Page 22 of The Impossible Fortune
‘But I’m protecting the Duke of Edinburgh.’
Hold on, thinks Donna, didn’t the Duke of Edinburgh die a few years ago? Donna doesn’t watch much news, but she’s sure she remembers that.
‘Actually, isn’t he dead?’ Donna asks.
‘That was the old Duke of Edinburgh,’ says Elizabeth. ‘This is the new one.’
‘There’s a new Duke of Edinburgh?’ asks Donna.
‘Of course there’s a new Duke of Edinburgh,’ says Elizabeth. ‘He used to be Prince Edward.’
Donna shakes her head. All this for Prince Edward. ‘Okay, I’ll be right with you.’
‘Tremendous,’ says Elizabeth. ‘We shall see you anon.’
‘I don’t suppose,’ says Donna, thrilled by the return of the old Elizabeth, and a thought occurring to her, ‘that you were in Mad about the Soy half an hour ago?’
But Elizabeth has hung up, and the familiar, business-like rudeness of that gesture brings a huge grin to Donna’s face.
13
One by one the barns in the lower fields are collapsing. There was a time when Lord Townes would have a team who would head down and patch them up, or maybe they’d throw a few quid at the problem and knock up a whole new barn altogether. The team is long gone though, as is most of the money. And so the barns were now headed the same way.
In his great-grandfather’s day Headcorn Hall had sat at the heart of four thousand acres of Sussex countryside, stretching from the cliffs, across the Downs and into the low valleys of Kent. His grandfather had sold off the odd packet of land here and there, more as favours to friends than anything else. His father had split the estate in two, selling nearly two thousand acres and ploughing the profits of the deal into the casinos of Mayfair. It would have been quicker simply to give the land to the casinos. In actuality he’d sold a lot of it to house builders, and entire new villages had sprung up, much to the horror of the old villages already there; some had gone to the Ministry of Defence, which, in true government style, had wildly overpaid. The latter was, very briefly, good news for his father, but, in the longer term, good news for the Grosvenor Casino.
So Lord Townes, Robert if you must, had inherited a tract of land and a mountain of debt, and had diligently setabout managing both. Headcorn Hall now has just eighty acres to call its own. Lord Townes could have driven the estate quad bike around the perimeter in less than an hour, if he hadn’t already had to sell the estate quad bike.
His years in the City had been well paid, but he had spent an awful lot of the proceeds patching this place up. He then did a bit of consulting for a while, but not many people in the new world of the City really want to consult a 59-year-old man who can’t work a computer.
He used to hire out Headcorn Hall for film shoots, which was tremendous fun. They’d had Joanna Lumley filming something here at one point, and there was an advert for Snickers that they’d shot in the Grand Ballroom. In the end he’d stopped hiring it out when he discovered that one particular company was using it to shoot pornographic films, something he’d discovered only when a friend down from London sheepishly admitted that he recognized the damask curtains in one of the guest bedrooms.
It is possible, however, that things are looking up. Holly Lewis and Nick Silver’s visit was unexpected. Could he give them advice? Well, of course he could. Giving advice to people with money has always been his job. While diverting a little to himself in the process.
In any deal there are angles, and your only job is to spot more of them than the other man. Robert Townes has never been the most ruthless of men; he would have achieved a great deal more if he had been. Some of the very worst people he’d ever worked with were now some of the very richest. Miserable, almost certainly, but their barns were not falling down.
When he’d started at the Culpepper Ward Bank in the mid-eighties, the mantra was ‘You can make friends, or you can make money’, and, as Robert already had money, he chose to make friends. People really seemed to like him.
But now that he has no money left? Where have the friends all disappeared to?
Over two hundred years Headcorn Hall has got smaller and smaller, as each successive Lord Townes has shrunk the estate. So much power and wealth disappearing under the auctioneer’s hammer long before Robert was born.
Lord Townes pours himself a whisky. The expensive stuff for once. Because who’s to say the fortunes of the family aren’t about to be reversed?
14
‘Well,’ says Elizabeth, surveying the wreckage of Nick Silver’s office at 8b Templar Street, ‘this isn’t ideal at all.’
‘Do you think they’ve killed him?’ Joyce asks. A desk has been upended in the middle of the room, its drawers pulled out and scattered. Two filing cabinets have been prised open, and papers are strewn across the floor. If Nick Silver had been in his office, waiting for Elizabeth, he was certainly not here now.
‘Killed who?’ asks Donna. Not unreasonably, in Elizabeth’s estimation.
Donna had argued for a while against breaking in, and that was to be expected, applauded even: we all need our self-respect. ‘Did you really see someone breaking in, Elizabeth?’ ‘Don’t you think I have better things to do, Elizabeth?’ ‘Is Elizabeth making you do this, Joyce? Blink twice for yes.’ But eventually the combination of Elizabeth’s helplessness and Donna’s resentment at Prince Edward costing her an easy week meant that she relented.
In the end, Donna had commandeered a local locksmith, who was only too happy to help – locksmiths not always being entirely above the law, and therefore eager for any opportunity to get on the good side of the police. The locksmith, however, had no luck: the door was made of tougher stuff than his tools and expertise combined. So Donna rangBogdan, who was nearby helping to renovate the local Polish community centre, and he rushed around. Within forty-five seconds or so they were inside.
‘The question is,’ says Elizabeth, ‘was this a burglary or was this a kidnapping?’
Had the violence unleashed on the room also been unleashed on Nick Silver?
