Duncan Kyle - The King's Commisar

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.'