The King's Commisar

CHAPTER THREE

-------------*?•:-------------The House of Four Forks

In the maroon-carpeted corridor Malory stopped outside the door of Pilgrim's office, knocked faintly and entered. Pilgrim, talking on the telephone, glanced up and nodded. Malory helped himself to coffee from the ever-hot gadget on the side table, and stared out of the window. In a moment he heard the phone replaced and Pilgrim's 'Yes, Horace?'

He turned, Dikeston's narrative in his hand. 'We disagree, I think, about the importance of this.'

Pilgrim shook his head. 'Nope. It could be important, I see it.' He laughed ruefully. 'Fifty thousand a year and no questions isn't the kind of thing you dismiss. I just have a block.'

'A what?'

'A block, Horace. This guy, Dikeston, he's a joker. He gives us part one, then sets us chasing part two. There's a whole trail laid and he's going to have us running our butts off. And then at the end - nothing. I can smell it.'

'And the promised catastrophe?'

Pilgrim leaned back in his chair. 'I can't make myself believe in it. Tell you why. Let's say this guy Dikeston has a big grudge against us, let's say that we foreclosed on his widowed mother's mortgage way back when, okay? She was turned out in the snow. He hates us. He's spent years muttering into his whiskers and plotting vengeance. Now listen - in 1918 he's already lieutenant-commander so he's rising thirty then. What is he now, ninety? No, he's dead. Everybody's dead. Dikeston's dead, Lenin's dead, Zaharoff's dead. Are you saying Dikeston spent half a century plotting a disaster he wouldn't live to see?' Malory said, 'Zaharoff seems to have agreed a payment in perpetuity. Of fifty thousand a year. Have you any idea how much that was in about nineteen-twenty?'

'Sure. It was a crazy sum. So maybe Dikeston had something on Zaharoff. What else could this thing be but blackmail, anyway? Horace, think - Zaharoff died in nineteen-thirty-six.'•

'You're saying, are you not,' Malory said, 'that Dikeston's grudge must have been against Sir Basil himself?'

'Well, why not, Horace! It couldn't be much more personal, could it? Annual payments on Zaharoff's say-so, Senior Partner's Notes, don't even query it or catastrophe follows. There was a two-man game here. Zaharoff lost and we keep on paying. But I reckon we're now paying Dikeston's ghost, we have to be. And a few pages of manuscript with dust on them don't convince me otherwise. God, Horace, it's too melodramatic to begin to be true!'

Malory looked at him steadily. 'There's one thing that isn't dead.'

'Okay, what?'

'Hillyard, Cleef.'

'You think he can wreck the bank? Now - from the graveyard?'

Malory shrugged. 'I don't know. Sir Basil seems to have feared something cataclysmic and he was not given to unnecessary panic, I do assure you. I feel we must find out-and quickly.'

'I tell you one thing, Horace - it's going to be costly. We won't find much, but we'll pay a hell of a lot.'

'Perhaps less costly than failing to find out?'

Pilgrim fingered his chin. He shaved twice daily and Malory's eyes caught the faint rasp of the stubble.

'Horace, we're in a strange position, you and I. You were boss man. I'm boss man now. We have an understanding of sorts. You don't like some of what I do and maybe I don't like some of your ways over here. We can both live with it. There are even advantages. But my whole instinct is to forget this thing and to cancel the next payment. Yours is not.'

'Most certainly it is not."

'Based on what you know of Zaharoff?'

'Principally, yes.'

Pilgrim's fingers still rasped against his beard. 'That's what throws me, Horace. Somebody told me once you're a downy old bird - and you are! You're exactly that. Unsentimental, experienced, knowledgeable. Yet you're still hypnotized by that old man. Why?'

Malory smiled. 'Because I knew him. Because I watched him work. Because he never in his life wasted a ha'penny. Because I know that an arrangement such as this one to pay an annual fifty thousand would never have been made except under the most extreme pressure and would have ended the moment an ending became possible. Yet it had already been paid for sixteen years when Sir Basil died. I promise you this, Laurence: there would not have been a day during those years when he did not give intense thought to the means of ending the payments. Since he didn't end them, it can only be because he couldn't.'

'So you're saying we have no alternative but to follow Dikeston's trail?'

'Pretty well that."

'No matter where it leads or what it costs?'

Malory nodded. 'On my say-so, perhaps? Old Malory must be crackers, you can say, but he's insisting.'

He watched Pilgrim with some anxiety. Understanding of Pilgrim's reasoning had come to him, quite suddenly, as often happened while they talked. Pilgrim was Hungarian by birth, a child refugee in 1956, had been a brilliant student in America, had had a brilliant career very young on Wall Street in investment banking, and was head now of an important international house. But terrified of looking a fool. That was the clue of it.

'If it goes wrong, Laurence, you can blame me entirely,' Malory went on. 'And I'll keep you informed all along the line. That way, well, I stay right out of your way, don't I? And I'm not exactly known for throwing money about, would you say?'

Pilgrim frowned. 'Give me one more reason. If I'm not convinced I don't sleep nights.'

'All right. How do you know that Hillyard, Cleef was Zaharoff's bank?'

'How? You told me, I guess.'

Malory said, 'And Graves knows too, now. But there aren't six people in the City with that knowledge, now or any other time. Sir Basil moved very quietly.'

'So?'

'How did this man Dikeston know?'

'So many years,' Pilgrim said. 'I feel as though it's archaeology I'm paying for.'

'Let's hope,' Malory offered, 'That we can keep the mummy's curse safely in its tomb.'

'Go ahead. Feel free. Use Graves, any time you want him.'

'I'll remember. Thank you, Laurence.'

Malory pottered back, satisfied at getting his own way, but feeling the burden of concern heavier on his shoulders. In his own room, where many times in making a decision he had said, 'What would you have done?' to the lurking shade of Basil Zaharoff, he now addressed the ghost another question. 'Why the payments?' Malory said aloud. 'Why?'

The shade gave no answer. It never did.

But as always, other voices clamoured. Busy departments at Hillyard, Cleef, accustomed to instant attention from the Partners, found that Malory in particular seemed distracted. Even to see him was difficult.

A partner named Huntly, whose present task it was to advise one seed and fertilizer corporation in its struggle to take over another - a matter of seven or eight million pounds was involved - threw customary deference out of the window, stormed past Mrs Frobisher's defensive protests, and barged into Malory's sanctum with a cry of, 'It's absolutely vital, Sir Horace!'

Malory gave him a longish look, but otherwise offered no comment. 'Sit down, Fergus.'

Huntly sat. He was in his early forties, with aristocratic if impoverished Scottish connections and a reputation for dourness. But he burst out: 'The offer will have to be increased again!'

'Then increase it,' Malory said. Huntly gaped at him. 'By how much?' Malory was renowned for fighting his takeover battles halfpenny by halfpenny.

'By what's necessary, for heaven's sake!' Then Malory abruptly took another tack. 'Fergus, do you do crossword puzzles?'

'Now and then, yes.'

'Then tell me what you make of this.' Malory reached for a slip of paper and read: 'In a cavity in The House of Four Forks, a mile from the meridian.'

'How many letters?' Huntly asked automatically, just as Mrs Frobisher opened the door to admit Graves.

'It is a clue, Fergus, but not to a crossword puzzle. Any ideas?'

'No. Can I think about it?' Huntly rose at Malory's nod. 'And I am to increase the bid price as I think necessary?'

Malory nodded.

At the door Huntly turned. 'The meridian has to be Greenwich, of course, house must be there, or in Black-heath. I'd get Mrs Frobisher to ask the local house agents.'

Malory turned to Graves. 'Better if you do it. Find me The House of Four Forks.'

With both men gone, Malory sat back in his chair. He could now pursue other thoughts along other paths. Who, exactly, had this fellow Dikeston been? And that Russian name - Yakovlev was it? perhaps some trace of it existed somewhere. Who might know? The essence of banking, Horace Malory had always insisted to his juniors, lay in knowing how to find out that which you did not already know. He made two telephone calls: one to a retired admiral who held a couple of minor directorships under the Hillyard, Cleef umbrella; the second to the master of an Oxford College, who was a distant cousin of his wife's.

As Graves's taxi crawled along a crowded Old Kent Road, Fergus Huntly was instructing his own secretary to hawk the clue around the company finance department. Prize for the solution: a bottle of whisky.

The bottle was claimed within minutes by an infuriatingly smug young man named Nayland who grinned his way to Huntly's desk and said 'It's really just another advantage of Oxford, you know. We're talking derivations, of course. This one would be from the Latin quadrifurcus, which means four-forked, and became in Middle English car-fouk. If I may write it down for you?'

'Please do.'

'Carfouk-like that!' said Nayland. 'But the word had to undergo further metamorphosis into.. . .'He paused like a conjuror.

'Into?' said Huntly with reluctance.

'Carfax.'

'Carfax? That's the place in the centre of . . .'

Nayland grinned again and nodded. 'Centre of Oxford, you were about to say.'

With a sense of relief, Huntly telephoned Malory and then retuned his attention to his fertilizer companies. 'Tell Mr Graves, when he telephones,' Malory told Mrs Frobisher, 'that he's looking for a house called Carfax.'

Now for a while, all the enquiries began to inch forward. A history fellow from Oxford telephoned Malory on the instructions of the Master of his College, to offer to Hill-yard, Cleef his expert knowledge of the Russian Revolution - in which, as it later turned out, Yakovlev had played no part. The tame admiral, having consulted that fat rump of the old Admiralty bureaucracy surviving now within the Ministry of Defence, called to report that Admiralty Records pertaining to Lt-Cdr. Henry George Dikeston stopped abruptly with an entry in 1918 which read 'seconded to special duties.' Beyond that entry the file was blank.

In an hour Jacques Graves stood with one foot on either side of a narrow strip of steel embedded immovably in stone, thus straddling the Greenwich meridian. One foot, his left as it happened, stood in the Eastern hemisphere and the other, in the Western. The thought gave him obscure pleasure, which disappeared at once when a schoolboy took his place, yelling the same thought aloud. Graves coloured a little and thought Carfax. And one mile from here.

Up or down? Greenwich lay below him, with Wren's superb buildings grey-white in the noon light. Up the hill lay Blackheath.

For no good reason he walked down, and failed to find a convenient house agent. A policeman advised him to try Blackheath. 'Top of the hill, sir, then across the grass. That's where they are, sir. Where the money is.'

Prosperity there certainly seemed to be, Graves thought as he walked up the stiff hill of the park and out on to the Heath. This was spick-and-span suburbia: old houses expensively restored, well-dressed young women walking with children on the grass. Everything tarted-up. Boutiques with canopies, an old Bentley car, driven by a boy in his early twenties.

Finally: a house agent's premises.

A variety of experiences that afternoon convinced him that the English were ill-served by their house agents. One fat young man said disagreeably through a haze of beer fumes that if Graves were not interested in buying property he shouldn't be wasting time in the place. Outside the premises Graves stood still for a moment waiting for the red mist of fury to clear. When it did, he found he was looking at a poster. 'Protect your environment,' it read, 'by joining the Georgian Society.'

There was a telephone number. When he called, a steely female voice answered. The lady was, she said, Jessica Drummond, honorary secretary of the Society. Yes, he could call to see her that very afternoon - if he was quick about it.

She lived in a terrace just beyond the railway station. A fat cat dozed upon the-bonnet of a car in the driveway. When Graves pressed the bell, the door was opened on the instant by a lady in a blue-and-white check skirt, white blouse, and blue cardigan. She had grey hair, and grey rims to her bifocals. She would be, he thought, about sixty-five.

'Mrs Drummond?'

'MissDrummond. You telephoned about the Georgian Society?'

'I did.'

'Then come in. I haven't much time.' She marched him into an over-furnished sitting-room, pointed to a chair and said, 'You're resident, or new to the district, or what?'

He smiled. 'Well, neither of those.'

He took a visiting card from the pocket of his waistcoat and handed it to her. Miss Drummond pronounced his name aloud, with precision and in French. 'Oh, and you're a banker, Mr Graves? How may I help you?'

'It's an odd little matter,' Jacques Graves said, 'concerning a client of ours, very long-standing, but just a little, well - eccentric. It was a habit of his to set us little puzzles concerning his instructions.'

Miss Drummond looked disapproving. 'Rather foolish, surely. Was there not a danger of misunderstanding?'

Graves waved a hand deprecatingly. 'There was, but these things go on. However, unfortunately the client has died and left us an unsolved puzzle. Part of it may, we think, concern a house in this area.'

'Oh, really? How exciting!'

'Miss Drummond, do the words Four Forks mean anything to you?'

'Four forks, did you say?' He nodded. 'No, nothing. Four forks, how very odd!'

'What about Carfax?'

'Oh yes.'

'It does?'

'Oh certainly.'

'What does it mean?'

'Well, Carfax House, of course.'

Graves smiled at her. 'Here in Blackheath?'

'Not a quarter of a mile from this very spot!'

'That's convenient, Miss Drummond. Can you tell me anything about the place?'

'Oh, it's such a good thing you came to me. I mean, it hasn't been known by that name for years.' She was looking across at him, her face full of a rather girlish enthusiasm. Then suddenly her expression changed. Money, he knew it: T, er, suppose this is really quite important, is it, Mr Graves?'

'Hardly that, Miss Drummond. It's just to tidy things up.'

'Oh yes, but you're a frightfully well-known banking house, are you not - like Rothschild's?'

'Well, not exactly like -'

'And the Georgian Society is always chronically short of funds, d'you see. I mean, all the people who live in Blackheath, they love it, of course, but they're all mean and they won't give, and there's so much for the Society to do, and it's all so expensive nowadays. Even stamps, you know.' By now, she was looking at him implacably.

'Well, I'm sure a donation could be -'

'I was thinking,' said Miss Drummond, 'of five hundred guineas.'

'You were what?’

'Five hundred, I thought.' She gave an unlikely giggle.

‘Only the other day we had a bill for that very sum from afirm of solicitors, and they'd done almost nothing, I assure you. When I protested they said we must pay for their knowledge. So I thought to myself, Mr Graves is wearing a beautiful suit, His shirt is from Jermyn Street and his shoes are hand-lasted - you can always tell, can't you? - and he must be really quite an important man. So, I thought -' she giggled once more, - 'that I could be like those solicitors and sell my knowledge.'

'I think,' Graves said seriously, 'that five hundred might be just a little high.'

Miss Drummond giggled yet again. 'Oh, I am enjoying this!'

'A reasonable sum might be -'

'Reasonable is what the market will bear, that's what my father always said.'

'And he -?'

'Dealt in Oriental carpets, Mr Graves. Look, why don't you do it this way. See if you can find out somewhere else. Then if you can't, and if it's important, you can always come back to me.'

Graves came to his feet. 'Well, five hundred is rather a lot. Maybe I will try -'

'Of course, you understand the price will go up, Mr Graves, if you have to return to me.'

He looked hard at her. 'How do I know it's worth the money?'

The giggle had subsided into a broad and very confident smile. 'You don't, Mr Graves. That's what's so delightful. Tell me something. Do you like dust?'

'Dust?' Graves repeated, perplexed.

'You'll be up to your neck in it, hunting through history for Carfax House.'

He blinked at her. 'Fifty pounds seems fair. Including support for a worthwhile cause.'

'Five hundred.'

Graves wriggled around miserably for a minute or two, but he was done and he knew it. And the money, after all, was not his. He even thought for a moment that he might renege on the promise, but that was before she made him write it out.

Carfax House, she told him, once the paper was locked away, had been built in the 1790's and burned to the ground during World War One, when a passing Zeppelin dropped an incendiary on it. It was rebuilt after that war by a certain Mr Cavendish, who had made money out of army contracts for bully beef, and who liked it to be thought that he was related to the Dukes of Devonshire, whose family name, was Cavendish. Cavendish House it now became. It may be true of lightning that it rarely strikes twice in the same place; but the same cannot be said for German bombs, for in the autumn of 1941 a Heinkel 111 proceeding upon an attack on the Isle of Dogs was hit by anti-aircraft fire and turned for home, jettisoning a stick of bombs, one of which turned Cavendish House into a ruin. But once again, said Miss Drummond, it was rebuilt, still as Cavendish House. The man who rebuilt it - she had forgotten his name

- was something of a recluse and had, in any case, eventually moved away.

'So who has it now?' Graves asked.

'Oh, some frightful people. He's something in popular music, or advertising is it? I forget which. She's just a tart. Well, a model anyway. I always think they're interchangeable, don't you?'

'Do you know the name?'

The name merely cost him a fiver, this time for the Lifeboats. The house was not big. It stood two storeys high in a walled garden close to the grass of the Heath. It was painted a delicate shade of pale lemon, with white window-frames, and it was clearly in first-class order. Miss Drummond's view that There's precious little of the original fabric left, of course, but it's still one of the prettiest little Georgian houses in the village,' was obviously sound. Graves lit a cigarette and paced across the grass, looking thoughtfully at Carfax/Cavendish House. Somewhere inside must lie the second part of Dikeston's story, no doubt carefully hidden. By whom - by Dikeston himself? It seemed at least possible that the recluse whose name Miss Drummond could not remember was in fact Dikeston.

Had he then moved away and left the packet of par concealed? They'd have to be well concealed, Graves thought, or somebody who had no business to do so might find them. The white front door, with its gleaming lion's head knocker, looked somehow forbidding in the sunshine. Graves, who would not normally have hesitated to approach the devil's own front door on Hillyard, Cleef business, found the thought of knocking on that door strangely daunting. How did one say it: 'Good afternoon, I'd like to search your house'? Graves felt himself agreeing with Pilgrim's stated view that Dikeston was a joker who was going to make all of them run their butts off. His own butt first. He returned to 6 Athelsgate.

'Do next?' said Sir Horace Malory. 'Good Lord, isn't it obvious - you find the packet of papers, man!

They're somewhere in the house - must be. Go and look! And get a move on!'

The white door, now lit from above by a bulb encased in a gleaming brass fixture, looked still less inviting as Graves crunched up the short gravel path towards it. His hand already on the lion's head knocker, he paused as laughter sounded from inside the house. Was it a dinner-party in there - or a television set? He knocked, and felt as he did so like an encyclopaedia salesman. It was a dinner-party. The door was opened by a man flushed with wine and carrying a napkin. Damn!

'Mr Abrahams?"

'Bit late, don't you think. Whatever you're selling, come back another time.' Abrahams dabbed the napkin at his lips and made to close the door.

Graves thrust a visiting card at him. 'Please,' he said. 'It's quite important.'

'Oh?' Abrahams glanced at him with some suspicion, and then at the card. After a moment his thumbnail scraped at the embossed lettering. 'Hillyard, Cleef? Merchant bank, isn't it?'

'Yes.'

'First time I heard of a merchant bank going door-to-door,' Abrahams said, grinning. 'I know about the recession, but Christ!'

Graves, feeling the beginnings of fluster, now turned to dignity. He emitted a sombre laugh and said, 'We have a request, Mr Abrahams. You may see it as somewhat unusual, but we hope you may consider helping us in a small way.'

Abrahams's eye ran over him knowledgeably, pricing the suit, the haberdashery, the shoes. Miss Drummond had done the same, Graves thought. Blackheath and its denizens clearly judged the goods by the wrapper.

'Come in, Mr Graves,' Abrahams said abruptly. 'Have you eaten yet? We have a couple of friends in for a meal but I'm sure there'll be plenty.' He closed the door and led the way into the dining-room, where three slightly startled faces turned towards him.

Abrahams's initially suspicious manner had now become airy. 'Mr Graves is from a merchant bank. Just dropped in to see me about something they want.' He contrived to imply that nocturnal visits by City figures were commonplace events at Cavendish House. Abrahams was also, Graves shortly understood, trying to drum up business from the other male guest. Graves found himself being used, and disliking it. But the evening ended, the guests departed, and at last Graves found himself making the nightmare request: 'We'd like to search your house!'

He had to repeat it, naturally, more than once. The eccentric client, now regrettably deceased, made a further appearance 'Search the house?' screeched Mrs Abrahams. She was much as Miss Drummond had described her: half-tart, half-model. 'You mean, go poking into the cupboards, don't you?'

Graves explained, with all the smoothness he could muster, which was a good deal, that the Abrahams'

own possessions would of course be inviolate. It was likely to be in the fabric of the house 'You're going to lift the floorboards!' she yelled accusingly 'There would,' Graves assured her, 'be a fee to cover any inconvenience.'

'A fee?' said Mrs Abrahams.

'Good one, I should hope,' said her husband.

Negotiations proceeded. The search, it was at last agreed, was to be in two stages. In the first of them, Graves accompanied by a man expert in building matters, and no doubt by Mrs Abrahams too, was to have complete access to loft and attics and cellars. The living-rooms could be examined but not disturbed. In the event that the search revealed nothing, Stage Two arrived. For that the removals department of Harrods would arrive, the entire contents of the house would be removed to store while the search took place. Mr and Mrs Abrahams would be accommodated in a suitable hotel, and the interior of Cavendish House would be redecorated pending the return of the owners and their possessions.

Mr Abrahams had ideas similar to, though grander than, Miss Drummond's. Stage One was a thousand. Stage Two was five thousand, plus all costs. Take it, or leave it. Graves took it. He also required the deeds of the house, the plans, if any, from which the house had been rebuilt on the second occasion; also, before he began handing over money he needed corroboration of the statement by Miss

TXDrummond that Cavendish House had once borne the name of Carfax. Brief consultation with Hillyard. Cleef's solicitors gave Graves the welcome tidings that all the information could be obtained. The less happy news was that he would have to take trouble to get it. This entailed first an easy trip to the Borough Records Office in nearby Lewisham, where a yellowish rate book for the year 1910 demonstrated Miss Drummond's veracity. At that time Carfax House had a rateable value of£125. Graves now telephoned Abrahams at the advertising agency of which he was a director, to ask the whereabouts of the deeds. Abrahams replied that, since the house was mortgaged, the deeds were lodged with the building society from which he had borrowed money, and would remain so until the mortgage was paid off in twenty years or so.

'Which building society?'

'The Leefield.'

"Which branch?'

Abrahams told him.

Graves set off by car armed with Abrahams's written permission to inspect the deeds, duly did so, and discovered what seemed to be shining gold. The bomb-damaged Cavendish House had been purchased in 1945 by one Henry George Dikeston. And sold by him some twenty years later to the Land Commissioners, who now held the freehold.

Carefully Graves noted the addresses: of the lawyers through whom the sales had been made, and of the Land Commissioners. There was not precisely a song in his heart at the prospect of tracking Dikeston down, for Dikeston at that stage was hardly the spectre he was later to become, but Graves was pleased. His pleasure increased when, later, at the offices of the Planning Department, he asked to inspect the plans of Cavendish House, and was given them.

The pleasure evaporated at once.

The bombs of 1941 wrecked Cavendish House. Its roof was destroyed: less than fifty per cent of the exterior walls remained standing. The architect's plans showed meticulous concern for the character of the house, and such of the original fabric as had been left standing was most carefully incorporated in the rebuilding. Turning the plan this way and that, looking for indications as to where the promised cavity might be. Graves found he was actually looking at that very word on the plan. In the architect's small, neat hand, appeared the phrase. Throughout in 9-inch cavity brickwork.' In the planning authority's office there was no shortage of people to explain the meaning: the walls of Cavendish House consisted of an outer and an inner skin of brick with a cavity between.

Graves swore under his breath. The second part of Dikeston's narrative was now somewhere in the hollow walls of the house, and there was no indication at all as to where. Easy to imagine the scene: scaffolding, bricklayers, the walls rising - and a packet, contained in some waterproof material, simply dropped down between the two skins of bricks, there to be safe for as long as the house stood.

'We need a consulting engineer,' Sir Horace Malory decided. Graves, surprised, thought he detected a trace of wry amusement in Malory's face. It was confirmed as Malory went on, This fella Dikeston's going to lead us the devil of a dance. I'm beginning to get a feeling about him.'

'What's that?' Graves asked.

'Remember the Cheshire cat, do you?' Malory asked ruminatively.

'Well, sure. I read Alice at school. Who didn't?'

'If you remember -' Malory was removing a Romeo No.3 from its tube - 'it vanished quite slowly, beginning with the end of the tail and ending with the grin, which remained some time after the rest of it had gone. Well, this is just the beginning of the tale, d'you see. And the grin is still here with us.'

'I'll fix the engineer,' Graves said.

Sir Horace, wise as he undoubtedly was in the ways of man, might have been a little surprised at the broad distribution already achieved by news of Hillyard, Cleef s interest in a private house in Blackheath. An advertising agency is not a Trappist community, Denis Abrahams was more loquacious than most. When he heard, by telephone from his excitable wife, that no fewer than five people had spent the morning at his house, inspecting it according to the agreed terms for Stage One, and that one of them was a Knight (Sir Horace was in fact a baronet, but Mrs Abrahams didn't know that) Abrahams opened his mouth wider and spoke more loudly. Since he was in the bar of the Wig and Pen Club at the time, his story was heard by lawyers, who were only idly interested, and by one or two reporters, who began to show a professional attention.

Before Sir Horace returned to 6 Athelsgate, Mrs Frobisher, his secretary, had already twice denied knowledge of the matter to city-page reporters of two London newspapers.

'Keep doing so,' Malory instructed her. He had spent an annoying morning. Not only had careful examination of the roof and walls of Cavendish House failed to produce any indication of where the Dikeston papers might be concealed; but while Graves and Smithson (the consulting engineer) had carried out the inspection, Malory, unable to climb to the roof space and unwilling to rummage in cellars, had been exposed to a good hour and a half of Mrs Abrahams. She had clutched his arm and given him precise information about every stitch of curtain and carpet, every Wedgwood cigarette lighter and every mock-Adam fireplace. He was mildly surprised to find he had lived through it. Now he must face Pilgrim, who would undoubtedly be amused, and probably patronizing. Pilgrim said, in fact, 'I told you this thing was going to get pricey and you ain't started yet. What's the next stage?'

Malory explained about the walls and watched crossly as Pilgrim controlled a laugh. 'It's not funny, Laurence!'

'It's not bad from where I'm sitting,' Pilgrim said. 'You're actually going to pull half of it down?’

'There's no alternative,' Malory said stiffly. 'You must see that.'

'How much is the place worth?'

'We have an estimate of about fifty-five thousand to rebuild.'

'A hundred thousand bucks!' Pilgrim said. The humour was ebbing fast from his face and voice. 'Better take care, Horace.'

Back in his own room, Malory instructed Graves to arrange as expeditiously as possible to transfer into Harrods' repository the Abrahams' furniture and effects; also the transfer of their persons to the Inter-Continental Hotel. He then made a neat little list of the visible difficulties. First, it would be necessary to inform, and indeed to persuade, the Abrahams of the necessity to pull down half of their beautiful house. Secondly, the local authority would have to be told and its consent probably have to be obtained before any work on the outside of Cavendish House could be carried out. Thirdly, the same must inevitably be true of the Land Commissioners, as ground landlords. None of them would agree, and Malory knew it.

Then what? That the affair had its comic aspects was not lost on Malory. But his conviction that Dikeston's manuscript was of enormous importance was undiminished. His developing 'feeling' for Dikeston now told him that he was involved in a hunt and that like all good hunts it would be exciting and probably dangerous, and that there would be blood to be spilled at the finish. They would just have to pull the walls down - knock 'em down and take the consequences. And what consequences they would be: suits for civil damages from the Abrahams; prosecution by the local authority. Etcetera, etcetera.

Horace Malory suddenly discovered he was holding his head in his hands, and frowning so hard that his forehead felt stiff. He sat up and looked around the room: that damned Cheshire cat grin was here somewhere.

He said aloud: 'Just have to face it, that's all. Just have to face it.'

A week later the furniture was expensively in store; so were Mr and Mrs Denis Abrahams; and the early morning calm of the leafy crossroads which had given Carfax House its original name was mildly disturbed by young mothers taking their offspring to school in French and German estate cars, and making way for a bulldozer which turned clumsily in at the side gate of Cavendish House, shoving the gatepost pillar aside.

Sir Horace Malory and Jacques Graves were there to meet it, with Smithson the consulting engineer, and a small gang of workmen.

As they stood watching they were joined by a neighbour whose presence had not been requested and who would certainly have been invited to leave had she not been an exceptionally handsome blonde in her mid-thirties. Malory tended to be gallant to handsome women.

'Of course it's very pretty,1 she observed. 'But it's manicured half to death1. In any case, hardly any of it's original. Why are you doing this, anyway?'

'Out of need, madam,' Malory muttered.

'Yes, well . . .' The woman looked round her with a critical eye. Graves guessed she could price everything in sight to within a pound or two. '. . . I wouldn't really want any of it, myself. Ours is authentic Georgian, of course.'

'Nice for you,' said Malory.

'Except the sundial. 'I'd love that. Done long before they came here, naturally. Have you seen it?'

'I believe not.' Malory's gallant habits were warring now with a growing dislike of her manner.

'It's in the garden at the rear. Beautiful thing. A cockatrice. Highly imaginative.'

Malory merely nodded, his attention on the now roaring bulldozer as it manoeuvred; but Graves frowned as a little bell tinkled in his mind. He turned to her. 'Did you say cockatrice?'

She smiled. 'That's right. If you're interested, you should have a look.'

'Some kind of heraldic animal, right?' Graves said. And when she nodded, he asked her, isn't there another name? Seems to me I've heard -'

'Oh yes,' she said, it was also called a basilisk. That's the other name. Do you know about it?'

But Graves, now with*both arms held high in the air, was signalling the bulldozer driver to halt. As the diesel's noise subsided he said, 'Sir Horace, this lady says there's a kind of special sundial. A basilisk.'

interesting word,' Malory said. 'Tell me more, if you will, madam.'

It was all she needed. 'Come on, I'll show you.'

'By all means.'

She led them to it. It was a big sundial, on a massive wrought-iron base in the form of a cage with the animal in it. The morning sun was pale and the shadow faint, but later in the day that shadow would fall upon the wall.

'Evil, you see.' She pointed to the wrought-iron animal. 'The embodiment of evil.'

Malory looked as she rattled on: its glance was fatal to any man - and to any animal except a weasel. Its breath was poisonous and killed all vegetation except the rue. It could only be killed by -'

Basilisk. Basil, Malory thought. Basilisk the embodiment of evil. Oh, Dikeston, Dikeston!

He held up his hand. "We can start here, I think, where the shadow's on the wall. And I hardly think we'll need the bulldozer.'