if they believed I was getting rid of most of it there would be less point in killing me… do you see?’
I stared at him. ‘You must be crazy,’ I said. ‘It sounds to me like an invitation to be murdered without delay.’
‘Ah well, that too has occurred to me of late.’ He smiled vividly. ‘But I have you with me now to prevent that.’
After a speechless moment I said, ‘I may not always be able to see the speeding car.’
‘I’ll trust your eyesight.’
I pondered. ‘What else have you spent a bundle on, that I haven’t heard about?’
He drank some champagne and frowned, and I guessed that he was trying to decide whether or not to tell me. Finally he sighed and said, ‘This is for your ears only. I didn’t do it for the same reason, and I did it earlier… several weeks ago, in fact, before Moira was murdered.’ He paused. ‘She was angry about it, though she’d no right to be. It wasn’t her money. She hated me to give anything to anyone else. She wanted everything for herself.’ He sighed, ‘I don’t know how you knew right from the beginning what she was like.’
‘Her calculator eyes,’ I said.
He smiled ruefully. He must have seen that look perpetually, by the end.
‘The nursing home where Robin is,’ he said unexpectedly, ‘needed repairs. So I paid for them.’
He wasn’t talking, I gathered, in terms of a couple of replaced window-frames.
‘Of course, you know it’s a private nursing home?’ he said. ‘A family business, basically.’
‘Yes.’
‘They needed a new roof. New wiring. A dozen urgent upgradings. They tried raising the residential fees too high and lost patients, familiar story. They asked my advice about fund-raising. I told them not to bother. I’d get estimates, and all I’d want in return was that they’d listen to a good business consultant who I’d send them.’ He shifted comfortably in his armchair. ‘Robin’s settled there. Calm. Any change upsets him, as you know. If the whole place closed and went out of business, which was all too likely, I’d have to find somewhere else for him, and he’s lost enough …’
His voice tapered off. He had delighted in Robin and Peter when they’d been small, playing with them on the carpet like a young father, proud of them as if they were his first children, not his eighth and ninth. Good memories: worth a new roof.
‘I know you still go to visit him,’ he said. ‘The nurses tell me. So you must have seen the place growing threadbare.’
I nodded, thinking about it. ‘They used to have huge vases of fresh flowers everywhere.’
‘They used to have top quality everything, but they’ve had to compromise to patch up the building. Country houses are open money drains when they age. I can’t see the place outliving Robin, really. You will look after him, when I’ve gone?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
He nodded, taking it for granted. ‘I appointed you his trustee when I set up the fund for him, do you remember? I’ve not altered it.’
I was glad that he hadn’t. At least, somewhere, obscurely, things had remained the same between us.
‘Why don’t we go and see him tomorrow?’ he said. ‘No one will kill me there.’
‘All right,’ I agreed: so we went in the hired car in the morning, stopping in the local town to buy presents of chocolate and simpletoys designed for three-year-olds, and I added a packet of balloons to the pile while Malcolm paid.
‘Does he like balloons?’ he asked, his eyebrows rising.
‘He gets frustrated sometimes. I blow the balloons up, and he bursts them.’
Malcolm looked surprised and in some ways disturbed. ‘I didn’t know he could feel frustration.’
‘It seems like that. As if sometimes he half remembers us… but can’t quite.’
‘Poor boy.’
We drove soberly onwards and up the drive of the still splendid-looking Georgian house which lay mellow and symmetrical in the autumn sunshine. Inside, its near fifty rooms had been adapted and transformed in the heyday of private medicine into a highly comfortable hospital for mostly chronic, mostly old, mostly rich patients. Short-stay patients came and went, usually convalescing after major operations performed elsewhere, but in general one saw the same faces month after month: the same faces ageing, suffering, waiting for release. Dreadfully depressing, I found it, but for Robin, it was true, it seemed the perfect haven, arrived at after two unsuccessful stays in more apparently suitable homes involving other children, bright colours, breezy nurses and jollying atmospheres. Robin seemed better with peace,