'Twice, now.'

'So it is. Take it as a mark of my esteem.'

She leaned over and kissed me very gently on the forehead, then I saw her swiftly brush a tear from her eye. 'Good luck, my friend.'

I kissed her on the cheek, and left. I felt utterly exhausted. I should have been preoccupied with the fate of empires and the fortunes of the mighty. Instead, the only image in my mind was of a beautiful young woman crying her eyes out.

CHAPTER 18

The next day I went as soon as it was polite to see Sir Edward Merson, Her Majesty's Ambassador to France. I was fairly certain it would be a waste of time, but I had been close to British civil servants long enough to realise that it is necessary to cover all possibilities, to stop up all routes by which blame can come and attach itself. Should everything end badly – and I thought it might well – a failure on my part to alert the British Embassy would undoubtedly become the reason why everything went wrong.

A strange morning, as it turned out, an island of tranquillity in the midst of the chaos that was surrounding me. Sir Edward was not there – it was the hunting season, and he was not a man to allow business to get between him and a quail. So I left a message, then, feeling unsure of what to do next, wandered into the nearby English church where all the English expatriates (except me) gathered as a matter of course every Sunday to listen to the Word of God and breathe in the aroma of the Home Counties. It was like stepping into a different world. The church was a perfect imitation of an English Gothic building, as reinterpreted by people like my own father in the past fifty years. I sat through the entire service, the first time I had done such a thing in many years. My father may have rebuilt the odd church, but he had only rarely gone into them for other than professional reasons. The Campbells were dutiful in their religion and took me along to St Mary's Bayswater every Sunday, but were hardly exuberant in their religiosity. And school chapel, twenty minutes of prayer, hymn, lecture, every morning, was such a commonplace that I think most of the boys there were entirely unaware that it had any religious significance whatsoever. It was just part of the day, a moment where you could drift off in your thoughts and dream of other things.

But I found that I relaxed. The rolling sound of a good hymn badly sung is particularly evocative. The sermon had just the right blend of comic irrelevance and tedium to make it pleasurable, and the very smell of the place reminded me of England in a manner that quite took me by surprise. And to see all those men in their Sunday best, the women who had taken pains with their clothes but still looked slightly askew in comparison to their French counterparts, the rebellious children struggling to remain still, so that the whole service was punctuated by the quiet, reassuring noise of hand against trouser bottom, was strangely calming. It was a very long way from the pews to the fate of the Buenos Aires Water Supply 5 per cent, but they were intimately connected.

And finally it was all over, the last hymn sung, the collection plate full, the blessings given. A cheerful chatter broke out and the organist started showing off his command of the instrument as the congregation began to file out. I waited a few moments. The vicar was coming in the opposite direction, and stopped me.

'You looked troubled, young man.'

'Oh, Reverend. You would not believe.'

I nodded and walked on. What could I have said anyway? Which would have been the better one to start with? The coming attack on British finance? Or should I have said how I was trying to think of a way that a whore, whose pimp I had once been shortly after she had committed murder, could marry an English industrialist and get away with it? Or should I have mentioned how I had murdered a man in cold blood a few days previously? All, I hoped, were a little outside the experience of a Church of England cleric.

I walked out of the church feeling bemused. I had done everything I could. If the world collapsed because no one would listen it was hardly my fault now. I had – so I believed – uncovered this great plot, and passed the information on. And yet, I felt I should do more. It was pride, if you like. No one likes to be powerless. And it was patriotism, strangely enhanced by my visit to that oddly English church. For a moment – one of the few such moments of my career – I knew why I was doing my job.

And out of that came a desire to do more, to step definitively out of my role as a gatherer of information, into something different and very much more difficult. But how to go about it? I had Netscher as a means of access to the French, so I thought, and I had contacted the Russians, but the difficulty was how to persuade them to take me seriously. I had no official status whatsoever. What did I propose to do? Open negotiations on my own account? Claim to be the personal spokesman of the Empire? Why would anyone believe me? The only thing I had at the moment to claim special status was knowledge, and in a very few days, when the markets opened on Thursday morning, everybody in the world would have that knowledge. I needed more authority, and I would have to go to London to get it.

So I took the night train yet again, and arrived at Victoria on Monday morning, then drove directly to the Foreign Office to see Wilkinson. I did not sleep as the train rumbled onwards and the boat gently swung as it ploughed across the Channel. All the figures, all the facts, kept on dancing in my head as I tried to work out some way that I was wrong. That this wasn't happening. I could see no alternative, but still I could not quite believe it.

I had not the slightest idea what sort of reception my sudden, unannounced arrival would get. Would my report have even been read? Would anyone pay the slightest bit of attention to it? Would I be laughed at – 'Oh, dear boy, this happens all the time. Don't worry, the Bank knows what it is doing.' Or even, 'Lord Revelstoke is furious that you ruined his weekend, and has demanded your instant dismissal.' All such possibilities had passed through my mind, as the train and boat had brought me ever closer to London. The Foreign Office itself is not a place to inspire self-confidence. It was built to intimidate and does its job very well. Its walls and marble colonnades are designed for eternity, the product of a nation which will never fail, which will never make mistakes. The inhabitants of such a building would never allow the colossal blunder I thought I had uncovered. I must be wrong.

I almost began my meeting with Wilkinson by apologising. But when I looked at him, when he lifted his face from his desk, I could see he had not slept. He had lines of tiredness across his face, the pasty shade that only anxiety or exhaustion can produce.

'Cort,' he said wearily, gesturing to my seat. 'Good. I had hoped you might show up, but as you didn't mention it in your letter . . .'

'I didn't think of it until afterwards. Then I realised there was little I could do in Paris without further instructions, so . . .'

'Yes. Well, I'm glad you are here. Although, as the bearer of ill tidings you cannot expect many others to be pleased to see you.'

'Was I correct?'

'You doubted it?'

'No. But that doesn't mean I was right.'

'True enough.' He stood up and stretched. 'At seven-thirty this morning, a French bank informed Barings by letter they would no longer trade in Argentinian or Uruguayan securities. At eight another two did so. All the indications are that no continental banks will touch them any more. What is the significance of that?'

'Then it is beginning and will get very much worse. The price of South American securities will drop, so when Barings needs to raise serious money on Thursday, it will be able to offer little as collateral.'