own possessions would of course be inviolate. It was likely to be in the fabric of the house 'You're going to lift the floorboards!' she yelled accusingly 'There would,' Graves assured her, 'be a fee to cover any inconvenience.'
'A fee?' said Mrs Abrahams.
'Good one, I should hope,' said her husband.
Negotiations proceeded. The search, it was at last agreed, was to be in two stages. In the first of them, Graves accompanied by a man expert in building matters, and no doubt by Mrs Abrahams too, was to have complete access to loft and attics and cellars. The living-rooms could be examined but not disturbed. In the event that the search revealed nothing, Stage Two arrived. For that the removals department of Harrods would arrive, the entire contents of the house would be removed to store while the search took place. Mr and Mrs Abrahams would be accommodated in a suitable hotel, and the interior of Cavendish House would be redecorated pending the return of the owners and their possessions.
Mr Abrahams had ideas similar to, though grander than, Miss Drummond's. Stage One was a thousand. Stage Two was five thousand, plus all costs. Take it, or leave it. Graves took it. He also required the deeds of the house, the plans, if any, from which the house had been rebuilt on the second occasion; also, before he began handing over money he needed corroboration of the statement by Miss
TXDrummond that Cavendish House had once borne the name of Carfax. Brief consultation with Hillyard. Cleef's solicitors gave Graves the welcome tidings that all the information could be obtained. The less happy news was that he would have to take trouble to get it. This entailed first an easy trip to the Borough Records Office in nearby Lewisham, where a yellowish rate book for the year 1910 demonstrated Miss Drummond's veracity. At that time Carfax House had a rateable value of£125. Graves now telephoned Abrahams at the advertising agency of which he was a director, to ask the whereabouts of the deeds. Abrahams replied that, since the house was mortgaged, the deeds were lodged with the building society from which he had borrowed money, and would remain so until the mortgage was paid off in twenty years or so.
'Which building society?'
'The Leefield.'
"Which branch?'
Abrahams told him.
Graves set off by car armed with Abrahams's written permission to inspect the deeds, duly did so, and discovered what seemed to be shining gold. The bomb-damaged Cavendish House had been purchased in 1945 by one Henry George Dikeston. And sold by him some twenty years later to the Land Commissioners, who now held the freehold.
Carefully Graves noted the addresses: of the lawyers through whom the sales had been made, and of the Land Commissioners. There was not precisely a song in his heart at the prospect of tracking Dikeston down, for Dikeston at that stage was hardly the spectre he was later to become, but Graves was pleased. His pleasure increased when, later, at the offices of the Planning Department, he asked to inspect the plans of Cavendish House, and was given them.
The pleasure evaporated at once.
The bombs of 1941 wrecked Cavendish House. Its roof was destroyed: less than fifty per cent of the exterior walls remained standing. The architect's plans showed meticulous concern for the character of the house, and such of the original fabric as had been left standing was most carefully incorporated in the rebuilding. Turning the plan this way and that, looking for indications as to where the promised cavity might be. Graves found he was actually looking at that very word on the plan. In the architect's small, neat hand, appeared the phrase. Throughout in 9-inch cavity brickwork.' In the planning authority's office there was no shortage of people to explain the meaning: the walls of Cavendish House consisted of an outer and an inner skin of brick with a cavity between.
Graves swore under his breath. The second part of Dikeston's narrative was now somewhere in the hollow walls of the house, and there was no indication at all as to where. Easy to imagine the scene: scaffolding, bricklayers, the walls rising - and a packet, contained in some waterproof material, simply dropped down between the two skins of bricks, there to be safe for as long as the house stood.
'We need a consulting engineer,' Sir Horace Malory decided. Graves, surprised, thought he detected a trace of wry amusement in Malory's face. It was confirmed as Malory went on, This fella Dikeston's going to lead us the devil of a dance. I'm beginning to get a feeling about him.'
'What's that?' Graves asked.
'Remember the Cheshire cat, do you?' Malory asked ruminatively.
'Well, sure. I read Alice at school. Who didn't?'
'If you remember -' Malory was removing a Romeo No.3 from its tube - 'it vanished quite slowly, beginning with the end of the tail and ending with the grin, which remained some time after the rest of it had gone. Well, this is just the beginning of the tale, d'you see. And the grin is still here with us.'
'I'll fix the engineer,' Graves said.
Sir Horace, wise as he undoubtedly was in the ways of man, might have been a little surprised at the broad distribution already achieved by news of Hillyard, Cleef s interest in a private house in Blackheath. An advertising agency is not a Trappist community, Denis Abrahams was more loquacious than most. When he heard, by telephone from his excitable wife, that no fewer than five people had spent the morning at his house, inspecting it according to the agreed terms for Stage One, and that one of them was a Knight (Sir Horace was in fact a baronet, but Mrs Abrahams didn't know that) Abrahams opened his mouth wider and spoke more loudly. Since he was in the bar of the Wig and Pen Club at the time, his story was heard by lawyers, who were only idly interested, and by one or two reporters, who began to show a professional attention.
Before Sir Horace returned to 6 Athelsgate, Mrs Frobisher, his secretary, had already twice denied knowledge of the matter to city-page reporters of two London newspapers.
'Keep doing so,' Malory instructed her. He had spent an annoying morning. Not only had careful examination of the roof and walls of Cavendish House failed to produce any indication of where the Dikeston papers might be concealed; but while Graves and Smithson (the consulting engineer) had carried out the inspection, Malory, unable to climb to the roof space and unwilling to rummage in cellars, had been exposed to a good hour and a half of Mrs Abrahams. She had clutched his arm and given him precise information about every stitch of curtain and carpet, every Wedgwood cigarette lighter and every mock-Adam fireplace. He was mildly surprised to find he had lived through it. Now he must face Pilgrim, who would undoubtedly be amused, and probably patronizing. Pilgrim said, in fact, 'I told you this thing was going to get pricey and you ain't started yet. What's the next stage?'
Malory explained about the walls and watched crossly as Pilgrim controlled a laugh. 'It's not funny, Laurence!'
'It's not bad from where I'm sitting,' Pilgrim said. 'You're actually going to pull half of it down?’
'There's no alternative,' Malory said stiffly. 'You must see that.'
'How much is the place worth?'
'We have an estimate of about fifty-five thousand to rebuild.'
'A hundred thousand bucks!' Pilgrim said. The humour was ebbing fast from his face and voice. 'Better take care, Horace.'
Back in his own room, Malory instructed Graves to arrange as expeditiously as possible to transfer into Harrods' repository the Abrahams' furniture and effects; also the transfer of their persons to the Inter-Continental Hotel. He then made a neat little list of the visible difficulties. First, it would be necessary to inform, and indeed to persuade, the Abrahams of the necessity to pull down half of their beautiful house. Secondly, the local authority would have to be told and its consent probably have to be obtained before any work on the outside of Cavendish House could be carried out. Thirdly, the same must inevitably be true of the Land Commissioners, as ground landlords. None of them would agree, and Malory knew it.