Stone's Fall

His father had trained him up for the business, but as Wilf had said, he had no taste for it. He was clever enough to leave well alone, and appoint good people who knew their jobs. Then he withdrew; his only connection was to attend the quarterly board meetings, collect his dividends and put his name to all those forms which require a chairman's signature. If I have conjured up the image of the typical second-generation owner, slowly dissipating his father's accumulated wealth in a life of indulgence and idle luxury, then the image is entirely incorrect. For Young Seyd had a secret life. He was a vicar in the Church of England, to which calling he had been inclined since his earliest youth. Only the authority of a very determined father had stopped him from being ordained as young as possible, and once that authority vanished Young Seyd had taken the cloth with almost unseemly haste. It was a strange mixture, pews and pulpits on the one hand and corporatised intelligence on the other, but he seemed to reconcile the two with little difficulty. Crockford's Clerical Directory supplied all the information I needed to find him. Young Seyd lived in Salisbury.

'I believe I am doing God's work in both,' he said with a smile once he had allowed me in – with some obvious hesitation, it must be said. 'Knowing their sins will be discovered helps to keep the men of wealth honest. It means that the poor will be treated more justly. And I must say that what I learned during my apprenticeship about the weaknesses of men, and the temptations of power, has prepared me well for life in the Church.'

I liked him; I had not expected to, as my opinion had been coloured in advance by Wilf's scarcely concealed disapproval. But Young Seyd – his father had now been dead for more than a decade but the name persisted – impressed me. More of an eighteenth-century vicar than a member of the newly reformed and muscular Church of England; not for him the business of evangelising workers or natives. No; Seyd was happy to let men be. If they came to him, well and good, but he did not believe he had any right to bother people unnecessarily. He christened, married and buried his parishioners; he read his books and he lived a quiet, contented life with his housekeeper, a cat and many friends.

And he kept a distant eye on the doings of his company. Which was why I had gone to Waterloo and taken a morning train to Salisbury.

Once I was in his house – a fine new villa in Manor Road, luxurious for a vicar but modest for the owner of a company – and he had some tea brought for me, I plunged straight into my tale. There seemed little point in dissimulating; to do so with such a decent man – he was perhaps in his early forties then and was just beginning to show the effects in his body of a life without want – was somehow unseemly. Also, in the train as I had watched the Wiltshire countryside pass in front of me, I had rehearsed all possible ways of broaching the subject without broaching it, if you understand me, and got nowhere. I could not discover any means of phrasing the questions which would get me the answers I wanted without being precise.

So I explained that I was writing a biography of Ravenscliff for his widow, although this was to be for private circulation only. I said that she was allowing me unparalleled access to all his papers. How some could not be found; how Wilf Cornford had mentioned the abortive investigation by Seyd's of a year or so previously . . .

At this the reverend gentleman began to look uneasy. But I continued anyway, saying that it was most important, and his wife's dearest wish, that I should have access to everything there was to know.

'It's important for my work, you understand. But it might also be important for the executors of his will, depending on what it contains, that is. These things seem to be terribly complicated.'

'Yes, yes. And thank heavens they are. Otherwise Seyd's would have nothing to do at all.'

'So you'll give me the report? I'm so grateful to you, and of course I will treat it in the strictest . . .'

The Reverend Seyd held up his hand. 'I am afraid that I cannot do that,' he said gently.

'Why not?'

'I was visited at my club in London by a man who explained that he would prefer this investigation to be discontinued.'

'And just because some total stranger . . .'

'You are also a total stranger,' he said. 'And the first was more persuasive than you are.'

'How so?'

He spread his hands in a gesture of resignation.

'And he worked for Ravenscliff?'

'I decided to do as he requested.'

'But what could he possibly say to make you do that? By what right . . . ?'

Again he did not reply.

'Do you still have this report?'

He shook his head. 'I gathered up all the papers and brought them all here. A fortnight later my house was burgled.'

'I see,' I said quietly. 'And you think Ravenscliff was responsible?'