asking all the right questions. Lorimer did not speculate or air his own hunches or suspicions, merely told the story of the Fedora Palace affair as it had unfolded. At one stage Wiles took out a notebook and jotted down the relevant names.
‘It doesn’t make much sense to me, I must say’ Wiles considered. ‘I’ll make a few calls, check a few records.
We may stumble across a clue.’ He put away his pen. ‘If there is something hot then I can write about it, yeah? That’s understood. It would be my story, to place where I wanted.’
‘In principle,’ Lorimer said cautiously, in the face of this freelance zeal. ‘Let’s see what we get first. My job maybe at stake.’
‘Don’t worry’ Wiles said cheerfully ‘I wouldn’t implicate you in any way. I always protect my sources.’ He looked at his notes. ‘What about this Rintoul fellow?’
‘I think Gale-Harlequin are suing him. I’d go easy with him, if I were you. Bit of a wide boy.’
‘Right. Point taken.’ He looked up and smiled. ‘So, how was Tenerife?’
‘Sorry?’
‘Dymphna told me you and she had a few days there.’
‘Did she? Oh. Yeah, it was… you know, nice.’
‘Lucky bastard,’ Wiles said, ruefully. ‘I always rather fancied Dymphna.’
Maybe if you changed your hairstyle you might stand more of a chance, Lorimer thought, and then felt a little ashamed at his lack of charity – Wiles was doing him a favour after all, and only because of his unrequited love for Dymphna.
‘We’re just, you know, good friends,’ Lorimer said, not wanting to close any doors in Wiles’s amatory life.
‘Nothing special.’
‘That’s what they all say.’ Wiles shrugged, his eyes sad behind his round frames. ‘I’ll get back to you. Thanks for the coffee.’
77. The World’s First Loss Adjuster. The very first policy of life insurance was written in England on the 18th June 1853. A man, one William Gibbons, insured his life for the sum of 383 pounds, 6 shillings and 8 pence for one year. He paid a premium of eight per cent and sixteen underwriters signed the contract. Gibbons died on the 20th May the following year, some four weeks short of the period covered in the insurance policy, and his bereaved family duly submitted a claim. What happened?
The underwriters refused to pay up. They did this on the grounds that a year – strictly defined – is twelve times four weeks – twelve times twenty-eight days – and therefore on the basis of this calculation William Gibbons had in fact lived longer than the ‘strictly defined’ year he had insured his life for, and had thus ‘survived the term’.
What I want to know, Hogg used to say, is the name of the man who came up with that calculation to define a year. Who was the clever devil who decided that the way out of this mess was to strictly define a year? Because whoever it was who decided that a ‘year’ was twelve times twenty-eight days was, in fact, the world’s first loss adjuster. Such a person must have existed and, Hogg would insist, this person is the patron saint of our profession. He certainly disturbed the anticipations of the Gibbons family when they turned up to claim their 383 pounds, 6 shillings and 8 pence.
The Book of Transfiguration
Lorimer turned down Lupus Crescent and angled his body into the wind – a snell and scowthering one as they used to say in Inverness – and hauled his coat close about him. Marlobe was right, it was a shite of a day with dense, rushing clouds showing strong contrasts of luminous white and dark slatey grey What was happening to the weather? Where was bloody spring? He felt the wind, or the tiny grains of brick and street dust in the wind, make tears smart in his eyes and he turned his face to one side – to see David Watts’s Rolls-Lamborghini or whatever it was silently keeping pace with him, like a limo behind a mafia don out for a stroll. He stopped and the car stopped.
Terry smiled genially as he crossed the street towards him.
‘Mr Black. What a day, eh? David would like a word, if that’s all right’
Lorimer slid into the calfskin interior and smelt and touched the money implicit in every fixture and fitting. He sat back and let Terry cruise him from Pimlico to the south bank of the river. What in God’s name was going on now? On a Saturday, no less. They crossed Vauxhall Bridge and turned on