Old Mr Caspian was the right sort, they said, the good sort from back before bankers came to see themselves as privateers. He was churchy; not in the way of sandwiches and the vicar’s sherry, but in the way of good works and alms for the poor and a brief silent grace before he ate, even or especially when he ate alone. Not that he ate alone often, the clerk Fitzgibbon added hastily, because he was not a loner. Not antisocial. Not a quiet man, not in that modern sense which meant that he had some poor girl chained up in his cellar. He was not that sort of quiet man at all, but the other sort, the sort who had plenty to say if they cared to but did not wish to boast. The sort who enjoyed wine and the company of his friends, but did not choose to advertise his wealth or intelligence to the casual passer-by. Old Mr Caspian, Fitzgibbon said, possessed the most English of virtues. He did not like to put himself forward. But there was no reason to read into his reticence any sinister motive, any untidy secret. Tom Rice could hear Fitzgibbon through the doorway to the other room, where he was giving the benefit of all this opinion to the detective in charge.
“Mr Caspian would have been most upset to be murdered,” Fitzgibbon declared defensively, and then—seeming to hear the sentence in the air—turned deservedly sheepish. “I mean, he would have been upset to die in a fashion which was so garish. I’m sure he would have wanted to go gently, as we all would, but I mean to go in such a way as to leave those behind him with as little as possible to worry about on his behalf. And he would not have wished to go at this moment in the tax year, with submissions and so on to be done. April is a difficult time for any bank. He would not have approved of … this.”
That this left a great deal to be desired was certainly true. Rice looked down at his feet and shifted his left shoe a little further away from a piece of debris, hoping against hope that it was brick and not a piece of Caspian’s skull.
“Pop down and see what the fuss is about, please, Tommy,” the man from the Legacy Board had told him in London. “Donny was our banker in some particulars, so we can’t have any fuss. I wish he’d been as bloody careful with our money as he was with everyone else’s, but that’s by the by. Draw a chalk line around the corpse, tell the coroner it was natural causes, and come home for tea and medals, all right?” And Tom Rice, recently appointed Under-Nobody in charge of sod all, had recognised in the immediate assent of his immediate superior at the Treasury the footstep of a giant, and said he’d leave without delay.
“Indeed, you will, Tommy,” the Legacy man agreed, and those were all the instructions he gave, or needed to. When Tom Rice let himself out of the briefing room,he found a stern woman awaiting him with documents.
Sheer propinquity made him quietly suspicious. He had been attending the monthly Legacy meeting as a stand-in for a colleague who had called in sick. He had been able to attend because another meeting had been cancelled. At the time, he had seen it as a chance to show some class and get noticed, but now the happy smoothness of it all had put him on alert. Granted, happy smoothness was a naturally occurring phenomenon. Coincidence was not always contrivance. But Rice had a naturally painstaking bent, and as he considered the chain of events leading to this opportunity, he found he did not absolutely believe in them.
“Sign this,” the stern woman said, but when he started to look the paper over, she tutted.
“You’re not cleared to read it,” she said, “until you’ve signed it. If you read it and then refuse to sign it, that’s an offence. And when you’ve read it, you will sign it, because that’s what everyone does. So you can read it in the car.”
“I can’t,” Rice said. “I get sick.”
She peered at him for a moment, apparently wondering why he would share this
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