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 paid.

"Does he like balloons?" he asked, his eyebrows rising.

"He gets frustrated sometimes. I blow the balloons up, and he bursts them."

Malcolm looked surprised and in some ways disturbed. "I didn't know he could feel frustration."

"it seems like that. As if sometimes he half remembers us… but can't quite."

"Poor boy."

We drove soberly onwards and up the drive of the still splendid- looking Georgian house which lay mellow and symmetrical in the autumn sunshine. Inside, its near fifty rooms had been adapted and transformed in the heyday of private medicine into a highly comfortable hospital for mostly chronic, mostly old, mostly rich patients. Short-stay patients came and went, usually convalescing after major operations performed elsewhere, but in general one saw the same faces month after month: the same faces ageing, suffering, waiting for release. Dreadfully depressing, I found it, but for Robin, it was true, it seemed the perfect haven, arrived at after two unsuccessful stays in more apparently suitable homes involving other children, bright colours, breezy nurses and jollying atmospheres. Robin seemed better with peace, quiet and no demands, and Malcolm had finally acted against professional advice to give them to him.

Robin had a large room on the ground floor with french doors opening on to a walled garden. He seldom went out into the garden, but he preferred the doors open in all weathers, including snow- storms. Apart from that, he was docile and easy to deal with, and if anyone had speculated on the upheavals that might happen soon if puberty took its natural course, they hadn't mentioned it in my hearing.

He looked at us blankly, as usual. He seldom spoke, though he did retain the ability to make words: it was just that he seemed to have few thoughts to utter. Brain damage of that magnitude was idiosyncratic, we'd been told, resulting in behaviour individual to each victim. Robin spoke rarely and then only to himself, in private, when he didn't expect to be overheard: the nurses sometimes heard him, and had told us, but said he stopped as soon as he saw them. I'd asked them what he said, but they didn't know, except for words like "shoes" and "bread" and "floor": ordinary words. They didn't know why he wouldn't speak at other times. They were sure, though, that he understood a fair amount of what others said, even if in a haze.

We gave him some pieces of chocolate which he ate, and unwrapped the toys for him which he fingered but didn't play with. He looked at the balloon packet without emotion. It wasn't a frustration day: on those, he looked at the packet and made blowing noises with his mouth.