?’ Rodent officers, garbage disposal and sanitary staff: pretty new names for rat-catchers, dustmen and road sweepers. So why not for me?

‘Only idiots laugh at nothing,’ said a voice in my ear. ‘What the hell are you looking so pleased about all of a sudden? And where the blazes have you been this last month?’

‘Don’t tell me you’ve missed me?’ I grinned, not needing to look round. We went together through the door of the high-up jockeys’ box, two of a kind, and stood looking out over the splendid racecourse.

‘Best view in Europe.’ He sighed. Mark Witney, thirty-eight years old, racehorse trainer. He had a face battered like a boxer’s from too many racing falls and in the two years since he hung up his boots and stopped wasting he had put on all of three stone. A fat, ugly man. We had a host of memories in common, a host of hard ridden races. I liked him a lot.

‘How’s things?’ I said.

‘Oh, fair, fair. They’ll be a damn sight better if that animal of mine wins the fifth.’

‘He must have a good chance.’

‘He’s a damn certainty, boy. A certainty. If he doesn’t fall over his god-damned legs. Clumsiest sod this side of Hades.’ He lifted his race glasses and looked at the number board. ‘I see poor old Charlie can’t do the weight again on that thing of Bob’s… That boy of Plumtree’s is getting a lot of riding now. What do you think of him?’

‘He takes too many risks,’ I said. ‘He’ll break his neck.’

‘Look who’s talking… No, seriously, I’m considering taking him on. What do you think?’ He lowered his glasses. ‘I need someone available regularly from now on and all the ones I’d choose are already tied up.’

‘Well, you could do better, you could do worse, I suppose. He’s a bit flashy for me, but he can ride, obviously. Will he do as he’s told?’

He made a face. ‘You’ve hit the bull’s eye. That’s the snag. He always knows best.’

‘Pity.’

‘Can you think of anyone else?’

‘Um… what about that boy Cotton? He’s too young really. But he’s got the makings…’ We drifted on in amiable chat, discussing his problem, while the box filled up around us and the horses went down to the start.

It was a three mile chase, and one of my ex-mounts was favourite. I watched the man who had my old job ride a very pretty race, and with half my mind thought about housing estates.

Sandown itself had survived, some years ago, a bid to cover its green tempting acres with little boxes. Sandown had powerful friends. But Hurst Park, Manchester and Birmingham racecourses had all gone under the rolling tide of bricks and mortar, lost to the double-barrelled persuasive arguments that shareholders liked capital gains and people needed houses. To defend itself from such a fate Cheltenham Racecourse had transformed itself from a private, dividend-paying company into a non-profit-making Holdings Trust, and other racecourses had followed their lead.

But not Seabury. And Seabury was deep in a nasty situation. Not Dunstable, and Dunstable Racecourse was now a tidy dormitory for the Vauxhall workers of Luton.

Most British racecourses were, or had been, private companies, in which it was virtually impossible for an outsider to acquire shares against the will of the members. But four, Dunstable, Seabury, Sandown and Chepstow, were public companies, and their shares could be bought on the open market, through the Stock Exchange.

Sandown had been played for in a staightforward and perfectly honourable way, and plans to turn it into suburban housing had been turned down by the local and county councils. Sandown flourished, made a good profit, paid a ten per cent dividend, and was probably now impregnable. Chepstow was surrounded by so much other open land that it was in little danger from developers. But little Dunstable had been an oasis inside a growing industrial area.

Seabury was on the flat part of the south coast, flanked on every side by miles of warm little bungalows representing the dreams and savings of people in retirement. At twelve bungalows to the acre — elderly people liked tiny gardens — there must be room on the spacious racecourse for over three thousand more. Add six or seven hundred pounds to the building price of each bungalow for the plot it stood on, and you scooped something in the region of two million…

The favourite won and was duly cheered. I clattered down the iron staircase with Mark, and we went and had a drink together.

‘Are you sending anything to Seabury next week?’ I asked. Seabury was one of his nearest meetings.

‘Perhaps. I don’t know. It depends if they hold it at all, of course. But I’ve got mine entered at Lingfield as well, and I think I’ll send them there instead. It’s a much more prosperous looking place, and the owners like it better. Good lunch and all that. Seabury’s so dingy these days. I had a hard job getting old Carmichael to agree to me running his horse there at the last meeting — and look what happened. The meeting was off and we’d missed the other engagement at Worcester too. It wasn’t my fault, but I’d persuaded him that he stood more chance at Seabury, and he blamed me because in the end the horse stayed at home eating his head off for nothing. He says there’s a jinx on Seabury, and I’ve a couple more owners who don’t like me entering their horses there. I’ve told them that it’s a super track from the horses’ point of view, but it doesn’t make much difference, they don’t know it like we do.’

We finished our drinks and walked back towards the weighing room. His horse scrambled home in the fifth by a whisker and I saw him afterwards in the unsaddling enclosure beaming like a Hallowe’en turnip.

After the last race I went to the Stewards’ tea room. There were several Stewards with their wives and friends having tea, but no Lord Hagbourne. The Stewards pulled out a chair, gave me a welcome, and talked as ever, about the racing. Most of them had ridden as amateurs in their day, one against me in the not too distant past, and I knew them all well.

‘Sid, what do you think of the new type hurdles?’

‘Oh, much better. Far easier for a young horse to see.’

‘Do you know of a good young chaser I could buy?’

‘Didn’t you think Hayward rode a splendid race?’

‘I watched the third down at the Pond, and believe me that chestnut took off outside the wings…’

‘…do you think we ought to have had him in, George?’

‘…heard that Green bust his ribs again yesterday…’

‘Don’t like that breed, never did, not genuine…’

‘Miffy can’t seem to go wrong, he’d win with a carthorse…’

‘Can you come and give a talk to our local pony club, Sid? I’ll write you the details… what date would suit you?’

Gradually they finished their tea, said good-bye, and left for home. I waited. Eventually he came, hurrying, apologising, explaining what had kept him.

‘Now,’ he said, biting into a sandwich. ‘What’s it all about, eh?’

‘Seabury.’

‘Ah yes, Seabury. Very worrying. Very worrying indeed.’

‘A Mr Howard Kraye has acquired a large number of shares…’

‘Now hold on a minute, Sid. That’s only a guess, because of Dunstable. We’ve been trying to trace the buyer of Seabury shares through the Stock Exchange, and we can find no definite lead to Kraye.’

‘Hunt Radnor Associates do have that lead.’

He stared. ‘Proof?’

‘Yes.’

‘What sort?’

‘Photographs of share transfer certificates.’ And heaven help me, I thought, if I’ve messed them up.

‘Oh,’ he said sombrely. ‘While we weren’t sure, there was some hope we were wrong. Where did you get these photographs?’

‘I’m not at liberty to say, sir. But Hunt Radnor Associates would be prepared to make an attempt to forestall the takeover of Seabury.’

‘For a fat fee, I suppose,’ he said dubiously.

‘I’m afraid so, sir, yes.’

‘I don’t connect you with this sort of thing, Sid.’ He moved restlessly and looked at his watch.

‘If you would forget about me being a jockey, and think of me as having come from Mr Radnor, it would make things a lot easier. How much is Seabury worth to National Hunt racing?’

He looked at me in surprise, but he answered the question, though not in the way I meant.

‘Er… well you know it’s an excellent course, good for horses and so on.’

‘It didn’t show a profit this year, though.’

‘There was a great deal of bad luck.’

‘Yes. Too much to be true, don’t you think?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Has it ever occurred to the National Hunt Committee that bad luck can be… well… arranged?’

‘You aren’t seriously suggesting that Kraye… I mean that anyone would damage Seabury on purpose? In order to make it show a loss?’

‘I am suggesting that it is a possibility. Yes.’

‘Good God.’ He sat down rather abruptly.

‘Malicious damage,’ I said. ‘Sabotage, if you like. There’s a great deal of industrial precedent. Hunt Radnor Associates investigated a case of it only last year in a small provincial brewery where the fermentation process kept going wrong. A prosecution resulted, and the brewery was able to remain in business.’

He shook his head. ‘It is quite ridiculous to think that Kraye would be implicated in anything like that. He belongs to one of my clubs. He’s a wealthy, respected man.’

‘I know, I’ve met him,’ I said.

‘Well then, you must be aware of what sort of person he is.’

‘Yes.’ Only too well.

‘You can’t seriously suggest…’ he began.

‘There would be no harm in finding out,’ I interrupted. ‘You’ll have studied the figures. Seabury’s quite a prize.’

‘How do you see the figures, then?’ It seemed he genuinely wanted to know, so I told him.

‘Seabury Racecourse has an issued share capital of eighty thousand pounds in fully paid-up one pound shares. The land was bought when that part of the coast was more or less uninhabited, so that this sum bears absolutely no relation to the present value of the place. Any company in that position is just asking for a takeover.

‘A buyer would in theory need fifty-one per cent of the shares to be certain of gaining control, but in practice, as was found at Dunstable, forty would be plenty. It could probably be swung on a good deal less, but from the point of view of the buyer, the more he got his hands on before declaring his intentions, the bigger would be his profit.

‘The main difficulty in taking over a racecourse company — it’s only natural safeguard, in fact — is that the shares seldom come on the market. I understand that it isn’t always by any means possible to buy even a few on the Stock Exchange, as people who own them tend to be fond of them, and as long as the shares pay any dividend, however small, they won’t sell. But it’s obvious that not everyone can afford to have bits of capital lying around unproductively, and once the racecourse starts showing a loss, the temptation grows to transfer to something else.

‘Today’s price of Seabury shares is thirty shillings, which is about four shillings higher than it was two years ago. If Kraye can manage to get hold of a forty per cent holding at an average price of thirty shillings, it will cost him only about forty-eight thousand pounds.

‘With a holding that size, aided by other shareholders tempted by a very large capital gain, he can out-vote any opposition, and sell the whole company to a land developer. Planning permission would almost certainly be granted, as the land is not beautiful, and is surrounded already by houses. I estimate that a developer would pay roughly a million for it, as he could double that by selling off all those acres in tiny plots. There’s the capital gains tax, of course, but Seabury shareholders stand to make eight hundred per cent on their original investment, if the scheme goes through. Four hundred thousand gross for Mr Kraye, perhaps. Did you ever find out how much he cleared at Dunstable?’

He didn’t answer.

I went on, ‘Seabury used to be a busy, lively, successful place, and now it isn’t. It’s a suspicious coincidence that as soon as a big buyer comes along the place goes downhill fast. They paid a dividend of only sixpence per share last year, a gross yield of under one and three-quarters per cent at today’s price, and this year they showed a loss of three thousand, seven hundred and fourteen pounds. Unless something is done soon, there won’t be a next year.’

He didn’t reply at once. He stared at the floor for a long time with the half-eaten sandwich immobile in his hand.

Finally he said, ‘Who did the arithmetic? Radnor?’

‘No… I did. It’s very simple. I went to Company House in the City yesterday and looked up the Seabury balance sheets for the last few years, and I rang for a quotation of today’s share price from a stockbroker this morning. You can easily check it.’

‘Oh, I don’t doubt you. I remember now, there was a rumour that you made a fortune on the Stock Exchange by the time you were twenty.’

‘People exaggerate so,’ I smiled. ‘My old governor, where I was apprenticed, started me off investing, and I was a bit lucky.’

‘Hm.’

There was another pause while he hesitated over his decision. I didn’t interrupt him, but I was much relieved when finally he said, ‘You have Radnor’s authority for seeing me, and he knows what you have told me?’

‘Yes.’

‘Very well.’ He got up stiffly and put down the unfinished sandwich. ‘You can tell Radnor that I agree to an investigation being made, and I think I can vouch for my colleagues agreeing. You’ll want to start at once, I suppose.’

I nodded.

‘The usual terms?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Perhaps you would get on to Mr Radnor about that.’

As I didn’t know what the usual terms were, I didn’t want to discuss them.

‘Yes, all right. And Sid… it’s understood that there is to be no leak about this? We can’t afford to have Kraye slapping a libel or slander action on us.’

‘The agency is always discreet,’ I said, with an outward and an inward smile. Radnor was right. People paid for privacy. And why not?