‘Ah well, so you say now. But I don’t give up easily… I shall try you later. But don’t forget, my first option?’
‘Certainly,’ said Charles. ‘My word on it.’
Kraye smiled at the stone he held in his hands, a magnificent raw amethyst like a cluster of petrified violets.
‘Don’t let this fall into the fire,’ he said. ‘It would turn yellow.’ He then treated everyone to a lecture on amethysts which would have been interesting had he made any attempt at simplicity: but blinding by words was with him either a habit or a policy. I wasn’t certain which.
‘…Manganese, of course occurring in geodes or agate nodules in South America or Russia, but with such a world-wide distribution it was only to be expected that elementary societies should ascribe to it supra rational inherencies and attributes…’
I suddenly found him looking straight at me, and I knew my expression had not been one of impressed admiration. More like quizzical sarcasm. He didn’t like it. There was a quick flash in his eyes.
‘It is symptomatic of the slum mentality,’ he remarked, ‘to scoff at what it can’t comprehend.’
‘Sid,’ said Charles sharply, unconsciously giving away half my name, ‘I’m sure you must have something else to do. We can let you go until dinner.’
I stood up. The natural anger rose quickly, but only as far as my teeth. I swallowed. ‘Very well,’ I muttered.
‘Before you go, Sid,’ said Mrs van Dysart from the depths of a sofa, ‘… Sid, what a deliciously plebeian name, so suitable… Put these down on the table for me.’
She held out both hands, one stone in each and another balanced between them. I couldn’t manage them all, and dropped them.
‘Oh dear,’ said Mrs van Dysart, acidly sweet, as I knelt and picked them up, putting them one by one on the table, ‘I forgot you were disabled, so silly of me.’ She hadn’t forgotten. ‘Are you sure you can’t get treatment for whatever is wrong with you? You ought to try some exercises, they’d do you the world of good. All you need is a little perseverance. You owe it to the Admiral, don’t you think, to
I didn’t answer, and Charles at least had the grace to keep quiet.
‘I know of a very good man over here,’ went on Mrs van Dysart. ‘He used to work for the army at home… excellent at getting malingerers back into service. Now he’s the sort of man who’d do you good. What do you think Admiral, shall I fix up for your son-in-law to see him?’
‘Er…’ said Charles, ‘I don’t think it would work.’
‘Nonsense.’ She was brisk and full of smiles. ‘You can’t let him lounge about doing nothing for the rest of his life. A good bracing course of treatment, that’s what he needs. Now,’ she said turning to me, ‘so that I know exactly what I’m talking about when I make an appointment, let’s see this precious crippled hand of yours.’
There was a tiny pause. I could feel their probing eyes, their unfriendly curiosity.
‘No,’ I said calmly. ‘Excuse me, but no.’
As I walked across the room and out of the door her voice floated after me. ‘There you are, Admiral, he doesn’t
I lay on my bed for a couple of hours re-reading the book on company law, especially, now, the section on take-overs. It was no easier than it had been in the hospital, and now that I knew why I was reading it, it seemed more involved, not less. If the directors of Seabury were worried, they would surely have called in their own investigator. Someone who knew his way round the stock markets like I knew my way round the track. An expert. I wasn’t at all the right sort of person to stop Kraye, even if indeed anyone could stop him. And yet… I stared at the ceiling, taking my lower lip between my teeth… and yet I did have a wild idea…
Viola came in, knocking as she opened the door.
‘Sid, dear, are you all right? Can I do anything for you?’ She shut the door, gentle, generous, and worried.
I sat up and swung my legs over the side of the bed. ‘No thanks, I’m fine.’
She perched on the arm of an easy chair, looked at me with her kind, slightly mournful brown eyes, and said a little breathlessly, ‘Sid, why are you letting Charles say such terrible things about you? It isn’t only when you are there in the room, they’ve been, oh, almost sniggering about you behind your back. Charles and that frightful Mrs van Dysart… What has happened between you and him? When you nearly died he couldn’t have been more worried if you’d been his own son… but now he is so cruel, and terribly unfair.’
‘Dear Viola, don’t worry. It’s only some game that Charles is playing, and I go along with him.’
‘Yes,’ she said, nodding. ‘He warned me. He said that you were both going to lay a smoke screen and that I was on no account to say a single word in your defence the whole weekend. But it wasn’t true, was it? When I saw your face, when Charles said that about your poor mother, I knew you didn’t know what he was going to do.’
‘Was it so obvious?’ I said ruefully. ‘Well, I promise you I haven’t quarrelled with him. Will you just be a dear and do exactly as he asked? Don’t say a single word to any of them about… um… the more successful bits of my life history, or about my job at the agency, or about the shooting. You didn’t today, did you, on the trip to Oxford?’ I finished with some anxiety.
She shook her head. ‘I thought I’d talk to you first.’
‘Good,’ I grinned.
‘Oh dear,’ she cried, partly in relief, partly in puzzlement. ‘Well in that case, Charles asked me to pop in and make sure you would come down to dinner.’
‘Oh he did, did he? Afraid I’ll throw a boot at him, I should think, after sending me out of the room like that. Well, you just pop back to Charles and say that I’ll come down to dinner on condition that he organises some chemmy afterwards, and includes me out.’
Dinner was a bit of a trial: with their smoked salmon and pheasant the guests enjoyed another round of Sid- baiting. Both the Krayes, egged on by Charles and the fluffy harpy beside him, had developed a pricking skill at this novel weekend parlour game, and I heartily wished Charles had never thought of it. However, he kept his side of the bargain by digging out the chemmy shoe, and after the coffee, the brandy, and another inspection of the dining- room quartz, he settled his guests firmly round the table in the drawing-room.
Upstairs, once the shoe was clicking regularly and the players were well involved, I went and collected Kraye’s attache case and took it along to my room.
Because I was never going to get another chance and did not want to miss something I might regret later, I photographed every single paper in the case. All the stockbroker’s letters and all the investment reports. All the share certificates, and also the two separate sheets under the writing board.
Although I had an ultra-bright light bulb and the exposure meter to help me to get the right setting, I took several pictures at different light values of the papers I considered the most important, in order to be sure of getting the sharpest possible result. The little camera handled beautifully, and I found I could change the films in their tiny cassettes without much difficulty. By the time I had finished I had used three whole films of twenty exposures on each. It took me a long time, as I had to put the camera down between each shot to move the next paper into my pool of light, and also had to be very careful not to alter the order in which the papers had lain in the case.
The envelope of ten pound notes kept me hoping like crazy that Howard Kraye would not lose heavily and come upstairs for replacements. It seemed to me at the time a ridiculous thing to do, but I took the two flat blocks of tenners out of the envelope, and photographed them as well. Putting them back I flipped through them: the notes were new, consecutive, fifty to a packet. One thousand pounds to a penny.
When everything was back in the case I sat looking at the contents for a minute, checking their position against my visual memory of how they looked when I first saw them. At last satisfied, I shut the case, locked it, rubbed it over to remove any finger marks I might have left, and put it back where I had found it.
After that I went downstairs to the dining-room for the brandy I had refused at dinner. I needed it. Carrying the glass, I listened briefly outside the drawing-room door to the murmurs and clicks from within and went upstairs again, to bed.
Lying in the dark I reviewed the situation. Howard Kraye, drawn by the bait of a quartz collection, had accepted an invitation to a quiet weekend in the country with a retired admiral. With him he had brought a selection of private papers. As he had no possible reason to imagine that anyone in such innocent surroundings would spy on him, the papers might be very private indeed. So private that he felt safest when they were with him? Too private
