'I am indeed.'
'As well as the Steyning heir?'
'Is that so incredible to you?'
'It's one hell of a coincidence.'
The Minister shook his head. 'Not really. The Parrotts and the Steynings were related and they had a common heir who married a Ratcliffe, that's all. Unfortunately for us there isn't a shadow of doubt about the descent either; because although the Ratcliffes have managed to lose practically every acre they inherited, with the sole exception of the land on which Standingham Castle stands, they've never failed to produce a male heir, right down to Charles Neville, who is literally the last of the line. With no pretenders and no rival claimants.'
No pretenders and no claimants—and no arguments, thought Audley. Charlie Ratcliffe could hardly be better placed if he had struck oil, not gold: he himself, unaided, had found his own property on his own land.
'The last of the Ratcliffes,' repeated the Minister, 'and now the richest. And consequently the most dangerous.' He lifted his hand to adjust his horn-rimmed spectacles on his nose.
'And there is apparently absolutely nothing we can do about it. As things stand the coroner's inquest will be a mere dummy5
formality, so it seems. And that's just two weeks from today.'
Audley looked very carefully from one serious face to the other. If what the Minister had said was true, literally true, he knew exactly what the Minister meant.
Only in England ... in Britain . . . here was a Minister of the Crown, holding one of the most powerful posts in the Government, and a very senior Civil Servant, one of the most senior officers of the security service, explaining to him the niceties of a three-hundred-year-old inheritance and their inability to control its fate.
There is absolutely nothing we can do about it and we're running out of time.
It could only happen in Britain. Or maybe in the United States, for all the scandals of recent years (perhaps even because of them!). And, to be absolutely fair, perhaps still in one or two of the other Western democracies. . . .
Only in the West, then—the West which Charlie and his kind hated and despised—only there would Charlie and his inheritance present any problem whatsoever. Elsewhere another minister would only have to nod, and another civil servant would take the nod and pass it down the line to someone whose job it was to translate ministerial nods into executive actions for the Good of the State.
But not this Minister, not this Civil Servant. Nor this State, thank God!
And the proof of that, if any proof beyond his own judgement dummy5
was needed, was that they would never have come to him to get their problem solved. He was even less skilled at committing murders than he was at solving them.
So what the devil did they want, then?
'Dr. Audley.' The Minister's voice was sharp suddenly.
'Minister?' Audley realised he had been looking clear through the Minister.
'If you're thinking what you may be thinking, then don't.
There's to be no killing.'
'Sir—' Stocker bristled defensively.
'It's all right, Brigadier.' Stocker's reaction defused Audley's anger before it had had time to spark. 'You do yourself an injustice as well as us, Minister. So perhaps we'd better get back to your problem . . . and I would have thought the law was still your best bet there. Better than me, anyway.'
The Minister sat in silence for a moment, as though slightly confused by the reactions he had stirred. 'The law?'
'The law's delay, more accurately. There has to be a fuzzy edge to it somewhere—enough to hold things up, anyway. If you want to stop Ratcliffe getting his hands on ready cash ...
Is that the object of the operation?'
'It is, yes.'
'And do I get to know why?'
The Minister shook his head slowly. 'You don't need to know that, Dr. Audley. Let's just say Ratcliffe can cause all kinds of dummy5
trouble with it on a scale we can't handle at this moment.'
'Then I would have thought someone would have already supplied him with the necessary funds.'
'But everyone would have known where they came from then. And that would have compromised him totally.' The head went on shaking slowly. 'The whole trouble with this money is that it's . . . shall we say, respectable?'
Point taken. In revolutionary circles Russian gold and Chinese gold—even at a pinch Libyan gold—was tainted. But Cromwell's gold had been purified by three hundred years in the ground.
'I see. . . .' Audley pursed his lips. 'Well, in that case I'd let the Spaniards contest it. You don't need to give it to them—
you can argue against them publicly. But you can use them to delay the pay-out.'
'Of course we can. But you're forgetting your basic economics; we can delay the pay-out in a hundred and one ways, nothing easier. What we can't affect is the credit. And at this moment Charlie's credit is as solid as a rock in
