The Conscience of the King

Five o'clock every morning in order to extend his working day. It was an easy story to circulate and, thought Gresham, easy to maintain once it was established, without actually having to get out of bed.

They set out at noon. It was only a relatively short walk from The House, with its favoured position on The Strand, to Chancery Lane. Gresham and Mannion could have taken a boat, ridden or taken the vast coach that Gresham's father had had built when those cumbersome contrivances had been fashionable. Today Gresham felt the need to walk, to get back in touch with London's ebb and flow, feel its pulse.

It had been dry for weeks and within seconds a thin layer of dust covered Gresham's boots. The clouds hanging loose in the sky threatened rain, had done so for days. At least they were spared the sucking, clinging mud, but not the steaming piles of horse shit littering the road or the stained yellow and brown earth where night soil had been thrown carelessly into the street. The smell of grass still blew in from the green fields visible past the houses on the northern side of The Strand, to mingle with the stench of the river and the open sewer that occasionally the street was allowed to become. Then there was the endless, richest smell of all: the smell of humanity. The perfumes and scents worn by the wealthy men and occasional lady; the nosegays of sweet orange or apple designed to ward off evil vapours; the sudden, intrusive, raw stench of sweat from the carters or porters carrying huge loads on their bending backs; the stale, warm, sickly sweet smell of the men and women who could neither afford clean linen nor to have what linen they owned washed every day.

The nearer they came to the old City walls, the closer together the houses grew, the more cramped and crammed the streets. The steep-pitched roofs almost touched their opposite neighbours. When it rained an avalanche of water poured from the roofs on to a few yards of street below, digging a trench with sheer force of water. You could sink deeper than your knees into the mud of a London street, and leave your boots in the sucking mire when your friends dragged you out. The noise was incessant. The cries of the street traders were everywhere, raucous, yelling, insistent.

Coke may or may not have stinted on his sleep but he certainly did not stint on the furnishings he allowed himself. Mannion had been left in an ante room with a sniffing and disapproving clerk. Coke's study was vast, with crimson taffeta curtains and a turkey foot carpet laid over polished boards. The wall hangings on three walk were particularly fine. Coke must have had them commissioned. One showed Solomon giving judgement, another Moses damning the Jews for their worship of a golden idol, with a smoking mountain in the background. Very judicious. At a guess, Sir Edward Coke wanted to be Solomon and thought he might be Moses. It was only a short step for him to believe that he was God.

'Good morning, Sir Henry.' Coke spoke as if to a rather poor and badly behaved Ward of Court. He gave Gresham the merest glance and continued to inscribe a careful signature on the document in front of him. 'I am, as you see, most busy, most busy indeed…' The table at which Coke sat was littered with papers and bound volumes. He had not risen as Gresham entered, an act of extraordinary rudeness. Gresham adopted a solicitous expression and sat "down on one of the ornately backed and armed chairs on the other side of the table, without being asked. From the slight stiffening of Coke's body Gresham knew he sensed the return discourtesy. Touchi. One all. Gresham's eye was caught by not one but two fine portraits of Sir Edward, posing magisterially, adorning the wall over the vast fireplace, and a third showing him with what Gresham assumed was his first wife and vast brood of children.

'It's a pleasure to come and meet you, Sir Edward,' said Gresham in his most understanding and sympathetic voice. 'Unlike your busy self, I've nothing at all to do with my time.' Coke did not look up. He was too much in control for that. But he had, Gresham noticed, managed to ruin one of the letters by the jerk his hand had given in response to Gresham's remark. He had done it just as he was forming the 'o' in his name, so that one missive was now apparently signed 'Ed. Cqke'. Gresham carried on. 'It's also always a pleasure to meet someone so exalted who is yet so… humble, so… well-mannered and lacking in vanity.'

Coke put down his quill, measured, making sure Gresham knew he was not hurrying. This was not a man to be underestimated, Gresham reminded himself. Coke had survived and flourished too long in the bitter, adversarial world of the law for that.

'You should know, Sir Henry, that the Earl of Salisbury is dead. He died yesterday at Marlborough.' Coke spoke solemnly, playing the part.

Cecil dead?

'Oh, good,' said Gresham, that same infuriating bland smile on his face. 'I'm so glad.'

That did get through to Coke. He had too much self control to rise from his chair but his colour roared up the scale towards red and Gresham saw his scrawny Adam's apple bobbing up and down several times as he swallowed. The skin was leathery, wrinkled, that of an old man.

'You are… gladV asked Coke, voice barely under control, rasping as if from a dry throat.

'Delighted,' said Gresham.

This man was an amateur! thought Gresham. He almost found himself missing Cecil. At least Cecil would never have let his true emotions show under such simple goading.

'How typical, Sir Henry, that you should go for a theatrical effect rather than deal with a serious matter with any degree of substance.' Coke put a special measure of loathing into the word 'theatrical'. Was he a Puritan? Gresham wondered. Or just someone who hated the thought of people letting their hair down and enjoying themselves.

Coke paused, and sipped from a king's ransom of a glass goblet. 'Quite frankly, Sir Henry, I was never able to see why the Earl wished you to become involved in this business.'

Coke's overwhelming sense of his own value and significance would never let him see why he could not be trusted with all and everything. Sharing a job was to Sir Edward Coke as much of an anathema as sharing a prosecution.

'No, Sir Edward, you would not be able to see why the Earl wished me to become involved in this business. I suspect my late Lord of the Flies recognised your weakness, which is that you think you know so much. Such people are a risk to themselves. They need to be placed with those who are willing to admit their ignorance.'

'You claim to know too little?' asked Coke, flat-voiced, his lawyer's brain leaping like a ferret at a rabbit's throat. He was almost visibly working to categorise and pin-point the nature of his opponent.

'I claim to have been told too little by my lord Cecil, and to recognise all the dangers to myself that lie therein. But then again, I'm more than used to working to Cecil's half-orders. You, I think, are a novice.'

'You are so little concerned for your own life that you would risk it, by your own admission, for you know not what?' asked Coke, his fish-eyes giving nothing away this time.

'Good, Sir Edward, very good,' replied Gresham. 'Our language is starting to reverse. Your questions are becoming shorter and shorter, my answers longer and longer. If this carries on I shall start to reveal more and more about who I am to your lawyer's brain. Is this always how you trap witnesses?'

'I do not trap witnesses.' There was acid in Coke's voice. Gresham said nothing. The silence between the two men lengthened. It was Coke who broke first. 'I care more for the law, and for justice, than you can ever imagine,' he said.

'How can you know what I imagine?' asked Gresham.

'Do not play with words with me!'

'Isn't that what lawyers do?'

'How can such as you presume to be a man of law?'

'I don't presume. I have too much self respect,' Gresham replied self-deprecatingly.

Cut. Thrust. Parry. Cut. Thrust. Parry. Gresham was starting to enjoy himself. Coke was energised now, the power almost visibly flowing through his ageing body. He spoke with scorn, hurling his words at Gresham.

'Self respect for yourself! Self! It is all you know, all you can speak of. The law speaks of respect for all people and their rights. Your self respect is little more than glorified selfishness!'

'True,' said Gresham. The best way of disarming an opponent was always to recognise when he spoke the truth. 'Yet my adoption of selfish survival as my creed is a response to those such as you who plead the law and justice as your creed, using it as a cloak for your greed and vanity.'

'A feeble defence!' grated Coke.

'Honesty is no defence against corruption, and never has been. Honesty merely makes men weak.'

'The honesty of the law*is its strength!' said Coke, as if stating a truth that could not be denied.

'It would be, if it were honest.'

'A feeble plea!' said Coke, voice full of scorn.

'True again,' said Gresham. 'As feeble and as frail as the humans you tear to pieces in your courts. Yet the difference is that you claim to be honest to all people while seeking power and wealth through your sycophancy. I know only how to be true to myself.'

That seemed to halt Coke in his assault. Had there once been a decent man buried among that arrogance, and had Gresham somehow reminded him of the betrayal of his soul?

'So what is it that you live for, Sir Henry?' asked Coke, part scornful, part in fear.

'For my honour, Sir Edward.' Gresham said it simply, with a dignity that undercut the crowing of Coke's legal brain. 'So that when death comes to me, I will be able to say that for all the stupidity of this life, at least while I lived I made things happen. To say that 1 survived. To say that I kept my honour, my self respect and my pride.'

Coke was trying to answer, Gresham could see. Half-formed words seemed to launch up into his throat and work the muscles there, but somehow died before they reached his mouth. Finally his words emerged.

'So you will die happy, Sir Henry?' Coke tried to put a world of sarcasm into his words but somehow the sting was lost.

'No man dies happy. I hope to die at peace with my honour, Sir Edward. You? You pretend to serve the law yet serve yourself. I hope you die with honour. I suspect you will die merely with possessions.'

There was a long pause.

'It doesn't matter, really, does it?' said Gresham, his voice almost kind. 'You see, we only need to work with each other.'

'Can you work with me on this matter?' Coke's voice had regained its composure. The previous conversation had been inconvenient. It had provoked thoughts of the wrong kind, therefore it had been dismissed. Not forgotten, but placed somewhere in a file where it could be coldly remembered without impacting on present day reality. Good, thought Gresham, very good. Not as good as Robert Cecil, not yet, but getting there.

'I can work with Satan if I have to,' said Gresham. 'After all, I came near to doing so when I worked with Robert Cecil. As I was saying, shall we get down to business?'

The two men looked at each other. Again, Coke broke first. He glanced away, down to his long-forgotten papers.

'Then, as you said, we should get down to business. These letters that were stolen. Cecil had spies.' Coke raised an eyebrow in Gresham's direction. 'Spies other than yourself. They reported that a Cambridge bookseller had been involved in the theft. Rumour, you understand, only rumour, based on one single instance where a man who might have claimed to be a Cambridge bookseller might have tried to sell letters to one of Cecil's agents which might have been the ones "we are seeking to find. That was one reason why the Earl thought of you to help us out, with your knowledge of Cambridge.'

'Does this bookseller have a name?'

'It is here, somewhere…' Coke rummaged among his papers. 'Ah, yes! "Cornelius Wagner". How very elaborate…'

A sudden, vague chill took Gresham's heart. Cornelius Wagner. There was no bookseller called Cornelius Wagner in Cambridge. Gresham knew them all. Yet he also knew of a Cornelius, and of a Wagner. Where had he heard the name?

'I had hoped to meet you with Sir Thomas Overbury,' Coke said, 'but it appears he must have been delayed…'

There was a ruckus outside the door then, shouting and a heavy thud. The door impacted inwards with a sharp crack and the servant whose head had appeared round the door earlier was flung into the room by what was clearly a hearty kick from the man standing in the doorway. The servant's head was bloodied from a cut that ran across his forehead. He was crying with a mixture of shame and anger, his hand wiping away tears and blood until they mingled and ran down his wrist to stain his shirt with a pink wetness.

'Sir!' The servant tried to speak. 'I am so sorry, I…' Coke raised a hand to silence him. The boy rose clumsily to his feet, a tear ripping half the leg of his hose. He bowed his head.

'You may go now,' said Coke, gazing at the figure in the doorway.

'Insolent pig!' said Sir Thomas Overbury as the servant scuttled past him, hand raised to ward off further blows.

As a consequence of his close relationship with James I, the vast majority of the King's correspondence was passed on to Robert Carr, unopened, for him to deal with. Carr, whose brain was small as if to compensate for his magnificent body, passed it on unopened to his oldest friend, Sir Thomas Overbury, who then dictated the answers. Overbury had brains enough for both of them. A tall, handsome figure capable of biting wit, his power as the eminence noir behind the King's favourite had added to his natural vanity and arrogance, until he was frequently described as insufferable by even the mildest men at Court. The King tolerated him because he was in love with Carr, but in truth, he both distrusted and disliked Overbury. Queen Anna, otherwise a feather-brained and overblown lapsed beauty, hated Overbury with unequalled venom. In a rare display of power, Queen Anna had forced Overbury to flee to Paris the year before. He had been allowed to return simply because without him Robert Carr had floundered under the duties imposed on him by the King. It was a very tender and fragile truce.

Overbury advanced into the room. He ignored Gresham completely. 'Your servant is insolent, Sir Edward,' said Overbury, peeling off his fine-fitting gloves and flinging them carelessly upon the table. 'He presumed to question the time of my arrival. I've been deep in matters of state. I disciplined him, as you saw. It were better, of course, to come from his master.'

Well, well, well, thought Gresham. This one is very special. He looked with amusement to Sir Edward Coke.

It must have been Overbury who supplied details of the theft of the compromising letters to Coke. Why else was he here? The loss of these letters must be truly embarrassing. For all that he had made a show of his entry, and been deliberately late to make a point, the fact remained that Overbury was here, and at Coke's bidding. Rescuing the letters would therefore give Coke huge credit in Overbury's eyes and, in all probability, the eyes of Robert Carr and King James himself. It would also give Coke a huge moral advantage in his dealings with the King should he choose to act as saviour, and, the cynic in Gresham noted, an equally huge opportunity for blackmail.

Were the letters in King James's own hand? wondered Gresham. If they were, and Coke recovered them, he held the whip-hand over James. If they were in Carr's hand they could be more easily dismissed as forgeries. Either way, Carr could lose huge favour with the King if he was responsible for the permanent loss of such damaging letters. If Carr's reputation was at stake, then Overbury would be involved.

Yet how on earth was Sir Edward Coke, a man of no small vanity himself, going to rein in his tongue in the face of this wholly offensive, reeking apology of a man? This is going to be more fun that it first seemed, thought Gresham.

Overbury sat down without invitation and knocked a few papers aside to show his superiority. His gaze wandering round the room, he finally allowed it to fall on Gresham.

'Gresham,' he said flatly, with a raised lip, an expression of total scorn and without so much as the merest nod of his head. It was extraordinarily ill-mannered. Duels had been fought and lives lost on the basis of lesser insults. Good manners were not simply outward courtesy. They were the measure of the respect in which a man was held.

Overbury swivelled his eyes round the room once more, then brought them back to rest on Gresham. Just at that moment Gresham's pupils seemed to enlarge. It was as if Gresham's gaze had decided Overbury was of no importance and looked through him in search of something of significance. Along with the eyes that did not seem to see him, Overbury was aware of the queer, sardonic half-smile on Gresham's face. It was as if he was being mocked and ignored at the same time.

'Gresham!' Overbury's venom reinforced the insult. 'Why do we need a… spy to help us in this matter?' Overbury spoke to Coke. His tone was scornful, dismissive.

Gresham did the one thing Overbury found it hardest to cope with. He ignored him completely. His eyes turned from the window at which he had been gazing, through Overbury without registering his presence and on to Coke's own eyes.

'As I was saying, shall we get down to business?' Gresham asked of Coke, outwardly thoroughly relaxed.

Overbury's mouth dropped. 'Cease your petty games, Gresham!' he announced, 'or I'll have to break your pate as I broke the servant's!'

Do I let it take its course now, or do I back down? This man would never bend, thought Gresham. So let it take its course.

Gresham waited politely for Overbury to finish, then carried on as if Overbury's words had never been spoken. So strong was the impression given by Gresham that there was only he and Coke in the room that Overbury almost had to shake himself to confirm he was actually there.

'Cecil was of the opinion that these incriminating and embarrassing letters must have been stolen from Carr or Overbury. If we're to do business, we really do need to stop playing games. I'm assuming that the letters were stolen from Overbury.' Gresham's tone made for no recognition whatsoever that Overbury was in the room with them. 'Overbury's clever enough to know how potentially explosive and destructive such letters would be. He's treacherous enough to keep them for future use against either his friend Carr or the King. He's arrogant enough and fool enough to lose them, and hated enough for any of his servants to risk stealing them if they thought that by doing so they could harm their master.'

There was a moment's silence while the enormity of what Gresham had said sank into Overbury's mind. He exploded. He leaped to his feet with a roar.

'You cur! You dog! You whore's whelp!' His sword was half out of its scabbard and he was rushing to fall upon Gresham…

… and suddenly he was flying through the air, landing to the sound of a sickening crunch followed by the sharpest stab of pain and then blissful unconsciousness.

The pain was the first thing he remembered as he came to, the sharp, red-hot pain and the bubbling noise as air tried to pass to and fro between the blood from his nose and mouth. Dimly he heard a voice. It was Gresham.

'… so all in all there's little likely to result from our investigating the point at which the letters were taken. Whoever did it will cover their tracks. Equally, whoever took them will want to make either political or financial advantage out of them. They'll have to make themselves known. This Cambridge bookseller might do just that. Cecil's spies will have prided themselves on the fact they found this man out as having some involvement. It's more likely he made sure they knew what was going on. It has to be this bookseller. Here's where we'll have our chance to retrieve the letters. The real question is whether we do it on his terms, or invent terms of our own.'

Sir Edward Coke was frozen to his chair, eyes passing rapidly between Gresham speaking fluently and clearly to him and the tumbled heap of Overbury lying on the floor. It was not so much the fact that Sir Thomas Overbury had been knocked out and bloodied while launching an assault on Gresham. It was the sheer clinical speed with which it had been accomplished that had silenced Sir Edward, and provoked real fear in him for the first time he could remember in many years. He had almost forgotten the taste of fear. Things had happened in a blur of movement. Overbury, goaded, had embarked on a mad rush towards Gresham. Gresham had hardly seemed to move, merely sway to one side. The momentum of Overbury's forward rush was such that it carried him onto Gresham's outstretched foot, tumbling him over and forward across the floor to crash into the far wall, head and nose first. In a blur of movement, Gresham had resumed his seat almost before Overbury had ceased moving — surely it could not have been so? — and carried on talking to Coke as though nothing had happened. The servants had rushed through the door. Gresham had ignored them. Even the one with the broken head who might just have been smiling as he saw the mess that was Overbury on the floor. Coke had motioned them away.

They both became aware that Overbury was stirring back into a painful consciousness in the corner.

'You must interview Overbury's and Carr's servants to find out as much as you can about how the letters went missing. I will interview Master Shakespeare. It's almost certainly a waste of time. Yet it has to be done.'

Coke spoke sharply. 'The manuscripts are secondary. Plays are not our concern. Letters are.' Coke was showing that phenomenal capacity to take unpleasant facts and sideline them, lock them away so that they did not interfere with his management of the moment's business. Yet was the tone just a little too urgent in dismissing these plays? Gresham immediately racked them up to a higher priority.

Sir Edward Coke glared balefully at Gresham. He had thought Gresham an irritant and an inconvenience when Cecil had insisted on informing him of the missing letters and manuscript, but necessary if the one thing that Cecil and Coke needed to happen was to take place. He had agreed to Gresham's involvement because he had believed that Gresham was being used as livebait. Now the bait had revealed himself to be an extraordinarily dangerous figure. A dreadful fear crossed Coke's heart. Was he using Gresham? Or was Gresham using him?

'Do 1 have your attention, Sir Edward?' Gresham's tone was solicitous. Coke had done something he had spent a lifetime training himself not to do, drifted away from a conversation. Cursing inwardly, he dragged himself back. 'We must understand one thing, Sir Edward.'

'And what exactly is that "one thing"?' asked Coke, his voice almost a hiss. i don't for a minute believe that I've been told the whole truth. But as Robert Cecil might have found time to tell you before he died, I usually do find the truth eventually.'

'What do you believe?' snapped Coke. i believe I've been told some of the truth. I believe in these letters, and I believe both they and some play scripts have been stolen. I believe both items have the capacity to get someone important into deep trouble. I believe there is a hidden agenda which means you need me to flush out the thief because you can't or daren't do it yourself.'

This was so close to the truth that even Coke could not stop a tiny tremor from crossing his face.

'Quite,' said Gresham, noting the tremor. 'I repeat: I do usually find the truth. You and Cecil believed I was an arrow that you could shoot in the direction you wanted. Your arrow has become a hawk, a lethal weapon with a mind of its own.'

Coke had always hated hawks. The total, unflinching, single-mindedness of their eyes, their utter focus on the prey, their inability to be distracted or diverted both undermined and angered him in a way he did not understand and could not therefore control.

Overbury groaned, rubbed his face and threw up as he felt and saw the blood on his hand. He tried to get to his feet, but fell on all fours.

'But don't worry too much,' Gresham said to Coke, almost sym-pathetically. 'Hawks get killed too. Who knows? Perhaps this is when my luck will run out.'

Coke tried not to show on his face just how very much he hoped that Gresham's luck would truly run out.

'By the way, Sir Edward,' Gresham said as he rose to leave, 'there's a foul stench in this room.' By the merest movement of his head he seemed to gesture towards Overbury. 'A stench of some-thing rotten. Perhaps one of your hounds is so old or ill that it can't stop itself from breaking wind.'

There were no hounds in the room. Coke viewed them as un-hygienic and anarchic.

'Such animals are dangerous. For all that they're useful, they can infect their masters with their own corruption.' Gresham flicked a speck of dust off the arm of his glorious velvet and silk doublet. 'If for pity's sake you can't have them put down, then you're well advised to keep them at a distance.'

Two sets of eyes directed glares of undiluted hatred at Sir Henry Gresham as he left the room.

Overbury dragged himself to the table. 'I…' he began to bluster.

'Will you be silent for once?' hissed Coke. And, for once, Sir Thomas Overbury remained silent. 'Gresham is dangerous. Above all, he's dangerous. You saw how dangerous. God knows why you seek to taunt and antagonise everyone you meet.'

Overbury flushed, and lowered his bloodied head. 'Why do we need Gresham?' he mumbled through bloodied lips. 'If he is so… dangerous, why welcome this viper to our bosom?'

Do you ever listen, Sir Thomas Overbury? thought Coke. Have you ever listened in your life?

'We need Gresham,' Coke explained patiently, as if to a child, 'because the Cambridge bookseller is Christopher Marlowe. Kit Marlowe. Diseased, syphilitic. Returned from the grave with homicidal mania for all those who wanted him dead, and for all those who conspired in his exile.'

Sir Thomas Overbury vomited over the table, the thin yellow spume staining a multitude of papers on Coke's desk. It seemed to make him feel better. He sat up, ready to speak through his battered lips. Coke decided to get in before he did so. The acid, sweet smell of the vomit filled his nostrils.

'Marlowe simply wants to destroy: the King, the monarchy, you, me. He came back into the country with enough information from his past to do very, very serious damage. He stole those damned letters — from you, Sir Thomas! — so now he has even more powder in his gun. And he has the manuscripts. He wants to see his damned play-'

The Fall of Lucifer? croaked Sir Thomas. For some reason he had remembered that.

'Yes,' said Sir Edward, looking at his own fallen and bloodied Lucifer, 'The Fall of Lucifer. He wants to see his damned play performed, and is convinced it will provoke a revolution.'

'Nonsense!' said Sir Thomas, learning how to speak again and fingering his lips. 'Plays don't provoke rebellion!'

'No?' said Coke, stung to a response. 'And when my good, and very dead, Lord Essex mounted his. rebellion, didn't he inspire it by commanding a performance of Richard II by that upstart crow Shakespeare? The rebellion failed. The provocation worked very well.'

'Oh God!' said Overbury, 'I'm sick at heart.' He sank down in his seat.

'I think, Sir Thomas,' said Coke, 'that you're sick everywhere. "We need Gresham because we can't find Marlowe. Cecil believed that if we set Gresham on to Marlowe, Marlowe will rush at him like an old man at a whore.'

Overbury raised his head again. 'And kill him?' His tone was almost lascivious.

'Possibly,' said Coke. Good God! he thought. Overbury was now tracing patterns on the wood of the table with the yellow fluid of his own vomit. 'But more likely draw him out and be killed himself. Safely killed, with no direct government involve-ment.'

'So we hope that Marlowe goes at Gresham like an old man at a second, young wife?'

Coke had recently married again, to a young girl who was leading him a merry dance. Suddenly Coke knew why so many people wanted to kill Sir Thomas Overbury. I will ignore this, he thought. That foul fiend Gresham has shown me the way. Ignore him.

Overbury's finger paused in the middle of an intricate pattern. Most of the patterns had arrow-point heads, Coke noted. Overbury lifted his head once more. The effect was spoiled by the blood that smeared his whole face and had dried into his beard. Yet it was not spoiled for Overbury. For he had hot just been bloodied and beaten by an opponent. It had never happened. It had been wiped out of his mind. Perhaps he even had the power to force his mind to cut off the signals of pain. All the old arrogance returned, his beating dismissed. It was a pity Gresham was not there. He would have noted the short-term effect of hitting someone and pointed it out to Mannion. Mannion. believed in things that could be eaten, drunk and slept with. In addition, he believed anything that did not work properly, particularly human beings, responded to a careful, cautious and judicious thumping.

'Who can guarantee that any man will kill another? Gresham? Scum. A spy. A double-dealer.'

'How easily could he have killed you, Sir Thomas?' said Coke in words of ice.

For another moment at least, Sir Thomas Overbury was silent. God help them all, thought Coke. They had released an uncontrollable force of nature on to the hunt for Kit Marlowe. They had placed all their money on one bet, that these two very different forces of nature would neutralise each other. Gresham would find Marlowe and kill him. Then a source would be closed off, permanently. Or Marlowe would find Gresham and kill him. Then the only person who could find the truth would be dead, and the only dangerous person who knew the truth would have revealed himself, and so made it easier for him to be murdered.

It had to be the right policy. Yet why did Gresham's presence in it fill him with such dread?