thousand pounds of his own money, and the only thing left for which he could feel any affection. The Lamborghini was as efficient as he was, its lines, like his own, dictated by the end for which it was created. But it was also a splendid thing to own. Expensive, illogical, flamboyant, and splendid. It made him happy. He got in, tossed the bowler hat behind him, and turned the key. The engine exploded into life, then modulated at once into the most superb of all mechanical sounds, the whisper of perfectly controlled power. Craig eased her out into the mews, locked the garage, then set off for Surrey. The best part. Where even the temperature of the rain is thermostatically controlled.
Simmons had quite a lot of space in
He'd heard already how he had made his money. That had started with his father. The Rev. Percy Simmons had been an unabashed hell-fire Baptist during the earlier part of his life. His visions of hell, described graphically and at length, had drawn enormous crowds three times every Sunday. That was in the 1880's, when hell still smelled of sulfur and northern congregations knew how to groan. A jobbing printer had approached the young, brazen-tongued reverend with the idea of printing his sermons, and a great career was born. The minister found he had another talent, another duty, besides that of preparing devout and quivering Yorkshiremen for the imminence of hell. He could publish—and prepare—the whole world, or at least that part of it which could read the English language. He started with
When World War I came, Simmons combined religion with patriotism, and his readers in the trenches found that his vision of hell was by no means exaggerated. After that war, the Christianity slowly but surely diminished but the patriotism stuck. Simmons gloried in his Englishness, and persuaded a lot of other people to glory in it too. It was what God had set him to do, and it paid a six per cent dividend. In 1921 at the age of sixty, he'd made a million and discovered he had no one to share it with, so he married a lady missionary who bore him Christopher Galahad (the latter name was her idea; she read a lot of Tennyson) and died when the child was three. Christopher had been sent to public school and Cambridge, though his old man had prayed at him for a solid hour every day of every vacation. He'd been destined to help his father when he was twenty-one, but the war stopped that. After five terms at Cambridge, at the age of nineteen, he became a cadet at Sandhurst. By 1942, on his twenty-first birthday, he was on a mission to Tito in Yugoslavia. When the war ended he was twenty-five, with the substantive rank of major. He never went back to the university, though they gave him an honorary doctorate after he built them a new college; instead, he went to help his father, then eighty-four, who was running the firm on an unrelieved diet of Union Jacks and brimstone. The old man dropped dead quite suddenly in the late summer of 1945—Loomis said it was because Labour won the election.
Christopher Galahad took over at once as chairman of the company, and within a year was managing director too. He had all of his father's canni-ness and drive, and a shrewdness for handling nicely calculated odds that slithering about the Balkans two jumps ahead of the Gestapo had honed to a very fine edge indeed. He was Britain's leading expert on the technique of making money out of the printed and spoken word. In 1946 he married the daughter of a sporting peer, and she promptly bore him a daughter, then died on the hunting field when the child was six months old. He never went near a place of worship.
9
Craig fumbled his way among the houses of the fairly rich—'two minutes from station, superior view'—to the stone-walled estates of the very rich indeed. Here the road spiraled gently around the curves of the downs, and copses and spinneys of firs were a black drama of lances against a blue pastel sky. Here the grass was short and plentiful, apt for the hooves of superior horses, and villages hid their lack of wealth discreetly, between folds of the smooth, expensive hills. The Lamborghini became more and more the right car to be driving; a Bentley would have been cowardly.
He found the place at last. About four miles of flintstone wall, pierced by lodge gates with a pretty eighteenth-century cottage at the side. He slowed as he turned into the gates, but the lodgekeeper took one look at the car and waved him on, through a mile of elm trees to a house designed during Queen Anne's reign by a pupil of Christopher Wren; a plain, neat rectangle of a house, flanked by identical wings, its brick faded to an enduring rose, its portico unpretentious, its chimney stacks slim and austere—a house entirely beautiful
because of the perfection of its proportions. He drove on to a graveled area, flanked by barbered lawn, and heard the whoosh of stones beneath his racing tires. Five other cars stood on the graveled area: two Rolls Royces, a Mercedes 800, a Ferrari, and a little Alfa-Romeo; there was plenty of room for the Lamborghini.
Craig retrieved his bowler, settled it at the right angle, then took up his briefcase and umbrella. It was time to pay his respects to Mammon. As he slammed the Lamborghini's door the whole scene seemed to freeze; himself with a ten-guinea bowler standing beside a five-thousand-pound automobile, with a quarter of a million pound's real estate as background. It looked like a whisky ad in a Sunday supplement. And then he remembered the night when he and his father had been out in the coble and the mackerel had run with the crazy death wish of which only mackerel are capable, so that the boat was heaped with the graceful shapes of fish, urgent even in death, that the moonlight had turned to a pale-winking silver, and his father's voice had said: 'There's a fortune here, Jackie lad. A fortune.' And he'd been able to do no more than nod, he was so bone-weary, but when they reached the little Tyneside port, every fish had had to be gutted and boxed and packed in ice. Then his father had had to carry him home on his shoulders, and he felt so marvelous—tired as he was—it was like riding between the stars. His father's share of the fortune had been four pounds thirteen and ninepence—and mackerel for a week.
The memory came sharp and clear, and Craig dismissed it, erasing it from his mind like a sponge erases the writing from a blackboard. That kind of thing took your mind from the job in hand; it made you vulnerable. He walked across the gravel toward the broad, shallow flight of steps that led to the house, and already a man was there, waiting for him. Craig felt a swift flash of disgust with himself; if he hadn't been standing daydreaming he'd have been ready for this man, instead of being watched by him.
He was a man to be ready for: taller than Craig's six feet, wide-shouldered, barrel-chested, but with an economy of movement that made Craig think of a mountaineer he had known in Crete. There was the same combination of tremendous strength and physical control. This man wore striped gray trousers, a short black coat, a black -and-silver tie. His face was round but without weakness, the cheekbones set rather high, the eyes very dark. A face rather Slav than Teuton, but without the usual free play of Slav emotion. It was the face of a man who would treat cruelty and kindness with equal indifference.
Craig said: 'Miss Simmons, please.'
The man said: 'I will inquire, sir. What name shall I give?'
'John Craig.'
He could have said: 'Tell her we met in the Lake District. I inquired into the death of the Chinaman.' Or even: 'I've come to make further enquiries.' But his name alone was better—if she remembered.
The butler opened the great half-door behind him and Craig walked into a hall floored in black and white marble, and furnished with the kind of
wealth going shabby that only utter certainty of riches can afford. The picture over the mantelpiece needed cleaning, but it was by Van Dyck; the breakfront table had a scar on it, but Sheraton had made it. And the whole place was littered with coats, a fencing mask, two shotguns in a case, and a pile of
