Stone's Fall

by Iain Pears

  She received me, we talked about little of importance. There was an awkwardness in our conversation which I had not noticed before. I could not talk to her as an employee, someone doing a job for her, an expert at my task. But I dared not adopt any other tone and, in any case, was hardly experienced enough to do so.

  After a particularly long pause during which the fire in the grate seemed to become of excessive importance to both of us—it was better than avoiding each other’s gaze—she turned back to me once more.

  “May I ask you a question?”

  “Of course.”

  “Did you wish to kiss me last night?”

  I didn’t know what to say. Tell the truth? That would alter things totally; I could never stand in front of her and talk to her in a normal way again. And I did not know, still, how she would reply. As I have said, the ways of the aristocracy, and of foreigners, and of women, were a mystery to me. I did not understand her in the slightest; I could not untangle what I thought from what I wanted to think. All I knew was that the sudden shortness of breath, the racing of my heart, had returned even more powerfully than the previous evening.

  “Yes,” I said after a long pause. “Very much.” There was another long silence. “What would you have done if I had?”

  She smiled, but only very faintly. “I would have kissed you back,” she said. “I am glad you did not.”

  My heart fell. My small experience was limited to girls who either wanted to be kissed, or did not. Not women who wanted both at the same time. But I knew what she meant.

  “Your Ladyship…”

  “I think, in the circumstances, you might call me Elizabeth,” she replied, “if you wish to do so. And also I think it would be best to talk of it no more. We both know quite well that relations have changed between us. It is foolish not to recognise it, to some measure.”

  But how had they changed? I wanted to ask. What am I meant to do? What do you want of me?

  “You must think very badly of me; I am quite shocked by myself, although not as much as I should be. I am an immoral foreigner and blood will out. That does not mean I feel free to act on my desires.”

  That was something, at least, although I did not know what. All sorts of explanations went through my head. This was a woman crazed by her loss who was defying fate by having such thoughts, by deliberately acting in such a fashion. Or, she was a woman who (so I assumed) had not made love to anyone for years, and was no longer in control of herself. I even considered that she might like me, that I was the only person who could offer her any sort of understanding. That I was the only person who knew anything of what she might feel. That was the most dangerous, insidious option.

  “Matthew?”

  She had said something. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I was a little distracted.”

  “I said, please tell me of your discoveries.”

  My discoveries? I wanted to say. Who on earth gives a hoot about my discoveries? All I wanted to do was tell her how I had wanted to take her in my arms, and run my fingers through her hair, and have her look at me like that again. Lost children, fraud, failing companies, what trivial nonsense was all this in comparison?

  But it was her conversation, not mine. And she had a better notion of how to be sensible than I had. Where had she learned that? How do people gain an intuitive grasp of when to stop, when to go forward in such circumstances? Is it just from age and experience?

  “Oh, them,” I said. “Well, there’s nothing exciting there. Except for a couple of things. Did you know that the Rialto Investment Trust is having its annual meeting soon?”

  “I didn’t.”

  “Well, it is. I thought I would go along, just to get a sense of these people. From my limited experience of these things it won’t be very interesting, but you never know. And you know Mrs. Vincotti told us that her father had left her some money? A certain amount which came from Barings every month?”

  She nodded.

  “That wasn’t an annuity. It was money sent by your husband. And from what she said, it has been paid every quarter for years. The records only go back ten years, but we can assume that he was responsible for payments right back to the beginning.”

  She looked interested, then her face fell. “But does this help?”

  “Not obviously. Mrs. Vincotti cannot be the person we are looking for. If he paid her money, he would hardly need to instruct his executors to launch a search for her. She cannot possibly be either the child or the mother of the child. I cannot explain the payments at all, except to say that they are not helpful. So I propose dropping the matter, unless something else suggests they are relevant.”

  “It seems John had a less straightforward life than I thought,” she said. “I didn’t think he had any secrets from me. Now he is dead I am discovering nothing but.”

  There was, of course, the greatest secret of all. All my instincts were to lay it in front of her; your husband was a cheat and a fraud. He was stealing money from his own companies on a vast scale. But how could I say that to a woman who had looked me in the eyes like that? Who had such hair? If I kept silent, it was not for the sake of the shareholders of Rialto.

  “On the subject of the Brotherhood or whatever they’re called,” I said, hurrying along, “I’ve found out little. Except that it is obviously a group so small that it poses little danger to the onward march of world capitalism, and consists of people so fractious that they were thrown out of another group called the Union of Socialist Solidarity two years ago, for being disruptive. The Union of Socialist Solidarity, in turn, walked out of the International Organisation of Workers… well, you get the idea.”

  “So how many of them are there?”

  “Not many. I haven’t found out much.”

  “They don’t sound very interesting either,” she said calmly. “Are you sure there isn’t some explanation consistent with his record as a capitalist exploiter of the masses?”

  “Not that I can think of without more information.”

  She shook her head. “Don’t concern yourself with this at the moment. It’s not much money and does not seem to be relevant to your task. I think you should concentrate on that.”

  “I just had this vision of his long-lost son turning up as a wild-eyed revolutionist.”

  “In which case he would have known exactly who he was, no?”

  “True.”

  She turned to me, and took my hand. “I need this business settled,” she said softly. “It is beginning to prey on my mind. I have to start a new life, not spend my days tidying up the old one. Please help me. Promise you will concentrate on the important.”

  Of course I would. Anything. Once more, as she held my hand and looked at me, I wanted to reach out for her. Once more I did not. But my resistance was already becoming enfeebled.

  CHAPTER 16

  I did not entirely ignore her request to concentrate on the lost child, but my enquiries went nowhere over the next week or so, and slowly. I did what you do in such circumstances; paid a young man at Births and Deaths to go through the registries, week by week and month by month, to see if any child had been registered naming Ravenscliff as father. The chances of this producing anything were small. Entries are named by the child’s surname, and it was more than likely that this one would not have his father’s name. I made enquiries of foreign journalists in London about how to go about finding children in France, Spain, Italy and other places, and wrote letters asking for assistance. Again, this was unlikely to produce results quickly, if at all, but I was determined to do a thorough job. After a week or so of this, the only possibility left was to write to every orphanage in Europe. This I decided to put off for as long as possible.

  Then I returned to my interest in Ravenscliff ’s money. Not least because I was beginning to find the topic of money in general quite interesting. I had been working for Lady Ravenscliff for more than a month; my bank account now had £21 in it, and every week, my income so greatly exceeded my expenses that I even took
to making out little columns of numbers, calculating how much I would have this time next year, or the year after that. Having money was very much more interesting than not having it. I almost began to understand (from a lowly point of view) what made someone like Ravenscliff tick. One thing had occurred to me, and that was that the start of Ravenscliff ’s attempt to siphon funds out of his companies had come around the time that Seyd’s had begun an investigation into Rialto and suddenly dropped it. The owner, Young Seyd, had been responsible for that decision, Wilf had said, so it was reasonable to consider him for a while.

  His father had trained him up for the business, but as Wilf had said, he had no taste for it. He was clever enough to leave well enough alone, and appoint good people who knew their jobs. Then he withdrew; his only connection was to attend the quarterly board meetings, collect his dividends and put his name to all those forms which require a chairman’s signature. If I have conjured up the image of the typical second generation owner, slowly dissipating his father’s accumulated wealth in a life of indulgence and idle luxury, then the image is entirely incorrect. For Young Seyd had a secret life. He was a vicar in the Church of England, to which calling he had been inclined since his earliest youth. Only the authority of a very determined father had stopped him from being ordained as young as possible, and once that authority vanished Young Seyd had taken the cloth with almost unseemly haste. It was a strange mixture, pews and pulpits on the one hand and corporatised intelligence on the other, but he seemed to reconcile the two with little difficulty. Crockford’s Clerical Directory supplied all the information I needed to find him. Young Seyd lived in Salisbury.

  “I believe I am doing God’s work in both,” he said with a smile once he had allowed me in—with some obvious hesitation, it must be said. “Knowing their sins will be discovered helps to keep the men of wealth honest. It means that the poor will be treated more justly. And I must say that what I learned during my apprenticeship about the weaknesses of men, and the temptations of power, has prepared me well for life in the Church.”

  I liked him; I had not expected to, as my opinion had been coloured in advance by Wilf ’s scarcely concealed disapproval. But Young Seyd—his father had now been dead for more than a decade but the name persisted—impressed me. More of an eighteenth-century vicar than a member of the newly reformed and muscular Church of England—not for him the business of evangelising workers or natives. No; Seyd was happy to let men be. If they came to him, well and good, but he did not believe he had any right to bother people unnecessarily. He christened, married and buried his parishioners; he read his books and he lived a quiet, contented life with his housekeeper, a cat and many friends.

  And he kept a distant eye on the doings of his company. Which was why I had gone to Waterloo and taken a morning train to Salisbury.

  Once I was in his house—a fine new villa in Manor Road, luxurious for a vicar but modest for the owner of a company—and he had some tea brought for me, I plunged straight into my tale. There seemed little point in dissimulating; to do so with such a decent man—he was perhaps in his early forties then and was just beginning to show the effects in his body of a life without want—was somehow unseemly. Also, in the train as I had watched the Wiltshire countryside pass in front of me, I had rehearsed all possible ways of broaching the subject without broaching it, if you understand me, and got nowhere. I could not discover any means of phrasing the questions which would get me the answers I wanted without being precise.

  So I explained that I was writing a biography of Ravenscliff for his widow, although this was to be for private circulation only. I said that she was allowing me unparalleled access to all his papers. How some could not be found; how Wilf Cornford had mentioned the abortive investigation by Seyd’s of a year or so previously…

  At this the reverend gentleman began to look uneasy. But I continued anyway, saying that it was most important, and his wife’s dearest wish, that I should have access to everything there was to know.

  “It’s important for my work, you understand. But it might also be important for the executors of his will, depending on what it contains, that is. These things seem to be terribly complicated.”

  “Yes, yes. And thank heavens they are. Otherwise Seyd’s would have nothing to do at all.”

  “So you’ll give me the report? I’m so grateful to you, and of course I will treat it in the strictest…”

  The Reverend Seyd held up his hand. “I am afraid that I cannot do that,” he said gently.

  “Why not?”

  “I was visited at my club in London by a man who explained that he would prefer this investigation to be discontinued.”

  “And just because some total stranger…”

  “You are also a total stranger,” he said. “And the first was more persuasive than you are.”

  “How so?”

  He spread his hands in a gesture of resignation.

  “And he worked for Ravenscliff?”

  “I decided to do as he requested.”

  “But what could he possibly say to make you do that? By what right…?”

  Again he did not reply. “Do you still have this report?”

  He shook his head. “I gathered up all the papers and brought them all here. A fortnight later my house was burgled.”

  “I see,” I said quietly. “And you think Ravenscliff was responsible?”

  “I do not know. Certainly it would be consistent with everything I knew about him. He was a terrible man, Mr. Braddock. Utterly without principles or loyalties.”

  The atmosphere was so heavy it felt oppressive. Seyd had alarmed me. But I was fascinated as well. And here, sitting in front of me with his dog collar on was the first man to say something other than the standard line on Ravenscliff. Fair, decent, a wonderful husband, good employer. Kindly. A wizard with money. All that had been repeated endlessly. Finally, I had found someone with a different view—and he wasn’t going to tell me why. I decided then and there I wasn’t going to leave until he had.

  “How far had the investigation progressed?”

  “Not far. Not far enough for anyone in London to make sense of it. Not even Wilf Cornford. No one had yet put all the pieces together. Maybe they wouldn’t have done, but I put them together, Mr. Braddock,” he said defiantly.

  “I thought you had no connection with that sort of thing?”

  “Mr. Cornford has a low opinion of my expertise. That is unwarranted. I spent many years at my father’s side before his death, and I learned a very great deal about the way the modern company operates. He also taught me how to read balance sheets when most young children are playing games, or struggling over their Latin irregular verbs.”

  “You must tell me what you found. You must.”

  He shook his head.

  “I am who I say I am,” I continued in the vague hope it would make some difference. “A reporter, a writer. I want the truth, that is all.”

  “Then you are an innocent. Or very brave.”

  “I am neither. If you won’t tell me, then at least answer some questions. Did your investigations deal with Ravenscliff sucking vast sums of money out of his companies and defrauding his shareholders?”

  Seyd was deathly quiet, and looked at me carefully. “Why do you say that?”

  “Because he was,” I said recklessly. “I discovered it. It had already started by the time you shut down your enquiry. Is that why? Is that what you discovered as well?”

  Not the best way of playing, giving away your best cards with no guarantee of anything in exchange. Had Seyd been more like Ravenscliff, he would have smiled, snapped up the information and refused still to reply. Maybe he intended to, but instead he said nothing at all; he frowned, rubbed his hands together in a jerky, agitated movement, put some sugar in his tea, then, a few moments later, put some more in. Tasting the result brought him back.

  “No,” he said. “No, it wasn’t. But it does explain why somebody wanted no investigation at that particular mo
ment. Why was he doing this? Do you know?”

  “You can’t expect me to answer your questions if you don’t answer mine, you know. That would be quite unfair.”

  “I am trying to protect you.”

  “So is everyone else I talk to. Very kind. But I don’t want to be protected. I want to do a good job, which everyone else also seems to think I am incapable of doing.”

  “Pride, eh?”

  “If you want. Do you know, I was recommended for this job because my editor thinks I am a poor reporter.”

  “Who’s he?”

  “McEwen, of the Chronicle.”

  He looked interested at this, but I continued. “And since then, every conversation has started: Why you? Why you? Why you? I am heartily sick of it.”

  “Spoken like a true twelve-year-old,” he said gently.

  I glared.

  “But McEwen is a good man. How very curious.” And he fell into a thoughtful mood, during which he poured some more tea into a clean cup.

  “Do you consider yourself a patriot, Mr. Braddock? A loyal Englishman?”

  “Naturally,” I said, somewhat surprised. “So much so that I never think about it.”

  “Yes; few people do. No doubt that will change in the coming years. Mr. McEwen does think of it. He is a good man, and a trustworthy one.”

  “You know him?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  The change that had come over him had been slow but distinct. Apart from the ecclesiastical garb, there was nothing of the vicar left in him. The mild, slightly slow mannerisms had been replaced by a precision which momentarily shocked me.

  “The investigation concerned lines of credit,” he began quietly. “That is, the means by which Ravenscliff ’s gigantic operations are funded. The whole structure of his cash flow, credits, the loans he makes to others to buy his products. Where the money goes. Do you understand me so far?”