"We're asking Miss Dorothy to cut the tape, Sir Makepeace. We've drafted the invite already."

"Who gave you permission? Did Mr. Philpott here? Did the deacons? Did the committee? Did I? To spend nine hundred and eight pounds of ^Appeal funds, widows' mites, on a motor coach?"

"We wanted the element of surprise, Sir Makepeace. We wanted to sweep the board with them. Once you spread the word beforehand, talk it round town, you take the air out of it. P.S.C. is going to be sprung upon an unsuspecting world."

Makepeace now enters what Syd calls the dicey part.

"Where are the books?"

"Books, sir? There's only one Book I know of--"

"Your files, boy. Your figures. You alone kept the accounts, we heard."

"Give me a week, Sir Makepeace. I'll account for every penny."

"That's not keeping accounts. That's fudging them. Did you learn nothing at all from your father, boy?"

"Rect.i.tude, sir. Humbleness before Jesus."

"How much have you spent?"

"Not spent, sir. Invested."

"How much?"

"Fifteen hundred. Rounded up."

"Where's the coach at present?"

"I said, sir. Being painted."

"Where?"

"Balham's of Brinkley. Coach-builders. Some of the finest Liberals in the county. Christians to a man."

"I know Balham's. TP sold timber to Balham's for ten years."

"They're charging cost."

"You propose to ply for trade in public, you say?"

"Three days a week, sir."

"Using the public coach stages?"

"Certainly."

"Are you familiar with the likely att.i.tude to be taken by the Dawlish Tambercombe Transport Corporation of Devon to this venture?"

"A popular demand like this--those boys can't block it, Sir Makepeace. We've got G.o.d driving for us. Once they see the ground-swell, feel the pulse, they'll back away and give us our heads all the way to the top. They can't stop progress, Sir Makepeace, and they can't stop the march of Christian people."

"Can't they," says Sir Makepeace, and scribbles figures on a piece of paper in front of him. "There's eight hundred and fifty pound in rent money missing as well," he remarks as he writes.

"We invested the rent money too, sir."

"That's more than the fifteen hundred then."

"Call it two thousand. Rounded up. I thought you only meant the Appeal money."

"What about the collection money?"

"Some of it."

"Counting all monies from any source, what's the total capital? Rounded up."

"Including private investors, Sir Makepeace--"

Watermaster sat up straight: "So we've private investors too, have we? My gracious, boy, you've been going it a bit. Who are they?"

"Private clients."

"Of whom?"

Perce Loft looks as though he is about to fall asleep out of sheer boredom. His eyelids are two inches long, his goatish head has slipped forward on his neck.

"Sir Makepeace, I am not at liberty to reveal this. When P.S.C. promises confidentiality, that's what she delivers. Our watchword is integrity."

"Has the company been incorporated?"

"No, sir."

"Why not?"

"Security, sir. Keep it under wraps. Like I said."

Makepeace begins jotting again. Everybody waits for more questions. None come. An uncomfortable air of completeness settles over Makepeace, and Rick senses it faster than anybody. "It was like being up the old doctor's, t.i.tch," Syd told me, "when he's made up his mind what you're dying of, only he's got to write out this prescription before he gives you the good news."

Rick speaks again. Unprompted. It was the voice he used when he was cornered. Syd heard it then, I heard it later only twice. It was not a pretty tone at all.

"I could bring those accounts up to you this evening, as a matter of fact, Sir Makepeace. They're in safekeeping, you see. I'll have to get them out."

"Give them to the police," says Makepeace, still writing. "We're not detectives here, we're churchmen."

"Miss Dorothy might think a bit different, though, mightn't she, Sir Makepeace?"

"Miss Dorothy has nothing to do with this."

"Ask her."

Then Makepeace stops writing and his head comes up a bit sharpish, says Syd, and they look at each other, Makepeace with his little baby eyes uncertain. And Rickie, suddenly his gaze has the glint of a flick-knife in the dark. Syd does not go as far as I shall in describing that stare because Syd won't touch the black side of his lifelong hero. But I will. It looks out of him like a child through the eyeholes of a mask. It denies everything it stood for not a half-second earlier. It is pagan. It is amoral. It regrets your decision and your mortality. But it has no choice because you cannot go back.

"Are you telling me Miss Dorothy is an investor in this project?" says Makepeace.

"You can invest more than money, Sir Makepeace," says Rick, from far away but close.

Now the point is, says Syd rather hastily here, Makepeace should never have driven Rick to use that argument. Makepeace was a weak man acting hard and they're the worst, says Syd. If Makepeace had been reasonable, if he'd been a believer like the rest and thought a little better of poor TP's boy instead of lacking faith and undermining everybody else's into the bargain, things could have been settled in a friendly, positive way and everyone could have gone home happy, believing in Rick and his coach the way he needed them to. As it was, Makepeace was the last barrier and he left Rickie no alternative but to knock him down. So Rickie did, didn't he? Well he had to, t.i.tch.

I strain and stretch, Tom, I shove with every muscle of my imagination as deep as I dare into the heavy shadows of my own pre-history. I put down my pen and stare at the hideous church tower across the square, and I can hear as plain as Miss Dubber's television downstairs the ill-contrasted voices of Rick and Sir Makepeace Watermaster matched against each other. I see the dark drawing-room of The Glades where I was so seldom admitted and I picture the two men closeted together there that evening alone, and my poor Dorothy trembling in our murky upper room reading the same hand-st.i.tched homilies that now adorn Miss Dubber's landings as she tries to suck comfort from G.o.d's flowers, G.o.d's love, G.o.d's will. And I could tell you, I think near enough to a sentence or two, what pa.s.sed between them by way of continuing their unfinished chat of that morning.

Rick's spirits are back, because the flick-knife never shows for long and because he has already achieved the object that is more important to him than any other in his human dealings, even if he himself does not yet know it. He has inspired Makepeace to hold two totally divergent opinions of him and perhaps more. He has shown him the official and unofficial versions of his ident.i.ty. He has taught him to respect Rick in his complexity and to reckon as much with Rick's secret world as with his overt one. It is as if in the privacy of that room each player revealed the many cards, fake or real is of no account, that comprised his hand: and Makepeace was left without a chip in front of him. But the fact is, both men are dead, both took their secret to the grave, Sir Makepeace going ahead by thirty years. And the one person who may still know it cannot speak, because if she exists at all any more, then it is only as a ghost, haunting her own life and mine, killed long ago by the very consequences of the two men's fateful dialogue that evening.

History records two meetings between Rick and my Dorothy before that sabbath. The first when she made a royal visit to the Young Liberals Club, of which Rick was at that time an elected officer--I believe, G.o.d help them, treasurer. The second when Rick was captain of the Tabernacle's football team and one Morrie Washington, a Night School Boy and another of Rick's lieutenants, was goalie. Dorothy, as sister of the Sitting Member, was invited to present the cup. Morrie remembers the line-up ceremony, with Dorothy walking along the troops and pinning a medal to each victorious breast, starting with Rick himself as captain. It seems she fumbled the clasp, or that Rick pretended she did. Either way, he let out a playful cry of pain and went down on one knee, clutching his bosom and insisting she had pierced him to the heart. It was a bold and rather naughty number and I am surprised he took it so far. Even in burlesque, Rick was normally very protective of his dignity, and at fancy-dress b.a.l.l.s, which were the rage until the war came, he preferred to go as Lloyd George rather than risk ridicule. But down he went, Morrie remembered it like yesterday, and Dorothy laughed, a thing n.o.body had ever seen her do: laugh. What a.s.signations followed we can never know, except that, according to Morrie, Rick did once boast that there was more than cake and lemon barley waiting for him up at The Glades when he delivered the church magazine.

Syd, I think, knows more than Morrie. Syd saw a lot. And people tell him things because he keeps his counsel.

Syd, I believe, knows most of the secrets that lurked in the wooded house that Makepeace Watermaster called his home, even if in old age he has done his best to bury them six foot under. He knows why Lady Nell drank and why Makepeace was so ill-at-ease with himself, and why his damp little eyes were so tormented, and his mouth unequal to his appet.i.tes, and why he was able to castigate sin with such pa.s.sionate familiarity. And why he wrote of a special love when he put his wretched name in my Dorothy's Bible. And why it was that Dorothy had taken herself to the furthest corner of the house to sleep, far from Lady Nell's rooms and further still from Makepeace's. And why Dorothy was so accessible to the smart-tongued upstart from the football team who spoke as if he could build her a road to anywhere, and drive her there in his coach. But Syd is a good man and a Mason. He loved Rick and gave the best years of his life, now to roistering with him, now to hanging on to his coat-tails. Syd would have a laugh, he would tell a story, provided it hurt n.o.body too much. But Syd won't touch the black side.

History records also that Rick took no account books to that meeting, though Mr. Muspole the great accountant, another Night School Boy, offered to help him write some and probably did. Muspole could invent accounts the way others can write postcards on holiday or rattle off anecdotes into a microphone. And that in order to prepare himself, Rick took a stroll over Brinkley Cliffs, alone, which I believe is the first known walk of this kind, though Rick, like myself after him, was always a one for striding out in search of a decision or a voice. And that he returned from The Glades wearing an air of high office not unlike Makepeace Watermaster's, except that it had more of the natural radiance in it that comes, we are told, of inner cleanliness. The matter of the Appeal had been attended to, he informed his courtiers. The problem of liquidity had been solved, he said. Everybody was going to be seen right. How? they begged him; how, Rickie? But Rick preferred to remain their magician and allowed n.o.body to look up his sleeve. Because I am blessed. Because I steer events. Because I am destined to become one of the Highest in the Land.

His other good news was not vouchsafed to them. This was a cheque drawn on Watermaster's personal account in the sum of five hundred pounds to set himself up in life--presumably, said Syd, in outer Australia. Rick endorsed it, Syd cashed it, since Rick's own bank account, as so often in later years, was temporarily indisposed. A few days afterwards, on the strength of this subsidy, Rick presided over a lavish if sombre banquet at the Brinkley Towers Hotel, attended by the entire court as then composed and several local Lovelies who were always an off-screen feature. Syd recalls a mood of historic change pervading the occasion though no one knew precisely what was over or what was about to begin. Speeches were made, mostly on the theme of old pals sticking together and keeping a straight bat through life, but when Rick's health was drunk he responded with uncharacteristic brevity, and it was whispered that he was in the grip of an emotion, for he was seen to weep, which he did often, even in those days; he could weep buckets, on the drop of a handkerchief. Perce Loft, the great lawyer, attended the gathering to the surprise of some, and to their greater surprise brought with him a beautiful, if incongruous, young music student named Lippschitz, first name Annie, who put the other Lovelies in the shade even though she'd hardly a coat to cover her back. They dubbed her "Lippsie." She was a refugee from Germany who had come to Perce in some immigration matter, and Perce in his goodness had decided to extend a helping hand to her, much as he had extended one to Rick. To close proceedings Morrie Washington the court jester sang a song, and Lippsie joined the other women in the chorus, though she sang too well and didn't fully appreciate the dirty bits, being foreign. It was by then dawn. A sleek taxi took Rick away, and he was not seen in those parts for many years.

History records further that one Richard Thomas Pym, bachelor, and Dorothy G.o.dchild Watermaster, spinster, both very temporarily of this parish, were the next day solemnly and discreetly married in the presence of two co-opted witnesses in a newly opened registry office off the Western by-pa.s.s, just where you turned left for Northolt Aerodrome. And that a little boy christened Magnus Richard and weighing in at very few pounds at all was born to them not six months later, whom the Lord protect. The Companies Registry, which I have consulted, also records the event, though in different terms. Within forty-eight hours of the birth, Rick had unveiled the Magnus Star Equitable Insurance Company Ltd., with a share capital of two thousand pounds. Its stated purpose was the Provision of life insurance to the Needy, Disabled, and Elderly. Its accountant was Mr. Muspole, its legal adviser Perce Loft. Morrie Washington was company secretary, and the late Alderman Thomas Pym, affectionately known as TP, its patron saint.

"So was there really a coach then or was it all flannel?" I ask Syd.

Syd is always cautious in how he replies. "Now there could have been a coach, t.i.tch. I'm not saying there wasn't, I'd be a liar if I did. I'm just saying I never heard about a coach till your dad happened to mention it in church that morning. Put it that way."

"So what had he done with the money--if there was no coach?"

Syd really doesn't know. So many thousands of pounds have floated under the bridge since then. So many great visions come and gone. Maybe Rick gave it away, Syd says awkwardly. Your dad couldn't say no to anyone, specially the Lovelies. Never right with himself unless he was giving. Maybe a con came and took it off him, your dad always loved a con. Then to my amazement Syd blushes. And I hear faintly but clearly from the side of his mouth the ratta-tat-tat he used to make for me when I was a child and wanted him to do the clip of horses' hoofs.

"You mean he used the Appeal money to lay bets?" I ask.

"t.i.tch, I'm only saying that that coach of his could have been horse-drawn. That's all I'm saying, isn't it, Meg?"

Oh but there was a coach all right! And it was not horse-drawn at all. That coach was the most splendid, powerful ever made. The golden lettering of the Pym Salvation Coach Company shone from its l.u.s.trous sides like the illuminated chapter headings of all the Bibles of Rick's youth. Its green was the racing green of England. Sir Malcolm Campbell himself was going to drive it. The Highest in the Land would ride in it. When the people of our town saw that coach they were going to go down on their knees and put their hands together and thank G.o.d and Rick in equal portion for it. The grateful crowds would gather outside Rick's house and call him out on to his balcony till late into the night. I have seen him practising his wave in expectation of them. With both hands as if rocking me above his head, while he beams and weeps into the middle distance: "I owe it all to old TP." And if, as doubtless happened, it turned out that Balham's of Brinkley, some of the finest Liberals in the county, had never strictly speaking heard of Rick's coach, let alone painted it for cost out of the goodness of their hearts, then they were in the same state of provisional reality as the coach was. They were waiting for Rick's wand to beckon them into being. It was only when meddlesome unbelievers such as Makepeace Watermaster had difficulty accepting this state of affairs that Rick found himself with a religious war on his hands, and like others before him was compelled to defend his faith by unpleasant means. All he demanded was the totality of your love. The least you could do in return was give it to him blindly. And wait for him, as G.o.d's Banker, to double it over six months.

3.

Mary had prepared herself for everything except for this. Except for the pace and urgency of the intrusion and the number of the intruders. Except for the sheer scale and complexity of Jack Brotherhood's anger, and for his bewilderment, which seemed greater than her own. And for the awful comfort of his being there.

Admitted to the hall he had barely looked at her. "Did you have any inkling of this?"

"If I had I'd have told you," she said, which was a quarrel before they had even begun.

"Has he phoned?"

"No."

"Has anybody else?"

"No."

"No word from anyone? No change?"

"No."

"Brought you a brace of house guests." He jabbed a thumb at two shadows behind him. "Relatives from London, come to console you for the duration. More to follow." Then he swept through her like a great ragged hawk on its journey to another prey, leaving her one frozen impression of his lined and punctured face and s.h.a.ggy white forelock as he stormed towards the drawing-room.

"I'm Georgie from Head Office," said the girl on the doorstep. "This is Fergus. We're so sorry, Mary."

They had luggage and she showed them to the foot of the stairs. They seemed to know the way. Georgie was tall and sharp-edged, with straight, sensible hair. Fergus was not quite Georgie's cla.s.s, which was the way the Office worked these days.

"Sorry about this, Mary," Fergus echoed as he followed Georgie up the stairs. "Don't mind if we take a look round, do you?"

In the drawing-room Brotherhood had switched out the lights and wrenched open the curtains to the French windows. "I need the key for this thing. The Chubb. The whatever they have here."

Mary hastened to the mantelpiece and groped for the silver rose bowl where she kept the security key. "Where is he?"

"He's anywhere in the world or out of it. He's using tradecraft. Ours. Who does he know in Edinburgh?"

"No one." The rose bowl was full of pot-pourri she had made with Tom. But no key.

"They think they've traced him there," said Brotherhood. "They think he took the five-o'clock shuttle from Heathrow. Tall man with a heavy briefcase. On the other hand, knowing our Magnus as we do, he might just be in Timbuctoo."

Looking for the key was like looking for Magnus. She didn't know where to begin. She seized the tea-caddy and shook it. She was getting sick with panic. She grabbed the silver Achievement Cup that Tom had won at school and heard something metal skid inside it. Taking the key to him, she barked her shin so hard her eyes blurred. That b.l.o.o.d.y piano stool.

"The Lederers ring?"

"No. I told you. No one did. I didn't get back from the airport till eleven."

"Where's the holes?"

She located the top keyhole for him and guided his hand to it. I should have done it myself then I wouldn't have had to touch him. She knelt and began fumbling for the lower one. I'm practically kissing his feet.

"Has he ever vanished before and you not told me?" Brotherhood demanded while she continued to grope.

"No."

"I want it level, Mary. I've got the whole of London at my throat. Bo's having the vapours and Nigel's cloistered with the Amba.s.sador now. The RAF doesn't fly us out in the middle of the night for nothing."

Nigel is Bo Brammel's hangman, Magnus had said. Bo says three-bags-full to everyone and Nigel pads behind him chopping off their heads.

"Never. No. I swear," she said.