It was therefore extremely gratifying for Dover to see that Sir Egbert was already priming the old digestive processes with a large scotch. Such, indeed, was Dover’s elation that he covered the fifty yards or so of ankle-clinging carpet which led to the tycoon’s desk without more than a faint whisper of protest.
MacGregor, on the other hand, was taking an intelligent interest in his sur-oundings. Although too young to remember the real thing, he had seen ‘The Great Dictator’ a couple of times on telly and fancied he knew what he was up against. Sir Egbert looked slightly more like Benito Mussolini than Charlie Chaplin, but he was clearly one of those financial giants, whose inferiority complexes even come king-sized.
Having reached the end of the long march, Dover and MacGregor lowered themselves into a couple of leather armchairs, the subservient height of which had been meticulously calculated by a whole clutch of psychologists.
‘Drink?’
Dover accepted with alacrity, both ignorant of and indifferent to the fact that this was merely a ploy designed by experts to put him under an inhibiting sense of obligation to his host. MacGregor primly refused to be bought so cheaply.
Sir Egbert opened his case by denying, quite categorically, that there was any connection whatsoever between Rankin’s Holiday Ranches and the little blue bead which had been removed from the dead man’s stomach.
MacGregor pointed out that certain basic facts would be easy enough to verify.
‘H’all right, h’all right!’ said Sir Egbert, abandoning his determination to fight this thing every inch of the way. ‘So it looks like one of h’ours. That don’t prove a blind thing.’
MacGregor, who’d never experienced any difficulty with his aspirates, became a touch patronising. Good heavens, Sir Egbert was nothing but a Philistine. What had he got apart from money? ‘Oh, come along now, sir,’ he twitted him gently. ‘If it looks like one of your Holiday Ranch tokens, it must be one, mustn’t it? Nobody’s likely to be going around imitating them, are they?’
‘That shows you know bugger-all about it!’ retorted Sir Egbert. He knew – none better – all about sergeants and where they came in the pecking order. It was a pity that this snooty little bastard didn’t. ‘H’imitate ’em is just what folks do. All the bleeding time. Forgers?’ He picked the blue bead up off his desk – ormolu and the size of a tennis court. ‘If we didn’t ’ave this Funny Money stuff manufactured to the ’ighest possible standards and run security checks like the Bank of England, we’d ’ave the world and his wife and ’is kids skinning the life out of us.’
‘But these tokens can only be used in your holiday camps.’
‘’Oliday Ranches!’ corrected Sir Egbert irritably. ‘So what makes you think our clientele are different? They’d all take me to the cleaners if I didn’t spend a fortune making it too difficult for ’em. We change the design and the colour and the size every year. And we give each ’Oliday Ranch its own individual set. The expense! We issue a complete new range of Funny Money every Easter, and by September there’s ’alf-a-dozen crooked bastards flooding the market with their ’ome-made stuff. Anybody who can get his hands on a bit of plastic the right colour’ll have a go. H’it makes you wonder if there’s anybody honest left in the world.’
MacGregor singled out the one bit of this rigmarole which was of interest to him. ‘Do you mean,’ he said, narrowing his eyes in a way that would have had Dover rolling in the aisles if he’d noticed, ‘that you can pin point when and where this blue bead was in use as Funny Money?’
‘Ah!’ said Sir Egbert, relaxing now that they’d reached the wheeler-dealer stage. ‘It’ll cost you.’
‘Cost us?’
‘You play ball with me and I’ll play ball with you,’ said Sir Egbert, not realising that he was nodding at a blind horse that wouldn’t drink.
‘I’m afraid I don’t understand what you mean, sir.’
Sir Egbert s smile wavered as he was forced to spell things out. ‘No publicity,’ he explained. ‘Stomachs, corpses, pile of rubbish – that’s not the image we want our ’Oliday Ranches to project. You know what stupid bastards people are. Give ’em a story like that and they’ll think we choked the poor sod to death. And then they’ll decide to give Rankin’s ’Oliday Ranches a miss this year. Believe me, I’ve seen it all before. If we don’t make like Caesar’s wife, it starts showing up in the books.’
MacGregor, being paid by the long-suffering tax payer, took a somewhat Olympian view of the trials and tribulations of the market place. ‘I’m afraid we have no control over the news media, sir,’ he said. ‘Besides, I thought any publicity was good publicity.’
‘If it was,’ Sir Egbert observed sourly, ‘we’d be marketing a rat poison called Rankin, wouldn’t we?’
Dover belched loudly in his chair. His glass was empty and his eyes were glazed. Both MacGregor and Sir Egbert stared a little anxiously at him. Dover pulled himself together. ‘Well, lesh get on with it!’ he exhorted them crossly.
Sir Egbert decided not to hang about. The whisky he kept specially for his guests was cheap and nasty, but extremely potent. Some people had even experienced temporary blindness after imbibing a mere soup^on over the recommended dose. Sir Egbert got up from his desk and went across to open the huge wall safe he kept concealed behind a rather second rate Giotto.
The various models of Funny Money were preserved in sealed trays of transparent plastic, labelled carefully and meticulously in Sir Egbert’s own fair hand. After all, these coloured beads did represent real money and Sir Egbert liked to think he’d made it from demob suit to Savile Row in two years flat simply
