Stone's Fall

by Iain Pears

  The offices he occupied, above a ships’ chandler, were modest enough—one room for himself, one for clerks, of whom there were about a dozen, and one room for ranks of files and records, but he was so large that the room he had taken as his own was nearly filled by his presence. The little space left over was inhabited by a strange pixie-like character with bright eyes and a pointed goatee beard. Somewhere in his forties, medium height, slender, wearing a brown suit and carrying a pair of bright yellow leather gloves in one hand. He said almost nothing all the time I was there, and we were not introduced; rather, he sat on a seat in a corner reading a file, only occasionally looking up and smiling sympathetically at me. I wished I had been dealing with him, rather than with Bartoli. He seemed a much more agreeable fellow.

  In contrast, Bartoli wore an orthodox black suit, but kept on scratching himself and running his finger around his collar as though it irked him. His vast belly fitted behind the desk with difficulty, and his red face and whiskers reminded me greatly of many of the regulars I often saw ranged alongside the bars of nearby pubs. His voice was loud and heavily accented, although it took me some time to realise what the accent was. Manchester-Italian, I decided after a while.

  “Sit down,” he said, gesturing at an uncomfortable chair on the other side of the desk. “You’ll be Burdock.”

  “Braddock,” I replied. “Mr.”

  “Yes, yes. Sit down.” He had the gestures of the foreigner; extravagant, and excessive, the sort of mannerisms which an Englishman distrusts. I took against Bartoli instantly. And (I must admit) against Ravenscliff, for putting such a man in a position to give orders. I was a great patriot then. I do not know whether I say so in pride or in sorrow.

  He looked at me piercingly, as though sizing me up for some appointment and finding me wanting. “I do not approve of what Lady Ravenscliff has decided to do,” he said eventually. “I should tell you this frankly, as you might as well know now that you will get little encouragement from me.”

  “What do you think she has asked me to do?” I asked, wondering whether he knew of the will.

  “The biography of Lord Ravenscliff,” he said.

  “Yes. Well, as you please. But I cannot see what your objection is.”

  He snorted. “You are a journalist.”

  “Yes.”

  “What do you know of business?”

  “All but nothing.”

  “That’s what I thought. Ravenscliff was a businessman. Perhaps the greatest this country has ever known. To understand him, you have to understand business, industry, finance. Do you?”

  “No. And until yesterday morning I’d never even heard of him. All I can say is that Lady Ravenscliff has asked me to do this job. I did not solicit it. If you want to know why she chose me, you must ask her. Like you, I could think of many people better able to do justice to the subject. But that was her decision and she offered such terms that I would have been mad to refuse. Perhaps I will do poorly; certainly I will unless I have the co-operation of those who knew him.”

  He grunted and pulled a folder from his desk. At least I had not puffed myself up and claimed an expertise I did not possess.

  “The payment is absurd,” he commented.

  “I quite agree. But if someone offers you a higher price than you anticipated for one of your products do you bargain them down?”

  He tossed it over. “Sign, then,” he said.

  “I think I should read it first.”

  “You won’t find anything unexpected. You are to write a biography of Lord Ravenscliff and will submit the finished manuscript to Her Lady ship for approval. You are forbidden to discuss anything which might be relevant to any of the companies listed in the appendix. Expenses will be paid at my discretion.”

  I had never come across a contract with an appendix before, nor one so big, but then I had never been paid so much either.

  “How do I get paid?” I asked as I read—more for form’s sake than anything else. He had summed the contents up admirably.

  “I will send a cheque to your address every week.”

  “I do not have a bank account.”

  “Then you’d better get one.”

  I felt like asking him—where do I start? But knew that his already low opinion of me would fall even further. The paper paid me weekly in a brown envelope. By the time I had paid bed and board, what was left over usually remained—although only for a short while—in my pocket until it was handed over to publicans or music hall owners.

  I had thought when I arrived at the office that Bartoli would give me all the information I needed on Ravenscliff’s business, but in fact he told me nothing. He would answer questions, but first of all I would have to know what to ask. I would need to make specific requests before he would let me see any papers and even then—such was the hint—he might prove unco-operative.

  “In that case,” I said cheerfully, “I would like to know—if it is possible—everywhere he went.”

  “When?”

  “Throughout his career.”

  “Are you mad?”

  “No. I also want a list of everybody he knew, or met.”

  Bartoli looked at me. “Lord Ravenscliff must have encountered tens of thousands of people. He travelled incessantly, throughout Europe, the Empire and to the Americas.”

  “Look,” I said patiently. “I am meant to write a biography which people will want to read. I am going to need personal details. How did he start? Who were his friends and family? What is it like travelling around the world? This is the sort of thing people are interested in. Not how much money he made in one year or the next. No one cares about that.”

  He annoyed me; he treated me with neither seriousness nor consideration. I have never liked being treated like that. My colleagues believe I am overly sensitive to slights, real or imagined. Perhaps so, but it is a tendency which has served me well over the years. Dislike and resentment are great stimulants. Bartoli had converted me from someone who thought solely about the amount of money he was paid into someone who would have been determined to do the job properly even if he hadn’t been paid at all.

  CHAPTER 4

  I emerged from the office thinking it was time to start work, and there was one obvious place to begin. Seyd & Co. was, by the standards of the City of London, a venerable institution. It had begun near half a century before to report on the credit-worthiness of traders wishing to borrow money from banks, and its investigations had gradually come to cover all aspects of finance. The more complex business became, the more obscure the origins of merchants, the greater the possibilities for duplicity and deception. And the more opportunities for companies like Seyd’s to make money by shining light into the murkier recesses of man’s greed.

  For the most part—and officially—their business was to produce guides. The Birmingham Commercial List. California and Its Resources. All of which had to be bought by importers and exporters, dealers and merchants to avoid imposition by scoundrels. But very quietly and discreetly they did much more than that. By its nature, the City was full of rogues and thieves. But thieves have their codes of honour, and Seyd’s winkled out those who did not follow the rules. Those who claimed financial backers who did not exist, who forgot to mention convictions for fraud in far-off countries. Who mentioned their assets, but not their debts. Whose word, in other words, was not their bond.

  Once upon a time a company like Seyd’s was not necessary, for the city of money was a small place, and everyone knew their clients. Life was simple when bankers only accepted people they had dined with. They dealt with gentlemen, and there was nothing easier to know about than the extent of a gentleman’s estate, or the solvency of his family. Now it is a gibbering Babel of unknowns. Is a man a penniless scoundrel or really one of the richest men in the Habsburg Empire? Does he really have a lucrative contract in Buenos Aires, or in reality should he be in gaol for having run from his creditors? How can one tell? Dissimulation is the first trick of banker and conman alike.


  Seyd’s discovered the truth. Not always, and not perfectly, but better than anyone else. I knew because I had on occasion done some work for them. I had been approached a few years previously to discover something of a man who was setting up as a company promoter in the north of England. He claimed to be able to bring seven cotton producers together to combine into one larger unit that could then be offered for sale. All he needed was some capital…

  I had to take a day off work to travel north, but I got the truth out soon enough. Ernest Mason left the country a day before he could be arrested for fraud, but only because I tipped him off. He offered me money in return, but my conscience rebelled at being paid thrice for the same work. Once by my newspaper, as I wrote up the story of the fraudulent promotions, once by Seyd’s, who paid me for my report, and once by Mason. But undoubtedly many in the company’s employ do so profit from their knowledge, and do worse. There is good money to be had in the City of London for those who really want it.

  Wilf Cornford was too lazy ever to become rich. Had he possessed easy wealth by inheritance he would have been a scientist working out the various species and subspecies of the insect world. Instead, he catalogued the character and follies of homo economicus; it was his duty and his pleasure, and he was one of the few men I have ever met who could be considered truly happy. He could have been a power in the land, for all would have been afraid of him had they truly appreciated how much he knew. But he could not be bothered and, so he told me once, it would spoil his observations. All those people who gave him such an interesting time with their activities would begin to behave differently if they knew they were being watched.

  It was he who first had the idea of hiring me for the occasional bit of investigation down in the police courts, and payment was occasionally some money, and more often a useful tip about a forthcoming arrest or scandal which his network of blabbermouths had passed on to him. On several occasions he had suggested I come to work for Seyd’s properly, but I had never taken him up. I liked a more varied diet.

  “Matthew,” he said in his even fashion when I knocked on his door and was admitted. “Nice to see you again. We haven’t seen you here for a long time.”

  Wilf’s way of speaking was as anonymous as his appearance. He was a portly fellow in his fifties, but not excessively so. He spoke with a measured neutrality, neither sounding like a toff nor yet betraying any trace of his West Country origins, for his father had been a labourer in Dorset, and he had been sent as a child to serve in the house of the local gentry. There he had somehow learned to read and write, and when the family had brought him to London for the season some thirty-five years ago he had walked out one morning and never gone back. He found a job at a tallow chandler’s writing up the books, for he had a fine script. Then he moved on to a corn broker, then a discount house, and finally to Seyd’s.

  “I was busy with the Mornington Crescent trial.”

  He wrinkled his nose in disapproval. As well he might. This had not been a classic in the annals of British crime, and the only interesting aspect of the case had been the sheer stupidity of William Goulding, the murderer, who had kept the head of his unfortunate victim in a box under his bed, so when the police came calling—as they were bound to do, for the woman had lived in his house—even they could not have failed to notice the smell and the pool of dried blood which had dripped through the floorboards from the bedroom above and stained the parlour carpet. Goulding had not read the penny press, and so was possibly the only person left in England who did not know about the wonders of fingerprints for identifying even headless corpses. It was an open-and-shut case, but the trial took place in an otherwise quiet period, and the public does love its gore.

  “I really don’t know how you do your job,” he said. “I would find it very dull.”

  “In comparison to the account books you like to read?”

  “Oh, yes. They are fascinating. If you know how to read them.”

  “Which I don’t. And that is one of the reasons I am here.”

  “I was rather hoping you had come to give me information, not ask for it.”

  “Do you know of a man called Ravenscliff?”

  He stared at me for a minute, then very uncharacteristically leaned back and laughed out loud. “Well,” he said indulgently, “yes. Yes, I think I can say I have heard of him.”

  “I need to find out about him.”

  “How many years do you have at your disposal?” He paused, and looked rather patronisingly at me. “You could spend the rest of your life learning about him, and still never find out everything. Where are you starting from? How much do you know already?”

  “Very little. I know he was rich, was some sort of financier and is dead. And that his wife wants me to write a biography of him.”

  That got his attention. “Really? Why you?”

  I summarised my interview—leaving out the truly important bit—and threw in for good measure my brief interview with Bartoli.

  “What a strange choice,” he said when I’d finished, staring up at the ceiling with a dreamy look in his eye, a bit like a cat that had just finished a particularly large bowl of cream.

  “I’m glad you find it so,” I said, rather nettled. “And if you could tell me what in particular…”

  He let out a long sigh. “It’s difficult to know where to begin, really,” he said after a while. “Are you really as ignorant as you say?”

  “Pretty much.”

  “You reporters never cease to amaze me. Do you never read your own newspaper?”

  “Not if I can help it.”

  “You should. You’d find it invaluable. And fascinating. But I forgot. You are a socialist. Dedicated to eradicating the ruling class and bringing in the New Jerusalem.”

  I scowled. “Most people live in poverty while the rich—”

  “Grind the faces of the poor. Yes, indeed they do. How they grind them, though, is of great importance and interest. Know thine enemy, young man. If you insist on thinking of them as your enemy. Although as you are now a fully paid-up servant of the worst of the grinders—or at least his widow—I have no doubt your views will have to undergo a certain modification. Had you been better informed you might have refused the money, and thus kept the purity of your soul intact.”

  “What do you mean, the worst of them?”

  “John Stone, First Baron Ravenscliff. Chairman of the Rialto Investment Trust, with holdings in the Gosport Torpedo Company, Gleeson’s Steel, Beswick Shipyards, Northcote Rifle and Machine Gun. Chemical works. Explosives. Mines. Now even an aircraft company, although I doubt those will ever amount to much. You name it. Very secretive man. When he travelled on the Orient Express he had his own private coach that no one but he used. No one really knows what he owned or controlled.”

  “Not even you?”

  “Not even me. We did begin an investigation on behalf of a foreign client about a year ago, but stopped.”

  “Why?”

  “Ah, well. Why indeed? All I know is that one day I was called in by young Seyd—the son, that is, and you know how rarely he ever comes near the place—and asked if we were looking at Rialto. He took the papers and told us not to continue.”

  “Does that often happen?”

  “Never. Mr. Seyd junior is not like his father, and is not known for his backbone. He prefers life in the country, saving souls and living off his dividends. But he’s an amiable enough man, and never interferes. This was the first and last time.”

  “So what caused this?”

  Wilf shrugged. “I cannot say. I don’t know that a biography would interest many people, except me,” he went on with a slight sniff of disapproval. “Ravenscliff was money. It’s all he did. All he ever did. From the standpoint of someone like you, obsessed with the tawdry details of humanity’s failings, he was an utter bore. You couldn’t even justify a paragraph on him. Which was why his death was so little reported, I suppose. He got up in the morning. He worked. He went to bed. As far as
I am aware, he was a faithful husband—”

  “Was he?” I asked quickly, hoping that my interest wouldn’t seem suspicious. Wilf, however, put it down to natural squalor.

  “Yes, I fear so. He might have owned a brothel and have patronised it on a regular basis, of course, but it never came to my attention. What I mean is that he never had any notable alliances, if you get my meaning. With People.”

  Now, by “People” Wilf meant the sort of folk he was interested in. The rich and the powerful—and, in this case, their wives and daughters. Shopgirls and women of that sort never came to his attention. “People” had money. Everyone else was merely scenery.

  “He had no time, and no interest in anything so frivolous, I believe. As far as I could discern, the companies were collectively highly profitable. Do you know anything about his companies?”

  I shook my head.

  “Very well then. One thing you should keep in the back of your mind is this: why were you asked to write about a subject for which you are perfectly unsuited? Even if you were presented with a full set of accounts for a company, you wouldn’t even be able to understand them. So why you? Why not someone who stands a chance of doing a decent job?”

  That irritated me. “Perhaps Lady Ravenscliff has a high opinion of my intelligence and ability to learn. But for £350 a year, why should I care?”

  “Oh, you should. You should. These are tricky people, young man. The rich believe they are allowed anything, and they are right. Be careful of what you are getting involved in.”

  He sounded just like George Short. Normally, Wilf spoke with the detachment of the scientific observer; now he was in earnest.

  “You like me,” I said in astonishment. “I am touched.”

  “I see you as a little mouse trying to steal an egg from an eagle’s nest, thinking it is so lucky to have found such a feast,” he said severely.

  I thought about this for a second, then shrugged his warning aside. “You still haven’t told me where I might begin.”