'It's such a sweet house,' Mrs Abrahams told Jacques Graves, gushing extravagantly. 'We're frightfully attached to it. And it's so convenient. All our friends are near by.'
Her husband took a slightly different line. He was prepared to consider a good offer. But not an independent valuation. 'I am, after all,' he said, 'a creature of the market place. Supply and demand, and all that.'
Graves knew all right: Hillyard, Cleef was bent backward over the barrel, and standing upright again would come expensive.
'The actual worth?' Sir Horace Malory asked him.
'Value to us,' said Graves flatly.
'There must be a figure.'
'I got two local estate agents to give me an idea. One said a hundred and five thousand, the other a bit higher.'
'Offer the higher figure.'
'Okay.'
Mr and Mrs Abrahams accepted. The higher figure was one hundred and fifteen thousand pounds. Graves, sitting in their gleaming drawing-room, rising to shake hands on the deal suddenly thought Abrahams's eyes looked shifty.
And so it proved. Abrahams's solicitor was a Mr Thomas Plantagenet Grace, a partner in Holdfast & Grace, of London Wall. He was also Mrs Abrahams's brother-in-law.
'The point is,' Abrahams told Grace, 'that they must want it badly, but I don't know how badly.'
Grace nodded wisely. 'We'll find out - if somebody else comes in with an offer,' he murmured. Solicitors acting for Hillyard, Cleef, and this was a firm accustomed to enormous fees in recognition of its willingness to match its* pace to the urgent needs of a banking house, then approached Mr Plantagenet Grace. Their letter was opened and acknowledged by Mr Grace's secretary, and then placed in a folder marked 'Abrahams conveyance' to await his return. Mr Plantagenet Grace was away for a while; it was his custom, at that time of year, to recharge his batteries with a trip to Barbados. Hillyard, Cleef's solicitors informed Jacques Graves, who consulted Abrahams. Abrahams was surprised and regretful, but having instructed Mr Grace felt unable to do more than wait. To nobody's surprise, not Graves's and certainly not Sir Horace Malory's, the Barbados hiatus produced a further offer. Mr Thomas Plantagenet Grace discovered it on his desk upon his return. It upped the ante to£130,000.
'This,' said Malory grimly, 'can go on for years. Damn fella will be in Timbuctoo next, and the new offer'll be a million. Offer one hundred and thirty-two conditional upon immediate acceptance.'
But the hostage had by then been given, and it had been examined with pleasure. It was now very clear that Hill 11Qyard, Cleef not only sought to possess Cavendish House, but did so with great ardour. 'And Hillyard, Cleef,' as Thomas Plantagenet Grace observed, 'are rich, rich, rich!'
The riches, however, had not been accumulated by succumbing very often to essentially simple lures. Malory and Graves could play this game, too, and frequently did. The Hillyard, Cleef offer was suddenly lowered. Neither Graves nor Malory was subsequently available when Mr Grace telephoned to enquire if he understood the reduced offer aright. A further and genuine bid then materialized from another source altogether; this for one hundred and fifteen thousand pounds. It was made by an elderly lady who marched up to the white-painted door one evening, said she was from Australia, and would buy the house there and then. 'Here,' she said, 'is my cheque. And here, because there are crooks in this world Mr Abrahams-and I'm not saying you're one of them because I don't know whether you are or not - is a document for you to sign. In the event you call off the deal, you pay me ten thousand. Fair?'
It was fair, Abrahams thought. But Mr Thomas Plantagenet Grace was privately doubtful. He suspected that the elderly lady was a plant, an agent of Hillyard, Cleef. What is more, he was right. She was herself a director of a Hillyard, Cleef subsidiary in Australia. Mr Grace could prove nothing. What he could do was delay matters.
He did.
At Hillyard, Cleef the effects of the delay varied according to the individual. Laurence Pilgrim, with a somewhat irritable Malory haunting the building seven hours a day, began to hope that part three of Dikeston's memoirs would surface soon, if only to get Malory off his back. Malory passed his day harrying lawyers, Graves, and anybody else within reach. He was, by now, thanks to the historian from Oxford, as well-informed as it is possible to be about the question of what happened to the Romanovs after Yakovlev was compelled to turn back outside Omsk. Evenings at Wilton Place tended to be spent in his study with a volume of Romanov reminiscences, rather than at the bridge table. He read the memoirs of Romanov uncles, cousins, aunts, teachers and friends. In some areas all said much the same thing. In others they differed.
Not one mentioned a meeting with Dutov - nor was there mention anywhere of the possibility that Commissar Vassily Yakovlev was a British agent.
There were other mysteries, too.
When at last Cavendish House changed hands-and it took a full month despite all the pressure exerted by the no-nonsense lady from Australia - Graves heard the news without pleasure. A most useful part of Graves's make-up was a pronounced node of suspicion which probably came from his French ancestry, and which told him that there was a great deal more to Dikeston's story than might be gathered from a first and superficial view. Dikeston, he thought, was obsessive; Dikeston had taken trouble with his arrangements, and had carried his grievances a long time. Dikeston had also liked setting traps and Graves, thinking about all the years Dikeston had had to set them and all the money available for them, viewed his own future involvement with no enthusiasm at all. He had originally accompanied Laurence Pilgrim to London because working for Pilgrim in international financing projects would provide the challenges to which he best responded: locking horns with clever and energetic men on a familiar battlefield and according to rules universally comprehended. But Dikeston's legacy - and Graves by now felt this strongly - was something very different. Had he been able to avoid further involvement, he would have done so, but Pilgrim had made clear his own aversion to what he described to Graves privately as
'Malory's senescent flourish', and had indicated that Graves must bear the load. The load had been borne quite lightly for several days, since Hillyard, Cleef's solicitors were taking the weight. Jacques Graves, temporarily freed as a result, had been in Vancouver. British Columbia, tying up a profitable deal involving the building of two ocean-going tugs. He was sitting in the dining-room of the Bayshore Inn, picking with pleasure at a handsomely arranged plate of Crab Louie, when he was paged. There was a telex from Malory. It read: 'Return at once.'
'The deeds.' Malory's smooth hand, brown-spotted with age, manicured throughout a lifetime, patted twice at the manila envelope which lay upon his desk. He took the gold hunter from his waistcoat pocket and consulted it. 'I don't think,' he added, 'that you should waste too much time.'
Graves, baggy-eyed and dopey with jet-lag after the seven thousand-mile overnight trip, reached for the envelope. 'Where was the address again?'
Malory looked at him reprovingly. 'A good memory,' he said, 'is extremely important in our profession, Mr Graves. Perhaps you'd better write it down.'
As the train travelled north to Liverpool, Graves's tired mind wrestled with images of Dikeston. Graves had never before in his life been subject to the feeling that he was being oppressed, but he felt it now. By some means or other, he thought savagely, anything that had its roots in Dikeston turned out to be uncomfortable, difficult or humiliating. It was evening when the train arrived in Lime Street. He awoke refreshed in one of the big high beds of the old but comfortable Adelphi Hotel in Liverpool; he breakfasted well and afterwards took a taxi to the premises of the Irish Linen Bank. The morning was bright; Graves felt cheerful; the dark, Dikeston-based delusions had been sloughed off by sleep and he was on his way to a bank to collect papers. What could be simpler? Yet it happened.