The King's Commisar

'Used to?' said Malory dangerously.

'Yeah, used to. Let me ask you, Horace, who's it making a goddam fool of himself here? Who's buying houses and handing them to the United Nations? Who's paying cheques into 'X' accounts? This is a bank, Horace, not a bottomless benevolent society.'

Malory crossed one immaculately creased trouser leg over the other, it is a bank I have served for a great many years. I'm entirely ready to re-examine the profit record and the growth under my stewardship. May I say that if you do as well, you will be doing very well! I can read profit and loss, I can see prospects and dangers, I can make financial assessments, all of those. But there are times, as now, when -'

'Look, we had all this before. There's a danger and we have to know what it is, that's your case, right? So answer me just one question, Horace.'

if I can.'

'We've spent two hundred thousands pounds. Okay.

Are we any nearer knowing what this danger is? Are we one single goddam step nearer?'

Malory pursed his lips. 'We know the general source of the danger lies in the relationship between Zaharoff and the Tsar. We are learning more, stage by stage.'

'Oh sure,' Pilgrim said angrily. 'Information is dispensed word by word by Dikeston. Dikeston met the Tsar; Dikes-ton met Zaharoff; Dikeston met the King, Lenin, Trotsky and Whistler's goddam mother for all I know. Dikeston's in charge of a train loaded with jewels. Dikeston's whizzing round Siberia like a fly with a ginger ass, and we don't even know who Dikeston is!'

'Oh, but we do, Laurence,' Malory said gently. 'We know he represented royalty at the highest level, and business too, also at the highest level. We know when he was born and when he died.'

Pilgrim blinked. 'Do we? Since when?'

'Since I arranged scrutiny of the death register at Somerset House. It showed that Henry George Dikeston died on 20th October, 1968.'

'You're sure he's dead, Horace?'

'There is a death certificate. He died at Sainte-Maxime in the South of France. But there was no will and no property.'

'No property! When he had fifty thousand a year for -'

'None in France or England, I meant, Laurence. None that can be traced.'

'What else do we know?'

Malory's eye inspected the shining toe of his hand-lasted shoe. 'I have a tame historian. Consider this, Laurence. It seems that in the first months of the nineteen-fourteen war, the Tsar sent huge amounts of money out of Russia. Much of it was part of his own personal fortune and he was undoubtedly at that time the richest man on earth.'

'Oh, come on, Horace. Not that stuff about Romanov millions scattered all over Europe and America and never claimed! You're not going to feed me that one?'

'I fear not,' Malory said. 'I'm going to feed you, as you put it, the report of Professor Bernard Pares to the Prime Minister, Lloyd George, and quoted in Lloyd George's War Memoirs, that relations between Britain and Russia were being gravely jeopardized by the failure of Vickers, Maxim & Co, to supply munitions.'

'Who was Pares?'

'A scholar with political ambitions. Lloyd George had sent him to Russia. You know who represented Vickers, Maxim?'

'Zaharoff?'

'Zaharoff indeed.'

Pilgrim passed a weary hand across his brow. 'Okay, I get it. You think Zaharoff fleeced the Tsar.'

'I don't see why not,' Malory said. 'He fleeced thousands, and most of them were a good deal brighter than Nicholas Romanov.'

'And Dikeston - where's Dikeston come in? You worked that out yet?'

'Two things worry me,' said Malory gently. 'The first is the piece of paper. Sir Basil's paper. Did the Tsar sign it, and if so what was it?'

'And the second?'

'Is the really serious one. Laurence - you talked about all the people Dikeston had met, but you quite failed to mention one.'

'Who was that?'

Malory gave a small smile. 'We're all human, you know, Dikeston included. He's told us he met the highest and the lowest. Let me ask you, Laurence, which individual do you think made the greatest impression on him?'

Pilgrim thought for a moment. 'You mean the girl - the Grand Duchess?'

'Marie. He fell for her.' Malory said. 'Fell like a ton of bricks. They talked for an hour and he never forgot a moment of it. And then what happened?'

'I don't follow you.'

'Don't you? She was butchered,' Malory said harshly. 'We really must find the painting Dikeston talks about. Don't you agree?'

Dikeston's letter of instructions was, in this instance, handwritten. You should keep a weather-eye open for a name. It

will appear quite soon in the catalogue of one of the

art auction houses - Christie's, Sotheby's or perhaps

Phillips'.

The name is Mallard. I am afraid it will be necessary

for you to purchase the painting. The manuscript is in

the frame.

'I suppose we have to be grateful it's not a Rembrandt,' Pilgrim said bitterly. 'Name mean anything to you, Horace?'

'Offhand, no. Except that it's a kind of duck. And if I remember, the name was once given to a railway engine.'

'We'll finish by running behind that engine, you want to bet?'

'I think not.' Malory took himself off to his room and there examined the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, which confirmed that the Mallard was indeed a duck, or at any rate a drake. It was also a festival celebrated on January 14th at All Souls College, Oxford. Of art or artists there was no mention. He sent for Fergus Huntly. 'There seems to have been an artist, Huntly. His name was Mallard. I want you to find out about him. Oh yes, and get on to the art auctioneers, Christie's, Sotheby's and Phillips. I want their catalogues.'

Huntly nodded. 'You know nothing about this artist?'

'Not a thing,' Malory said briskly. 'Come to think, it may not be an artist at all. Could be a picture, couldn't it?'

'Of a duck?'

'Well, why not! What about Scott? Peter Scott - that's the chap. Painted lots of ducks.'

'Right, Sir Horace.'

Huntly took himself to the London Library in St James's Square, but though he consulted a wide selection of art books, he found no artist named Mallard. Nor, it seemed, from enquiries at the art auction houses, was any painting of wild duck - or not a painting of any consequence -coming up for sale.

He reported sadly back to Sir Horace Malory. 'There's no trace at all.'

'Isn't there?' Malory sat ruminatively over the remains of a tumbler of malt whisky. 'Who do I know in art?'

'Well - I don't know. I mean, you know a lot of people, you must know a lot of -' Huntly got hold of himself, wondering what it was in Malory that gave him verbal dysentery.

'Historian, he is, yes, this fella. You know the one. None too savoury, matter of fact. Traitor and a pansy, nasty combination!'

'Oh, him!' said Huntly.

Malory found him at a club. Both men were members of several, but had only this one in common. The art historian, who had achieved eminence as a scholar and infamy as a betrayer of his country and had somehow contrived not to be prosecuted, should, Malory thought, have been sitting in a cell. He crossed the large, decaying room, with its vaulted ceiling, its worn leather chairs and its moth-eaten Afghan rugs, reflecting mischievously that the art historian was not the only one in his wide acquaintanceship who might properly be in gaol. Half the City for a start. Why, he himself, observed in a certain light . . . Malory smiled to himself and tottered towards the man's seat. He wore his doddering old buffer act as comfortably as though it were an old jacket.