I’d read in a book: at any rate, when I’d installed it, it worked obligingly at once.
It had pleased me intensely to build a door that Gervase would never find. No more dead rats. No more live birds, shut in and fluttering with fright. No more invasions of my own private place.
Gervase had never found the door and nor had anyone else and, as the years passed, grass grew long in front of the wall, and nettles, and although I’d meant to give the secret to Robin and Peter some day, I hadn’t done so by the time of the crash. Only Malcolm knew how to get in — and Malcolm had used the knowledge.
‘What’s in there?’ I repeated.
He put on his airiest expression. ‘Just some things I didn’t want Moira to get her hands on.’
I remembered sharply the objects missing from his study.
‘The gold dolphin, the amethyst tree, the silver candelabra… those?’
‘You’ve been looking,’ he accused.
I shook my head. ‘I noticed they were gone.’
The few precious objects, all the same, hardly accounted for the severity of his first alarm.
‘What else is in there?’ I said.
‘Actually,’ he said, calmly now, ‘quite a lot of gold.’
Five
‘Some people buy and sell gold without ever seeing it,’ he said. ‘But I like possessing the actual stuff. There’s no fun in paper transactions. Gold is beautiful on its own account, and I like to see it and feel it. But it’s not all that easy to store it in banks or safety deposits. Too heavy and bulky. And insurance is astronomical. Takes too much of the profit. I never insure it.’
‘You’re storing it there in the wall… waiting for the price to rise?’
‘You know me, don’t you?’ He smiled. ‘Buy low, bide your time, sell high. Wait a couple of years, not often more. The price of gold itself swings like a pendulum, but there’s nothing, really, like gold shares. When gold prices rise, gold shares often rise by two or three times as much. I sell the gold first and the shares a couple of months later. Psychological phenomenon, you know, that people go on investing in gold mines, pushing the price up, when the price of gold itself is static or beginning to drop. Illogical, but invaluable to people like me.’
He sat looking at me with the vivid blue eyes, teaching his child.
‘Strategic Minerals, now. There never was anything like the Strategic Minerals Corporation of Australia. This year, the price of gold itself rose twenty-five per cent, but Strats - shares in Strategic Minerals - rose nearly a thousand per cent before they dropped off the top. Incredible. I got in near the beginning of those and sold at nine hundred and fifty per cent profit. But don’t be fooled, Strats happen only once or twice in a lifetime.’
‘How much,’ I said, fascinated, ‘did you invest in Strats?’
After a brief pause he said, ‘Five million. I had a feeling about them… they just smelted right. I don’t often go in so deep, and I didn’t expect them to fly so high, no one could, but there you are, all gold shares rose this year, and Strats rose like a skylark.’
‘How are they doing now?’ I asked.
‘Don’t know. I’m concerned with the present. Gold mines, you see, don’t go on for ever. They have a life: exploration, development, production, exhaustion. I get in, wait a while, take a profit, forget them. Never stay too long with a rising gold share. Fortunes are lost by selling too late.’
He did truly trust me, I thought. If he’d doubted me still, he wouldn’t have told me there was gold behind the brick door, nor that even after tax he had made approximately thirty million pounds on one deal. I stopped worrying that he was overstretching himself in buying the colt and a half-share in Blue Clancy. I stopped worrying about practically everything except how to keep him alive and spending.
I’d talked to someone once whose father had died when she was barely twenty. She regretted that she hadn’t ever known him adult to adult, and wished she could meet him again, just to talk. Watching Malcolm, it struck me that in a way I’d been given her wish: that the three years’ silence had been a sort of death, and that I could talk to him now adult to adult, and know him as a man, not as a father.
We spent a peaceful evening together in the suite, talking about what we’d each done during the