Solomons Seal

Chapter Two

That evening the traffic was particularly heavy, and by the time I reached Woodham Ferrers I was running short of time. Tubby’s cottage overlooked the Crouch, and when I finally got there, I found he had some half-dozen pages from the collection laid out on his desk and there was a pile of books with markers in them stacked to one side. ‘You in a hurry?’ he asked as he poured me a whisky. ‘I could knock up an omelette later, or we could go down to the pub for a bite if you doubt my cooking.’

‘Is this going to take long?’ I asked. ‘I’ve got a client coming to see me at seven. I mustn’t keep him waiting.’

He sighed. ‘No, it won’t take long, Roy. Come over to the desk here and see what I’ve dug up about this collection.’ He switched on an Anglepoise lamp. ‘Newfoundland and Western Australia. That’s what was puzzling you, wasn’t it? I spotted it at once, of course, but I didn’t say anything. I wasn’t sure. I’m not sure yet, not really. How the hell did he manage to get hold of the dies? Or did he choose the designs and employ an engraver to copy them?’ He reached for the page that showed proofs of the frame and centre of the stamp separately. The seal first. Now that, unless I can’t tell a copy from the original, is the seal from the American Bank Note Company’s printing of the Newfoundland 1865 five cent brown.’ He picked up the Gibbons catalogue from the top of the pile on his desk, opening it at a marker. ‘There’s the picture of it, under the Codfish two cent stamp. Seal-on-Icefloe. Now compare that with the die proof. Same shape, same background, same blank area of white representing the icefloe. Agreed?’

‘Looks the same.’ But I hadn’t called on him for a lecture on stamp design. ‘Who is this man Berners?’ I asked.

‘I’ll come to him in a moment,’ he said impatiently. ‘Just concentrate on this now.’ He selected another page from the collection. ‘Here is an example of the stamp itself — a five cent blue, the edges rouletted, not perforated. It was issued in 1876, and like the two previous issues, it was printed in New York by the American Bank Note Company. Nice condition, too, except that it’s stuck down tight and the original gum lost. Worth, I suppose, a tenner or so, but if it had been the five cent brown of 1865, it would have been worth a lot more.’ He looked up at me, smiling. ‘Like angling, isn’t it, the big fish always just out of reach.’

He turned to the end of the catalogue. ‘Now take a look at the frame. This is less obvious, but I’m pretty certain it’s the Perkins Bacon design for the first Western Australian stamp, the black one penny of 1854.’ He held the catalogue under the light so that I could see. ‘Almost square, but slightly rectangular, with a sort of four-leaf-clover-shaped cross in each corner. The words “Western Australia” on the two sides, “Postage” at the top and “One Penny” at the bottom.’ He placed the page with the die proof alongside the illustration so that I could compare it. ‘The die proof omits the words, of course. Presumably they were to be included, together with the value, in the roller die from which they would prepare the final plate before going to press.’

‘Any idea what the words would have been?’ I asked.

‘No, I haven’t been able to find that out. Not yet.’ He put the page back on the desk and closed the catalogue. ‘You might ask Arnold Berners that. He was the dealer who purchased the cover I mentioned in my letter, so he will know.’

‘Why didn’t you contact him then?’

He gave a little shrug, smiling at me. ‘I’m a collector as well as a dealer. No point in alerting the opposition when you’ve made up your mind you want a thing.’

‘That’s not very ethical when you’ve been asked for a valuation.’ I didn’t tell him I was behaving just as badly, trying to raise his offer without telling him.

‘Perhaps not, but my offer was fair, even generous. I doubt he’ll offer more. Anyway, he operates from Switzerland. Presumably he came over for last week’s Harmer’s auction and stayed on to see some of his clients,’ And he added on a note of envy, ‘The little bastard has managed to get his hands on some of the Arab oil money.’

‘You don’t like him?’

‘No, none of us do. Operating out of Switzerland with clients like that, he can outbid us any time he wants. But mostly he buys privately. Two months ago he acquired a unique collection of Japanese Malayan Occupation stamps for a figure that is believed to have been in the region of eighteen thousand pounds. That’s a hell of a price, but then he’s like a professional burglar — he never grabs anything unless he knows he has a market.’ He was gazing down at the pages of the collection left out on his desk. ‘I can’t match him if he’s got a wealthy client interested in this. Did he say he had a client interested?’

‘Yes.’

He nodded, and there was a trace of wistfulness in his voice as he said, ‘Probably the same one he sold the cover to. I wonder what he charged the poor devil for that? A lot more than the two hundred and twenty pounds he paid for it at auction, I’ll bet.’ And he added, ‘It carried the only example of this very odd stamp in existence. What do you suppose happened to the others? Went down with the ship, eh?’ He shook his head. ‘And I don’t even know what the finished label looks like. There was no illustration of it in the auction catalogue. Josh dug it out for me. It just said: Cover with unrecorded ship label in deep blue with Port Moresby cancellation dated 17 July, 1911, also Australia 1909-11 Postage Due 2d. cancelled at Cooktown. Some stains, otherwise fine, unusual. The estimated value was fifty pounds plus.’

‘Berners referred to it as the Solomons Seal,’ I said.

‘Did he now?’ He leaned forward and picked up the page containing the proof of the entire stamp. ‘So that’s one more piece of the jigsaw fallen into place. Presumably Holland’s ships operated out of the Solomon Islands. Anything else he told you?’

I shook my head.

‘Oh, well, no point in going on, not now that I know Berners is after the collection.’ He began to gather the pages, putting them back in their albums. ‘Whoever has that cover is probably prepared to pay over the odds for the die proofs, and there’ll be others after them when they realise …’ He gave a little shrug, his words hanging in the air. ‘Another Scotch?’

‘No.’ I glanced at my watch. ‘I’ve got Rowlinson coming in to see me, and I’m running it fine as it is.’

‘The frozen food man?’ And when I nodded, he said, ‘Wish more of my clients were as successful as that. Tell him to put his money into stamps. One of the few things that have never gone down in value.’ He put the albums back in their original wrapping and handed the parcel to me. ‘For the sake of the girl, inform Berners you’ve got an offer of twenty-five hundred pounds. See what he says to that.’

I stared at him. ‘Are you serious?’

‘Yes, I think so.’

‘A figure like that, it could frighten him off.’

He nodded, a speculative look in those bright blue eyes. ‘If it does, then I’ve got the collection, haven’t I?’ And he added, ‘But I doubt whether it will, not if his client is rich.’

‘I think,’ I said, ‘I had better have that offer of yours in writing.’

‘Don’t trust me, eh?’

‘I wouldn’t trust anybody making a bid like that.’ My voice was sharpened by disappointment, the sense of opportunity lost. But at least it disposed of my own offer. I couldn’t outbid him at that figure.

He sat down at his desk and pulled a sheet of notepaper from a drawer. ‘You’re sharp, Roy,’ he said heavily. ‘What I had in mind was for you to quote him my offer so that he’d be forced to pay Miss Holland a thumping price.’ He was gazing questioningly at me. ‘Then, if it did scare him off, you’d let me have the collection for the figure I originally offered.’

‘That would be dishonest,’ I said.

He stared up at me a moment longer, not saying a word; then he wrote down his revised bid and signed it with a flourish. ‘You know, I must be mad,’ he said, slipping it into an envelope and handing it to me. ‘But it’s not often I’ve wanted anything as badly as I want that collection.’

‘It’s your money,’ I told him.

He laughed. ‘You remember somebody suggesting a long time ago that ocean racing was like tearing up fivers under a cold shower? Well, stamps are a bit like that. You get a hunch, a feel about something, and then you become so obsessed you’ve got to have it whatever the cost.’

He saw me to my car, and as I was getting into it, I remembered what he had said to me on the phone, that something very odd about those die proofs had come to light. I asked him what it was, but he laughed and shook his head. ‘When you’ve got more time and are prepared to show a little more interest-’

‘I’m a lot more interested now you’ve upped your bid by such a large amount.’

‘If I get the collection, then I’ll tell you. Okay?’

I was annoyed with myself then, wishing I weren’t already late for my appointment. All I could think of as I drove fast through the quiet Essex countryside was his extraordinary behaviour. I had no idea what his financial position was, but he lived quite modestly, certainly within his pension, and though he presumably made a profit out of buying and selling stamps, I was sure an offer like that would be stretching his resources. I had seen quite a bit of him since his wife had died a couple of years back. I liked him, and not doubting for a moment that his original valuation had been arrived at in good faith, I was afraid he had been carried away and was offering too high a price.

I was almost a quarter of an hour late when I turned into the concrete driveway, and from two fields away, just after I had hit the dirt track, I could see Rowlinson’s Aston Martin standing outside the hall. I found him sitting under the walnut tree by the moat, watching a pair of mallards, his dark, almost Welsh features brooding and sullen.

‘Sorry I’m late,’ I said. ‘Can I offer you a drink?’

‘No thanks.’ He tossed the broken half of an old walnut shell into the water. ‘I’m afraid I’ve some bad news for you. I’m selling.’ He didn’t look up, just sat there staring into the water. ‘Not your fault. Your ideas were fine, and I think they’d have worked. But I can’t fight Bessie and the board. We’ve decided to expand further, and we need the money.’ He picked up another walnut shell, breaking it between his fingers. ‘Doesn’t look as though I’ll have time for any more long trips, so no point in hanging on to the property. Pity. But there it is.’

I stood there, not saying anything. There was nothing to say with my hopes dashed like that. I had known Chips Rowlinson for about six years, ever since I had sold him a new engine for his boat and arranged its installation. Then, after I had taken the job with Browne, Baker amp; Browne, I learned he was looking for a larger residence. I was lucky, I managed to find him a lovely old manor house near Tolleshunt D’Arcy, and I got him the land to go with it much cheaper than he expected. As a result, he had come to regard me as his land and agricultural adviser, which was why he had turned to me when the rundown sheep station with the ridiculous name of Munnobungle had become a problem. I had looked at the rainfall figures in that part of Queensland, and I was certain deeper boreholes and a switch to cattle and sorghum would help to make it profitable. It just needed somebody there to get the place back on its feet. ‘I’m sorry you’ve decided to sell,’ I murmured.

‘So am I.’ He got slowly to his feet. ‘Don’t think I want to. I’ve had a lot of fun out of it. Marvellous country.’ And he began talking in that quick, energetic way of his about the climate and the people, the sense of space, and trips he had made out to the Barrier Reef in fishing boats and in a Cessna he had hired from an outfit called Bush Pilots Airways. He was pacing up and down the edge of the moat, his head up as though sniffing the air. ‘You know, I’ve half a mind to pack it in here, let the tax boys have their last bite at me and go out there for good. There’s a sense of freedom, like a breath of fresh air. The sea, the fish, all that coral, and over the horizon to the north-east islands hardly anybody has ever seen. The Solomons, the Bismarcks; I never got as far as that. Only Papua New Guinea. But that was enough. One of the last lost primitive frontiers.’

‘Primitive enough to believe in magic?’ I asked. ‘Death wishes? That sort of thing?’

‘Oh, yes. It’s witchcraft really, but they call it sorcery.’ He had stopped and was staring out at the moat. ‘I was at Mendi, and there was a young Australian lawyer staying at the hotel with me, running a course for local village magistrates, and he had just come face to face with this problem. What the devil does a magistrate, or a High Court judge for that matter, do when a case is brought against a man for putting a death wish on another? Is it murder? Difficult under our laws. No physical attack, no weapons. But they know it’s murder, and if the law doesn’t act, then the relatives will. They’ll take the law into their own hands. They call it pay-back. It’s feuding, of course. Can go on for generations.’

‘And the Administration, the district officers — a patrol officer, for instance, would he believe in it?’

‘Yes, I imagine so. I did see it once myself. Not in Papua New Guinea, in West Africa, when I was a sapper there. I had a company out in the bush throwing a Bailey bridge over a swollen river, and my best sergeant went sick on me. Nothing obviously wrong, only that he’d had a go at another man’s wife in a nearby village and the local witch doctor had been paid to put a spell on him. Medicines didn’t do any good, so I had to go and search the old wizard out, buy him off and the injured man as well.’

‘And your sergeant recovered?’

‘Oh yes, once he knew the death wish was lifted. Funny thing is that this sort of magic doesn’t seem to be an oral or even a visual art. The sorcerer seems able to do it by remote control, by telepathy.’ He was silent a moment, still staring into the moat, which was now becoming shadowed from the rays of the sinking sun. ‘Quite honestly,’ he said quietly, ‘it’s something I can do without. It’s quite beyond my comprehension, and I don’t want to know about it.’

His acceptance of it, the way he had reacted to it — a hard-headed businessman … I was appalled. Here in England, in this most mechanical, most material of all ages … ‘When you were out there,’ I said, ‘did you ever hear the name Holland mentioned?’ And when he looked at me with a surprised lift of his eyebrows, I added, ‘There was a Carlos Holland ran ships in the islands around the turn of the century.’

He shook his head. ‘Queenslanders aren’t much interested in the past. Life’s too hard, and they live for the present. What they talk about mostly is the price of sheep or cattle or sugar, and how that randy old sport out at Dead Horse Springs has shacked up with some raw kid up from Brisbane. And if they do mention the past at all, it’s to curse the Chinks for mining out all the gold on the Palmer River.’

He had spent a week up in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea, and he talked about that for a moment, how the people there had developed their pig and cassowary economy to a degree of complexity that was quite as difficult for the uninitiated to comprehend as the City’s dealings in stocks and shares. ‘But the rich man, the banker as you might say, doesn’t lend, he borrows, so that individuals, sometimes whole clans, become tied to him. Splendid fellows,’ he added. ‘A real fighting people who are not averse to a little cannibalism if it will increase their virility.’ I think he saw my mind had strayed, for he suddenly switched back to my question. ‘No, the only Holland I ever heard of was a fellow called Black Holland. He was killed by an abo half-breed in a bar brawl up near Ingham. Lewis, that was the abo’s name. He was tried for murder. Queer fellow, you buy him a drink and he’ll tell you a tall tale about some forgotten gold mine.’

‘How would an aborigine have come by a name like Holland?’ I asked.

‘His father, of course.’ His tone was terse, as though suddenly bored. ‘If the father is white, they’ll cling to the name, like all those hyphenated Smiths. Human nature is much the same everywhere. But Black Holland wasn’t an abo. He was from the islands. Bougainville, I think.’ He dropped the subject then. ‘Now, about Australia. I know you were very set on the idea of going out there to look after my interests. That’s why I wanted to tell you the situation myself. The final decision to expand was only taken yesterday.’ He was staring up into my face very intently. After a moment he said, ‘But I do need somebody I can trust to go out there and organise the sale of the property. Will you do that for me? All expenses paid, of course.’

I didn’t say anything for a moment, as I tried to readjust to this totally different offer. It wasn’t at all what I had been hoping for, but at least it would give me a chance to see whether there was more of a future for me out there than there seemed to be here in England. I think he misunderstood my silence, for he said, ‘I’m not leaving it to some smart-alec land agent out there. Like as not, he’d take me for a ride. Can’t blame him, a Pommie with a lot of land and nobody looking after his interests. I’d be a sitting duck. Well?’

‘I’ll think about it,’ I said.

He stared at me a moment longer. ‘Tell you what I’ll do. You’ve been through all the figures. You know what I paid for the place. I’ll give you a percentage of the net difference between my purchase price and whatever you manage to get for it. Say ten per cent. Would that help?’ And without waiting for a reply, he turned abruptly and walked to his car.

He had bought Munnobungle early in the seventies, when Australian land prices were almost at bottom. There had been massive inflation since then, and with a good local agent the price should be very much higher now, even if the exchange rate was against him. As soon as he was in the driving seat, he lowered the electric window. ‘You get a good deal for me and you’ll have a nice little packet of Australian dollars. Not a bad start if you’re thinking of settling there.’ He was looking up at me, smiling. ‘We’re having another board meeting day after tomorrow, a lunch afterwards. Why not join us? One o’clock at the factory. That gives you time to think it over.’ And he drove off, taking my acceptance for granted.

At the office next morning there was a handwritten envelope marked ‘Personal’ among the correspondence lying opened on my desk. It was a brief note from Miss Holland to say she had been offered a job as stewardess on a cruise ship, and would I be kind enough to sell the stamps for her and forward whatever I got for the collection, less commission and any expenses, to the credit of her account at the Southampton branch of the National Westminster Bank?

The writing was small and neat, slightly angular, so that it was not noticeably feminine, and she signed herself Perenna Holland. I had never come across the name Perenna before. There was no address, and the note had been scribbled on what appeared to be a half-sheet of typing paper. The cheap buff envelope in which it had been enclosed was post-marked Southampton. I dialled her solicitor’s number, and as soon as I was put through to him, he said in that high, precise voice of his, ‘I was just about to phone you.’

‘You’ve heard from Miss Holland, have you?’

‘Yes. She’s sent me a Power of Attorney and asked me to arrange for the sale of the house as well as the contents as soon as possible. Fortunately I now have the agreement of the mortgagors, so we can go ahead. I’d like you to handle that for us, if you will — since you were kind enough to give us a rough guide to the market value.’

‘Who drew up the Power of Attorney?’ I asked. ‘Was it a firm in Southampton?’

‘Ah, you’ve heard from her, too, have you? Yes, it was a Commissioner for Oaths at Southampton. And you were right when you said she seemed anxious to get away. She’s got a job on a cruise ship.’

I asked him for her address, but it was the same she had given me, the bank. She hadn’t said what ship she was sailing on or where it was going. It was all ‘very odd’, he thought. I told him we would deal with the sale of the house, and after I had put the phone down, I rang Lloyd’s Intelligence Services at Colchester. It took only a moment for them to check the Southampton sailings on the computer. A Greek cruise ship, the Lemnos, had left at 20.30 hours the previous evening for the Caribbean, calling at Madeira en route. No other cruise ship was due to sail from Southampton for the next eight days.

‘When will the Lemnos return?’ I asked. But they weren’t sure she would dock at Southampton again. It was a fortnight’s cruise, finishing up in Bermuda. The ship would then embark mainly American passengers for a further cruise through the Panama Canal to the Galápagos, then down to Callao and Valparaiso, finishing up at San Francisco on August 2. That was as far as their information went.

It wasn’t much, but at least I knew that she had sailed, and on a vessel headed for the Pacific. I sat there for a moment remembering the things she had said, the atmosphere of that house, wondering how much Eric Chandler knew about the family.

I was still thinking about that when the phone rang. It was the chairman of the Rotary Club. Would I take the chair for him at today’s lunch as his wife had suddenly been taken ill? There was a lot of work to get through, and it was only as I was leaving that I remembered Berners was coming at three. I gave the two albums to Miss Paget and told her to remain with him the whole time he was looking through them.

By the time I got back from lunch Berners was in my office with Miss Paget, the albums open on the desk in front of him. He was a small, thrusting little man, expensively dressed in a dark grey suit, rather square at the shoulders, and a gaily patterned bow tie. He got quickly to his feet, bowing slightly and giving me a limp handshake. As soon as we were alone, he said, ‘Your description of the last few pages of the collection was exact, Mr Slingsby. They’re undoubtedly die proofs, and the stamp is the one that interests my client.’ He folded his neat pale hands across his stomach, a signet ring glinting in the sunlight that streamed in through the open window. ‘Now, if I make you an offer, are you in a position to deal?’

‘Yes.’ I sat down at my desk, waving him to the chair opposite.

‘So, you have heard from Miss Holland.’

‘This morning.’

‘Then perhaps you will inform me what figure I have to beat.’

‘A high one,’ I said, wondering once again whether Tubby really wanted the collection at that price or if I should try to get him off the hook. But looking at Berners, I didn’t think I could. He was so obviously a hard bargainer.

He stared at me for a moment, his eyes coldly grey and very shrewd behind thick-lensed glasses. ‘How much?’

‘Suppose you name a figure?’

‘This is not an auction.’ His thin lips were compressed into a sour little smile, and he shook his head. ‘First, let me say that the value of this collection for anyone not specifically interested in the Solomons Seal label — and it is no more than that, you understand, it is not in any sense a postage stamp …’ He hesitated. ‘The value is perhaps one thousand pounds. That is, to a dealer.’

Allowing for the fact that he was pitching it as low as possible, it was close enough to Tubby’s valuation to make nonsense of his subsequent offer. I said, ‘But you are interested. So what is your offer?’

He shook his head, still with that sour little smile. ‘I don’t make any offer until I know how much I have to beat. I think in fairness to your client, to Miss Holland, you have to tell me that. You say it is high.’

‘Very high,’ I told him.

‘Higher than one thousand pounds?’

‘Much higher.’

He frowned, his hand moving up to his blue jowls and the high dome of his forehead catching the light. The hand came away, the head thrust forward. ‘You have this offer in writing?’

‘Yes.’

‘Show me. I don’t believe it.’

I started to tell him that I wasn’t accustomed to having my word doubted, but I checked myself. The figure was so preposterous that in his shoes I would have been equally incredulous. ‘All right,’ I said, and I took Tubby’s letter from the drawer in my desk and handed it to him.

He picked it up, holding it close to his face. ‘C’est incroyable!’ he breathed. ‘Who is this?’ He peered closely at the signature. ‘J. L. Sawyer. A dealer?’ he asked. ‘Yes. I remember now. I have met him. An amateur.’ He said it half in contempt, half in wonder. And then he looked at me over the top of the letter. ‘Have you had any other offers?’

I shook my head.

‘Then why does he go directly to this very high figure of twenty-five hundred pounds? It cannot be for the “Lady McLeod” Trinidad stamp; that is in too poor condition.’

‘I’ve no idea,’ I said. ‘He just seems fascinated by the collection as a whole, and by the proofs, of course.’

‘Why? What is his interest?’

‘He seems to think it has great curiosity value.’

‘He wants it for himself then, not for a client?’

‘Yes, for himself.’

He shook his head as though in wonderment at the stupidity of it. ‘Well, I’m not sure now. For myself I could not go beyond fifteen hundred pounds, maybe a little more. But above his figure, no — not on my own responsibility, you understand.’ He had been speaking slowly, more to himself than to me. Then abruptly he put the bid letter down on the desk. ‘You must give me a little time. I have to consult my client about this.’

‘Miss Holland needs the money,’ I said. ‘If you would like to use my phone.’

But he shook his head. ‘My client is not in England any more. He is somewhere in Europe, I think. You must wait a little, until I can contact him.’

‘How long?’

‘A fortnight, three weeks — I’m not sure. Shall we say a month? I expect him to be in England again sometime next month.’

I hesitated. A month would take us to July 23. That would be running it fine if she was leaving the ship at Callao or Valparaiso. ‘I’ll give you three weeks.’

He seemed about to argue, but then abruptly he nodded. ‘Three weeks then. Meantime, I have your word that you do not sell to this man Sawyer before I contact you again.’

‘You have until July sixteenth,’ I told him. ‘If I haven’t heard from you by then-’

‘You will hear from me. That I promise you.’ And he got to his feet. ‘It’s very strange,’ he said, shaking his head and frowning again. ‘I don’t understand why Sawyer is making this bid. It can only be that he hopes to twist my client’s elbow.’ He suddenly spun round on me. ‘You think he knows who my client is?’

‘I’ve no idea.’

He seemed puzzled and uneasy as I showed him to the door. I, too, was beginning to wonder about that client of his. I was wondering about a lot of things, particularly the sheets Tubby had talked about. If the proofs were worth this sort of money, what would a whole sheet be worth, a solid block of 120 or 240 of the printed stamps?

Though Packer was back by then, I decided to deal with the sale preliminaries myself. I could then have a look at that loft. A lot of papers and records are usually left behind by the occupants when the house and its contents are up for sale. There was sure to be something there, and a closer look at those old photographs might help. But first I needed more information about the family’s background. I rang Chandler and asked him to have a drink with me before lunch at the County Hotel next day.

I thought he might be a little less reticent over a drink than if I saw him at his office. Unfortunately I was delayed, and he had already bought his own drink by the time I got there. It started us off on the wrong foot. ‘I can only give you a quarter of an hour,’ he said primly.

‘And I’ve got to be at Rowlinson Fast Freeze by one.’ I wasn’t in the best of tempers. I’d just had a long session with Sam Baker, who had told me bluntly that if I went off to Australia to do a job for Rowlinson on my own account, it would be the end of our association. With business the way it was I knew he was taking advantage of the situation to edge me out. In the end we had had a blazing row, and I had walked out, telling him he’d better start advertising for another office boy right away. I got myself a drink and steered Chandler to an empty table.

‘So you’re lunching with Chips Rowlinson.’ He was looking at me the way a thrush eyes a worm, his eyes bright behind his glasses. ‘There’s talk that they’re expanding again. If I can assist in any way …’ He left it at that. ‘Well now, you want some information on the Hollands. May I ask why?’

I explained briefly about the stamps, but when I asked him about Carlos Holland, he said, ‘I wouldn’t know about that. Before my time. In any case, I’m not at all sure I’m at liberty to discuss their affairs with you.’

‘Then why did you agree to meet me?’

He smiled suddenly, his glasses catching the light. ‘Like you, perhaps I’m a little curious. Also, I don’t like loose ends. I ought to have been informed. She should have told me she was going abroad, not written to me so that I only received the letter after she had sailed.’

I asked him how long his firm had been acting for them, and he said, ‘Since January 1922. I had one of my juniors check through the files. Fortunately they were in store here when our Moorgate office was gutted in the Blitz. The first conveyance we handled was for the sale of a London office property, then shortly afterwards a house in Surrey. Of course, the partner who dealt with that is dead now.’

‘Presumably he was acting for Miss Holland’s grandfather.’

‘Yes. Lieutenant-Colonel Lawrence Douglas Holland. He sold up and went abroad shortly after the First World War.’

‘Do you know where he went?’

‘Singapore. His address was care of a bank in Singapore. We had to have his bank address, as he had arranged for us to manage his affairs. At that time all his funds were invested in this country. Later he instructed us to sell most of his investments and remit the proceeds to a bank in Sydney, Australia. In 1923 he changed his address again to a Post Office Box number at Port Moresby in Papua. After that there’s nothing on the file until his son, Captain Philip Holland, arrived in England with his family and we handled the conveyancing, first for a farm near Snape, and then, when he sold that, for the purchase of the house at Aldeburgh.’

‘I take it her grandfather was dead by then?’

He nodded. ‘Apparently Colonel Holland disappeared the same year they came to England.’

‘When was that?’

‘About six years ago.’

‘You say he disappeared.’

‘Yes. Made an end of it, that was what she said. He took a native boat and just sailed off into the blue.’

‘Did she say why?’

‘No. She wasn’t there at the time. Anyway, she had come to see me on business, and that was a private matter. I didn’t ask her.’ He was silent for a moment. ‘I don’t know whether I should tell you this, but she was badly injured, and her mother was killed, in some sort of an outbreak of native hysteria. I think perhaps this preyed on the old man’s mind. He must have been over eighty, and at that age, nearing the end of his life …’ He sighed, a solicitor’s acceptance of the vagaries of elderly people. That’s what decided Captain Holland to sell up and come to England. Wanted to get away from it all.’

‘You met him, did you?’

He nodded. ‘When he bought the farm, and again when he sold it and purchased the little place in Aldeburgh.’

‘What was he like?’

‘An odd-looking man, mixed blood, you see. Not very sure of himself. Quite out of his depth running a farm here in England.’ He leaned back, his eyes half closed. ‘Can’t recall him very clearly, only that there was something about his manner that was a little strange, and his features — the nose rather broad and without character, large eyes and a low forehead under a mop of brown hair. Thickset, but rather shrivelled. He wasn’t at all well the last time I saw him, some disease of the tropics, hepatitis probably. He had a darkish skin that had a tinge of yellow in it. He died shortly afterwards. That’s when Miss Holland came to see me.’

‘What nationality was her mother?’ I asked. ‘English?’

‘No, Australian, I think. Captain Holland had been educated in Australia and had served in the Australian forces at the end of the last war. He probably met her then. At any rate, they were married shortly after.’

‘You say he had mixed blood?’

He nodded. ‘According to the information we dug out of the files, Colonel Holland’s first wife died just after the Kaiser’s war. The flu epidemic, I imagine. She would have been quite a young woman. Probably why he sold his ship-broking business and went out to Papua New Guinea.’

‘To see if he could discover what had happened to the ship that went down with his brother?’

‘Something like that, I imagine. It would have given him a purpose.’ He hesitated, then said, ‘You’re wondering about that young woman, I suppose. Well, no reason why you shouldn’t know. Miss Holland’s grandmother was from the islands, I can’t remember which. She was the daughter of a French trader.’ He said it as though that explained everything. ‘I suppose Holland was finding it pretty lonely up there in Papua New Guinea. He’d bought some land, a place called Kuamegu according to the photocopy of the deeds we have. That was in 1923 if I remember rightly, and he married this island girl the following year.’

‘Was Captain Holland the only child?’ I asked.

‘No, there was a sister. She’s married and lives in Perth.’

‘So why did he come to England?’

‘God knows. Probably because of his son, the younger one who had just left school.’

I asked him about Timothy Holland then, but he couldn’t tell me much, only that he had failed at Sandhurst and had then gone out to Australia. ‘As you know, Australia became administrators for Papua New Guinea after the war, from I think 1952 until independence a few years ago. He was an officer in that Administration.’

‘She said he was a patrol officer. Was he on duty when he was injured?’

He shrugged. ‘I presume so.’

‘How did it happen? Was he attacked?’

‘No, it was an accident apparently. He was examining a ship while it was unloading and was hit by the cargo sling swinging on its boom. It knocked him into the hold. Just one of those things,’ he murmured, finishing his drink and glancing at his watch.

‘Can you tell me anything about the elder brother?’ I asked. ‘Have you met him?’

‘No, I’ve never met him. Why?’

‘My guess is she intends joining him. He’s something to do with ships, I believe.’

‘Yes. Runs his own vessel, a landing craft if I remember rightly. The Hollands have always been interested in island trading.’

‘He was being financed by his father, I believe.’

He looked at me sharply. ‘Did Miss Holland tell you that?’

‘Yes. She said that’s where all their money had gone.’

He nodded. ‘I advised against it, but yes, that’s true I’m afraid. And now he’s gone in with a rival shipowner, a relative of some sort.’ I asked whether he had any information about the man, but he said, ‘No, Captain Holland was very reticent on the matter. But I do know this, he wouldn’t have approved of his son’s involvement. Some sort of family feud.’ He checked himself there. ‘I can’t go into that, you understand, or into the financial details. But as far as Miss Holland’s money is concerned, I tied it up as best I could so that she now has quite a large stake in this ship of her brother’s. Something I’ll have to look into, but I fear it’ll take time and no way I can see of converting it into cash.’ He got to his feet, muttering in a very petulant tone, ‘She should have told me what she was doing so that I could advise her.’

I was standing beside him, downing the rest of my drink, when he continued, speaking slowly, almost reflectively, ‘If you’re right about Miss Holland going out to join her brother, then I am afraid it will be a difficult journey for her, a very unhappy one. I can’t help wondering … ’ He shook his head, and when I asked him what he meant, he pursed his lips and murmured something about its being no place for a young woman. ‘It means she’s going back to the very island where her mother was murdered, where she herself was injured.’

‘What island is that?’ I asked.

‘Madehas, near Buka. And it was in the Buka Passage that Timothy Holland had his accident.’ He shook his head again. ‘Her grandfather, too. It’s not been a lucky place for the Hollands.’

‘And that’s where her brother is now?’

‘I suppose so. His base anyway. The last I heard he was living on board his ship. He had just the one, and he was running it himself, trading in the islands and around Bougainville.’ He seemed to think he had said enough, for he turned to leave. But then he paused. ‘Those stamps you mentioned. Are they worth anything?’ I told him she should clear at least £2,000, and he seemed pleased. ‘That’s good. I’d like to think she had some money coming to her.’ And then with his usual caution he added, ‘I take it you have a buyer.’

‘Two,’ I said, ‘so it may pay to auction them. I’ll be going up to London on Friday, and if I have time, I’ll look in on a dealer I know and get his advice.’

He nodded. ‘Well, I’m sure you’ll do the best you can for her.’ He was turning to go, and I reminded him about the house and that I’d need the key. ‘Ah, yes, I should have told you. She left it with a Mrs Clegg next door, a house called Wherry Haven.’ And he added, ‘Have a good lunch, and if you’re being asked to deal with anything local, you might remind Rowlinson we did the conveyance on his present residence.’

It was well past one when I got to the factory on the Maldon road. They were standing around in the boardroom, and a girl was serving drinks. All the directors were there, including Chips’s wife, Bessie, a nice homely woman, but with a very good head for business. Shortly after they were married, the two of them had begun smoking salmon in a shed attached to their cottage on the Blackwater, using the traditional oak chips, which was how he got his nickname. That was the start of it all, and now even the new factory was too small for them. The board meeting had been considering details of the latest expansion programme, and they asked me about the availability of the adjoining land and its probable cost.

It was when we were having coffee that Bessie Rowlinson drew me aside and said, ‘You realise what this means. That sheep station will have to go. Chips is needed here. He can’t go out and see to the sale himself.’

And later, when I was leaving, Chips took me by the arm and saw me to my car. ‘Bessie had a word with you, did she? When do you think you can leave?’

‘As soon as I’ve got my visa.’

‘Your firm agrees?’

‘Not exactly.’ And I told him the result of my interview with the senior partner.

‘I see.’ He looked at me, a sly little smile. ‘But you’re not worried.’

‘No, not really. It’s time I moved on.’

He nodded. ‘Good. I’ll dictate a letter of agreement for you this afternoon.’

Three hours later I had cleared my desk and was on the A12 driving north to Aldeburgh. It was a bright, still evening, and the house when I reached it looked less neglected with its brickwork glowing in the slanting rays of the sun. Wherry Haven was only a few yards down the road. I had phoned Mrs Clegg that afternoon, and as she handed me the keys, she said, ‘I’ll be glad when it’s sold. My husband didn’t think I should be saddled with the responsibility, not at my age, but I couldn’t very well refuse. First her father, then that poor brother of hers. She needed to get away.’

She was grey-haired, her hands showing signs of rheumatism, but her eyes were bright and intelligent, her movements still energetic. ‘How long have you known the Hollands?’ I asked.

‘Let me see now. We came here when my husband retired. He was very keen on sailing. That was just over four years ago, and they came soon after.’

‘You knew her father then?’

She nodded. ‘He used to walk down to the yacht club and chat with us while we were working on the boat. We had a small twenty-footer then. He had lived a lot of his life abroad. In Papua New Guinea.’

‘He came to England when his wife died, I believe.’

‘Yes. But he never talked about that. She was killed, you see. By the natives. It was a very primitive place, and they had some sort of cult. Something to do with ships and cargo.’ She hesitated as though trying to remember something, then went on: ‘The Hollands were a shipping family, that’s why he was interested in boats. He’d have a drink with us sometimes, and then he’d talk about the incredible blackness of the people, the incessant rain and the war, when his father had lived close under an active volcano and had fought the Japanese, things like that. It was all very interesting and colourful. But he never told us what happened. He was a strange man, very withdrawn, very nervy. And that poor boy. You’d never think they were father and son, would you?’

‘I never met either of them,’ I said, wondering what she meant.

‘Oh, well, if you’d seen them together. The father was quite a dull little man, very English in his manner. But that son of his with his red hair, those strangely flattened features, and the eyes … you’ve met Miss Holland, haven’t you?’ And when I nodded, she said, ‘Yes, I thought I saw you here about a fortnight ago, before she left. She has something of the same features. Very striking, don’t you think — unusual?’ She was suddenly silent, as though she had been trying to convey something to me and was at a loss for words. ‘Oh, well, I mustn’t keep you. You’ll bring back the keys.’ And she added, ‘I hope it’s sold soon. I never liked the house — inside, I mean. All those terrible carvings.’

The first thing I noticed when I went into the house was that the carvings had gone, and most of the pictures, too. I went through it quickly, noting down the rough measurements of the rooms and drafting out the sale notice. The reddening sun cast a lurid light, and the empty, abandoned feel of the place made even a professional visit seem like an unwarranted intrusion. It didn’t take me long to check the contents against the inventory I had made on the previous visit. All the furniture was still there, but she had cleared out every drawer. No papers, no photographs, nothing to show the sort of people who had occupied the place. She had made a clean sweep of everything. Even the loft was empty. The trunk she had mentioned was gone, presumably into store. The place was dusty, still hanging in cobwebs, and in a corner close under the rafters my torch picked out a small pile of books. They were most of them old Army manuals, a copy of Queen’s Regulations, some pictures of Sandhurst, one of a group of cadets, several dinner menus. And then, tucked into the pages of a book called Black Writing from New Guinea, I found the photograph of a man in khaki shirt and shorts, a black and white picture taken against a background of round thatched huts exuding smoke in the shadow of sombre mountains.

I took it down with me to the window of the room that had been her bedroom. The picture had been taken in the fading evening light when the cooking fires were burning in the thatched village, the whole scene very dark, no humans, only that single figure and a pig with its tail up scurrying away from him. But some trick of the light, a shaft of sunlight perhaps shining through a gap in the mountains, illumined the man’s face. He was a young man, clean-shaven, hair standing up like a brush on his bare head, and the face rather square, a jutting jaw and wide-set eyes above a flattened pugilistic nose. It was a face that was both pugnacious and gentle, the nose and jaw contrasting oddly with the appearance of almost childlike innocence, the overall impression one of clean-living boyishness.

I looked up from the picture and saw her as I had last seen her, sitting on the window ledge staring out to sea, the same brooding, dreamy look, the same nose and jaw, only the hair different. They must have been very alike, the way twins are; I knew why she had gone then, understood her purpose, and it scared me, so that without thinking I stuffed the picture into my pocket and hurried downstairs, out into the fresh air, closing the front door behind me.

The sun was setting now, the sky cloud-galleoned and flaring red. The stillness and the brilliance, the peace of an East Anglian summer evening — my mood changed. The sense of something appalling and beyond my comprehension that had clung to those empty walls was gone. Like a bad dream, I could not even recall what it was that had so disturbed me, just the memory of her face and how she had stared out towards the sea.

I still had to calculate roughly the acreage of the garden, and I went round the back of the house to pace it out. At the far end, where it backed on to the garden of the house in the next street, there was a toolshed. I checked the contents, adding them to my list, then continued my pacing. A garden fork was stuck into the ground by the remains of a bonfire. I pulled it out and was about to put it in the shed where it belonged when I realised that the heap of ashes in front of me was not an ordinary bonfire. There were charred scraps of paper scattered around it. This was where she had burned the contents of the drawers, all the papers and rubbish that had accumulated in the loft.

I began turning over the half-burned scraps with the fork. There were cheque counterfoils, remains of bank statements, old Christmas cards and scraps of newspapers. Not our newspapers. The words were English, but the names were foreign. A headline caught my eye: Meteor Falls near Goroka Village. The paper was yellowed with age. And there was the remains of a letter. I bent down to read the charred fragment of notepaper and found myself staring at something that lay beside it, a tattered travesty of the human figure, a sort of doll about ten inches high, burned black but with the head still recognisable, a birdlike mask of wood and bones and feathers.

I picked it up. The wood was driftwood, smooth and hardened by the sea, the feathers seagulls’ feathers, and there were shells as well as the thin little bones of seabirds. I had a sudden mental picture of her striding along the beach, the brassy helmet of her hair blowing in the wind, gathering up the sea’s high-tide offerings and taking them back to her brother, and that young man, propped up in his room, half paralysed and alone, struggling to fashion this feathered monstrosity from the bits and pieces of her beachcombing.

I dropped it back on the ashes, standing there staring down at it, feeling sickened that he should have believed in sorcery to the extent of trying to defeat death with that — thing. In a sudden feeling of revulsion I raked the remains of the fire over it and in doing so uncovered something else, a thin sliver of carved wood like a long barbed needle. It was white with ash and badly charred at one end, but when I had wiped it clean on the long lawn grass, I saw that the pointed end was coated with red paint.

The actual point was about six inches long, and below that were several barblike nicks. It looked like the head of a very thin-bladed wooden spear, or perhaps an arrow. But what caught my eye, because it was so strange, was that below the nicks were three long slits cut into the shaft. They had been fashioned with great care, and there was no doubt at all about their purpose. Driven into the body of a man and wrenched back, those slits would cause the hard narrow splines of wood to spring outwards, tearing into the flesh and holding fast.

It was a weapon fashioned by somebody with experience and understanding of a deadly primitive craft, and the red paint on the tip, traces of it still clinging to the slits, right back to where the fire had burned it off, could be nothing else but a simulation of the blood of the intended victim. The masked doll and the weapon, the two together … and the blood-red sky fading above me. I felt suddenly cold and appalled, the concentrated hatred, the deadly fear that had made him do this, lying there in his bed, working away at this murderous copy of a weapon that symbolised a death wish — somebody else’s death — and his face so innocently boyish, his body crippled! What primitive knowledge had driven him to it? A patrol officer in a Civil Administration, and yet somehow he had been infected, possessed almost, by the primitive beliefs of the people he had administered. His grandmother’s people. Was he a throwback to the island woman Colonel Holland had married? And who was the enemy for whom it had been intended, who was the intended victim, whose death would save him? Or was it all just the figment of a dying man’s superstitious imagination?

I slipped it into my clipboard with the intention of getting an expert opinion. Sorcery, she had said. I could hear her voice, the way she had said, You can’t enter that as the cause of death, not in England.

My God, I thought, and she’s gone back there, alone. She’s gone to do what her brother could not do. I was still thinking about that as I took the fork to the toolshed and completed my pacing out of the garden. Then I went down the road to return the key to Mrs Clegg.

She must have been watching for me, for the door opened before I had even rung the bell. ‘You’ve finished then?’

I nodded, my mind still groping for a rational explanation.

‘Is it true the house is up for sale, too?’

‘Yes.’

‘When will it be, do you know?’

‘We’ll be advertising the date in the local paper. I think sometime next month.’ And I handed her the key.

‘You want me to keep this?’

‘The lawyers will be in touch with you.’ And I added, ‘Some of the things have been put in store. Do you know where?’

But all she could tell me was that a small van had been there about ten days ago. ‘It was just a trunk and several suitcases. There was no furniture moved. You’ll be selling the furniture, too, I suppose?’

‘The contents will go into one of our weekly sales at Chelmsford.’

‘I wonder who will come to live here. It makes so much difference in a road like this. We all know each other.’

‘Yes, of course.’ I hesitated. ‘Did they have many visitors?’

‘No, they kept very much to themselves. I went in occasionally, but Miss Holland didn’t make friends easily, and then there were all those extraordinary carvings. It wasn’t that people here didn’t care, but the house had a strange, rather unpleasant atmosphere. I always felt uneasy when I visited.’

‘What about strangers? Has anybody been to see them just recently?’

‘No. Not just recently.’ She stared at me, a little hesitant. ‘Perhaps I shouldn’t say this, but earlier, talking about Miss Holland’s appearance — it was the red hair, you see. It reminded me.’

‘Reminded you of what?’ I asked, for she had stopped there as though she had changed her mind about telling me.

‘This man. It was about two months ago. Dick — that’s my husband — he was out, so I answered the bell. He seemed to have mistaken the house. He was asking for the Hollands, and really he looked so like Miss Holland’s brother, the same coloured hair, you see, and his face tanned by the sun, almost leathery. A rather aggressive manner. Australian, I think. He had that sort of accent.’

‘Did he say who he was?’

‘No. He asked if this was the Hollands’ house, and when I said No and pointed it out to him, he just nodded and went straight there.’

‘A relative?’

‘Oh, yes, I would think he must have been, with hair like that and coming to Aldeburgh specially to see them. Do you think that’s why she left? He was there a long time, several hours. I asked her about him when I next saw her. Two days later it would have been, and she just stared me down, making it obvious she didn’t want to discuss it. He was quite handsome in a way, but there was a hardness; the eyes, I think.’

She couldn’t tell me anything else, and I left her, wondering whether there was any connection between this stranger and the things I had found in the ashes of that fire.

I stopped for sandwiches and beer at The Spaniard near Marks Tey, sitting at a table by myself and staring at that arrowhead. Now that I had a chance to examine it closely I knew it wasn’t an old weapon, certainly not one of her grandfather’s collection of spears and arrows. The red coating came away quite easily to the scratch of my thumbnail, and the wood underneath was pale. The coating itself wasn’t hard like paint; it was softer, more like dried blood.

Who had taught him, I wondered, to fashion such a weapon, and for such a deadly purpose? I had never met him, yet holding that wicked little sliver of wood in my hand, I seemed to feel his presence. I could see him, propped up in that bed with the pictures on the wall in front of him, pictures that represented his real world, and labouring to trim the point and cut the slits, and death in his heart as he struggled to control and direct the movements of his hands. And she had thrown it on the fire, hating it. The doll, too. And now, to save him from himself, she was working her passage back to the world he had come from, where she had been born.

Pay-back, Chips Rowlinson had called it. If I catch up with the man … I felt a chill run through me, though the darkened bar was heavy with the day’s heat trapped in the crush of people eating and drinking. An English pub, everything so ordinary, and the sliver of wood in my hand, the memory of her words. And those stamps. They were part of it, too. I was certain of it, so that sitting there, drinking the rest of my beer, I wondered how Timothy Holland had come by them. He couldn’t have inherited them, not from his father at any rate; otherwise the albums would have been at Aldeburgh all the time, not as his sister had said among personal belongings sent home with him from Papua New Guinea. No, he had either discovered them or been given them out there. But where? And had he known they were valuable, or was his interest in them in some way connected with the disappearance of the Holland Trader?

Unfortunately, I had other things to think about next day in London, and when I discovered the stamps were probably worth even more than Tubby had offered for them, I ceased to worry about their real significance. If you’re hungry, you don’t enquire where the manna comes from.

*

Canberra House, where I had to go for my visa, is near the Law Courts so that it was only a short walk to the Strand Stamp Arcade and on my way to the Qantas office to pick up my airline tickets. This philatelic hypermarket almost next door to the Savoy has the atmosphere of a bazaar, a sort of Aladdin’s cave of stamps. I preferred it to Stanley Gibbons on the other side of the Strand because you were not confined to any one dealer and could wander from counter to counter, looking at stamps, chatting to dealers, meeting other collectors, and no pressure on you to buy anything. However, since I had got to know Josh Keegan personally, most of my purchases had been through him. He was expensive, handling nothing but the best, but if you could catch him between Continental buying trips, he was fascinating to talk to, full of stories of deals he had pulled off, fakes he had exposed and, of course, his latest acquisitions, which were always superb and mostly beyond my modest means.

His stand was at the far end of the arcade: J. S. H. Keegan, Specialist in GB amp; Commonwealth. It was just before lunch when I arrived, and his manager, Jim Grace, was invoicing some early St Helena he had just sold to a thickset man flourishing a German credit card. The only other customer at the counter was picking over some Specimen GBs neatly packaged in plastic envelopes.

‘Is Josh Keegan in?’ I asked.

Grace nodded. ‘Just back from Birmingham. Our first auction is next week.’ To look at this small stand in a crowded arcade it was difficult to realise that he had a partner in Zurich, another in Munich, and had just gone into partnership with a firm of auctioneers in the Midlands. ‘If it’s about that little collection Commander Sawyer brought in, I know he’d like to see you.’ He reached for the credit card, jotting down the number on the invoice. ‘He’s upstairs in the office if you’d like to go up.’

I had only once before been to his office on the third floor; that was when Tubby had introduced me to him. It had originally been one large room; now it was partitioned off into small cubicles where his staff sorted, packaged and priced the material he acquired, most of it from private collectors. His own office was little bigger than the others, a desk, two chairs, a window looking down on to the Strand and the walls lined with small filing tray cabinets. He was standing at the window when I went in, a neatly dressed man with a shock of grey hair. He might have been a musician, except that he had a block of orange stamps gripped in a pair of tweezers and was holding it up to the light, his glasses pushed on to the top of his head and a jeweller’s magnifying glass screwed into his right eye.

He turned and smiled at me. I think he was Irish, the smile and the charm all part of his stock-in-trade. ‘Ever seen a block of four five-pound orange? Lightly cancelled, too. I thought they might be fakes, but no, they’re all right and it’s the blued paper.’ He held the block out for me to see. ‘Superb, isn’t it?’ His eyes were shining with enthusiasm.

‘What’s it worth?’ I asked.

He shrugged. ‘What anybody will pay for it — four thousand pounds, five thousand, I don’t know. But it’s something to bring the dealers down to Birmingham when we hold our big auction there in the autumn.’ He slipped the brilliant orange block back into its plastic mount, his eyes already fastened on the parcel I was carrying. ‘Is that the Holland collection you’ve got there?’ He sat down at his desk, clearing a space with a sweep of his hand. ‘Are you going to let us auction it for the lady, or is she prepared to sell direct? I’ll make you an offer for it if you like.’

‘Tubby has already made an offer,’ I said. ‘And I’ve given a man named Berners until July sixteenth to better it.’

‘Two dealers after it already, eh?’ He smiled and rubbed his hands together. ‘Tubby won’t get it, of course, poor fellow. I’ve already been on to my Zurich partner, and I’ve just heard that one of our clients over there is willing to go to thirty-five hundred pounds, probably more, provided the background is substantiated. In that case I might even go to four thousand myself.’

I stared at him. ‘But you were only willing to give five hundred and fifty for the Trinidad ship stamp.’

‘It’s not the “Lady McLeod”. Didn’t Tubby tell you what he had discovered?’

‘He said something very odd had come to light, but I was in a hurry and wasn’t prepared for one of his lectures. I thought it was some finer point of printing-’

‘Some finer point of printing?’ He laughed. ‘You could certainly call it that.’ He leaned back. ‘So you don’t know. And if I’d offered you four thousand pounds, you’d have taken it?’

‘There’s Berners,’ I said. ‘Also I’d have had to get advice about exchange regulations.’ And I told him about Perenna Holland’s movements. ‘As a UK resident, I think it might require Bank of England permission to send money out to her.’ That was before exchange controls were lifted.

‘No problem, if you’re willing to let us auction the collection.’

I hesitated. But it was what I had been hoping for. ‘Provided you can let her have some sort of guarantee in advance.’ And I explained her position and also that I was booked out for Sydney on Sunday evening.

‘Sydney, Australia?’ He looked at me with sudden interest. ‘That could be very helpful. But before I promise anything, let’s have another look at those die proofs. It’s the die proofs that make the collection unique.’

‘Because they’re ship stamps?’

‘No, because they could explain something that has always puzzled students of the Perkins Bacon printing house. Come on, open it up and let me have another look at them.’ And he added as I undid the wrapping, ‘The catalogue description would have to be very circumspect, but we could certainly say enough to bring every major GB and Commonwealth dealer running to have a look at it.’ He opened the albums, searching out the two pages with the proofs, placing them side by side on the desk in front of him. ‘Forgeries, fakes, re-entries, inverted watermarks, doubled surcharges, there are examples of every vagary of stamp printing. But stolen dies that were later used to prepare the transfer roller for a plate of ship labels — that’s something quite new. Hard to believe in connection with a firm like Perkins Bacon.’ He put the glass to his eye, peering closely at the seal in its frame. ‘Solomons Seal. That’s right, isn’t it? That’s how Berners described it to you.’

‘Yes.’

He nodded, still examining the proof. ‘Tubby rang me about it, said he thought the label on the cover auctioned a couple of years ago must have had the word “Solomons” on it — Solomons Shipping Company, something like that.’ And he added, ‘I checked with a friend of mine at Robson Lowe. He couldn’t remember what was on the label, so I asked him who had put the cover up for auction. He rang me later to say that it had been sent to them by a dealer in Sydney.’ He reached to a box file on the window ledge behind him, searched out a card and copied an address on to a slip of paper. ‘Cyrus Pegley, that’s the dealer’s name.’ He handed me the slip. ‘Since you’re going there, do me a favour, will you? Go and see him when you’re in Sydney, find out all you can about that cover, where he got it from, what was printed on the label — anything at all that will help establish the provenance of these die proofs.’

The address he had given me was Victoria Street, King’s Cross, presumably a suburb of Sydney. ‘I won’t have much time,’ I murmured.

‘Then make time. It’s important if you want these die proofs to fetch the sort of figure I think they could.’ He was leaning forward again, peering intently at the pages, the jeweller’s glass back in his eye. ‘Solomons Shipping Company,’ he murmured, and shook his head. ‘I don’t believe that would fit. Berners didn’t tell you who his client was, I suppose? No, of course not.’ He sighed. ‘A pity. We need to know a lot more. It’s so incredible, so incongruous.’

‘What is?’

‘The seal. Particularly the seal on its icefloe. Do you have the Perkins Bacon Records?’ he asked without looking up. ‘The first volume dealing with the Colonial issues. You’ll find it in that, towards the end. A very odd admission for a firm of security printers that was known chiefly for the printing of banknotes.’ And when I told him I hadn’t got the books, he said, ‘You should have. Those two volumes are the meticulous record of every letter, every transaction connected with the design, printing and delivery by Perkins Bacon of stamps for the colonies, and for several foreign countries, too. It took Percy de Worms years to compile it, and he died before he had completed the work. Every collector of early line-engraved issues should have them.’

‘Well, I haven’t,’ I said. ‘So perhaps you’ll tell me what it’s all about.’

He hesitated, then shook his head. ‘Better ask Tubby. He spotted it first, not me.’ He took the glass out of his eye, closed the albums and leaned back in his chair. ‘He’ll enjoy telling you, so I won’t spoil it for him. And now, having had another look at the proofs, I have a suggestion to make, bearing in mind your client’s needs and the fact that you’ll be out of the country for a time.’

What he proposed was to have the collection entered on the books of his partner in Zurich, who would then advance Miss Holland the equivalent of £2,000 in Swiss francs. This would be paid into an external account at her Southampton bank, thus enabling her to draw on it for payments in any currency. The only stipulation he made was that I sign an undertaking on her behalf that the collection would be put up for sale at his Birmingham auction house. ‘We’ll put it up in the autumn, when I hope to have a really big sale, and I won’t charge her any interest on the monies advanced. Okay?’

It was as good an arrangement as I could have hoped for, and with my departure for Australia so imminent I was relieved to have the whole thing settled. It was only when I was out in the Strand again that I remembered what Tubby had said about the Seal-on-Icefloe stamp having been printed by an American banknote company. It couldn’t have been anything to do with Perkins Bacon. But that was Keegan’s problem now. As far as I was concerned, the collection was out of my hands. Perenna Holland had £2,000 spending money in the form of a guaranteed minimum, and the prospect of at least double that if he was right about the interest the collection would arouse.

As soon as I got home, I wrote to her care of the bank. Then I rang Tubby. There was no reply. I rang him again later that night, when I had broken the back of the things that had to be done before I left. There was still no reply. My curiosity unsatisfied, I got out my own collection. It always gave me a feeling of satisfaction to look through the colourful print mosaics of my careful lay-outs and to realise that most of the stamps had been acquired long before inflation had got into its stride. But not this time, for I was very conscious that there was nothing in my collection that was in any way out of the ordinary, nothing that would get Josh Keegan talking the way he had about the Solomons Seal.

In the end I locked the albums away and went to bed. It was after one. An owl was hooting from the big cedar across the moat, and though it was already Saturday, and tomorrow I would be on my way to Australia, the forlorn sound of it seemed to reflect my mood.

A new country, the possibility of a fresh start — I should have been feeling eager, full of anticipation. Instead, the feeling I had was one of despondency, almost foreboding. And that night I had a very strange dream. I was back in that empty house, and everywhere there were masks and strange obscene figures staring at me, and a voice was calling. I don’t know whose voice it was or what it was trying to say; it just boomed meaninglessly around the empty rooms, and I woke with the feeling that somebody, something had been trying to get through to me.

I don’t often dream, and when I do, my dreams are usually fairly innocuous. But this wasn’t, and I automatically reached out to the next bed for comfort. But it was empty, as it had been for far too long now, and I lay there in the dark, trying to remember some detail that would provide a rational explanation.

In the end I switched on the light, got myself a Scotch and took it back to bed, thinking about that girl, and about Australia. What would she do when she got my letter? The memory of her was very vivid in my mind, and I lay there sipping my drink, telling myself it was nothing to do with me and no chance our paths would cross again. It was finished, but the knowledge that she was gone out of my life for good didn’t stop me indulging in fantasy. And all the time I was remembering that booming, unintelligible voice.

Dawn was breaking before I dozed off, and when I finally woke, it was past nine. I rang Tubby, but again I got no answer. I didn’t bother about breakfast, but drove straight down to the Crouch. His boat was gone. I went on board my own then, got the anchor up and beat down the river against the tide, tacking through the first yacht race of the day until I was out in the fairway and thumping around in a growing nor’easter off Foulness. It did me a world of good, the voice of my dream and that dreadful little house blown away by the stiff onshore breeze funnelling up the estuary.

Back at my moorings I cooked myself a meal, and afterwards I sat in the cockpit with a drink in my hand, wondering whether I would ever see my boat again. The wind had died with the setting sun, the Burnham waterfront gleaming white in the fading light, everything very still except for the ripple of the tide against the bows and the waterborne sound of voices from the last yachts drifting up on the tide. No sign of Tubby, so clearly he was away for the weekend. The pale glow of the town, the estuary, the tide … I had lived in East Anglia ever since finishing my National Service, and the thought of leaving it for good filled me with nostalgia. Would I always have to be shifting from job to job? Was that the pattern of my life, some flaw in my character, a lack of stability? Two months past forty, and here I was planning to start all over again.

I finished the bottle, slept the night on board and in the morning drove home, closed up the house and took an afternoon train to London. The following morning I was breakfasting at over 30,000 feet and looking down on the bare arid hills of Muscat and Oman.