It took two months and nearly all my money to get my first job, working on the social anouncements page of the Chronicle. I later moved to football, the obituaries and after nearly two years finally had my piece of luck. The crime reporter was more of a drunk than was average, and he was entirely unconscious on the pavement outside the Duck when the first of the Marylebone murders took place. I volunteered to stand in for him, and McEwen agreed. In my desperation – such chances come very infrequently – I nearly said, 'Let me go, Cox is drunk again.' That would have damned me. Instead, I robustly denied all knowledge of the poor man's whereabouts, and said that I was sure he was out on a story. I would fill in until he returned.

And so I did, as he never did return. McEwen did not need me to tell tales. He knew perfectly well what Cox was working on and his patience finally snapped.

I did a good job; a very good job, dare I say it, considering my inexperience. I was told to continue until a proper replacement was found, but one never was. Eventually editorial interest faded, and I continued as acting crime reporter for another year until someone remembered that I was not supposed to be doing the job at all. Then I was promoted, given a proper position, and told to keep going.

That had been five years previously. I had dreamed of being a reporter on a London newspaper and I was one. My ambitions for life should have been satisfied. But, however splendid a job may seem when one does not have it, it rarely stands up to close acquaintanceship. I was beginning to get bored with the life, and even to find murder most foul just a little tedious. But I had not yet fixed on a new goal to fire my ambitions once more. That, quite apart from the money, was why I had taken up Lady Ravenscliff's offer with so little hesitation.

As far as the matter of Ravenscliff was concerned, I needed to look through his office with care. Perhaps the papers were there after all. Perhaps some diary or letter would provide all the information I needed, and solve the matter in a few seconds. I doubted it; his widow wasn't so helpless that she couldn't find that herself, and she had good reason to look carefully. I knew already that most of the papers were financial in nature and that I could spend days looking at them, with every possibility that I would miss the vital clue even if it was there. So I decided to recruit Franklin.

This wasn't easy, not because he wasn't willing, but because he had so little time off from work. He was at the bank from eight in the morning to seven in the evening every day, six days a week. And on Sunday he spent much of his time in church. I thought initially this was calculated; Franklin attended a church frequented by the great bankers of the City and travelled a couple of miles to do his singing and praying when he could have walked a hundred yards round the corner to St Mary's, Chelsea. But that was attended only by shopkeepers and landladies. Eventually I realised I did him an injustice. Many people choose a church they find inspiring. Some go for ancient and beautiful buildings, some choose a church with fine music, some prefer an eloquent vicar who can deliver a good sermon. Franklin found that being enveloped in an aura of money incited religious awe in him. To sit around individuals who controlled tens of millions of pounds brought home to him the infinite possibilities of God's benevolence, and the intricacy of his Creation.

It sounds like a fundamental misunderstanding of Christianity. Eye of a needle, and all that. But it was Franklin's nature; he could do no other. Just as some people simply are incapable of loving a woman who is not beautiful, so Franklin could only think of the divine in terms of the endless flow of capital. His piety was no less for being so strange in origin, just as a man's love for a woman is no less passionate merely because it may require a decent inheritance to make it flower. He believed that the rich were better people than the poor, and that to be around them made him better as well. Wealth was both the indication of God's favour, and provided the means to carry out His wishes on earth.

Harry Franklin, you will understand, had no trouble whatsoever in reconciling God, Darwin and Mammon; indeed, each depended on the others. The survival of the fittest meant the triumph of the richest, which was part of His plan for mankind. Accumulation was divinely ordained, both a mark of God's favour and a way of earning more benevolence. True, Christ was a carpenter but, had He been living at the start of the twentieth century, Franklin was sure that the Messiah would have paid good attention to His stock levels, steadily expanded His business into the manufacture of fine furniture, while also investing in the latest methods of mass production by means of a stock market flotation to raise the additional capital. Then He would have brought in a manager to free Himself to go about His ministry.

Inevitably, I suppose, the idea of being allowed into the hallowed halls where once trod the feet of the supreme capitalist of the age gave him pause. In fact, the mere idea of Ravenscliff terrified him, and when he arrived at the house in St James's Square on the following Sunday morning he was more nervous than I had ever seen him. He seemed to shrink as we were let in, gazed around with reverence as we walked up the stairs, tiptoed past the doors which led to the reception rooms on the first floor, and said not a word until I had firmly shut the door to Ravenscliff's study.

'I don't want to disturb your reverie,' I remarked, 'but can we get started?'

He nodded, and looked anxiously at the chair – the very chair – on which the divine bottom had once rested as its owner perused his books. I made him sit on it, by the desk. Just to torment him a little.

'I will read the letters, if you take care of anything with numbers on it.'

'So what am I looking for?'

He had asked me this before. Several times, in fact. But so far I had avoided answering him. While I had Lady Ravenscliff's permission to use him, I was not allowed to tell him exactly what all this was about.

'I want you to look for interesting payments,' I said lamely. 'Nothing to do with his business interests, although you may look through that if you wish. I want to get an idea of how he spent his own money, in the hope that it will tell me what he was like. Did he buy paintings? Bet on horses? How much on wine? Did he give money to charities, or to hospitals or to friends? Did he have an expensive tailor? Bootmaker? A French chef? Paint me a financial portrait of the man. I need all the information I can get, as everyone I have talked to so far has given me nothing but generalities. I meanwhile will read through everything else, and see what there is.'

Franklin found the idea of columns of money reassuring, although the thought of prying into Ravenscliff's private papers made him apprehensive. As it did me. But somewhere in those huge piles of paper might lie the little nugget that would answer all my questions. I had searched the room again the previous day and still found nothing.

So we set to work, each in our different way. I worked like a reporter: spending ten minutes reading, then jumping up and staring out the window, humming to myself. Picking up this pile, then the next, more or less at random, hoping that luck would give me something of interest. Franklin, in contrast, worked like a banker; starting at the top of the first sheet, working his way steadily down through the pile, then on to the next. Number after number, column after column, file after file. He sat still and impassively, only his eyes flickering across the tallies, his pen occasionally jotting a brief note on a pad of paper before him. He made no noise; he seemed almost to be in a dream – and a happy dream at that.