to him now adult to adult, and know him as a man, not as a father. We spent a peaceful evening together in the suite, talking about what we'd each done during the hiatus, and it was difficult to imagine that outside, somewhere, a predator might be searching for the prey.
At one point I said, 'You gave Joyce's telephone number on purpose to the film man, didn't you? And Gervase's number to the retarded- children lady? You wanted me with you to see you buy the colt… You made sure that the family knew all about your monster outlays as soon as possible, didn't you?'
'Huh,' he said briefly, which after a moment I took as admission. One misdirected telephone call had been fairly possible: two stretched credibility too far.
'Thomas and Berenice,' I said, 'were pretty frantic over some little adventure of yours. What did you do to stir them up?'
'How the hell do you know all this?'
I smiled and fetched the cassette player and re-ran for him the message tape from my telephone. He listened grimly but with an undercurrent of amusement to Serena, Gervase and Joyce and then read Thomas's letter and when he reached Thomas's intense closing appeal I waited for explosions.
They didn't come. He said wryly, 'I suppose they're what I made them.'
'No,' I said.
'Why not?'
'Personality is mysterious, but it's born in you, not made.'
'But it can be brainwashed.'
'Yes, OK,' I said. 'But you didn't do it.'
'Vivien and Alicia did… because of me.'
'Don't wallow in guilt so much. It isn't like you.'
He grinned. 'I don't feel guilty, actually.'
Joyce, I thought, had at least played fair. A screaming fury she might have been on the subject of Alicia, but she'd never tried to set me against Malcolm. She had agreed in the divorce settlement when I was six that he should have custody of me: she wasn't basically maternal, and infrequent visits from her growing son were all she required. She'd never made great efforts to bind me to her, and it had always been clear to me that she was relieved every time at my departure. Her life consisted of playing, teaching, and writing about bridge, a game she played to international tournament standard, and she was often abroad. My visits had always disrupted the acute concentration she needed for winning, and as winning gave her the prestige essential for lecture tours and magazine articles, I had more often raised impatience in her than comradeship, a feeling she had dutifully tried to stifle.
She had given me unending packs of cards to play with and had taught me a dozen card games, but I'd never had her razor memory of any and every card played in any and every game, a perpetual disappointment to her and a matter for impatience in itself. When I veered off to make my life in a totally different branch of the entertainment industry, she had been astonished at my choice and at first scornful, but had soon come round to checking the racing pages during the steeplechase season to see if I was listed as riding.
'What did you tell Thomas and Berenice?' I asked Malcolm again, after a pause.
With satisfaction he said, 'I absentmindedly gave their telephone number to a wine merchant who was to let me know the total I owed him for the fifty or so cases of 1979 Pol Roger he was collecting for me to drink.'
'And, er, roughly how much would that cost?'
'The 1979, the Winston Churchill vintage, is quite exceptional, you know.'
'Of course it would be,' I said.
'Roughly twenty-five thousand pounds, then, for fifty cases.'
Poor Thomas, I thought.
'I also made sure that Alicia knew I'd given about a quarter of a million pounds to fund scholarships for bright girls at the school Serena went to. Alicia and I haven't been talking recently. I suppose she's furious I gave it to the school and not to Serena herself.'
'Well, why did you?'
He looked surprised. 'You know my views. You must all carve your own way. To make you all rich too young would rob you of incentive.'
I certainly did know his views, but I wasn't sure I always agreed with them. I would have had bags of incentive to make a success of being a racehorse trainer if he'd lent, advanced or given me enough to start, but I also knew that if he did, he'd have to do as much for the others (being ordinarily a fair man), and he didn't believe in it, as he said.
'Why did you want them all to know how much you've been spending?' I asked. 'Because of course they all will know by now. The telephone wires will have been red hot.'
'I suppose I thought… um… if they believed I was getting rid of most of it there would be less point in killing me… do you see?'
I stared at him. 'You must be crazy,' I said. 'It sounds to me like an invitation to be murdered without delay.'
'Ah well, that too has occurred to me of late.' He smiled vividly. 'But I have you with me now to prevent that.'
After a speechless moment I said, 'I may not always be able to see the speeding car.'
'I'll trust your eyesight.'
I pondered. 'What else have you spent a bundle on, that I haven't heard about?'
He drank some champagne and frowned, and I guessed that he was trying to decide whether or not to tell me. Finally he sighed and said, 'This is for your ears only. I didn't do it for the same reason, and I did it earlier… several weeks ago, in fact, before Moira was murdered.' He paused. 'She was angry about it, though she'd no right to be. It wasn't her money. She hated me to give anything to anyone else. She wanted everything for herself.' He sighed. 'I don't know how you knew right from the beginning what she was like.'
'Her calculator eyes,' I said.
He smiled ruefully. He must have seen that look perpetually, by the end.
'The nursing home where Robin is,' he said unexpectedly, 'needed repairs. So I paid for them.'
He wasn't talking, I gathered, in terms of a couple of replaced window-frames.
'Of course, you know it's a private nursing home?' he said. 'A family business, basically.'
'Yes.'
'They needed a new roof. New wiring. A dozen urgent upgradings. They tried raising the residential fees too high and lost patients, familiar story. They asked my advice about fund-raising. I told them not to bother. I'd get estimates, and all I'd want in return was that they'd listen to a good business consultant who I'd send them.' He shifted comfortably in his armchair. 'Robin's settled there. Calm. Any change upsets him, as you know. If the whole place closed and went out of business, which was all too likely, I'd have to find somewhere else for him, and he's lost enough…'
His voice tapered off. He had delighted in Robin and Peter when they'd been small, playing with them on the carpet like a young father, proud of them as if they were his first children, not his eighth and ninth. Good memories: worth a new roof.
'I know you still go to visit him,' he said. The nurses tell me. So you must have seen the place growing threadbare.'
I nodded, thinking about it. 'They used to have huge vases of fresh flowers everywhere.'
'They used to have top quality everything, but they've had to compromise to Patch up the building. Country houses are open money drains when they age. I can't see the place outliving Robin, really. You will look after him, when I've gone?'
'Yes,' I said.
He nodded, taking it for granted. 'I appointed you his trustee when I set up the fund for him, do you remember? I've not altered it.'
I was glad that he hadn't. At least, somewhere, obscurely, things had remained the same between us.
'Why don't we go and see him tomorrow?' he said. 'No one will kill me there.'
'All right,' I agreed: so we went in the hired car in the morning, stopping in the local town to buy presents of chocolate and simple toys designed for three-year-olds, and I added a packet of balloons to the pile while Malcolm
