'Matthew?'

She had said something. 'I'm sorry,' I said. 'I was a little distracted.'

'I said, please tell me of your discoveries.'

My discoveries? I wanted to say. Who on earth gives a hoot about my discoveries? All I wanted to do was tell her how I had wanted to take her in my arms, and run my fingers through her hair, and have her look at me like that again. Lost children, fraud, failing companies, what trivial nonsense was all this in comparison?

But it was her conversation, not mine. And she had a better notion of how to be sensible than I had. Where had she learned that? How do people gain an intuitive grasp of when to stop, when to go forward in such circumstances? Is it just from age and experience?

'Oh, them,' I said. 'Well, there's nothing exciting there. Except for a couple of things. Did you know that the Rialto Investment Trust is having its annual meeting soon?'

'I didn't.'

'Well, it is. I thought I would go along, just to get a sense of these people. From my limited experience of these things it won't be very interesting, but you never know. And you know Mrs Vincotti told us that her father had left her some money? A certain amount which came from Barings every month?'

She nodded.

'That wasn't an annuity. It was money sent by your husband. And from what she said, it has been paid every quarter for years. The records only go back ten years, but we can assume that he was responsible for payments right back to the beginning.'

She looked interested, then her face fell. 'But does this help?'

'Not obviously. Mrs Vincotti cannot be the person we are looking for. If he paid her money, he would hardly need to instruct his executors to launch a search for her. She cannot possibly be either the child or the mother of the child. I cannot explain the payments at all, except to say that they are not helpful. So I propose dropping the matter, unless something else suggests they are relevant.'

'It seems John had a less straightforward life than I thought,' she said. 'I didn't think he had any secrets from me. Now he is dead I am discovering nothing but.'

There was, of course, the greatest secret of all. All my instincts were to lay it in front of her; your husband was a cheat and a fraud. He was stealing money from his own companies on a vast scale. But how could I say that to a woman who had looked me in the eyes like that? Who had such hair? If I kept silent, it was not for the sake of the shareholders of Rialto.

'On the subject of the Brotherhood or whatever they're called,' I said, hurrying along, 'I've found out little. Except that it is obviously a group so small that it poses little danger to the onward march of world capitalism, and consists of people so fractious that they were thrown out of another group called the Union of Socialist Solidarity two years ago, for being disruptive. The Union of Socialist Solidarity, in turn, walked out of the International Organisation of Workers . . . well, you get the idea.'

'So how many of them are there?'

'Not many. I haven't found out much.'

'They don't sound very interesting either,' she said calmly. 'Are you sure there isn't some explanation consistent with his record as a capitalist exploiter of the masses?'

'Not that I can think of without more information.'

She shook her head. 'Don't concern yourself with this at the moment. It's not much money and does not seem to be relevant to your task. I think you should concentrate on that.'

'I just had this vision of his long-lost son turning up as a wild-eyed revolutionist.'

'In which case he would have known exactly who he was, no?'

'True.'

She turned to me, and took my hand. 'I need this business settled,' she said softly. 'It is beginning to prey on my mind. I have to start a new life, not spend my days tidying up the old one. Please help me. Promise you will concentrate on the important.'

Of course I would. Anything. Once more, as she held my hand and looked at me, I wanted to reach out for her. Once more I did not. But my resistance was already becoming enfeebled.

CHAPTER 16

I did not entirely ignore her request to concentrate on the lost child, but my enquiries went nowhere over the next week or so, and slowly. I did what you do in such circumstances; paid a young man at Births and Deaths to go through the registries, week by week and month by month, to see if any child had been registered naming Ravenscliff as father. The chances of this producing anything were small. Entries are named by the child's surname, and it was more than likely that this one would not have his father's name. I made enquiries of foreign journalists in London about how to go about finding children in France, Spain, Italy and other places, and wrote letters asking for assistance. Again, this was unlikely to produce results quickly, if at all, but I was determined to do a thorough job. After a week or so of this, the only possibility left was to write to every orphanage in Europe. This I decided to put off for as long as possible.

Then I returned to my interest in Ravenscliff's money. Not least because I was beginning to find the topic of money in general quite interesting. I had been working for Lady Ravenscliff for more than a month; my bank account now had £21 in it, and every week, my income so greatly exceeded my expenses that I even took to making out little columns of numbers, calculating how much I would have this time next year, or the year after that. Having money was very much more interesting than not having it. I almost began to understand (from a lowly point of view) what made someone like Ravenscliff tick. One thing had occurred to me, and that was that the start of Ravenscliff's attempt to siphon funds out of his companies had come around the time that Seyd's had begun an investigation into Rialto and suddenly dropped it. The owner, Young Seyd, had been responsible for that decision, Wilf had said, so it was reasonable to consider him for a while.

His father had trained him up for the business, but as Wilf had said, he had no taste for it. He was clever enough to leave well alone, and appoint good people who knew their jobs. Then he withdrew; his only connection was to attend the quarterly board meetings, collect his dividends and put his name to all those forms which require a chairman's signature. If I have conjured up the image of the typical second-generation owner, slowly dissipating his father's accumulated wealth in a life of indulgence and idle luxury, then the image is entirely incorrect. For Young Seyd had a secret life. He was a vicar in the Church of England, to which calling he had been inclined since his earliest youth. Only the authority of a very determined father had stopped him from being ordained as young as possible, and once that authority vanished Young Seyd had taken the cloth with almost unseemly haste. It was a strange mixture, pews and pulpits on the one hand and corporatised intelligence on the other, but he seemed to reconcile the two with little difficulty. Crockford's Clerical Directory supplied all the information I needed to find him. Young Seyd lived in Salisbury.

'I believe I am doing God's work in both,' he said with a smile once he had allowed me in – with some obvious hesitation, it must be said. 'Knowing their sins will be discovered helps to keep the men of wealth honest. It means that the poor will be treated more justly. And I must say that what I learned during my apprenticeship about the weaknesses of men, and the temptations of power, has prepared me well for life in the Church.'

I liked him; I had not expected to, as my opinion had been coloured in advance by Wilf's scarcely concealed disapproval. But Young Seyd – his father had now been dead for more than a decade but the name persisted – impressed me. More of an eighteenth-century vicar than a member of the newly reformed and muscular Church of England; not for him the business of evangelising workers or natives. No; Seyd was happy to let men be. If they came to him, well and good, but he did not believe he had any right to bother people unnecessarily. He christened, married and buried his parishioners; he read his books and he lived a quiet, contented life with his housekeeper, a cat and many friends.