I laughed: couldn't help it. 'Please, Doug.'

He relented. 'I suppose you've got an analog mobile. They have radio signals that can be listened to. It's difficult, though. Your average bloke in the pub couldn't do it.'

'Could you?'

'I'm not your average bloke in the pub. I'm a walking mid-life crisis halfway through an oil change. I could do it if I had the right gear.'

'How do I deal with it?'

'Blindingly simple.' He sneezed and sniffed heavily. 'I need a tissue.' There was a sudden silence on the line, then the distant sound of a nose being vigorously blown, then the hoarse voice of wisdom in my ear.

'OK,' he said. 'You ditch the analog, and get a digital.'

'I do?'

'Sid, being a jockey does not equip the modern man to live in tomorrow's world.'

'I do see that.'

'Everyone,' he sniffed, 'if they had any sense, would go digital.'

'Teach me.'

'The digital system,' he said, 'is based on two numbers, nought and one. Nought and one have been with us from the dawn of computers, and no one has ever invented anything better.'

'They haven't?'

He detected my mild note of irony. 'Has anyone,' he asked, 're-invented the wheel?'

'Er, no.'

'Quite. One cannot improve on an immaculate conception.'

'That's blasphemous.' I enjoyed him always.

'Certainly not,' he said. 'Some things are perfect to begin with. E = mc2, and all that.'

'I grant that. How about my mobile?'

'The signal sent to a digital telephone,' he said, 'is not one signal, as in analog, but is eight simultaneous signals, each transmitting one eighth of what you hear.'

'Is that so?' I asked dryly.

'You may bloody snigger,' he said, 'but I'm giving you the goods. A digital phone receives eight simultaneous signals, and it is impossible for anyone to decode them, except the receiving mobile. Now, because the signal arrives in eight pieces, the reception isn't always perfect. You don't get the crackle or the fading in and out that you get on analog phones, but you do sometimes get bits of words missing. Still, no one can listen in. Even the police can never tap a digital mobile number.'

'So,' I said, fascinated, 'where do I get one?'

'Try Harrods,'he said.

'Harrods?'

'Harrods is just round the corner from where you live, isn't it?'

'More or less.'

'Try there, then. Or anywhere else that sells phones. You can use the same number that you have now. You just need to tell your service provider. And, of course, you'll need an SIM card. You have one, of course?'

I said meekly, 'No.'

'Sid!' he protested. He sneezed again. 'Sorry. An SIM card is a Subscribers Identity Module. You can't live without one.'

'I can't?'

'Sid, I despair of you. Wake up to technology.'

'I'm better at knowing what a horse thinks.'

Patiently he enlightened me, 'An SIM card is like a credit card. It actually is a credit card. Included on it are your name and mobile phone number and other details, and you can slot it into any mobile that will take it. For instance, if you are someone's guest in Athens and he has a mobile that accepts an SIM card, you can slot your card into his phone and the charge will appear on your account, not his.'

'Are you serious?' I asked.

'With my problems, would I joke?'

'Where do I get an SIM card?'

'Ask Harrods.' He sneezed. 'Ask anyone who travels for a living. Your service provider will provide.' He sniffed. 'So long, Sid.'

Amused and grateful, I opened my post and read the Fax. The Fax being most accessible got looked at first.

Handwritten, it scrawled simply, 'Phone me,' and gave a long number.

The writing was Kevin Mills', but the Fax machine he'd sent it from was anonymously not The Pump's.

I phoned the number given, which would have connected me to a mobile, and got only the infuriating instruction, 'Please try later.'

There were a dozen messages I didn't much want on my answering machine and a piece of information I definitely didn't want in a large brown envelope from Shropshire.

The envelope contained a copy of a glossy county magazine, one I'd sent for as I'd been told it included lengthy coverage of the heir-to-the-dukedom's coming-of-age dance. There were, indeed, four pages of pictures, mostly in colour, accompanied by prose gush about the proceedings and a complete guest list.

A spectacular burst of fireworks filled half a page, and there in a group of heaven-gazing spectators, there in white dinner jacket and all his photogenic glory, there unmistakably stood Ellis Quint.

My heart sank. The fireworks had started at three-thirty. At three-thirty, when the moon was high, Ellis had been a hundred miles north-west of the Windward Stud's yearling.

There were many pictures of the dancing, and a page of black and white shots of the guests, names attached. Ellis had been dancing. Ellis smiled twice from the guests' page, carefree, having a good time.

Damn it to hell, I thought. He had to have taken the colt's foot off early. Say by one o'clock. He could then have arrived for the fireworks by three-thirty. I'd found no one who'd seen him arrive, but several who swore to his presence after five-fifteen. At five-fifteen he had helped the heir to climb onto a table to make a drunken speech. The heir had poured a bottle of champagne over Ellis's head. Everyone remembered that. Ellis could not have driven back to Northampton before dawn.

For two whole days the previous week I'd traipsed round Shropshire, and next door Cheshire, handed on from grand house to grander, asking much the same two questions (according to sex) -- did you dance with Ellis Quint or did you drink/eat with him. The answers at first had been freely given, but, as time went on, news of my mission spread before me until I was progressively met by hostile faces and frankly closed doors. Shropshire was solid Ellis country. They'd have stood on their heads to prove him unjustly accused. They were not going to say that they didn't know when he'd arrived.

In the end I returned to the duchess's front gates, and from there drove as fast as prudence allowed, to the Windward Stud Farm, timing the journey at two hours and five minutes. On empty roads at night, Northampton to the duchess might have taken ten minutes less. I'd proved nothing except that Ellis had had time.

Enough time was not enough.

As always before gathering at such dances, the guests had given and attended dinner parties both locally and further away. No one that I'd asked had entertained Ellis to dinner.

No dinner was not enough.

I went through the guest list crossing off the people I'd seen. There were still far more then half unconsulted, most of whom I'd never heard of.

Where was Chico? I needed him often. I hadn't the time, or to be frank, the appetite to locate and question all the guests, even if they would answer. There must have been people -- local people - helping with the parking of cars that night. Chico would have chatted people up in the local pubs and found out if any of the car-parkers remembered Ellis's arrival. Chico was good at pubs, and I wasn't in his class.

The police might have done it, but they wouldn't. The death of a colt still didn't count like murder.

The police.

I phoned Norman Picton's police station number and gave my name as John Paul Jones.

He came on the line in a good humour and listened to me without protest.

'Let me get this straight,' he said. 'You want me to ask favours of the Northamptonshire police? What do I offer in return?'

'Blood in the hinges of lopping shears.'

'They'll have made their own tests.'

'Yes, and that Northamptonshire colt is dead and gone to the glue factory. An error, wouldn't you say? Might they not do you a favour in exchange for commiseration?'

'You'll have my head off. What is it you actually want?

'Er …' I began, 'I was there when the police found the lopping shears in the hedge.'

'Yes, you told me.'

'Well, I've been thinking. Those shears weren't wrapped in sacking, like the ones we took from the Quints.'

'No, and the shears weren't the same, either. The ones at Northampton are a slightly newer model. They're on sale everywhere in garden centres. The problem is that Ellis Quint hasn't been reported as buying any, not in the Northamptonshire police district, nor ours.'

'Is there any chance,' I asked, 'of my looking again at the material used for wrapping the shears?'

'If there are horse hairs in it, there's nothing left to match them to, same as the blood.'

'All the same, the cloth might tell us where the shears came from. Which garden centre, do you see?'

'I'll see if they've done that already.'

'Thanks, Norman.'

'Thank Archie. He drives me to help you.'

'Does he?'

He heard my surprise. 'Archie has influence,' he said, 'and I do what the magistrate tells me.'

When he'd gone off the line I tried Kevin Mills again and reached the same electronic voice: 'Please try later.'

After that I sat in an armchair while the daylight faded and the lights came on in the peaceful square. We were past the equinox, back in winter thoughts, the year dying ahead. Autumn for me had for almost half my life meant the longed-for resurgence of major jump racing, the time of big winners and speed and urgency in the blood. Winter now brought only nostalgia and heating bills. At thirty-four I was growing old.

I sat thinking of Ellis and the wasteland he had made of my year. I thought of Rachel Ferns and Silverboy, and lymphoblasts. I thought of the Press, and especially The Pump and India Cathcart and the orchestrated months of vilification. I thought of Ellis's relentless jokes.

I thought for a long time about Archie Kirk, who had drawn me to Combe Bassett and given me Norman Picton. I wondered if it had been from Archie that Norman had developed a belief in a heavy presence behind the scenes. I wondered if it could possibly be Archie who had prompted Davis Tatum to engage me to find that heavyweight. I wondered if it could possibly have been Archie who told Davis Tatum about my run-in with the bad hat at the Jockey Club, and if so, how did he know?

I trusted Archie. He could pull my strings, I thought, as long as I was willing to go where he pointed, and as long as I was sure no one was pulling his.

I thought about Gordon Quint's uncontrollable rage, and the practical difficulties his fencing post had inflicted. I thought of Ginnie Quint and despair and sixteen floors down.

I thought of the colts and their chopped-off feet.

When I went to bed I dreamed the same old nightmare.

Agony. Humiliation. Both hands.

I awoke sweating.

Damn it all to hell.

CHAPTER 9

In the morning, when I'd failed yet again to get an answer from Kevin Mills, I shunted by tube across central London and emerged not far from Companies House at 55 City Road, E.G.

Companies House, often my friend, contained the records of all public and private limited companies active in the United Kingdom, including the audited annual balance sheets, investment capital, fixed assets and the names of major shareholders and the directors of the boards.

Topline Foods, I soon learned, was an old company recently taken over by a few new big investors and a bustling new management. The chief shareholder and managing director was listed as Owen Cliff Yorkshire. There were fifteen non-executive directors, of whom one was Lord Tilepit.

The premises at which business was carried out were located at Frodsham in Cheshire. The registered office was at the same address.

The product of the company was foodstuffs for animals.

After Topline, I looked up Village Pump Newspapers (they'd dropped the 'Village' in about 1900, but retained the idea of a central meeting place for gossip) and found interesting items, and after Village Pump Newspapers I looked up the TV company that aired Ellis's sports programme, but found no sign of Tilepit or Owen Yorkshire in its operations.

I travelled home (safely) and phoned Archie, who was, his wife reported, at work.

'Can I reach him at work?' I asked.

'Oh no, Sid. He wouldn't like it. I'll give him a message when he gets back.'

Please try later.

I tried Kevin Mills later and this time nearly got my eardrums perforated. 'At last!'

'I've tried you a dozen times,' I said.

'I've been in an old people's home.'

'Well, bully for you.'

'A nurse hastened three harpies into the hereafter.'

'Poor old sods.'

'If you're in Pont Square,' he said, 'can I call round and see you. I'm in my car not far away.'

'I thought I was The Pump's number one all-time shit.'

'Yeah. Can I come?'

'I suppose so.'

'Great.' He clicked off before I could change my mind and he was at my door in less than ten minutes.

'This is nice,' he said appreciatively, looking round my sitting-room. 'Not what I expected.'

There was a Sheraton writing-desk and buttoned brocade chairs and a couple of modern exotic wood inlaid tables by Mark Boddington. The overall colours were greyish blue, soft and restful. The only brash intruder was an ancient fruit machine that worked on tokens.

Kevin Mills made straight towards it, as most visitors did. I always left a few tokens haphazardly on the floor, with a bowl of them nearby on a table. Kevin picked a token from the carpet, fed it into the slot, and pulled the handle. The wheels clattered and clunked. He got two cherries and a lemon. He picked up another token and tried again.

'What wins the jackpot?' he asked, achieving an orange, a demon and a banana.

'Three horses with jockeys jumping fences.'

He looked at me sharply.

'It used to be the bells,' I said. 'That was boring, so I changed it.'

'And do the three horses ever come up?'

I nodded. 'You get a fountain of tokens all over the floor.'

The machine was addictive. It was my equivalent of the psychiatrist's couch. Kevin played throughout our conversation but the nearest he came was two horses and a pear.

'The trial has started, Sid,' he said, 'so give us the scoop.'

'The trial's only technically started. I can't tell you a things When the adjournment's over, you can go to court and listen.'

'That's not exclusive,' he complained.

'You know damned well I can't tell you.'

'I gave you the story to begin with.'

'I sought you out,' I said. 'Why did The Pump stop helping the colt owners and shaft me instead?'

He concentrated hard on the machine. Two bananas and a blackberry.

'Why?'I said

'Policy.'

'Whose policy?'

'The public wants demolition, they gobble up spite.'

'Yes, but -'

'Look, Sid, we get the word from on high. And don't ask who on high, I don't know. I don't like it. None of us likes it. But we have the choice, go along with overall policy or go somewhere else where we feel more in tune. And do you know where that gets you? I work for The Pump because it's a good paper with, on the whole, fair comment. OK, so reputations topple. Like I said, that's what Mrs Public wants. Now and then we get a request, such as 'lean hard on Sid Halley'. I did it without qualms, as you'd clammed up on me.'

He looked all the time at the machine, playing fast.

'And India Cathcart?' I asked.

He pulled the lever and waited until two lemons and a jumping horse came to rest in a row.

'India…' he said slowly. 'For some reason she didn't want to trash you. She said she'd enjoyed her dinner with you and you were quiet and kind. Kind! I ask you! Her editor had to squeeze the poison out of her drop by drop for that first long piece. In the end he wrote most of her page himself. She was furious the next day when she read it, but it was out on the streets by then and she couldn't do anything about it.'

I was more pleased than I would have expected, but I wasn't going to let Kevin see it. I said, 'What about the continued stab wounds almost every week?'

'I guess she goes along with the policy. Like I said, she has to eat.'

'Is it George Godbar's policy?'

'The big white chief himself? Yes, you could say the editor of the paper has the final say.'

'And Lord Tilepit?'

He gave me an amused glance. Two pears and a lemon. 'He's not a hands-on proprietor of the old school. Not a Beaverbrook or a Harmsworth. We hardly know he's alive.'

'Does he give the overall policy to George Godbar?'

'Probably.' A horse, a demon and some cherries. 'Why do I get the idea that you are interviewing me, instead of the other way round?'

'I cannot imagine. What do you know about Owen Cliff Yorkshire?'

'Bugger all. Who is he?'

'Quite likely a friend of Lord Tilepit.'

'Sid,' he protested. 'I do my job. Rapes, murders, little old ladies smothered in their sleep. I do not chew off the fingernails of my pay cheque.'

He banged the fruit machine frustratedly. 'The bloody thing hates me.'

'It has no soul,' I said. I fed in a stray token myself with my plastic fingers and pulled the handle. Three horses. Fountains of love. Life's little irony.

Kevin Mills took his paunch, his moustache and his disgusted disgruntlement off to his word-processor, and I again phoned Norman as John Paul Jones.

'My colleagues now think John Paul Jones is a snitch,' he said.

'Fine.'

'What is it, this time?'

'Do you still have any of those horse-nuts I collected from Betty Bracken's field, and those others we took from the Land-Rover?'

'Yes, we do. And as you know, they're identical in composition.'

'Then could you find out if they were manufactured by Topline Foods Ltd, of Frodsham in Cheshire?'

After a short silence he said cautiously, 'It could be done, but is it necessary?'

'If you could let me have some of the nuts I could do it myself.'

'I can't let you have any. They are bagged and counted.'

'Shit.' And I could so easily have kept some in my own pocket. Careless. Couldn't be helped.

'Why does it matter where they came from?' Norman asked.

'Um … You know you told me you thought there might be a heavyweight somewhere behind the scenes? Well, I've been asked to find out.'

'Jeez,' he said. 'Who asked you?'

'Can't tell you. Client confidentiality and all that.'

'Is it Archie Kirk?'

'Not so far as I know.'

'Huh!' He sounded unconvinced. 'I'll go this far. If you get me some authenticated Topline nuts I'll see if I can run a check on them to find out if they match the ones we have. That's the best I can do, and that's stretching it, and you wouldn't have a prayer if you hadn't been the designer of our whole prosecution - and you can not quote me on that.'

'I'm truly grateful. I'll get some Topline nuts, but they probably won't match the ones you have.'

'Why not?'

'The grains - the balance of ingredients - will have changed since those were manufactured. Every batch must have its own profile, so to speak.'

He well knew what I meant, as an analysis of ingredients could reveal their origins as reliably as grooves on a bullet.

'What interests you in Topline Foods?' Norman asked.

'My client.'

'Bugger your client. Tell me.' I didn't answer and he sighed heavily. 'All right. You can't tell me now. I hate amateur detectives. I've got you a strip off that dirty Northampton material. At least, it's promised for later today. What are you going to do about it, and have you cracked Ellis Quint's alibi yet?'

'You're brilliant,' I said. 'Where can I meet you? And no, I haven't cracked the alibi.'

'Try harder.'

'I'm only an amateur.'

'Yeah, yeah. Come to the lake at five o'clock. I'm picking up the boat to take it home for winter storage. OK?'

'I'll be there.'

'See you.'

I phoned the hospital in Canterbury. Rachel, the ward sister told me, was 'resting comfortably'.

'What does that mean?'

'She's no worse than yesterday, Mr Halley. When can you return?'

'Sometime soon.'

'Good.'

I spent the afternoon exchanging my old vulnerable analog mobile cellular telephone for a digital mobile receiving eight splintered transmissions that would baffle even the Thames Valley stalwarts, let alone The Pump.

From my flat I then phoned Miss Richardson of Northamptonshire, who said vehemently that no, I certainly might not call on her again. Ginnie and Gordon Quint were her dear friends and it was unthinkable that Ellis could harm horses, and I was foul and wicked even to think it. Ginnie had told her about it. Ginnie had been very distressed. It was all my fault that she had killed herself.

I persevered with two questions, however, and did get answers of sorts.

'Did your vet say how long he thought the foot had been off when the colt was found at seven o'clock?'

'No, he didn't.'

'Could you give me his name and phone number?'

'No.'

As I had over the years accumulated a whole shelfful of area telephone directories, it was not so difficult, via the Northamptonshire Yellow Pages to find and talk to Miss Richardson's vet. He would, he said, have been helpful if he could. All he could with confidence say was that neither the colt's leg nor the severed foot had shown signs of recent bleeding. Miss Richardson herself had insisted he put the colt out of his misery immediately, and, as it was also his own judgement, he had done so.

He had been unable to suggest to the police any particular time for the attack; earlier rather than later was as far as he could go. The wound had been clean: one chop. The vet said he was surprised a yearling would have stood still long enough for shears to be applied. Yes, he confirmed, the colt had been lightly shod, and yes, there had been horse-nuts scattered around, but Miss Richardson often gave her horses nuts as a supplement to grass.

He'd been helpful, but no help.

After that I had to decide how to get to the lake, as the normal taken-for-granted act of driving now had complications. I had a knob fixed on the steering wheel of my Mercedes which gave me a good grip for one-(right)handed operation. With my left unfeeling hand I shifted the automatic gear lever.

I experimentally flexed and clenched my right hand. Sharp protests. Boring. With irritation I resorted to ibuprofen and drove to the lake wishing Chico were around to do it.

Norman had winched his boat onto its trailer by the edge of the water. Big, competent and observant, he watched my slow emergence to upright and frowned.

'What hurts?'he asked.

'Self-esteem.'

He laughed. 'Give me a hand with the boat, will you? Pull when I lift.'

I looked at the job and said briefly that I couldn't.

'You only need one hand for pulling.'

I told him unemotionally that Gordon Quint had aimed for my head and done lesser but inconvenient damage. 'I'm telling you, in case he tries again and succeeds. He was slightly out of his mind over Ginnie.'

Norman predictably said I should make an official complaint.

'No,' I said. 'This is unofficial, and ends right here.'

He went off to fetch a friend to help him with the boat, and then busied himself with enclosing his powerful outboard engine into a fitted zipped cover.

I said, 'What first gave you the feeling that there was some heavyweight meandering behind the scenes?'

'First?' He went on working while he thought. 'It's months ago. I talked it over with Archie. I expect it was because one minute I was putting together an ordinary case - even if Ellis Quint's fame made it newsworthy - and the next I was being leaned on by the Superintendent to find some reason to drop it, and when I showed him the strength of the evidence, he said the Chief Constable was unhappy, and the reason for the Chief Constable's unhappiness was always the same, which was political pressure from outside.'

'What sort of political?'

Norman shrugged. 'Not party politics especially. A pressure group. Lobbying. A bargain struck somewhere, along the lines of "get the Quint prosecution aborted and such-and-such a good thing will come your way!"'

'But not a direct cash advantage?'

'Sid!'

'Well, sorry.'

'I should frigging well hope so.' He wrapped thick twine round the shrouded engine. 'I'm not asking cash for a strip of rag from Northamptonshire.'

'I grovel,' I said.

He grinned. 'That'll be the day.' He climbed into his boat and secured various bits of equipment against movement en route.

'No one has entirely given in to the pressure,' he pointed out. 'The case against Ellis Quint has not been dropped. True, it's now in a ropey state. You yourself have been relentlessly discredited to the point where you're almost a liability to the prosecution, and even though that's brutally unfair, it's a fact.'

'Mm.'

In effect, I thought, I'd been commissioned by Davis Tatum to find out who had campaigned to defeat me. It wasn't the first time I'd faced campaigns to enforce my inactivity, but it was the first time I'd been offered a fee to save myself. To save myself, in this instance, meant to defeat Ellis Quint: so I was being paid for that, in the first place. And for what else?

Norman backed his car up to the boat trailer and hitched them together. Then he leaned through the open front passenger window of the car, unlocked the glove compartment there, and drew out and handed to me a plastic bag.

'One strip of dirty rag,' he said cheerfully. 'Cost to you, six grovels before breakfast for a week.'

I took the bag gratefully. Inside, the filthy strip, about three inches wide, had been loosely folded until it was several layers thick.

'It's about a metre long,' Norman said. 'It was all they would let me have. I had to sign for it.'

'Good.'

'What are you going to do with it?'

'Clean it, for a start.'

Norman said doubtfully, 'It's got some sort of pattern in it but there wasn't any printing on the whole wrapping. Nothing to say where it came from. No garden centre name, or anything.'

'I don't have high hopes,' I said, 'but, frankly, just now every straw's worth clutching.'

Norman stood with his legs apart and his hands on his hips. He looked a pillar of every possible police strength but what he was actually feeling turned out to be indecision.

'How far can I trust you?' he asked.

'For silence?'

He nodded.

'I thought we'd discussed this already.'

'Yes, but that was months ago.'

'Nothing's changed,'I said.

He made a decision, stuck his head into his car again and this time brought out a business-sized brown envelope which he held out to me.

'It's a copy of the analysis done on the horse-nuts,' he said. 'So read it and shred it.'

'OK. And thanks.'

I held the envelope and plastic bag together and knew I couldn't take such trust lightly. He must be very sure of me, I thought; and felt not complimented but apprehensive.

'I've been thinking,' I said, 'do you remember, way back in June, when we took those things out of Gordon Quint's Land-Rover?'

'Of course, I remember.'

'There was a farrier's apron in the Land-Rover. Rolled up. We didn't take that, did we?'

He frowned. 'I don't remember it, but no, it's not among the things we took. What's significant about it?'

I said, 'I've always thought it odd that the colts should stand still long enough for the shears to close round the ankle, even with head-collars and those nuts. But horses have an acute sense of smell … and all those colts had shoes on - I checked with their vets -- and they would have known the smell of a blacksmith's apron. I think Ellis might have worn that apron to reassure the colts. They may have thought he was the man who shod them. They would have trusted him. He could have lifted a fetlock and gripped it with the shears.'

He stared.

'What do you think?'I asked.

'It's you who knows horses.'

'It's how I might get a two-year-old to let me near his legs.'

'As far as I'm concerned,' he said, 'that's how it was done.'

He held out his hand automatically to say goodbye, then remembered Gordon Quint's handiwork, shrugged, grinned, and said instead, 'If there's anything interesting about that strip of rag, you'll let me know?'

'Of course.'

'See you.'

He drove off with a wave, trailing his boat, and I returned to my car, stowed away the bag and the envelope and made a short journey to Shelley Green, the home of Archie Kirk.

He had returned from work. He took me into his sitting-room while his smiling wife cooked in the kitchen.

'How's things?' Archie asked. 'Whisky?'

I nodded. 'A lot of water …'

He indicated chairs, and we sat. The dark room looked right in October: imitation flames burnt imitation coals in the fireplace, giving the room a life that the sun of June hadn't achieved.

I hadn't seen Archie since then. I absorbed again the probably deliberate greyness of his general appearance, and I saw again the whole internet in the dark eyes.

He said casually, 'You've been having a bit of a rough time.'

'Does it show?'

'Yes.'

'Never mind,' I said. 'Will you answer some questions?'

'It depends what they are.'

I drank some of his undistinguished whisky and let my muscles relax into the ultimate of non-aggressive, non-combative postures.

'For a start, what do you do?' I said.

'I'm a civil servant.'

'That's not… well … specific.'

'Start at the other end,' he said.

I smiled. I said, 'It's a wise man who knows who's paying him.'

He paused with his own glass halfway to his lips.

'Go on,' he said.

'Then … do you know Davis Tatum?'

After a pause he answered,'Yes.'

It seemed to me he was growing wary; that he, as I did, had to sort through a minefield of facts one could not or should not reveal that one knew. The old dilemma -- does he know I know he knows -- sometimes seemed like child's play.

I said, 'How's Jonathan?'

He laughed. 'I hear you play chess,' he said. 'I hear you're a whiz at misdirection. Your opponents think they're winning, and then … wham.'

I played chess only with Charles at Aynsford, and not very often.

'Do you know my father-in-law?' I asked. 'Ex-father-in-law, Charles Roland?'

With a glimmer he said, 'I've talked to him on the telephone.'

At least he hadn't lied to me, I thought; and, if he hadn't lied he'd given me a fairly firm path to follow. I asked about Jonathan, and about his sister, Betty Bracken.

'That wretched boy is still at Combe Bassett and now that the water ski-ing season is over he is driving everyone mad. You are the only person who sees any good in him.'

'Norman does.'

'Norman sees a talented water-skier with criminal tendencies.'

'Has Jonathan any money?'

Archie shook his head. 'Only the very little we give him for toothpaste and so on. He's still on probation. He's a mess.' He paused. 'Betty has been paying for the water ski-ing. She's the only one in our family with real money. She married straight out of school. Bobby's thirty years older - he was rich when they married and he's richer than ever now. As you saw, she's still devoted to him. Always has been. They had no children; she couldn't. Very sad. If Jonathan had any sense he would be nice to Betty.'

'I don't think he's that devious. Or not yet, anyway.'

'Do you like him?' Archie asked curiously.

'Not much, but I hate to see people go to waste.'

'Stupid boy.'

'I checked on the colt,' I said. 'The foot stayed on.'

Archie nodded. 'Betty's delighted. The colt is permanently lame, but they're going to see if, with his breeding, he's any good for stud. Betty's offering him free next year to good mares.'

Archie's sweet wife came in and asked if I would stay to dinner; she could easily cook extra. I thanked her but stood up to go. Archie shook my hand. I winced through not concentrating, but he made no comment. He came out to my car with me as the last shreds of daylight waned to dark.

He said, 'In the Civil Service, I work in a small unacknowledged off-shoot department which was set up sometime ago to foretell the probable outcome of any high political appointment. We also predict the future inevitable consequences of pieces of Proposed legislation.' He paused and went on wryly, 'We call ourselves the Cassandra outfit. We see what will happen and no one believes us. We are always on the look out for exceptional independent investigators with no allegiances. They're hard to find. We think you are one.'

I stood beside my car in the dying light looking into the extraordinary eyes. An extraordinary man of unimaginable insights. I said, 'Archie, I'll work for you to the limit as long as I'm sure you're not sending me into a danger that you know exists but are not telling me about.'

He took a deep breath but gave no undertaking.

'Goodnight,' I said mildly.

'Sid.'

'I'll phone you.' It was as firm a promise, I thought, as 'let's do lunch'.

He was still standing on his gravel as I drove out through his gates. A true civil servant, I thought ruefully. No positive assurances could ever be given because the rules could at any time be changed under one's feet.

I drove north across Oxfordshire to Aynsford and rang the bell of the side entrance of Charles's house. Mrs Cross came in answer to the summons, her enquiring expression melting to welcome as she saw who had arrived.

'The Admiral's in the wardroom,' she assured me, when I asked if he were at home, and she bustled along before me to give Charles the news.

He made no reference to the fact that it was the second time in three days that I had sought his sanctuary. He merely pointed to the gold brocade chair and poured brandy into a tumbler without asking.

I sat and drank and looked gratefully at the austerity and restraint of this thin man who'd commanded ships and was now my only anchor.

'How's the arm?' he asked briefly, and I said lightly, 'Sore.'

He nodded and waited.

'Can I stay?' I said.

'Of course.'

After a longish pause, I said, 'Do you know a man called Archibald Kirk?'

'No, I don't think so.'

'He says he talked to you on the telephone. It was months ago, I think. He's a civil servant and a magistrate. He lives near Hungerford, and I've come here from his house. Can you remember? Way back. I think he may have been asking you about me. Like sort of checking up, like a reference. You probably told him that I play chess.'

He thought about it, searching for the memory.

'I would always give you a good reference,' he said. 'Is there any reason why you'd prefer I didn't?'

'No, definitely not.'

'I've been asked several times about your character and ability. I always say if they're looking for an investigator they couldn't do better.'

'You're … very kind.'

'Kind, my foot. Why do you ask about this Archibald Church?'

'Kirk.'

'Kirk, then.'

I drank some brandy and said, 'Do you remember that day you came with me to the Jockey Club? The day we got the head of the Security section sacked?'

'I could hardly forget it, could I?'

'You didn't tell Archie Kirk about it, did you?'

'Of course not. I never talk about it. I gave you my word I wouldn't.'

'Someone has,' I said morosely.

'The Jockey Club didn't actually swear an oath of silence.'

'I know.' I thought a bit and asked, 'Do you know a barrister called Davis Tatum? He's the head of chambers of the prosecuting counsel at Ellis's trial.'

'I know of him. Never met him.'

'You'd like him. You'd like Archie, too.' I paused, and went on, 'They both know about that day at the Jockey Club.'

'But Sid … does it really matter? I mean, you did the Jockey Club a tremendous favour, getting rid of their villain.'

'Davis Tatum and, I'm sure, Archie, have engaged me to find out who is moving behind the scenes to get the Quint trial quashed. And I'm not telling you that.'

He smiled. 'Client confidentiality?'

'Right. Well, Davis Tatum made a point of telling me that he knew all about the mandarins insisting I took off my shirt, and why. I think he and Archie are trying to reassure themselves that if they ask me to do something dangerous, I'll do it.'

He gave me a long slow look, his features still and expressionless.

Finally he said, 'And will you?'

I sighed.'Probably.'

'What sort of danger?'

'I don't think they know. But realistically, if someone has an overwhelming reason for preventing Ellis's trial from ever starting, who is the person standing chiefly in the way?'

'Sid!'

'Yes. So they're asking me to find out if anyone might be motivated enough to ensure my permanent removal from the scene. They want me to find out if and who and why.'

'God, Sid.'

From a man who never blasphemed, those were strong words.

'So …' I sighed, 'Davis Tatum gave me a name, Owen Yorkshire, and told me he owned a firm called Topline Foods. Now Topline Foods gave a sponsored lunch at Aintree on the day before the Grand National. Ellis Quint was guest of honour. Also among the guests was a man called Lord Tilepit, who is both on the Board of Topline Foods and the proprietor of The Pump, which has been busy mocking me for months.'

He sat as if frozen.

'So,' I said, 'I'll go and see what Owen Yorkshire and Lord Tilepit are up to, and if I don't come back you can kick up a stink.'

When he'd organised his breath, he said, 'Don't do it, Sid.'

'No … but if I don't, Ellis will walk out laughing, and my standing in the world will be down the tubes for ever, if you see what I mean.'

He saw.

After a while he said, 'I do vaguely remember talking to this Archie fellow. He asked about your brains. He said he knew about your physical resilience. Odd choice of words - I remember them. I told him you played a wily game of chess. And it's true, you do. But it was a long time ago. Before all this happened.'

I nodded. 'He already knew a lot about me when he got his sister to phone at five-thirty in the morning to tell me she had a colt with his foot off.'

'So that's who he is? Mrs Bracken's brother?'

'Yeah.' I drank brandy and said, 'If you're ever talking to Sir Thomas Ullaston, would you mind asking him - and don't make a drama of it - if he told Archie Kirk or Davis Tatum about that morning in the Jockey Club?'

Sir Thomas Ullaston had been Senior Steward at the time, and had conducted the proceedings which led to the removal of the head of the Security section who had arranged for Chico and me to be thoroughly deterred from investigating anything ever again. As far as I was concerned it was all past history, and I most emphatically wanted it to remain so.

Charles said he would ask Sir Thomas.

'Ask him not to let The Pump get hold of it.'

Charles contemplated that possibility with about as much horror as I did myself.

The bell of the side-door rang distantly, and Charles frowned at his watch.

'Who can that be? It's almost eight o'clock.'

We soon found out. An ultra-familiar voice called 'Daddy?' across the hall outside, and an ultra-familiar figure appeared in the doorway. Jenny … Charles's younger daughter … my sometime wife. My still-embittered wife, whose tongue had barbs.

Smothering piercing dismay I stood up, and Charles also.

'Jenny,' Charles said, advancing to greet her. 'What a lovely surprise.'

She turned her cheek coolly, as always, and said, 'We were passing. It seemed impossible not to call in.' She looked at me without much emotion and said, 'We didn't know you were here until I saw your car outside.'

I took the few steps between us and gave her the sort of cheek to cheek salutation she'd bestowed on Charles. She accepted the politeness, as always, as the civilised acknowledgement of adversaries after battle.

'You look thin,' she observed, not with concern but with criticism, from habit.

She, I thought, looked as beautiful as always, but there was nothing to be gained by saying so. I didn't want her to sneer at me. To begin with, it ruined the sweet curve of her mouth. She could hurt me with words whenever she tried, and she'd tried often. My only defence had been -- and still was -- silence.

Her handsome new husband had followed her into the room, shaking hands with Charles and apologising for having appeared without warning.

'My dear fellow, any time,' Charles assured him.

Anthony Wingham turned my way and with self-conscious affability said, 'Sid …' and held out his hand.

It was extraordinary, I thought, enduring his hearty embarrassed grasp, how often one regularly shook hands in the course of a day. I'd never really noticed it before.

Charles poured drinks and suggested dinner. Anthony Wingham waffled a grateful refusal. Jenny gave me a cool look and sat in the gold brocade chair.

Charles made small talk with Anthony until they'd exhausted the weather. I stood with them but looked at Jenny, and she at me. Into a sudden silence she said, 'Well, Sid, I don't suppose you want me to say it, but you've got yourself into a proper mess this time.'

'No.'

'No what?'

'No, I don't want you to say it.'

'Ellis Quint! Biting off more than you can chew. And back in the summer the papers pestered me too. I suppose you know?'

I unwillingly nodded.

'That reporter from The Pump,' Jenny complained. 'India Cathcart, I couldn't get rid of her. She wanted to know all about you and about our divorce. Do you know what she wrote? She wrote that I'd told her that quite apart from being crippled, you weren't man enough for me.'

'I read it,' I said briefly.

'Did you? And did you like it? Did you like that, Sid?'

I didn't reply. It was Charles who fiercely protested. 'Jenny! Don't.'

Her face suddenly softened, all the spite dissolving and revealing the gentle girl I'd married. The transformation happened in a flash, like prison bars falling away. Her liberation, I thought, had dramatically come at last.

'I didn't say that,' she told me, as if bewildered. 'I really didn't. She made it up.'

I swallowed. I found the re-emergence of the old Jenny harder to handle than her scorn.

'What did you say?' I said.

'Well. ..!…!…'

'Jenny,' Charles said again.

'I told her,' Jenny said to him, 'that I couldn't live in Sid's hard world. I told her that whatever she wrote she wouldn't smash him or disintegrate him because no one had ever managed it. I told her that he never showed his feelings and that steel was putty compared to him, and that I couldn't live with it.'

Charles and I had heard her say much the same thing before. It was Anthony who looked surprised. He inspected my harmless-looking self from his superior height and obviously thought she had got me wrong.

'India Cathcart didn't believe Jenny either,' I told him soothingly.

'What?'

'He reads minds, too,' Jenny said, putting down her glass and rising to her feet. 'Anthony, darling, we'll go now. OK?' To her father she said, 'Sorry it's such a short visit,' and to me, 'India Cathcart is a bitch.'

I kissed Jenny's cheek.

'I still love you,' I said.

She looked briefly into my eyes. 'I couldn't live with it. I told her the truth.'

'I know.'

'Don't let her break you.'

'No.'

'Well,' she said brightly, loudly, smiling, 'When birds fly out of cages they sing and rejoice. So … goodbye, Sid.'

She looked happy. She laughed. I ached for the days when we'd met, when she looked like that always; but one could never go back.

'Goodbye, Jenny,' I said.

Charles, uncomprehending, went with them to see them off and came back frowning.

'I simply don't understand my daughter,' he said. 'Do you?'

'Oh, yes.'

'She tears you to pieces. I can't stand it, even if you can. Why don't you ever fight back?'

'Look what I did to her.'

'She knew what she was marrying.'

'I don't think she did. It isn't always easy, being married to a jockey.'

'You forgive her too much! And then, do you know what she said just now, when she was leaving? I don't understand her. She gave me a hug - a hug - not a dutiful peck on the cheek, and she said, "Take care of Sid."'

I felt instantly liquefied inside: too close to tears.

'Sid …'

I shook my head, as much to retain composure as anything else.

'We've made our peace,' I said.

'When?'

'Just now. The old Jenny came back. She's free of me. She felt free quite suddenly … so she'll have no more need to … to tear me to pieces, as you put it. I think that all that destructive anger has finally gone. Like she said, she's flown out of the cage.'

He said, 'I do hope so,' but looked unconvinced. 'I need a drink.'

I smiled and joined him, but I discovered, as we later ate companionably together, that even though his daughter might no longer despise or torment me, what I perversely felt wasn't relief, but loss.

CHAPTER 10

Leaving Aynsford early I drove back to London on Thursday morning and left the car, as I normally did, in a large public underground car park near Pont Square. From there I walked to the laundry where I usually took my shirts and waited while they fed my strip of rag from Northampton twice through the dry-cleaning cycle.

What emerged was a stringy looking object, basically light turquoise in colour, with a non-geometric pattern on it of green, brown and salmon pink. There were also black irregular stains that had stayed obstinately in place.

I persuaded the cleaners to iron it, with the only result that I had a flat strip instead of a wrinkled one.

'What if I wash it with detergent and water?' I asked the burly half-interested dry cleaner.

'You couldn't exactly harm it,' he said sarcastically.

So I washed it and ironed it and ended as before: turquoise strip, wandering indeterminate pattern, stubborn black stain.

With the help of Yellow Pages I visited the wholesale showrooms of a well-known fabric designer. An infinitely polite old rnan there explained that my fabric pattern was woven, while theirs -- the wholesaler's -- was printed. Different market, he said. The wholesaler aimed at the upper end of the middle-class market. I, he said, needed to consult an interior decorator, and with kindness he wrote for me a short list of firms.

The first two saw no profit in answering questions. At the third address I happened on an underworked twenty-year-old who ran pale long fingers through clean shoulder-length curls while he looked with interest at my offering. He pulled out a turquoise thread and held it up to the light.

'This is silk,'he said.

'Real silk?'

'No possible doubt. This was expensive fabric. The pattern is woven in. See.' He turned the piece over to show me the back. 'This is remarkable. Where did you get it? It looks like a very old lampas. Beautiful. The colours are organic, not mineral.'

I looked at his obvious youth and asked if he could perhaps seek a second opinion.

'Because I'm straight out of design school?' he guessed without umbrage. 'But I studied fabrics. That's why they took me on here. I know them. The designers don't weave them, they use them.'

'Then tell me what I've got.'

He fingered the turquoise strip and held it to his lips and his cheek and seemed to commune with it as if it were a crystal ball.

'It's a modern copy,' he said. 'It's very skilfully done. It is lampas, woven on a Jacquard loom. There isn't enough of it to be sure, but I think it's a copy of a silk hanging made by Philippe de Lasalle in about 1760. But the original hadn't a blue-green background, it was cream with this design of ropes and leaves in greens and red and gold.'

I was impressed. 'Are you sure?'

'I've just spent three years learning this sort of thing.'

'Well, who makes it now? Do I have to go to France?'

'You could try one or two English firms but, you know what -'

He was brusquely interrupted by a severe-looking woman in a black dress and huge Aztec-type necklace who swept in and came to rest by the counter on which lay the unprepossessing rag.

'What are you doing?' she asked. 'I asked you to catalogue the new shipment of passementerie.'

'Yes, Mrs Lane.'

'Then please get on with it. Run along now.'

'Yes, Mrs Lane.'

'Do you want help?' she asked me briskly.

'Only the names of some weavers.'

On his way to the passementerie, my source of knowledge spoke briefly over his shoulder, 'It looks like a solitary weaver, not a firm. Try Saul Marcus.'

'Where?' I called.

'London.'

'Thanks.'

He went out of sight. Under Mrs Lane's inhospitable gaze I picked up my rag, smiled placatingly and departed.

I found Saul Marcus first in the telephone directory and then in white-bearded person in an airy artist's studio near Chiswick in west London where he created fabric patterns.

He looked with interest at my rag but shook his head.

I urged him to search the far universe.

'It might be Patricia Huxford's work,' he said at length, dubiously. 'You could try her. She does - or did - work like this sometimes. I don't know of anyone else.'

'Where would I find her?'

'Surrey, Sussex. Somewhere like that.'

'Thank you very much.'

Returning to Pont Square I looked for Patricia Huxford in every phone book I possessed for Surrey and Sussex and, for good measure, the bordering southern counties of Hampshire and Kent. Of the few Huxfords listed, none turned out to be Patricia, a weaver.

I really needed an assistant, I thought, saying goodbye to Mrs Paul Huxford, wife of a double-glazing salesman. This sort of search could take hours. Damn Chico, and his dolly-bird protective missus.

With no easy success from the directories I started on directory enquiries, the central computerised number-finder. As always, to get a number one had to give an address, but the computer system contemptuously spat out Patricia Huxford, Surrey, as being altogether too vague.

I tried Patricia Huxford, Guildford (Guildford being Surrey's county town) but learned only of the two listed P. Huxfords that I'd already tried. Kingston, Surrey: same lack of results. I systematically tried all the other main areas: Sutton, Epsom, Leather-head, Dorking … Surrey might be a small county in square-mile size, but large in population. I drew a uniform blank.

Huxfords were fortunately rare. A good job she wasn't called Smith.

Sussex, then. There was East Sussex (county town Lewes) and West Sussex (Chichester). I flipped a mental coin and chose Chichester, and could hardly believe my lucky ears.

An impersonal voice told me that the number of Patricia Huxford was ex-directory and could only be accessed by the police, in an emergency. It was not even in the C.O. grade one class of ex-directory, where one could sweet-talk the operator into phoning the number on one's behalf (C.O. stood for Calls Offered). Patricia Huxford valued absolute grade two privacy and couldn't be reached that way.

In the highest, third grade, category, there were the numbers that weren't on any list at all, that the exchanges and operators might not know even existed; numbers for government affairs, the Royal Family and spies.

I yawned, stretched and ate cornflakes for lunch.

While I was still unenthusiastically thinking of driving to Chichester, roughly seventy more miles of arm-ache, Charles phoned from Aynsford.

'So glad to catch you in,' he said. 'I've been talking to Thomas Ullaston, I thought you'd like to know.'

'Yes,' I agreed with interest. 'What did he say?'

'You know, of course, that he's no longer Senior Steward of the Jockey Club? His term of office ended.'

'Yes, I know.'

I also regretted it. The new Senior Steward was apt to think me a light-weight nuisance. I supposed he had a point, but it never helped to be discounted by the top man if I asked for anything at all from the department heads in current power. No one was any longer thanking me for ridding them of their villain: according to them, the whole embarrassing incident was best forgotten, and with that I agreed, but I wouldn't have minded residual warmth.

'Thomas was dumbfounded by your question,' Charles said. 'He protested that he'd meant you no harm.'

'Ah!' I said.

'Yes. He didn't deny that he'd told someone about that morning, but he assured me that it had been only one person, and that person was someone of utterly good standing, a man of the utmost probity. I asked if it was Archibald Kirk, and he gasped, Sid. He said it was early in the summer when Archie Kirk sought him out to ask about you. Archie Kirk told him he'd heard you were a good investigator and he wanted to know how good. It seems Archie Kirk's branch of the Civil Service occasionally likes to employ independent investigators quietly, but that it's hard to find good ones they can trust. Thomas Ullaston told him to trust you. Archie Kirk apparently asked more and more questions, until Thomas found himself telling about that chain and those awful marks … I mean, sorry, Sid.'

'Yeah,' I said, 'go on.'

'Thomas told Archie Kirk that with your jockey constitution and physical resilience -- he said physical resilience, Thomas did, so that's exactly where Kirk got that phrase from -- with your natural inborn physical resilience you'd shaken off the whole thing as if it had never happened.'

'Yes,' I said, which wasn't entirely true. One couldn't ever forget. One could, however, ignore. And it was odd, I thought, that I never had nightmares about whippy chains.

Charles chuckled. 'Thomas said he wouldn't want young master Halley on his tail if he'd been a crook.'

Young master Halley found himself pleased.

Charles asked, 'Is there anything else I can do for you, Sid?'

'You've been great.'

'Be careful.'

I smiled as I assured him I would. Be careful was hopeless advice to a jockey, and at heart I was as much out to win as ever.

On my way to the car I bought some robust adhesive bandage and, with my right forearm firmly strapped and a sufficient application of ibuprofen drove to Chichester in West Sussex, about seven miles inland from the coast.

It was a fine spirits-lifting afternoon. My milk-coffee Mercedes swooped over the rolling South Downs and sped the last flat mile to the cathedral city of Chichester, wheels satisfyingly fast but still not as fulfilling as a horse.

I sought out the public library and asked to see the electoral roll.

There was masses of it: all the names and addresses of registered voters in the county, divided into electoral districts.

Where was Chico, blast him?

Resigned to a long search that could take two or three hours, I found Patricia Huxford within a short fifteen minutes. A record. I hated electoral rolls: the small print made me squint.

Huxford, Patricia Helen, Bravo House, Lowell.

Hallelujah.

I followed my road map and asked for directions in the village of Lowell, and found Bravo House, a small converted church with a herd of cars and vans outside. It didn't look like the reclusive lair of an ex-directory hermit.

As people seemed to be walking in and out of the high heavy open west door, I walked in too. I had arrived, it was soon clear, towards the end of a photographic session for a glossy magazine.

I said to a young woman hugging a clipboard, 'Patricia Huxford?'

The young woman gave me a radiant smile. 'Isn't she wonderful? she said.

I followed the direction of her gaze. A small woman in an astonishing dress was descending from a sort of throne that had been built on a platform situated where the old transepts crossed the nave. There were bright theatrical spotlights that began to be switched off, and there were photographers unscrewing and dismantling and wrapping cables into hanks. There were effusive thanks in the air and satisfied excitement and the overall glow of a job done well.

I waited, looking about me, discovering the changes from church to modern house. The window glass, high up, was clear, not coloured. The stone-flagged nave had rugs, no pews, comfortable modern sofas pushed back against the wall to accommodate the crowd, and a large-screen television set.

A white-painted partition behind the throne platform cut off the view of what had been the altar area, but nothing had been done to spoil the sweep of the vaulted ceiling, built with soaring stone arches to the glory of God.

One would have to have a very secure personality, I thought, to choose to live in that place.

The media flock drifted down the nave and left with undimin-ished goodwill. Patricia Huxford waved to them and closed her heavy door and, turning, was surprised to find me still inside.

'So sorry,' she said, and began to open the door again.

'I'm not with the photographers,' I said. 'I came to ask you about something else.'

'I'm tired,' she said. 'I must ask you to go.'

'You look beautiful,' I told her, 'and it will only take a minute.' I brought my scrap of rag out and showed it to her. 'If you are Patricia Huxford, did you weave this?'

'Trish,' she said absently. 'I'm called Trish.'

She looked at the strip of silk and then at my face.

'What's your name?' she asked.

'John.'

'John what?'

'John Sidney.'

John Sidney were my real two first names, the ones my young mother had habitually used. 'John Sidney, give us a kiss.' 'John Sidney, wash your face.' 'John Sidney, have you been fighting again?'

I often used John Sidney in my job: whenever, in fact, I didn't want to be known to be Sid Halley. After the past months of all-too-public drubbing I wasn't sure that Sid Halley would get me anything anywhere but a swift heave-ho.

Trish Huxford, somewhere, I would have guessed, in the middle to late forties, was pretty, blonde (natural?), small-framed and cheerful. Bright observant eyes looked over my grey business suit, white shirt, unobtrusive tie, brown shoes, dark hair, dark eyes, unthreatening manner: my usual working confidence-inspiring exterior.

She was still on a high from the photo session. She needed someone to help her unwind, and I looked - and was - safe. Thankfully I saw her relax.

The amazing dress she had worn for the photographs was utterly simple in cut, hanging heavy and straight from her shoulders, floor length and sleeveless with a soft ruffled frill round her neck. It was the cloth of the dress that staggered: it was blue and red and silver and gold, and it shimmered.

'Did you weave your dress?' I asked.

'Of course.'

'I've never seen anything like it.'

'No, you wouldn't, not nowadays. Can I do anything for you? Where did you come from?'

'London. Saul Marcus suggested you might know who wove my strip of silk.'

'Saul! How is he?'

'He has a white beard,' I said. 'He seemed fine.'

'I haven't seen him for years. Will you make me some tea? I don't want marks on this dress.'

I smiled. 'I'm quite good at tea.'

She led the way past the throne and round the white-painted screen. There were choir stalls beyond, old and untouched, and an altar table covered by a cloth that brought me to a halt. It was of a brilliant royal blue with shining gold Greek motifs woven into its deep hem. On the table, in the place of religious altar furniture, stood an antique spinning wheel, good enough for Sleeping Beauty. Above the table, arched clear glass windows rose to the roof.

'This way,' Patricia Huxford commanded, and, leading me past the choir stalls, turned abruptly through a narrow doorway which opened onto what could once probably have been a vestry and was now a small modern kitchen with a bathroom beside it.

'My bed is in the south transept,' she told me, 'and my looms are in the north. You might expect us to be going to drink China tea with lemon out of a silver teapot, but in fact I don't have enough time for that sort of thing, so the tea bags and mugs are on that shelf.'

I half filled her electric kettle and plugged it in, and she spent the time walking around watching the miraculous colours move and mingle in her dress.

Intrigued, waiting for the water to boil, I asked, 'What is it made of?'

'What do you think?'

'Er, it looks like … well… gold.'

She laughed. 'Quite right. Gold, silver thread, and silk.'

I rather clumsily filled the mugs.

'Milk?'she suggested.

'No, thank you.'

'That's lucky. The crowd that's just left finished it off.' She gave me a brilliant smile, picked up a mug by its handle and returned to the throne, where she sat neatly on the vast red velvet chair and rested a thin arm delicately along gilt carving. The dress fell into sculptured folds over her slender thighs.

'The photographs,' she said, 'are for a magazine about a festival of the arts that Chichester is staging all next summer.'

I stood before her like some mediaeval page: stood chiefly because there was no chair nearby to sit on.

'I suppose,' she said, 'that you think me madly eccentric?'

'Not madly.'

She grinned happily. 'Normally I wear jeans and an old smock.' She drank some tea. 'Usually I work. Today is playacting.'

'And magnificent.'

She nodded. 'No one, these days, makes cloth of gold.'

'The Field of the Cloth of Gold,' I exclaimed.

'That's right. What do you know of it?'

'Only that phrase.'

'The field was the meeting place at Guines, France, in June 1520, of Henry VIII of England and Francis I of France. They were supposed to be making peace between England and France but they hated each other and tried to outdo each other in splendour. So all their courtiers wore cloth woven out of gold and they gave each other gifts you'd never see today. And I thought it would be historic to weave some cloth of gold for the festival … so I did. And this dress weighs a ton, I may tell you. Today is the only time I've worn it and I can't bear to take it off.'

'It's breathtaking,'I said.

She poured out her knowledge. 'In 1476 the Duke of Burgundy left behind a hundred and sixty gold cloths when he fled from battle against the Swiss. You make gold cloth - like I made this - by supporting the soft gold on threads of silk, and you can recover the gold by burning the cloth. So when I was making this dress, that's what I did with the pieces I cut out to make the neck and armholes. I burnt them and collected the melted gold.'

'Beautiful.'

'You know something?' she said. 'You're the only person who's seen this dress who hasn't asked how much it cost.'

'I did wonder.'

'And I'm not telling. Give me your strip of silk.'

I took her empty mug and tucked it under my left arm, and in my right hand held out the rag, which she took; and I found her looking with concentration at my left hand. She raised her eyes to meet my gaze.

'Is it…?' she said.

'Worth its weight in gold,' I said flippantly, 'Yes.'

I carried the mugs back to the kitchen and returned to find her standing and smoothing her fingers over the piece of rag.

'An interior decorator,' I said, 'told me it was probably a modern copy of a hanging made in 1760 by … um … I think Phillipe de Lasalle.'

'How clever. Yes, it is. I made quite a lot of it at one time.' She paused, then said abruptly, 'Come along,' and dived off again, leaving me to follow.

We went this time through a door in another white-painted partition and found ourselves in the north transept, her workroom. There were three looms of varying construction, all bearing work in progress. There was also a business section with filing cabinets and a good deal of office paraphernalia, and another area devoted to measuring, cutting and packing.

'I make fabrics you can't buy anywhere else,' she said. 'Most of it goes to the Middle East.' She walked towards the largest of the three looms, a monster that rose in steps to double our height.

'This is a Jacquard loom,' she said. 'I made your sample on this.'

'I was told this piece was … a lampas? What's a lampas?'

She nodded. 'A lampas is a compound weave with extra warps and wefts which put patterns and colours on the face of the fabric only, and are tucked into the back.' She showed me how the design of ropes and branches of leaves gleamed on one side of the turquoise silk but hardly showed on the reverse. 'It takes ages to set up' she said. 'Nowadays almost no one outside the Middle East thinks the beauty is worth the expense, but once I used to sell quite a lot of it to castles and great houses in England, and all sorts of private people. I only make it to order.'

I said neutrally, 'Would you know who you made this piece for?'

'My dear man. No, I can't remember. But I probably still have the records. Why do you want to know? Is it important?'

'I don't know if it is important. I was given the strip and asked to find its origin.'

She shrugged. 'Let's find it then. You never know, I might get an order for some more.'

She opened cupboard doors to reveal many ranks of box files, and ran her fingers along the labels on the spines until she came to one that her expression announced as possible. She lifted the box file from the shelf and opened it on a table.

Inside were stiff pages with samples of fabric stapled to them, with full details of fibres, dates, amount made, names of purchasers and receipts.

She turned the stiff pages slowly, holding my strip in one hand for comparison. She came to several versions of the same design, but all in the wrong colour.

'That's it!' she exclaimed suddenly. 'That's the one. I see I wove it almost thirty years ago. How time flies. I was so young then. It was a hanging for a four-poster bed. I see I supplied it with gold tassels made of gimp.'

I asked without much expectation, 'Who to?'

'It says here a Mrs Gordon Quint.'

I said, '… Er …' meaninglessly, my breath literally taken away.

Ginnie? Ginnie had owned the material?

'I don't remember her or anything about it,' Trish Huxford said. 'But all the colours match. It must have been this one commission. I don't think I made these colours for anyone else.' She looked at the black stains disfiguring the strip I'd brought. 'What a pity! I think of my fabrics as going on for ever. They could easily last two hundred years. I love the idea of leaving something beautiful in the world. I expect you think I'm a sentimental old bag.'

'I think you're splendid,' I said truthfully, and asked, 'Why are you ex-directory, with a business to run?'

She laughed. 'I hate being interrupted when I'm setting up a design. It takes vast concentration. I have a mobile phone for friends - I can switch it off - and I have an agent in the Middle East who gets orders for me. Why am I telling you all this?'

'I'm interested.'

She closed the file and put it back on the shelf, asking, 'Does Mrs Quint want some more fabric to replace this damaged bit, do you think?'

Mrs Quint was sixteen floors dead.

'I don't know,' I said.

On the drive back to London I pulled off the road to phone Davis Tatum at the number he'd given me, his home.

He was in and, it seemed, glad to hear from me, wanting to know what I'd done for him so far.

'Tomorrow,' I said, 'I'll give Topline Foods a visit. Who did you get Owen Yorkshire's name from?'

He said, stalling, 'I beg your pardon?'

'Davis,' I said mildly, 'you want me to take a look at Owen Yorkshire and his company, so why? Why him?'

'I can't tell you.'

'Do you mean you promised not to, or you don't know?'

'I mean … just go and take a look.'

I said, 'Sir Thomas Ullaston, Senior Steward last year of the Jockey Club, told Archie Kirk about that little matter of the chains, and Archie Kirk told you. So did the name Owen Yorkshire come to you from Archie Kirk?'

'Hell,'he said.

'I like to know what I'm getting into.'

After a pause he said, 'Owen Yorkshire has been seen twice in the boardroom of The Pump. We don't know why.'

'Thank you,' I said.

'Is that enough?'

'To be going on with. Oh, and my mobile phone is now safe. No more leaks. See you later.'

I drove on to London, parked in the underground garage and walked along the alleyway between tall houses that led into the opposite side of the square from my flat.

I was going quietly and cautiously in any case, and came to a dead stop when I saw that the street light almost directly outside my window was not lit.

Boys sometimes threw stones at it to break the glass. Normally its darkness wouldn't have sent shudders up my spine and made my right arm remember Gordon Quint from fingers to neck. Normally I might have crossed the square figuratively whistling while intending to phone in the morning to get the light fixed.

Things were not normal.

There were two locked gates into the central garden, one opposite the path I was on, and one on the far side, opposite my house. Standing in shadow I sorted out the resident-allocated garden key, went quietly across the circling roadway and unlocked the near gate.

Nothing moved. I eased the gate open, slid through, and closed it behind me. No squeaks. I moved slowly from patch to patch of shaded cover, the half-lit tree branches moving in a light breeze, yellow leaves drifting down like ghosts.

Near the far side I stopped and waited.

There could be no one there. I was foolishly afraid over nothing.

The street light was out.

It had been out at other times …

I stood with my back to a tree, waiting for alarm to subside to the point where I would unlock the second gate and cross the road to my front steps. The sounds of the city were distant. No cars drove into the cul-de-sac square.

I couldn't stand there all night, I thought … and then I saw him.

He was in a car parked by one of the few meters. His head -unmistakably Gordon Quint's head - moved behind the window. He was looking straight ahead, waiting for me to arrive by road or pavement.

I stood immobile as if stuck to the tree. It had to be obsession with him, I thought. The burning fury of Monday had settled down not into grief but revenge. I hadn't been in my flat for about thirty hours. How long had he been sitting there waiting? I'd had a villain wait almost a week for me once, before I'd walked unsuspectingly into his trap.

Obsession - fixation - was the most frightening of enemies and the hardest to escape.

I retreated, frankly scared, expecting him to see my movement, but he hadn't thought of an approach by garden. From tree to tree, round the patches of open grass, I regained the far gate, eased through it, crossed the road and drifted up the alleyway, cravenly expecting a bellow and a chase and, as he was a farmer, perhaps a shotgun.

Nothing happened. My shoes, soled and heeled for silence, made no sound. I walked back to my underground car and sat in it, not exactly trembling but nonetheless stirred up. So much, I thought, for Tatum's myth of a clever, unafraid investigator.

I kept always in the car an overnight bag containing the personality-change clothes I'd got Jonathan to wear; dark two-piece tracksuit (trousers and zip-up jacket), navy blue trainers, and a baseball cap. The bag also contained a long-sleeved open-necked shirt, two or three charged-up batteries for my arm, and a battery charger, to make sure. Habitually round my waist I wore a belt with a zipped pocket big enough for a credit card and money.

I had no weapons nor defences like mace. In America I might have carried both.

I sat in the car considering the matter of distance and ulnas. It was well over two hundred miles from my London home to Liverpool, city of my birth. Frodsham, the base of Topline Foods, wasn't quite as far as Liverpool, but still over two hundred miles. I had already, that day, steered a hundred and fifty - Chichester and back. I'd never missed Chico so much.

I considered trains. Too inflexible. Airline? Ditto. TeleDrive? I lingered over the comfort of TeleDrive but decided against, and resignedly set off northwards.

It was an easy drive normally; a journey on wide fast motorways taking at most three hours. I drove for only one hour, then stopped at a motel to eat and sleep, and at seven o'clock in the morning wheeled on again, trying to ignore both the obstinately slow-mending fracture and India Cathcart's column that I'd bought from the motel's news stand.

Friday mornings had been a trial since June. Page fifteen in The Pump - trial by the long knives of journalism, the blades that ripped the gut.

She hadn't mentioned at all seeing Tatum and me in the Le Meridien bar. Perhaps she'd taken my advice and pretended we hadn't been there. What her column said about me was mostly factually true but spitefully wrong. I wondered how she could do it? Had she no sense of humanity?

Most of her page concerned yet another politician caught with his trousers at half-mast, but the far-right column said:

Sid Halley, illegitimate by-blow of a nineteen-year-old window cleaner and a packer in a biscuit factory, ran amok as a brat in the slums of Liverpool. Home was a roach-infested council flat. Nothing wrong with that! But this same Sid Halley now puts on airs of middle-class gentility. A flat in Chelsea? Sheraton furniture? Posh accent? Go back to your roots, lad. No wonder Ellis Quint thinks you funny. Funny pathetic!

The slum background clearly explains the Halley envy. Halley's chip on the shoulder grows more obvious every day. Now we know why!

The Halley polish is all a sham, just like his plastic left hand.

Christ, I thought, how much more? Why did it so bloody hurt?

My father had been killed in a fall eight months before my birth and a few days before he was due to marry my eighteen-year-old mother. She'd done her best as a single parent in hopeless surroundings. 'Give us a kiss, John Sidney …'

I hadn't ever run amok. I'd been a quiet child, mostly. 'Have you been fighting again, John Sidney …?' She hadn't liked me fighting, though one had to sometimes, or be bullied.

And when she knew she was dying she'd taken me to Newmarket, because I'd been short for my age, and had left me with the king of trainers to be made into a jockey, as I'd always wanted.

I couldn't possibly go back to my Liverpool 'roots'. I had no sense of ever having grown any there.

I had never envied Ellis Quint. I'd always liked him. I'd been a better jockey than he, and we'd both known it. If anything, the envy had been the other way round. But it was useless to protest, as it had been all along. Protests were used regularly to prove The Pump's theories of my pitiable inadequacy.

My mobile phone buzzed. I answered it.

'Kevin Mills,' a familiar voice said. 'Where are you? I tried your flat. Have you seen today's Pump yet?'

'Yes.'

'India didn't write it,' he said. 'I gave her the info, but she wouldn't use it. She filled that space with some pars on sexual stress and her editor subbed them out.'

Half of my muscles unknotted, and I hadn't realised they'd been tense. I forced unconcern into my voice even as I thought of hundreds of thousands of readers sniggering about me over their breakfast toast.

'Then you wrote it yourself,' I said. 'So who's a shit now? You're the only person on The Pump who's seen my Sheraton desk.'

'Blast you. Where are you?'

'Going back to Liverpool. Where else?'

'Sid, look, I'm sorry.'

'Policy?'

He didn't answer.

I asked, 'Why did you phone to tell me India didn't write today's bit of demolition?'

'I'm getting soft.'

'No one's listening to this phone any more. You can say what you like.'

'Jeez.' He laughed. 'That didn't take you long.' He paused. 'You might not believe it, but most of us on The Pump don't any more like what we've been doing to you.'

'Rise up and rebel,' I suggested dryly.

'We have to eat. And you're a tough bugger. You can take it.'

You just try it, I thought.

'Listen,' he said, 'the paper's received a lot of letters from readers complaining that we're not giving you a fair deal.'

'How many is a lot?'

'Two hundred or so. Believe me, that's a lot. But we're not allowed to print any.'

I said with interest, 'Who says so?'

'That's just it. The Ed, Godbar himself, says so, and he doesn't like it either, but the policy is coming from the very top.'

'Tilepit?'

'Are you sure this phone's not bugged?'

'You're safe.'

'You've had a bloody raw mauling, and you don't deserve it. I know that. We all know it. I'm sorry for my part in it. I'm sorry I wrote today's venom, especially that bit about your hand. Yes, it's Tilepit. The proprietor himself.'

'Well… thanks.'

He said, 'Did Ellis Quint really cut off those feet?'

I smiled ruefully. 'The jury will decide.'

'Sid, look here,' he protested, 'you owe me!'

'Life's a bugger,' I said.

CHAPTER 11

Nine o'clock Friday morning I drove into the town of Frodsham and asked for Topline Foods.

Not far from the river, I was told. Near the river; the Mersey.

The historic docks of Liverpool's Mersey waterfront had long been silent, the armies of tall cranes dismantled, the warehouses converted or pulled down. Part of the city's heart had stopped beating. There had been by-pass surgery of sorts, but past muscle would never return. The city had a vast red-brick cathedral, but faith, as in much of Britain, had dimmed.

For years I'd been to Liverpool only to ride there on Aintree racecourse. The road I'd once lived in lay somewhere under a hyper-market. Liverpool was a place, but not home.

At Frodsham there was a 'Mersey View' vantage point with, away to the distant north, some still-working docks at Runcorn on the Manchester Ship Canal. One of those docks (I'd been told earlier by telephone from the dockmaster's office), was occupied by Topline Foods. A ship lying alongside bearing the flag and insignia of Canada had been unloading Topline grain.

I'd stopped the car from where I could see the sweep of river with the seagulls swooping and the stiff breeze tautening flags at the horizontal. I stood in the cold open air, leaning on the car, smelling the salt and the mud, and hearing the drone of traffic on the roads below.

Were these roots? I'd always loved wide skies, but it was the wide sky of Newmarket Heath that I thought of as home. When I'd been a boy there'd been no wide skies, only narrow streets, the walk to school, and rain. 'John Sidney, wash your face. Give us a kiss.'

The day after my mother died I'd ridden my first winner, and that evening I'd got drunk for the first and only time until the arrest of Ellis Quint.

Soberly, realistically, in the Mersey wind I looked at the man I had become: a jumble of self-doubt, ability, fear and difficult pride. I had grown as I was from the inside out. Liverpool and Newmarket weren't to blame.

Stirring and getting back into the car I wondered where to find all those tungsten nerves I was supposed to have.

I didn't know what I was getting into. I could still at that point retreat and leave the field to Ellis. I could - and I couldn't. I would have myself to live with, if I did.

I'd better simply get on with it, I thought.

I drove down from the vantage point, located the Topline Foods factory, and passed through its twelve foot high but hospitably open wire-mesh gates. There was a guard in a gatehouse who paid me no attention.

Inside there were many cars tidily parked in ranks. I added myself to the end of one row and decided on a clothing compromise of suit trousers, zipped up tracksuit top, white shirt, no tie, ordinary shoes. I neatly combed my hair forward into a young-looking style and looked no threat to anybody.

The factory, built round three sides of the big central area, consisted of loading bays, a vast main building and a new-looking office block. Loading and unloading took place under cover, with articulated lorries backing into the bays. In the one bay I could see into clearly, the cab section had been disconnected and removed; heavy sacks that looked as if they might contain grain were being unloaded from a long container by two large men who slung the sacks onto a moving conveyer belt of rollers.

The big building had a row of windows high up: there was no chance of looking in from outside.

I ambled across to the office building and shouldered open a heavy glass door that led into a large but mostly bare entrance hall, and found there the reason for the unguarded front gates. The security arrangements were all inside.

Behind a desk sat a purposeful-looking middle-aged woman in a green jumper. Flanking her were two men in navy blue security-guard suits with Topline Foods insignia on their breast pockets.

'Name, please,' said the green jumper. 'State your business. All parcels, carriers and handbags must be left here at the desk.'

She had a distinct Liverpool accent. With the same inflection in my own voice, I told her that, as she could see, I had no bag, carrier or handbag with me.

She took the accent for granted and unsmilingly asked again for my name.

'John Sidney.'

'Business?'

'Well,' I said as if perplexed by the reception I was getting, 'I was asked to come here to see if you made some horse-nuts.' I paused. 'Like,' I lamely finished, dredging up the idiom.

'Of course, we make horse-nuts. It's our business.'

'Yes,' I told her earnestly, 'but this farmer, like, he asked me to come in, as I was passing this way, to see if it was you that made some horse-nuts that someone had given him, that were very good for his young horse, like, but he was given them loose and not in a bag and all he has is a list of what's in the nuts and he wanted to know if you made them, see?' I half pulled a sheet of paper from an inside pocket and pushed it back.

She was bored by the rigmarole.

'If I could just talk to someone,' I pleaded. 'See, I owe this farmer a favour and it wouldn't take no more than a minute, if I could talk to someone. Because this farmer, he'll be a big customer if these are the nuts he's looking for.'

She gave in, lifted a telephone, and repeated a shortened version of my improbable tale.

She inspected me from head to foot. 'Couldn't hurt a fly,' she reported.

I kept the suitably feeble half-anxious smile in place.

She put down the receiver. 'Miss Rowse will be down to help you. Raise your hands.'

'Eh?'

'Raise your hands … please.'

Surprised, I did as I was told. One of the security guards patted me all over in the classic way of their job, body and legs. He missed the false hand and the cracked bone. 'Keys and mobile phone,' he reported. 'Clean.'

Green jumper wrote 'John Sidney' onto a clip-on identity card and I clipped it dutifully on.

'Wait by the lift,' she said.

I waited.

The doors finally parted to reveal a teenage girl with wispy fair hair who said she was Miss Rowse. 'Mr Sidney? This way, please.'

I stepped into the lift with her and rode to the third floor.

She smiled with bright inexperienced encouragement and led me down a newly carpeted passage to an office conspicuously labelled 'Customer Relations' on its open door.

'Come in,' Miss Rowse said proudly. 'Please sit down.'

I sat in a Scandinavian-inspired chair of blond wood with arms, simple lines, blue cushioning and considerable comfort.

'I'm afraid I didn't really understand your problem,' Miss Rowse said trustingly. 'If you'll explain again, I can get the right person to talk to you.'

I looked round her pleasant office, which showed almost no sign of work in progress.

'Have you been here long?' I asked. (Guileless Liverpool accent, just like hers.) 'Nice office. They must think a lot of you here.'

She was pleased, but still honest. 'I'm new this week. I started on Monday - and you're my second enquiry.'

No wonder, I thought, that she'd let me in.

I said, 'Are all the offices as plush as this?'

'Yes,' she said enthusiastically. 'Mr Yorkshire, he likes things nice.'

'Is he the boss?'

'The managing director,' she nodded. The words sounded stiff and unfamiliar, as if she'd only newly learned them.

'Nice to work for, is he?' I suggested.

She confessed, 'I haven't met him yet. I know what he looks like, of course, but … I'm new here, like I said.'

I smiled sympathetically and asked what Owen Yorkshire looked like.

She was happy to tell me, 'He's ever so big. He's got a big head and a lovely lot of hair, wavy like.'

'Moustache?' I suggested. 'Beard?'

'No,' she giggled. 'And he's not old. Not a grandad. Everyone gets out of his way.'

Do they indeed, I thought.

She went on, 'I mean, Mrs Dove, she's my boss really, she's the office manager, she says not to make him angry, whatever I do. She says just to do my job. She has a lovely office. It used to be Mr Yorkshire's own, she says.'

Miss Rowse, shaped like a woman, chattered like a child.

'Topline Foods must be doing all right to have rich new offices like these,' I said admiringly.

'They've got the TV cameras coming tomorrow to set up for Monday. They brought dozens of potted plants round this morning. Ever so keen on publicity, Mrs Dove says, Mr Yorkshire is.'

'The plants do make it nice and homey,' I said. 'Which TV company, do you know?'

She shook her head. 'All the Liverpool big noises are coming to a huge reception on Monday. The TV cameras are going all over the factory. Of course, although they're going to have all the machines running, they won't really make any nuts on Monday. It will all be pretend.'

'Why's that?'

'Security. They have to be security mad, Mrs Dove says. Mr Yorkshire worries about people putting things in the feed, she says.'

'What things?'

'I don't know. Nails and safety-pins and such. Mrs Dove says all the searching at the entrance is Mr Yorkshire's idea.'

'Very sensible,' I said.

An older and more cautious woman came into the office, revealing herself to be the fount of wisdom, Mrs Dove. Middle-aged and personally secure, I thought. Status, ability and experience all combining in priceless efficiency.

'Can I help you?' she said to me civilly, and to the girl, 'Marsha dear, I thought we'd agreed you would always come to me for advice.'

'Miss Rowse has been really helpful,' I said. 'She's going to find someone to answer my question. Perhaps you could, yourself?'

Mrs Dove (grey hair pinned high under a flat black bow, high heels, customer-relations neat satin shirt, cinched waist and black tights) listened with slowly glazing eyes to my expanding tale of the nutty farmer.

'You need our Willy Parrott,' she said when she could insert a comment. 'Come with me.'

I waggled conspiratorial fingers at Marsha Rowse and followed Mrs Dove's busy backview along the expensive passage with little partitioned but mostly empty offices on each side. She continued through a thick fire-door at the end, to emerge on a gallery round an atrium in the main factory building, where the nuts came from.

Rising from the ground, level almost to the gallery, were huge mixing vats, all with paddles circulating, activated from machinery stretching down from above. The sounds were an amalgam of whirr, rattle and slurp: the air bore fine particles of cereal dust and it looked like a brewery, I thought. It smelled rather the same also, but without the fermentation.

Mrs Dove passed me thankfully on to a man in brown overalls who inspected my dark clothes and asked if I wanted to be covered in fall-out.

'Not particularly.'

He raised patient eyebrows and gestured to me to follow him, which I did, to find myself on an iron staircase descending one floor, along another gallery and ending in a much-used battered little cubby-hole of an office, with a sliding glass door that he closed behind us.

I commented on the contrast from the office building.

'Fancy fiddle-faddle,' he said. 'That's for the cameras. This is where the work is done.'

'I can see that.'I told him admiringly.

'Now, lad,' he said, looking me up and down, unimpressed, 'what is it you want?'

He wasn't going to be taken in very far by the farmer twaddle. I explained in a shorter version and produced the folded paper bearing the analysis of the nuts from Combe Bassett and the Land-Rover, and asked if it was a Topline formula.

He read the list that by then I knew by heart.

Wheat, oatfeed, ryegrass, straw, barley, maize, molasses, salt, linseed.

Vitamins, selenium, copper, other substances and probably the antioxidant Ethoxyquin.

'Where did you get this?' he asked.

'From a farmer, like I told you.'

'This list isn't complete,' he said.

'No … but is it enough?'

'It doesn't give percentages. I can't possibly match it to any of our products.' He folded the paper and gave it back. 'Your cubes might be our supplement feed for horses out at grass. Do you know anything about horses?'

'A little.'

'Then, the more oats you give them, the more energy they expend. Racehorses need more oats. I can't tell you for sure if these cubes were for racehorses in training unless I know the proportion of oats.'

'They weren't racehorses in training.'

'Then your farmer friend couldn't do better than our Sweet-field mix. They do contain everything on your list.'

'Are other people's cubes much different?'

'There aren't very many manufacturers. We're perhaps fourth on the league table but after this advertisement campaign we expect that to zoom up. The new management aims for the top.'

'But… um … do you have enough space?'

'Capacity?'

I nodded.

He smiled. 'Owen Yorkshire has plans. He talks to us man to man.' His face and voice were full of approval. 'He's brought the old place back to life.'

I said inoffensively, 'Mrs Dove seems in awe of his anger.'

Willy Parrott laughed and gave me a male chauvinist-type wink. 'He has a flaming temper, has our Owen Yorkshire. And the more a man for that.'

I looked vaguely at some charts taped to a wall. 'Where does he come from?' I asked.

'Haven't a clue,' Willy told me cheerfully. 'He knows bugger all about nutrition. He's a salesman, and that's what we needed. We have a couple of nerds in white coats working on what we put in all the vats.'

He was scornful of scientists as well as women. I turned back from the wall charts and thanked him for his time. Very interesting job, I told him. Obviously he ran the department that mattered most.

He took the compliment as his due and saved me the trouble of asking by offering to let me tag along with him while he went to his next task, which was to check a new shipment of wheat. I accepted with an enthusiasm that pleased him. A man good at his job often enjoyed an audience, and so did Willy Parrott.

He gave me a set of over-large brown overalls and told me to clip the identity card on the outside, like his own.

'Security is vital,' he said to me. 'Owen's stepped it all up. He lectures us on not letting strangers near the mixing vats. I can't let you any nearer than this. Our competitors wouldn't be above adding foreign substances that would put us out of business.'

'D'you mean it?' I said, looking avid.

'You have to be specially careful with horse feed,' he assured me, sliding open his door when I was ready. 'You can't mix cattle food in the same vats, for instance. You can put things in cattle feed that are prohibited for racehorses. You can get traces of prohibited substances in the horse-cubes just by using the same equipment, even if you think you've cleaned everything thoroughly.'

There had been a famous example in racing of a trainer getting into trouble by unknowingly giving his runners contaminated nuts.

'Fancy,' I said.

I thought I might have overdone the impressed look I gave him, but he accepted it easily.

'We do nothing else except horse-cubes here,' Willy said. 'Owen says when we expand we'll do cattle feed and chicken pellets, and all sorts of other muck, but I'll be staying here, Owen says, in charge of the equine branch.'

'A top job,' I said with admiration.

He nodded. 'The best.'

We walked along the gallery and came to another fire-door, which he lugged open.

'All these internal doors are locked at night now, and there's a watchman with a dog. Very thorough, is Owen.' He looked back to make sure I was following, then stopped at a place from which we could see bags marked with red maple leaves travelling upwards on an endless belt of bag-sized ledges, only to be tumbled off the top and be manhandled by two smoothly swinging muscular workers.

'I expect you saw those two security men in the entrance hall?' Willy Parrott said, the question of security not yet exhausted.

'They frisked me,' I grinned. 'Going a bit far, I thought.'

'They're Owen's private bodyguards,' Willy Parrott said with a mixture of awe and approval. 'They're real hard men from Liverpool. Owen says he needs them in case the competitors try to get rid of him the old-fashioned way.'

I frowned disbelievingly. 'Competitors don't kill people.'

'Owen says he's taking no risks because he definitely is trying to put other firms out of business, if you look at it that way.'

'So you think he's right to need bodyguards?'

Willy Parrott turned to face me and said, 'It's not the world I was brought up in, lad. But we have to live in this new one, Owen says.'

'I suppose so.'

'You won't get far with that attitude, lad.' He pointed to the rising bags. 'That's this year's wheat straight from the prairie. Only the best is good enough, Owen says, in trade wars.'

He led the way down some nearby concrete stairs and through another heavy door, and I realised we were on ground level just off the central atrium. With a smile of satisfaction he pushed through one more door and we found ourselves amid the vast mixing vats, pygmies surrounded by giants.

He enjoyed my expression.

'Awesome,' I said.

'You don't need to go back upstairs to get out,' he said. 'There's a door out to the yard just down here.'

I thanked him for his advice about the nuts for the farmer, and for showing me round. I'd been with him for half an hour and couldn't reasonably stretch it further, but while I was in mid-sentence he looked over my shoulder and his face changed completely from man-in-charge to subservient subject.

I turned to see what had caused this transformation and found it not to be a Royal Person but a large man in white overalls accompanied by several anxious blue-clad attendants who were practically walking backwards.

'Morning, Willy,' said the man in white. 'Everything going well?'

'Yes, Owen. Fine.'

'Good. Has the Canadian wheat come up from the docks?'

'They're unloading it now, Owen.'

'Good. We should have a talk about future plans. Come up to my new office at four this afternoon. You know where it is? Top floor, turn right from the lift, like my old office.'

'Yes, Owen.'

'Good.'

The eyes of the businessman glanced my way briefly and incuriously, and passed on. I was wearing brown overalls and an identity card, after all, and looked an employee. Not an employee of much worth, either, with my over-big overalls wrinkling around my ankles and drooping down my arms to the fingers. Willy didn't attempt to explain my presence, for which I was grateful. Willy was almost on his knees in reverence.

Owen Yorkshire was, without doubt, impressive. Easily over six foot tall, he was simply large, but not fat. There was a lot of heavy muscle in the shoulders, and a trim, sturdy belly. Luxuriant closely-waving hair spilled over his collar, with the beginnings of grey in the lacquered wings sweeping back from above his ears. It was a hairstyle that in its way made as emphatic a statement as Jonathan's. Owen Yorkshire intended not only to rule but to be remembered.

His accent was not quite Liverpool and not at all London, but powerful and positive. His voice was unmistakably an instrument of dominance. One could imagine that his rages might in fact shake the building. One could have sympathy with his yes-men.

Willy said, 'Yes, Owen,' several more times.

The man-to-man relationship that Willy Parrott prized so much extended, I thought, not much further than the use of first names. True, Owen Yorkshire's manner to Willy was of the 'we're all in this together' type of management technique, and seemed to be drawing the best out of a good man; but I could imagine the boss also finding ways of getting rid of his Willy Parrott, if it pleased him, with sad shrugs and 'you know how it is these days, we no longer need a production manager just for horse-cubes; your job is computerised and phased out. Redundancy money? Of course. See my secretary. No hard feelings.'

I hoped it wouldn't happen to Willy.

Owen Yorkshire and his satellites swept onwards. Willy Parrott looked after him with pride tinged very faintly with anxiety.

'Do you work tomorrow?' I asked. 'Is the factory open on Saturdays?'

He reluctantly removed his gaze from the Yorkshire backview and began to think I'd been there too long.

'We're opening on Saturdays from next week,' he said. 'Tomorrow they're making more advertising films. There will be cameras all over the place, and on Monday too. We won't get anything useful done until Tuesday.' He was full of disapproval, but he would repress all that, it was clear, for man-to-man Owen. 'Off you go then, lad. Go back to the entrance and leave the overalls and identity tag there.'

I thanked him again and this time went out into the central yard which, since my own arrival, had become clogged with vans and truckloads of television and advertising people. The television contingent were from Liverpool. The advertisement makers, according to the identification on their vans, were from Intramind Imaging (Manchester) Ltd.

One of the Intramind drivers, in the unthinking way of his kind, had braked and parked at an angle to all the other vehicles. I walked across to where he still sat in his cab and asked him to straighten up his van.

'Who says so?' he demanded belligerently.

'I just work here,' I said, still in the brown overalls that, in spite of Willy Parrott's instructions, I was not going to return. 'I was sent out to ask you. Big artics have to get in here.' I pointed to the unloading bays.

The driver grunted, started his engine, straightened his vehicle, switched off and jumped down to the ground beside me.

'Will that do?' he asked sarcastically.

'You must have an exciting job,' I said enviously. 'Do you see all those film stars?'

He sneered. 'We make advertising films, mate. Sure, sometimes we get big names, but mostly they're endorsing things.'

'What sort of things?'

'Sports gear, often. Shoes, golf clubs.'

'And horse-cubes?'

He had time to waste while others unloaded equipment. He didn't mind a bit of showing off.

He said, 'They've got a lot of top jockeys lined up to endorse the horse-nuts.'

'Have they?' I asked interestedly. 'Why not trainers?'

'It's the jockeys the public know by their faces. That's what I'm told. I'm a football man myself.'

He didn't, I was grateful to observe, even begin to recognise my own face, that in years gone by had fairly often taken up space on the nation's sports pages.

Someone in his team called him away and I walked off, sliding into my own car and making an uneventful exit through the tall unchecked outward gates. Odd, I thought, that the security-paranoid Owen Yorkshire didn't have a gate bristling with electronic barriers and ominous name-gatherers; and the only reason I could think of for such laxity was that he didn't always want name-takers to record everyone's visits.

Blind-eye country, I thought, like the private backstairs of the great before the India Cathcarts of the world floodlit the secretive comings and goings, and rewarded promiscuity with taint.

Perhaps Owen Yorkshire's backstairs was the lift to the fifth floor. Perhaps Mrs Green Jumper and the bouncers in blue knew who to admit without searching.

Perhaps this, perhaps that. I'd seen the general layout and been near the power running the business, but basically I'd done little there but reconnoitre.

I stopped in a public car park, took off the brown overalls and decided to go to Manchester.

The journey was quite short, but it took me almost as long again to find Intramind Imaging (Manchester) Ltd which, although in a back street, proved to be a much bigger outfit than I'd pictured; I shed the tracksuit top and the Liverpool accent and approached the reception desk in suit, tie and business aura.

'I've come from Topline Foods,' I said. 'I'd like to talk to whoever is in charge of their account.'

Did I have an appointment?

No, it was a private matter.

If one pretended sufficient authority, I'd found, doors got opened, and so it was at Intramind Imaging. A Mr Gross would see me. An electric door-latch buzzed and I walked from the entrance lobby into an inner hallway, where cream paint had been used sparingly and there was no carpet underfoot. Ostentation was out.

Mr Gross was 'third door on the left'. Mr Gross's door had his name and a message on it, 'Nick Gross. What the F do you want?'

Nick Gross looked me up and down. 'Who the hell are yow? You're not Topline Foods top brass, and you're over-dressed.'

He himself wore a black satin shirt, long hair and a gold earring. Forty-five disintegrating to fifty, I thought, and stuck in a time warp of departing youth. Forceful, though. Strong lines in his old-young face. Authority.

'You're making advertising films for Topline,' I said.

'So what? And if you're another of their whinging accountants sent to beg for better terms, the answer is up yours, mate. It isn't our fault you haven't been able to use those films you spent millions on. They're all brilliant stuff, the best. So you creep back to your Mr Owen effing Yorkshire and tell him there's no deal. Off you trot, then. If he wants his jockey series at the same price as before he has to send us a cheque every week. Every week or we yank the series, got it?'

I nodded.

Nick Gross said, 'And tell him not to forget that in ads the magic is in the cutting, and the cutting comes last. No cheque, no cutting. No cutting, no magic. No magic, no message. No message, we might as well stop right now. Have you got it?'

I nodded again.

'Then you scurry right back to Topline and tell them no cheque, no cutting. And that means no campaign. Got it?'

'Yes.'

'Right. Bugger off.'

I meekly removed myself but, seeing no urgent reason to leave altogether, I turned the wrong way out of his office and walked as if I belonged there down a passage between increasingly technical departments.

I came to an open door through which one could see a screen showing startlingly familiar pieces of an ad campaign currently collecting critical acclaim as well as phenomenally boosting sales. There were bursts of pictures as short as three seconds followed by longer intervals of black. Three seconds of fast action. Ten of black.

I stopped, watching, and a man walked into my sight and saw me standing there.

'Yes?' he said. 'Do you want something?'

'Is that,' I said, nodding towards the screen, 'one of the mountain bike ads?'

'It will be when I cut it together.'

'Marvellous,' I said. I took half a step unthreateningly over his threshold. 'Can I watch you for a bit?'

'Who are you, exactly?'

'From Topline Foods. I came to see Nick Gross.'

'Ah.' There was a world of comprehension in the monosyllable: comprehension that I immediately aimed to transfer from his brain to mine.

He was younger than Nick Gross and not so mock-rock-star in dress. His certainty shouted from the zany speed of his three-second flashes and the wit crackling in their juxtaposition: he had no need for earrings.

I said, quoting the bike campaign's slogan, 'Every kid under fifty wants a mountain bike for Christmas.'

He fiddled with reels of film and said cheerfully, 'There'll be hell to pay if they don't.'

'Did you work on the Topline ads?' I asked neutrally.

'No, thank Christ. A colleague did. Eight months of award-worthy brilliant work sitting idle in cans on the shelves. No prizes for us, and your top man's shitting himself, isn't he? All that cabbage spent and bugger all back. And all because some twisted little pipsqueak gets the star attraction arrested for something he didn't do.'

I held my breath, but he had no flicker of an idea what the pipsqueak looked like. I said I'd better be going and he nodded vaguely without looking up from his problems.

I persevered past his domain until I came to two big doors, one saying 'Sound Stage. Keep Out' and one, opening outwards with a push-bar, marked 'Backlot'. I pushed that door half open and saw outside in the open air a huge yellow crane dangling a red sports car by a rear axle. Film cameras and crews were busy round it. Work in progress.

I retreated. No one paid me any attention on the way out. This was not, after all, a bank vault, but a dream factory. No one could steal dreams.

The reception lobby, as I hadn't noticed on my way in, bore posters round the walls of past and current purse-openers, all prestigious prize-winning campaigns. Ad campaigns, I'd heard, were now considered an OK step on the career ladder for both directors and actors. Sell cornflakes one day, play Hamlet the next. Intramind Imaging could speed you on your way.

I drove into the centre of Manchester and anonymously booked into a spacious restful room in the Crown Plaza Hotel. Davis Tatum might have a fit over the expense but if necessary I would pay for it myself. I wanted a shower, room-service and cosseting, and hang the price.

I phoned Tatum's home number and got an answering machine. I asked him to call back to my mobile number and repeated it, and then sat in an armchair watching racing on television - Flat racing at Ascot.

There was no sight of Ellis on the course. The commentator mentioned that his 'ludicrous' trial was due to resume in three days' time, on Monday. Sid Halley, he said, was sensibly keeping his head down as half Ellis's fan club was baying for his blood.

This little tit-bit came from a commentator who'd called me a wizard and a force for good not long ago. Times changed: did they ever. There were smiling close-ups of Ellis's face, and of mine, both helmetless but in racing colours, side by side. 'They used to be the closest of friends,' said the commentator sadly. 'Now they slash and gore each like bulls.'

Sod him, I thought.

I also hoped that none of Mrs Green Jumper, Marsha Rowse, Mrs Dove, Willy Parrott, the Intramind van driver, Nick Gross and the film cutter had switched on to watch racing at Ascot. I didn't think Owen Yorkshire's sliding glance across my overalls would have left an imprint, but the others would remember me for a day or two. It was a familiar risk, sometimes lucky, sometimes not.

When the racing ended I phoned Intramind Imaging and asked a few general questions that I hadn't thought of in my brief career on the spot as a Topline Foods employee.

Were advertising campaigns originally recorded on film or on disks or on tape, I wanted to know, and could the public buy copies. I was answered helpfully: Intramind usually used film, especially for high-budget location-based ads and no, the public could not buy copies. The finished film would eventually be transferred onto Broadcast Quality video tape, known as BETA-CAM. These tapes then belonged to the clients, who paid television companies for air time. Intramind did not act as an agent.

'Thanks very much,' I said politely, grateful always for knowledge.

Davis Tatum phoned soon after.

'Sid,'he said,'where are you?'

'Manchester, city of rain.'

It was sunny that day.

'Er …' Davis said. 'Any progress?'

'Some,' I said.

'And, er …' he hesitated again. 'Did you read India Cathcart this morning?'

'She didn't write that she'd seen us at Le Meridien,' I said.

'No. She took your excellent advice. But as to the rest…!'

I said, 'Kevin Mills phoned especially to tell me that she didn't write the rest. He did it himself. Policy. Pressure from above. Same old thing.'

'But wicked.'

'He apologised. Big advance.'

'You take it so lightly,' Davis said.

I didn't disillusion him. I said, 'Tomorrow evening - would you be able to go to Archie Kirk's house?'

'I should think so, if it's important. What time?'

'Could you arrange that with him? About six o'clock, I should think. I'll arrive there sometime myself. Don't know when.'

With a touch of complaint he said, 'It sounds a bit vague.'

I thought I'd better not tell him that with burglary, times tended to be approximate.

CHAPTER 12

I phoned The Pump, asking for India Cathcart. Silly me.

Number one, she was never in the office on Fridays.

Number two, The Pump never gave private numbers to unknown callers.

'Tell her Sid Halley would like to talk to her,' I said, and gave the switchboard operator my mobile number, asking him to repeat it so I could make sure he had written it down right.

No promises, he said.

I sat for a good while thinking about what I'd seen and learned, and planning what I would do the next day. Such plans got altered by events as often as not, but I'd found that no plan at all invited nil results. If all else failed try Plan B. Plan B, in my battle strategy, was to escape with skin intact. Plan B had let me down a couple of times but disasters were like falls in racing; you never thought they'd happen until you were nose down to the turf.

I had some food sent up and thought some more, and at ten-fifteen my mobile buzzed.

'Sid?' India said nervously.

'Hello.'

'Don't say anything! I'll cry if you say anything.' After a pause she said, 'Sid! Are you there?'

'Yes. But I don't want you to cry so I'm not saying anything.'

'Oh, God.' It was half a choke, half a laugh. 'How can you be so … so civilised?

'With enormous difficulty,' I said. 'Are you busy on Sunday evening? Your restaurant or mine?'

She said disbelievingly, 'Are you asking me out to dinner?'

'Well,' I said, 'it's not a proposal of marriage. And no knife through the ribs. Just food.'

'How can you laugh?

'Why are you called India?' I asked.

'I was conceived there. What has that got to do with anything?'

'I just wondered,'I said.

'Are you drunk?

'Unfortunately not. I'm sitting soberly in an armchair contemplating the state of the universe, which is C minus, or thereabouts.'

'Where? I mean, where is the armchair?'

'On the floor,'I said.

'You don't trust me!'

'No,' I sighed, 'I don't. But I do want to have dinner with you.'

'Sid,' she was almost pleading, 'be sensible.'

Rotten advice, I'd always thought. But then if I'd been sensible I would have two hands and fewer scars, and I reckoned one had to be born sensible, which didn't seem to have happened in my case.

I said, 'Your proprietor - Lord Tilepit - have you met him?'

'Yes.' She sounded a bit bewildered. 'He comes to the office party at Christmas. He shakes everyone's hand.'

'What's he like?'

'Do you mean to look at?'

'For a start.'

'He's fairly tall. Light-brown hair.'

'That's not much,' I said, when she stopped.

'He's not part of my day-to-day life.'

'Except that he burns saints,' I said.

A brief silence, then, 'Your restaurant, this time.'

I smiled. Her quick mind could reel in a tarpon where her red mouth couldn't. 'Does Lord Tilepit,' I asked, 'wear an obvious cloak of power? Are you aware of his power when you're in a room with him?'

'Actually … no.'

'Is anyone … could anyone be physically in awe of him?'

'No.' It was clear from her voice that she thought the idea laughable.

'So his leverage,' I said, 'is all economic?'

'I suppose so.'

'Is there anyone that he is in awe of?'

'I don't know. Why do you ask?'

'That man,' I said, 'has spent four months directing his newspaper to … well … ruin me. You must allow, I have an interest.'

'But you aren't ruined. You don't sound in the least ruined. And anyway, your ex-wife said it was impossible.'

'She said what was impossible?'

'To … to .. .'

'Say it.'

'To reduce you to rubble. To make you beg.'

She silenced me.

She said, 'Your ex-wife's still in love with you.'

'No, not any more.'

'I'm an expert on ex-wives,' India said. 'Wronged wives, dumped mistresses, women curdled with spite, women angling for money. Women wanting revenge, women breaking their hearts. I know the scenery. Your Jenny said she couldn't live in your purgatory, but when I suggested you were a selfish brute she defended you like a tigress.'

Oh God, I thought. After nearly six years apart the same old dagger could pierce us both.

'Sid?'

'Mm.'

'Do you still love her?'

I found a calm voice. 'We can't go back, and we don't want to,' I said. 'I regret a lot, but it's now finally over. She has a better husband, and she's happy.'

'I met her new man,' India said. 'He's sweet.'

'Yes.' I paused. 'What about your own ex?'

'I fell for his looks. It turned out he wanted an admiration machine in an apron. End of story.'

'Is his name Cathcart?'

'No,' she said. 'Patterson.'

Smiling to myself I said, 'Will you give me your phone number?'

She said, 'Yes,' and did so.

'Kensington Place restaurant. Eight o'clock.'

'I'll be there.'

When I was alone, which was usual nowadays, since Louise Mclnnes and I had parted, I took off my false arm at bedtime and replaced it after a shower in the morning. I couldn't wear it in showers, as water wrecked the works. Taking it off after a long day was often a pest, as it fitted tightly and tended to cling to my skin. Putting it on was a matter of talcum powder, getting the angle right and pushing hard.

The arm might be worth its weight in gold, as I'd told Trish Huxford, but even after three years, whatever lighthearted front I might now achieve in public, in private the management of amputation still took me a positive effort of the 'get on with it' ethos. I didn't know why I continued to feel vulnerable and sensitive. Too much pride, no doubt.

I'd charged up the two batteries in the charger overnight, so I started the new day, Saturday, with a fresh battery in the arm and a spare in my pocket.

It was by then five days since Gordon Quint had cracked my ulna, and the twinges had become less acute and less frequent. Partly it was because one naturally found the least painful way of performing any action, and partly because the ends of bone were beginning to knit. Soft tissue grew on the site of the break and on the eighth day it would normally begin hardening, the whole healing process being complete within the next week. Only splintered displaced ends caused serious trouble, which hadn't occurred in this case.

When I'd been a jockey the feel of a simple fracture had been an almost twice-yearly familiarity. One tended in jump racing to fall on one's shoulder, quite often at thirty miles an hour, and in my time I'd cracked my collar bones six times each side: only once had it been distinctly bad.

Some jockeys had stronger bones than others, but I didn't know anyone who'd completed a top career unscathed. Anyway, by Saturday morning, Monday's crack was no real problem.

Into my overnight bag I packed the battery charger, washing things, pyjamas, spare shirt, business suit and shoes. I wore both pieces of the tracksuit, white shirt, no tie and the dark trainers. In my belt I carried money and a credit card, and in my pocket a bunch of six keys on a single ring, which bore also a miniature torch. Three of the keys were variously for my car and the entry doors of my flat. The other three, looking misleadingly simple, would between them open any ordinary lock, regardless of the wishes of the owners.

My old teacher had had me practise until I was quick at it. He'd shown me also how to open the simple combination locks on suitcases; the method used by airport thieves.

I checked out of the hotel and found the way back to Frodsham, parking by the kerb within sight of the Topline Foods' wire-mesh gates.

As before, the gates were wide open and, as before, no one going in and out was challenged by the gatekeeper. No one, in fact, seemed to have urgent business in either direction and there were far fewer cars in the central area than on the day before. It wasn't until nearly eleven o'clock that the promised film crews arrived in force.

When getting on for twenty assorted vans and private cars had come to a ragged halt all over the place, disgorging film cameras (Intramind Imaging), a television camera (local station) and dozens of people looking purposeful with heavy equipment and chest-hugged clipboards, I got out of my car and put on the ill-fitting brown overalls, complete with identity badge. Into the boot I locked my bag and also the mobile phone, first taking the SIM card out of it and stowing it in my belt. 'Get into the habit of removing the SIM card,' my supplier had advised. 'Then if someone steals your phone, too bad, they won't be able to use it.'

'Great,' I'd said.

I started the car, drove unhesitatingly through the gates, steered a course round the assorted vans and stopped just beyond them, nearest to the unloading bays. Saturday or not, a few other brown-overall hands were busy on the rollers and the shelf escalator, and I simply walked straight in past them, saying 'Morning' as if I belonged.

They didn't answer, didn't look up, took me for granted.

Inside, I walked up the stairs I'd come down with Willy Parrott and, when I reached the right level, ambled along the gallery until I came to his office.

The sliding glass door was closed and locked and there was no one inside.

The paddles were silent in the vats. None of the day before's hum and activity remained, and almost none of the smells. Instead, there were cameras being positioned below, with Owen Yorkshire himself directing the director, his authoritative voice telling the experts their job.

He was too busy to look up. I went on along the gallery, coming to the fire-door up the flight of metal stairs. The fire-doors were locked at night, Willy had said. By day, they were open. Thankful, I reached in the end the plush carpet of the offices.

There was a bunch of three media people in there, measuring angles and moving potted plants. Office work, I gathered, was due for immortality on Monday. Cursing internally at their presence, I walked on towards the lift, passing the open door of 'Customer Relations'. No Marsha Rowse.

To the right of the lift there was a door announcing 'Office Manager, A. Dove', fastened with businesslike locks.

Looking back, I saw the measuring group taking their damned time. I needed them out of there and they infuriatingly dawdled.

I didn't like to hover. I returned to the lift and, to fill in time, opened a nearby door which proved to enclose fire-stairs, as I'd hoped.

Down a floor, and through the fire-door there, I found an expanse of open space, unfurnished and undecorated, the same in area as the office suite above. Up two storeys, above the offices, there was similar quiet, undivided, clean-swept space. Owen Yorkshire had already built for expansion, I gathered.

Cautiously, I went on upwards to the fifth floor, lair of the boss.

Trusting that he was still down among the vats, I opened the fire-door enough to put my head through.

More camera people moved around. Veritable banks of potted plants blazed red and gold. To the left, open opulently-gleaming double doors led into an entertaining and boardroom area impressive enough for a major industry of self-importance. On the right, more double doors led to Yorkshire's own new office; not, from what I could see, a place of paperwork. Polished wood gleamed. Plants galore. A tray of bottles and glasses.

I retreated down the unvarnished nitty-gritty fire-stairs until I was back on the working-office floor, standing there indecisively, wondering if the measurers still barred my purpose.

I heard voices, growing louder and stopping on the other side of the door. I was prepared to go into a busy-employee routine, but it appeared they preferred the lift to the stairs. The lifting machinery whirred on the other side of the stairwell, the voices moved into the lift and diminished to zero. I couldn't tell whether they'd gone up or down, and I was concerned only that they'd all gone up and not left one behind.

There was no point in waiting. I opened the fire-door, stepped onto the carpet and looked left and right towards Mrs Dove's domain.

I had the whole office floor to myself.

Great.

Mrs Dove's door was locked twice: an old-looking mortise and a new knob with a keyhole in the centre. These were locks I liked. There could be no nasty surprises like bolts or chains or wedges on the inside: also the emphatic statement of two locks probably meant that there were things of worth to guard.

The mortise lock took a whole minute, with the ghost of my old master breathing disapprovingly down my neck. The modern lock took twenty seconds of delicate probing. One had to 'feel' one's way through. False fingers for that, as for much else, were useless.

Once inside Mrs Dove's office I spent time relocking the door so that anyone outside trying it for security would find it as it should be. If anyone came in with keys, I would have warning enough to hide.

Mrs Dove's cote was large and comfortable with a wide desk, several of the Scandinavian-design armchairs and grainy blowup black and white photographs of racing horses round the walls. Along one side there were the routine office machines -Fax, copier and large print-out calculator, and, on the desk, a computer, shrouded for the weekend in a fitted cover. There were multiple filing cabinets and a tall white-painted and -- as I discovered -- locked cupboard.

Mrs Dove had a window with louvered blinds and a distant view of the Mersey. Mrs Dove's office was managing director stuff.

I had only a vague idea of what I was looking for. The audited accounts I'd seen in Companies House seemed not to match the actual state of affairs at Frodsham. The audit did, of course, refer to a year gone by, to the first with Owen Yorkshire in charge, but the fragile bottom-line profit, as shown, would not suggest or justify expensive publicity campaigns or televised receptions for the notables of Liverpool.

The old French adage 'look for the lady' was a century out of date, my old teacher had said. In modern times it should be 'look for the money'; and, shortly before he died, he had amended that to 'follow the paper'. Shady or doubtful transactions, he said, always left a paper trail. Even in the age of computers, he'd insisted that paper showed the way; and over and over again I'd proved him right.

The paper in Mrs Dove's office was all tidied away in the many filing cabinets, which were locked.

Most filing cabinets, like these, locked all drawers simultaneously with a notched vertical rod out of sight within the right-hand front corner, operated by a single key at the top. Turning the key raised the rod, allowing all the drawers to open. I wasn't bad at opening filing cabinets.

The trouble was that Topline Foods had little to hide, or at least not at first sight. Pounds of paper referred to orders and invoices for incoming supplies; pounds more to sales, pounds more to the expenses of running an industry, from insurance to wages, to electricity to general maintenance.

The filing cabinets took too long and were a waste of time. What they offered was the entirely respectable basis of next year's audit.

I locked them all again and, after investigating the desk drawers themselves, which held only stationery, took the cover off the computer and switched it on, pressing the buttons for 'List Files', and 'Enter'. Scrolls of file names appeared and I tried one at random: 'Aintree'.

Onto the screen came details of the lunch given the day before the Grand National, the guest list, the menu, a summary of the speeches and a list of the coverage given to the occasion in the press.

Nothing I could find seemed any more secret. I switched off, replaced the cover and turned my lock-pickers to the tall white cupboard.

The feeling of time running out, however irrational, shortened my breath and made me hurry. I always envied the supersleuths in films who put their hands on the right papers in the first ten seconds and, this time, I didn't know if the right paper even existed.

It turned out to be primarily not a paper but a second computer.

Inside the white cupboard, inside a drop-down desk arrangement in there, I came across a second keyboard and a second screen. I switched the computer on and nothing happened, which wasn't astounding as I found an electric lead lying alongside, disconnected. I plugged it into the computer and tried again, and with a grumble or two the machine became ready for business.

I pressed 'List Files' again, and this time found myself looking not at individual subjects, but at 'Directories', each of which contained file names such as 'Formula A'.

What I had come across were the more private records, the electronic files, some very secret, some not.

In quick succession I highlighted the 'Directories' and brought them to the screen until one baldly listed 'Quint': but no amount of button-pressing got me any further.

Think.

The reason I couldn't get the Quint information onto the screen must be because it wasn't in the computer.

OK? OK. So where was it?

On the shelf above the computer stood a row of box-files, numbers 1 to 9, but not one labelled Quint.

I lifted down Number 1 and looked inside. There were several letters filed in there, also a blue computer floppy disk in a clear cover. According to the letters, box-file No. 1 referred to loans made to Topline Foods, loans not repaid on the due date. There was also a mention of 'sweeteners' and 'quid pro quos'. I fed the floppy disk into the drive slot in the computer body and got no further than a single unhelpful word on the screen: PASSWORD?

Password? Heaven knew. I looked into the box-files one by one and came to 'Quint' in No. 6. There were three floppies in there, not one.