To the hilt [en]

'All banks are secretive,' the big bank man said. 'And so are we.'

'Don't despair,' Margaret said, 'we'll find the money. It's just taking longer than we hoped.'

By the end of the afternoon, however, they themselves were looking cast down; they said they would think of a new strategy for the next day. The time change alone was making things difficult. It was already mid-afternoon in Reading when the bank in Panama opened for business.

They carefully shredded every scrap of used fax and working paper and locked Norman Quorn's list into the manager's private safe. I drove a shade dispiritedly back to Lambourn and found that Emily, my mother and Audrey Newton had arrived a bare five minutes before me.

C. Y. Uttley was busy unloading suitcases from the boot.

I gave my mother a minimum hug, kissed Emily and planted an air kiss beside Audrey Newton's buxom cheek.

'We've had a lovely weekend,' she said, beaming. 'Thank you ever so much. You've bruised your face, dear, did you know?'

'Walked into a door.'

Emily took Audrey and my mother into the house and Chris gave me an assessing inspection.

'You look lousy,' he said. 'Worse than Sunday.'

'Thanks.'

'Your bus-stealing Grantchester-immobilising friend no longer exists,' he assured me. 'I dumped her today, bit by bit, in a succession of wheelybins on my way to Devon.'

'So wise.'

'How do blonde bubble curls and D-cup knockers grab you?'

'I wouldn't be seen dead with her.'

'At least the lawyer didn't cauterise your sense of humour.'

'A close-run thing.'

'Do you want anything else done?'

'Just take Audrey Newton home to Bloxham.'

'After that?'

We stared at each other.

'A friend for life,' I suggested.

'I'll send my bill.'

Emily proposed that my mother and I stay the night in Lambourn and met with little resistance.

The telephone rang in the kitchen while we were sitting round the big table watching Emily search for supper in the freezer. Emily picked up the receiver and in a moment said with surprise, 'Yes, he's here. So is Vivienne.' She held out the receiver in my direction. 'It's Himself. He's been looking for you.' I took the instrument and said, 'My lord.' 'Al, where have you been? I've had Patsy on the line all day. She sounds practically hysterical. She wants to talk to you. She says you signed yourself out of some hospital she put you in. She won't tell me why she put you in hospital. What the hell's happened?'

'Er… I ran out of wall.'

'Al, talk sense.'

My mother and Emily could both hear what I said. I thought through five seconds of silence and said, 'Can I come for a drink with you at about six tomorrow evening?'

'Of course.'

'Well… please don't tell Patsy where I am. Ask her if she'll meet me at two o'clock tomorrow afternoon in the car park of the brewery's bank's head office in Reading. And tell her…' I paused. 'Tell her thanks for the help.'

Emily said, astounded, as I put the phone down, 'Patsy helped you?'

'Mm.'

They would have to know, so I told them as unemotionally as possible that Oliver Grantchester had been trying to lay his hands on the brewery's missing millions. 'He had either conspired with Norman Quorn to steal the money in the first place, or tried to wrest it from him afterwards,' I said. 'I'm not yet sure which.'

'Not Oliver!' my mother protested in total disbelief. 'We've known him for years. He's always been Ivan's solicitor, and the brewery's too…' her voice faded. 'Ivan trusted him.'

I said, 'Ivan trusted Norman Quorn. Quorn and Grantchester… they were two normal men, good at their jobs, but fatally attracted by what looked like an easy path to a bucket of gold - and I'm not talking about the literal bucket of gold, the King Alfred Gold Cup, which Grantchester thought he could lay his hands on as a consolation when the serious prize slipped through his fingers. Grantchester may have been a good lawyer but he's an inefficient crook. He hasn't got the Gold Cup and he hasn't got the brewery's money, and Patsy has woken up to the fact that her dear darling avuncular Oliver had been trying his damnedest to rob her, as she now owns the brewery complete with its losses.'

My mother had her own concern, 'You didn't really walk into a door, did you, Alexander?'

I smiled. 'I walked into Grantchester's fist man. You'd think I'd know better.'

'And no one took hostages,' Emily said thoughtfully, with much understanding.

We went to bed. Emily expected and invited me between her sheets, but I simply had no stamina left for the oldest of games.

She asked what was under the bandages that was making me sweat.

'The wages of pride,' I said. 'Go to sleep.'

I drove my mother to Reading in the morning and saw her onto the London train, promising to spend the evening and night in Park Crescent after my six o'clock date with Himself.

Frail from grief, my calm and exquisite parent showed me in a single trembling hug on the railway platform how close we both were to being stretched too far. I understood suddenly that it was from her I had learned the way to hide fear and pain and humiliation, and that if I'd extended that ability into material things like hilts and chalices and dynamite lists, it had been because of her ultra-controlled outer face that I had all my life taken to be an absence - or at least a deficiency - of emotion.

'Ma,' I said on Reading station, 'I adore you.'

The train came, quiet and rapid, slowing to whisk her away.

'Alexander,' she said, 'don't be ridiculous.'

In the bank Tobias, Margaret and the big financial cheese were gloomily studying the electronic messages on the one machine they had left alive to receive them overnight.

Useful information from around the globe: zero.

The experts had drawn up ways of approaching the problem from so far untried angles, but nothing worked. By lunchtime they were saying they couldn't dedicate more than that afternoon to the search, as they had other unbreakable commitments ahead.

When I asked if I could bring Patsy to the afternoon session they said I could do anything I liked but Tobias, chewing hard on a toothpick, asked if I remembered what had happened to me four days ago, on the one time I'd believed in her good faith.

I was leaning forward, elbows on table, the morning's pills wearing off. I remembered, I said, and I would rely on Tobe to defend me from the maiden.

I could joke, he said, but I should also remember the sirens whose seductive songs lured foolish sailors to shipwreck and death.

Not in this bank, I said.

I met her in the car park, as arranged.

'Hello,' I said.

'Alexander…'

She was unsure of herself. Awkward. I'd never seen her like that.

She wore a shirt, a cardigan, long skirt, flat shoes: wholesome, well-groomed.

I explained that she should come into the bank with me and listen to the difficulties that had arisen in finding the brewery's millions.

For someone whose main fears for twelve years or so had been that I would somehow manage to rob her, she seemed less than anxious about the success of the search.

'I promise you,' I said, 'they are trying everything they know to find your money.'

'My father's money,' she said. 'Everything you have done was for him, wasn't it?'

'I suppose so.'

'You would never have done it for me.'

I said, 'His whole life was the brewery. He built it up. It was his pride. The heartless betrayal of Norman Quorn devastated him, and yes, I believe it killed him. And for his sake, and for my mother's sake I would have done anything to put things right. I've tried. I haven't managed it. I want the bank people to tell you that I am not trying to steal from you. I am trying to restore what Ivan built.'