'Well?' I asked after about an hour and a half when I could stand it no longer. 'Have you found anything? I haven't.'

Franklin held up a hand for quiet, and he continued reading, then jotted down another note. 'What did you say?'

'I said, what have you got so far?'

'I've only just started,' he began. 'You can't expect . . .'

'I don't. But I want a break. Do you have any idea how bad his handwriting was? Each word is a torture. I want a diversion for a few moments so my eyes can recover.'

'I'll look at them myself another time,' he offered. 'This stuff, in contrast, is fascinating. Absolutely fascinating. But I suspect of no earthly use to you at all.'

I groaned. The worst of both worlds. Franklin was going to tell me more about stock prices.

He did. I absented myself mentally from the room after a few minutes, as he waxed lyrical about debenture stocks and dividend payouts, and operations in the market.

'Not as sound as everyone thought, you see,' he concluded some time later. How long – ten minutes or an hour I could not say.

'What isn't?'

Franklin frowned. 'Have you been paying attention?'

'Of course,' I replied robustly. 'I've been hanging on every word. I'd just like a useful summary. I'm a journalist, remember. I don't like detail.'

'Very well. A summary. Ravenscliff's enterprises in England have been burning up cash. He has been sucking money out of the operation at a quite phenomenal rate for almost a year.'

I stared hopefully at him. This was more my line. I could understand this. Hand in the till to pay for wine, women and song. Gambling debts. Racehorses. Jump out of the window to avoid the shame of ruin. How very disappointing. 'How much?'

'About three million pounds.'

I looked at him aghast. That was a lot of racehorses. 'Are you sure?'

'Pretty sure. That is, I've looked back at the past seven years' accounts. They are very complicated, but he had a private set prepared every year, which summarised his total operations. I imagine no one else ever saw them. Without those, I doubt I could ever have noticed what he was up to. But these are quite clear. Do you want me to show you?' He brandished a thick folder of complicated looking papers in my direction.

'No. Just tell me.'

'Very well. If you take the amount of cash at the start of the year, add on the cash received, subtract the cost of operations and other expenses, then you get the amount of cash at the end of the year. Do you understand that?'

I nodded cautiously

'The official accounts use one figure. These,' again he waved the file in the air, 'use another which is very different. All the shareholders, except for Ravenscliff, who evidently knew better, believe that the businesses have considerably more money than, in fact, they do. Three million, as I say.'

'And that means?'

'That means that if anyone ever found out, then not only Rialto but all the companies it owns shares in would drop like a stone. If you'll forgive me.' Franklin seemed momentarily alarmed that he could be frivolous on such a subject, even accidentally. 'The companies are not bankrupt, but they are worth nowhere near as much as people think. Including these people.'

I looked. It was a list of names, with figures on them. The Prime Minister, the Chancellor, the Foreign Secretary. Their opposite numbers in the Conservative party. And many other MPs, judges and bishops.

'What are these numbers?'

'Their shareholdings in Rialto. Multiply by the price. The Prime Minister in the case of a total collapse would lose nearly £11,000. The Leader of the Opposition £8,000.'

'Enough reason to get Barings in to prop up the share price?'

'More than enough, I'd say.'

'So what do I do about this?'

'You keep your mouth firmly closed. If you must do something, try to find out if any of the people on this list have been selling their shares. I have savings of £75, and £35 of these are in the Rialto Investment Trust. I intend to sell them first thing on Monday morning. It has taken me four years to save that much, and I don't intend to lose it. I imagine anyone else who knew about this would have the same reaction.'

He looked protective as he thought of his nest egg. For my part, I had not a penny saved in the world, as yet. But I could imagine how I would feel at the prospect of losing the result of several years' parsimony.

'Where has this money gone, then?'

He shrugged. 'No idea.'

'There is nothing else to say? I can't imagine that such a quantity of money could just vanish.'

'I quite agree. But it's not here, or at least I haven't found it. I told you I wasn't finished. And there are some files missing. I only found this one because it was in the wrong place.'

'So what do I do?'

'If I were you? I'd forget I'd ever seen it. If you say so much as a word you will start a financial storm the like of which London has not seen for decades.'

I could see that he was enjoying this brush with the occult secrets of the mighty. I wasn't. I knew better than he realised what we were dealing with. He was right. I should leave this alone; forget all about it. But I was a reporter. I wanted to know what was going on; where that money had gone. The fact that it had nothing to do with Ravenscliff's child was irrelevant. I had completely forgotten about the little brat.

Franklin brought me back to myself. 'I must go,' he said. 'I have to go to church.'

How he could think of such a thing, when he had just discovered proof that all these people he liked to associate with in the pews were not quite what they seemed I did not know. But Franklin was not the sort who would allow one sinner to call into question his entire outlook on life. I suspected he would pray fervently that God would show him His favour by allowing him to get a good price for his Rialto Ordinaries the next morning.

I nodded. He left, but not without reminding me of his advice. 'One other thing,' he added as he opened the door. 'File three/twenty-three. Personal disbursements. Try that. Apart from anything else, it seems that his Lordship has been supporting the International Brotherhood of Socialists for the past year.'

I sat in Ravenscliff's study for the next hour in a reverie, occasionally emerging from my mood to study the notes Franklin had made. I did quite well. Not that I uncovered any significant new financial information, of course. That was quite beyond me. But I at least managed to understand it. And I discovered, by comparing handwriting, that the accounts detailing the true situation at Rialto had been prepared for Ravenscliff by Joseph Bartoli, his right-hand man. My simple solution to the problem – simply asking Bartoli what was going on – disappeared. If Bartoli was part of some elaborate fraud, he was hardly going to open up to me.

Eventually I put down the file, and took out file three/twenty-three. It was, as Franklin had said, Ravenscliff's personal expenses, and exactly the sort of documents I should have been studying. If there were any payments for illegitimate children they should be here, buried among the itemised notes for clothes, shoes, household expenses, food, servants' wages and so on. The lists went back to 1900, and there were many entries which were ambiguous. I realised after a while that detailed study would yield nothing: an entire schoolroom of bastards could easily have been hidden under the heading of 'miscellaneous expense' (1907; £734 17s 6d). All it established was that, by the standards of the wealthy (if, perhaps, no longer quite as wealthy as I had imagined) Ravenscliff was not at all extravagant. His greatest expense was his wife (1908; £2234 12s 6d) and he spent more on books than he did on clothes. The payments Franklin referred to were on a separate sheet on the top of the file. Easy enough to understand, they were headed 'Provisional list of payments to the International Brotherhood of Socialists'. No ambiguity there. And a list of dates and amounts. This was curious. It was a lot of money; nearly £400 in the past year. Nor did it occur in the more detailed sheets of expenses underneath it. And what on earth was someone like Ravenscliff doing giving money to a group who, one assumed, were dedicated to abolishing everything he stood for? Had he had a Damascene conversion? Did that explain the sucking of money out of his own companies? I went back to his appointments diary and there, jotted down for a few days after his death, was the entry, 'Xanthos – ibs.'