There was, of course, the greatest secret of all. All my instincts were to lay it in front of her; your husband was a cheat and a fraud. He was stealing money from his own companies on a vast scale. But how could I say that to a woman who had looked me in the eyes like that? Who had such hair? If I kept silent, it was not for the sake of the shareholders of Rialto.

'On the subject of the Brotherhood or whatever they're called,' I said, hurrying along, 'I've found out little. Except that it is obviously a group so small that it poses little danger to the onward march of world capitalism, and consists of people so fractious that they were thrown out of another group called the Union of Socialist Solidarity two years ago, for being disruptive. The Union of Socialist Solidarity, in turn, walked out of the International Organisation of Workers . . . well, you get the idea.'

'So how many of them are there?'

'Not many. I haven't found out much.'

'They don't sound very interesting either,' she said calmly. 'Are you sure there isn't some explanation consistent with his record as a capitalist exploiter of the masses?'

'Not that I can think of without more information.'

She shook her head. 'Don't concern yourself with this at the moment. It's not much money and does not seem to be relevant to your task. I think you should concentrate on that.'

'I just had this vision of his long-lost son turning up as a wild-eyed revolutionist.'

'In which case he would have known exactly who he was, no?'

'True.'

She turned to me, and took my hand. 'I need this business settled,' she said softly. 'It is beginning to prey on my mind. I have to start a new life, not spend my days tidying up the old one. Please help me. Promise you will concentrate on the important.'

Of course I would. Anything. Once more, as she held my hand and looked at me, I wanted to reach out for her. Once more I did not. But my resistance was already becoming enfeebled.

CHAPTER 16

I did not entirely ignore her request to concentrate on the lost child, but my enquiries went nowhere over the next week or so, and slowly. I did what you do in such circumstances; paid a young man at Births and Deaths to go through the registries, week by week and month by month, to see if any child had been registered naming Ravenscliff as father. The chances of this producing anything were small. Entries are named by the child's surname, and it was more than likely that this one would not have his father's name. I made enquiries of foreign journalists in London about how to go about finding children in France, Spain, Italy and other places, and wrote letters asking for assistance. Again, this was unlikely to produce results quickly, if at all, but I was determined to do a thorough job. After a week or so of this, the only possibility left was to write to every orphanage in Europe. This I decided to put off for as long as possible.

Then I returned to my interest in Ravenscliff's money. Not least because I was beginning to find the topic of money in general quite interesting. I had been working for Lady Ravenscliff for more than a month; my bank account now had £21 in it, and every week, my income so greatly exceeded my expenses that I even took to making out little columns of numbers, calculating how much I would have this time next year, or the year after that. Having money was very much more interesting than not having it. I almost began to understand (from a lowly point of view) what made someone like Ravenscliff tick. One thing had occurred to me, and that was that the start of Ravenscliff's attempt to siphon funds out of his companies had come around the time that Seyd's had begun an investigation into Rialto and suddenly dropped it. The owner, Young Seyd, had been responsible for that decision, Wilf had said, so it was reasonable to consider him for a while.