head, receiver glued to one ear and finger stuck in the other, was a large bald-headed man with half-moon spectacles sitting half way down a prominent nose. As always, he was in his shirt sleeves, teamed with a frayed pullover and baggy grey flannels. No tie. He seemed to have an inexhaustible supply of old clothes but never any new ones, and Jones-boy had a theory that his wife dressed him from jumble sales.
I waited until he had finished a long conversation with a managing director about the character of the proposed production manager of a glass factory. The invaluable thing about Jack Copeland was his quick and comprehensive grasp of what dozens of jobs entailed. He was speaking to the glass manufacturer as if he had grown up in the industry: and in five minutes, I knew, he might be advising just as knowledgeably on the suitability of a town clerk. His summing up of a man went far beyond the basic list of honesty, conscientiousness, normality and prudence, which was all that many employers wanted. He liked to discover his subject’s reaction under stress, to find out what he disliked doing, and what he often forgot. The resulting footnotes to his reports were usually the most valuable part of them, and the faith large numbers of industrial firms had in him bore witness to his accuracy.
He wielded enormous power but did not seem conscious of it, which made him much liked. After Radnor, he was the most important person in the agency.
‘Jack,’ I said, as he put down the receiver. ‘Can you check a man for me, please?’
‘What’s wrong with the Racing Section, pal?’ he said, jerking his thumb towards the floor.
‘He isn’t a racing person.’
‘Oh? Who is it?’
‘A Howard Kraye. I don’t know if he has a profession. He speculates on the stock market. He is a rabid collector of quartz.’ I added Kraye’s London address.
He scribbled it all down fast.
‘O.K., Sid. I’ll put one of the boys on to it and let you have a prelim. Is it urgent?’
‘Fairly.’
‘Right.’ He tore the sheet off the pad. ‘George? You still doing that knitting wool client’s report? When you’ve finished, here’s your next one.’
‘George,’ I said. ‘Be careful.’
They both looked at me, suddenly still.
‘An unexploded bomb,’ I observed. ‘Don’t set him off.’
George said cheerfully, ‘Makes a nice change from knitting wool. Don’t worry, Sid. I’ll walk on eggs.’
Jack Copeland peered at me closely through the half specs.
‘You’ve cleared it with the old man, I suppose?’
‘Yes.’ I nodded. ‘It’s a query fraud. He said to check with him if you wanted to.’
He smiled briefly. ‘No need, I guess. Is that all then?’
‘For the moment, yes, thanks.’
‘Just for the record, is this your own show, or Dolly’s, or whose?’
‘I suppose… mine.’
‘Uh-huh,’ he said, accenting the second syllable. ‘The wind of change, if I read it right?’
I laughed. ‘You never know.’
Down in the Racing Section I found Dolly supervising the reshuffling of the furniture. I asked what was going on, and she gave me a flashing smile.
‘It seems you’re in, not out. The old man just rang to say you needed somewhere to work, and I’ve sent Jones-boy upstairs to pinch a table from Missing Persons. That’ll do for now, won’t it? There isn’t a spare desk in the place.’
A series of bangs from outside heralded the return of Jones-boy, complete with a spindly plywood affair in a sickly lemon colour. ‘How that lot ever find a missing person I’ll never know. I bet they don’t even find their missing junk.’
He disappeared and came back shortly with a chair.
‘The things I do for you!’ he said, setting it down in front of me. ‘A dim little bird in the typing pool is now squatting on a stool. I chatted her up a bit.’
‘What this place needs
‘Don’t be funny,’ said Dolly. ‘Every time the old man buys one desk he takes on two assistants. When I first came here fifteen years ago we had a whole room each, believe it or not…’
The rearranged office settled down again, with my table wedged into a corner next to Dolly’s desk. I sat behind it and spread out the photographs to sort them. The people who developed and printed all the agency’s work had come up with their usual excellent job, and it amazed me that they had been able to enlarge the tiny negatives up to nine by seven inch prints, and get a clearly readable result.
I picked out all the fuzzy ones, the duplicates at the wrong exposures, tore them up, and put the pieces in Dolly’s waste paper basket. That left me with fifty-one pictures of the contents of Kraye’s attache cash. Innocent enough to the casual eye, but they turned out to be dynamite.
The two largest piles, when I had sorted them out, were Seabury share transfer certificates, and letters from Kraye’s stockbroker. The paper headed S.R. revealed itself to be a summary in simple form of the share certificates, so I added it to that pile. I was left with the photographs of the bank notes, of share dealings which had nothing to do with Seabury, and the two sheets of figures I had found under the writing board at the bottom of the case.
I read through all the letters from the stockbroker, a man called Ellis Bolt, who belonged to a firm known as Charing, Street and King. Bolt and Kraye were on friendly terms; the letters referred sometimes to social occasions on which they had met; but for the most part the typewritten sheets dealt with the availability and prospects of various shares (including Seabury), purchases made or proposed, and references to tax, stamp duty, and commission.
Two letters had been written in Bolt’s own hand. The first, dated ten days ago, said briefly:
Dear H.
Shall wait with interest for the news on Friday.
E
The second, which Kraye must have received on the morning he went to Aynsford, read:
Dear H.
I have put the final draft in the hands of the printers, and the leaflets should be out by the end of next week, or the Tuesday following at the latest. Two or three days before the next meeting, anyway. That should do it, I think. There would be a lot of unrest should there be another hitch, but surely you will see to that.
E
‘Dolly,’ I said. ‘May I borrow your phone?’
‘Help yourself.’
I rang upstairs to Bona Fides. ‘Jack? Can I have a run-down on another man as well? Ellis Bolt, stockbroker, works for a firm called Charing, Street and King.’ I gave him the address. ‘He’s a friend of Kraye’s. Same care needed, I’m afraid.’
‘Right. I’ll let you know.’
I sat staring down at the two harmless looking letters.
‘Shall wait with interest for the news on Friday’. It could mean any news, anything at all. It also could mean the News; and on the radio on Friday I had heard that Seabury Races were off because a lorry carrying chemicals had overturned and burned the turf.
The second letter was just as tricky. It could easily refer to a shareholders’ meeting at which a hitch should be avoided at all costs. Or it could refer to a race meeting — at Seabury — where another hitch could affect the sale of shares yet again.
It was like looking at a conjuring trick: from one side you saw a normal object, but from the other, a sham.
If it were a sham, Mr Ellis Bolt was in a criminal career up to his eyebrows. If it was just my suspicious mind
