The King's Commisar

'Then increase it,' Malory said. Huntly gaped at him. 'By how much?' Malory was renowned for fighting his takeover battles halfpenny by halfpenny.

'By what's necessary, for heaven's sake!' Then Malory abruptly took another tack. 'Fergus, do you do crossword puzzles?'

'Now and then, yes.'

'Then tell me what you make of this.' Malory reached for a slip of paper and read: 'In a cavity in The House of Four Forks, a mile from the meridian.'

'How many letters?' Huntly asked automatically, just as Mrs Frobisher opened the door to admit Graves.

'It is a clue, Fergus, but not to a crossword puzzle. Any ideas?'

'No. Can I think about it?' Huntly rose at Malory's nod. 'And I am to increase the bid price as I think necessary?'

Malory nodded.

At the door Huntly turned. 'The meridian has to be Greenwich, of course, house must be there, or in Black-heath. I'd get Mrs Frobisher to ask the local house agents.'

Malory turned to Graves. 'Better if you do it. Find me The House of Four Forks.'

With both men gone, Malory sat back in his chair. He could now pursue other thoughts along other paths. Who, exactly, had this fellow Dikeston been? And that Russian name - Yakovlev was it? perhaps some trace of it existed somewhere. Who might know? The essence of banking, Horace Malory had always insisted to his juniors, lay in knowing how to find out that which you did not already know. He made two telephone calls: one to a retired admiral who held a couple of minor directorships under the Hillyard, Cleef umbrella; the second to the master of an Oxford College, who was a distant cousin of his wife's.

As Graves's taxi crawled along a crowded Old Kent Road, Fergus Huntly was instructing his own secretary to hawk the clue around the company finance department. Prize for the solution: a bottle of whisky.

The bottle was claimed within minutes by an infuriatingly smug young man named Nayland who grinned his way to Huntly's desk and said 'It's really just another advantage of Oxford, you know. We're talking derivations, of course. This one would be from the Latin quadrifurcus, which means four-forked, and became in Middle English car-fouk. If I may write it down for you?'

'Please do.'

'Carfouk-like that!' said Nayland. 'But the word had to undergo further metamorphosis into.. . .'He paused like a conjuror.

'Into?' said Huntly with reluctance.

'Carfax.'

'Carfax? That's the place in the centre of . . .'

Nayland grinned again and nodded. 'Centre of Oxford, you were about to say.'

With a sense of relief, Huntly telephoned Malory and then retuned his attention to his fertilizer companies. 'Tell Mr Graves, when he telephones,' Malory told Mrs Frobisher, 'that he's looking for a house called Carfax.'

Now for a while, all the enquiries began to inch forward. A history fellow from Oxford telephoned Malory on the instructions of the Master of his College, to offer to Hill-yard, Cleef his expert knowledge of the Russian Revolution - in which, as it later turned out, Yakovlev had played no part. The tame admiral, having consulted that fat rump of the old Admiralty bureaucracy surviving now within the Ministry of Defence, called to report that Admiralty Records pertaining to Lt-Cdr. Henry George Dikeston stopped abruptly with an entry in 1918 which read 'seconded to special duties.' Beyond that entry the file was blank.

In an hour Jacques Graves stood with one foot on either side of a narrow strip of steel embedded immovably in stone, thus straddling the Greenwich meridian. One foot, his left as it happened, stood in the Eastern hemisphere and the other, in the Western. The thought gave him obscure pleasure, which disappeared at once when a schoolboy took his place, yelling the same thought aloud. Graves coloured a little and thought Carfax. And one mile from here.

Up or down? Greenwich lay below him, with Wren's superb buildings grey-white in the noon light. Up the hill lay Blackheath.

For no good reason he walked down, and failed to find a convenient house agent. A policeman advised him to try Blackheath. 'Top of the hill, sir, then across the grass. That's where they are, sir. Where the money is.'

Prosperity there certainly seemed to be, Graves thought as he walked up the stiff hill of the park and out on to the Heath. This was spick-and-span suburbia: old houses expensively restored, well-dressed young women walking with children on the grass. Everything tarted-up. Boutiques with canopies, an old Bentley car, driven by a boy in his early twenties.

Finally: a house agent's premises.

A variety of experiences that afternoon convinced him that the English were ill-served by their house agents. One fat young man said disagreeably through a haze of beer fumes that if Graves were not interested in buying property he shouldn't be wasting time in the place. Outside the premises Graves stood still for a moment waiting for the red mist of fury to clear. When it did, he found he was looking at a poster. 'Protect your environment,' it read, 'by joining the Georgian Society.'

There was a telephone number. When he called, a steely female voice answered. The lady was, she said, Jessica Drummond, honorary secretary of the Society. Yes, he could call to see her that very afternoon - if he was quick about it.

She lived in a terrace just beyond the railway station. A fat cat dozed upon the-bonnet of a car in the driveway. When Graves pressed the bell, the door was opened on the instant by a lady in a blue-and-white check skirt, white blouse, and blue cardigan. She had grey hair, and grey rims to her bifocals. She would be, he thought, about sixty-five.

'Mrs Drummond?'

'MissDrummond. You telephoned about the Georgian Society?'

'I did.'

'Then come in. I haven't much time.' She marched him into an over-furnished sitting-room, pointed to a chair and said, 'You're resident, or new to the district, or what?'

He smiled. 'Well, neither of those.'

He took a visiting card from the pocket of his waistcoat and handed it to her. Miss Drummond pronounced his name aloud, with precision and in French. 'Oh, and you're a banker, Mr Graves? How may I help you?'

'It's an odd little matter,' Jacques Graves said, 'concerning a client of ours, very long-standing, but just a little, well - eccentric. It was a habit of his to set us little puzzles concerning his instructions.'

Miss Drummond looked disapproving. 'Rather foolish, surely. Was there not a danger of misunderstanding?'

Graves waved a hand deprecatingly. 'There was, but these things go on. However, unfortunately the client has died and left us an unsolved puzzle. Part of it may, we think, concern a house in this area.'

'Oh, really? How exciting!'

'Miss Drummond, do the words Four Forks mean anything to you?'

'Four forks, did you say?' He nodded. 'No, nothing. Four forks, how very odd!'

'What about Carfax?'

'Oh yes.'

'It does?'

'Oh certainly.'

'What does it mean?'

'Well, Carfax House, of course.'

Graves smiled at her. 'Here in Blackheath?'

'Not a quarter of a mile from this very spot!'

'That's convenient, Miss Drummond. Can you tell me anything about the place?'

'Oh, it's such a good thing you came to me. I mean, it hasn't been known by that name for years.' She was looking across at him, her face full of a rather girlish enthusiasm. Then suddenly her expression changed. Money, he knew it: T, er, suppose this is really quite important, is it, Mr Graves?'

'Hardly that, Miss Drummond. It's just to tidy things up.'

'Oh yes, but you're a frightfully well-known banking house, are you not - like Rothschild's?'

'Well, not exactly like -'

'And the Georgian Society is always chronically short of funds, d'you see. I mean, all the people who live in Blackheath, they love it, of course, but they're all mean and they won't give, and there's so much for the Society to do, and it's all so expensive nowadays. Even stamps, you know.' By now, she was looking at him implacably.