"You regularly go out for half an hour at this time. And how many Of the family still have keys to the house?"

He was silent. All of the people who had ever lived there could have kept their keys to the house, and there had never been any need, before now, to change the locks.

"Stay here, then?" I asked, and he nodded sadly.

The kitchen door was still locked. I let myself in and went all through the house again, but it was quiet and undisturbed, and doors that I'd set open at certain angles were still as I'd left them.

I called Malcolm and he came into the kitchen and began getting the food for the dogs.

"Are you going through this checking rigmarole every single time we leave the house?" he said, sounding as if he didn't like it.

"Yes, until we get the locks changed."

He didn't like that either, but expressed his disapproval only in a frown and a rather too vigorous scraping of dog food out of a tin.

"Fill the water bowls," he said rather crossly, and I did that and set them down again on the floor.

"It isn't so easy to change the locks," he said. "They're all mortice locks, as you know, set into the doors. The one on the front door is antique."

The front door keys were six inches long and ornate, and there had never been more than three of them, as far as I knew.

"All right," I said. "If we keep the front door bolted and the keys in your safe, we won't change that one."

A little pacified, he put the filled dinner bowls on the floor, wiped his fingers and said it was time for a noggin. I bolted the kitchen door on the inside and then followed him through the hall to the office, where he poured scotch into two glasses and asked if I wanted to desecrate mine with ice. I said yes and went back to the kitchen to fetch some. When I returned, he had taken some sheets of paper from his open briefcase and was reading them.

"Here you are. Here's my will," he said, and passed the papers over.

He had made the will, I reflected, before he had telephoned me to put an end to our quarrel, and I expected not to figure in it in consequence, but I'd done him an injustice. Sitting in an armchair and sipping the whisky, I read through all the minor bequests to people like Arthur Bellbrook, and all the lawyerly gobbledegook "upon trust" and without commas, and came finally to the plain language.

"To each of my three divorced wives Vivien Joyce and Alicia I bequeath the sum of five hundred thousand pounds.

"My son Robin being provided for I direct that the residue of my estate shall be divided equally among my children Donald Lucy Thomas Gervase Ian Ferdinand and Serena."

A long clause followed with provisions for "if any of my children shall pre-decease me", leaving "his or her share" to the grandchildren.

Finally came two short sentences:

"I bequeath to my son Ian the piece of thin wire to be found on my desk. He knows what he can do with it."

Surprised and more moved than I could say, I looked up from the last page and saw the smile in Malcolm's eyes deepen to a throaty chuckle.

"The lawyer chap thought the last sentence quite obscene. He said I shouldn't put that sort of thing in a will."

I laughed. "I didn't expect to be in your will at all."

"Well…" He shrugged. "I'd never have left you out. I've regretted for a long while… hitting you… everything."

"Guess I deserved it."

"Yes, at the time."

I turned back to the beginning of the document and re-read one of the preliminary paragraphs. In it, he had named me as his sole executor, when I was only his fifth child.

"Why me?" I said.

"Don't you want to?"

"Yes. I'm honoured."

"The lawyer said to name someone I trusted." He smiled lopsidedly. "You got elected."

He stretched out an arm and picked up from his desk a leather pot holding pens and pencils. From it, he pulled a wire about ten inches long and about double the thickness, of the sort used by florists for stiffening flower stalks.

"If this one should get lost," he said, "just find another."

"Yes. All right."

"Good." He put the wire back in the pot and the pot back in the desk.

"By the time you pop off," I said, "the price of gold might have risen out of sight and all I'd find in the wall would be spiders."

"Yeah, too bad."

I felt more at one with him than at any time since he'd telephoned, and perhaps he with me. I hoped it would be a very long time before I would have to execute his will.

"Gervase," I said, "suggests that you should distribute some of your money now, toer… reduce the estate tax."

"Does he? And what do you think?"

"I think," I said, "that giving it to the family instead of to scholarships and film companies and so on might save your life."

The blue eyes opened wide. "That's immoral."

"Pragmatic."

"I'll think about it."

We dined on the caviar, but the fun seemed to have gone out of it.

"Let's have shepherd's pie tomorrow," Malcolm said. "There's plenty in the freezer."

We spent the next two days uneventfully at Quantum being careful, but with no proof that care was needed.

Late on Tuesday afternoon, out with the dogs and having made certain that Arthur Bellbrook had gone home, we walked round behind the kitchen wall and came to the treasure house.

A veritable sea of nettles guarded the door. Malcolm looked at them blankly. "The damn things grow overnight."

I pulled my socks over the bottoms of my trousers and assayed the traverse; stamped down an area by the bottom of the door and with fingers all the same stinging felt along to one end of the wooden sill and with some effort tugged it out. Malcolm leaned forward and gave me the piece of wire, and watched while I stood up and located the almost invisible hole. The wire slid through the tiny tube built into the mortar and, under pressure, the latch inside operated as smoothly as it had when I'd installed it. The wire dislodged a metal rod out of a slot, allowing the latch to spring open.

"I oiled it," Malcolm said. "The first time I tried, it was as rusty as hell."

I pushed the edge of the heavy narrow door and it opened inwards, its crenellated edges disengaging from the brick courses on each side with faint grating noises but with no pieces breaking off.

"You built it well," Malcolm said. "Good mortar."

"You told me how to mix the mortar, if you remember."

I stepped into the small brick room which was barely four feet across at the far end and about eight feet long, narrowing in a wedge-shape towards the door which was set into one of the long walls. The wider end wall was stacked to waist height with flat wooden boxes like those used for chateau-bottled wines. In front, there were two large cardboard boxes with heavily taped-down tops. I stepped further in and tried to open one of the wine-type boxes, but those were nailed shut. I turned round and took a couple of steps back and stood in the doorway, looking out.

"Gold at the back, treasures in front," Malcolm said, watching me with interest.

"I'll take your word for it."

The air in the triangular room smelled faintly musty. There was no ventilation, as I'd told Arthur Bellbrook, and no damp course, either. I reset the rod into the latch on the inside as it wouldn't shut unless one did, and stepped outside. My teenage design limitations meant that one had to go down on one's knees to close the door the last few inches, hooking one's fingers into a hollow under the bottom row of bricks and pulling hard. The door and walls fitted together again like pieces of jigsaw, and the latch inside clicked into place. I replaced the sill under the door, kicking it home, and tried to encourage the crushed nettles to stand up again.

"They'll be flourishing again by morning," Malcolm said. "Rotten things."

"Those cardboard boxes are too big to come out through the door," I observed, rubbing stings on my hands and wrists.