Stone's Fall by Iain Pears Page B

Morrison fervently for the excellent repast, and walked out into the cool morning sun.

CHAPTER 7
    Until that evening the day passed uneventfully. I went to Sloane Square, where I knew there was a bank, and asked to open an account. The Midland and County (a joint stock bank, I learned, as opposed to a private bank—these things become important when you study them) seemed quite enthusiastic when I mentioned the regular payments of £6 14s 8d that would be credited to my account every week. They were not so enthusiastic when I informed them that in fact I had absolutely nothing to give them at that moment, but dealt with the disappointment in a manly fashion. They gave me a book of cheques, with strict instructions not even to think of using one until I had deposited some money.
    I went then to the Chelsea library to plunge into the world of money. Banking—joint stock, private, discount. Bills of exchange. Bills on London for forward delivery. Consols. Debentures. Issue at, below or above par. Yield. Dividend. First preference (or second preference) shares. Bonds, international, domestic, government or commercial. Clearly this capitalism was a more sophisticated beast than I had thought. I had considered it to be a means of theft that was more or less magical in its operation, but slowly realised it had its rules. Arcane and incomprehensible they might be, but rules nonetheless. Some people, at least, understood how it all worked. And what they could understand I could understand as well.
    This determination was the sole result of my morning in the library. That and a headache, and the information that Mr. Theodore Xanthos was, alas, only a salesman working for Ravenscliff’s shipbuilding company. A pity. I had hoped he would have been more important than that, but it seemed he was only a minor figure whose enthusiasm to assist came from a desire for a mention in a book which would never get written anyway.
    I walked down to the World’s End for a sandwich and a pint, and returned to easier, more familiar matters in the afternoon. The death of Lord Ravenscliff. The obituaries. Journalism. Things I could grasp standing on my head. McEwen said start at the end and work back, and it was good advice, even without his own particular interest. I needed to know and understand the man; and a man’s death is often very illuminating.
    I summoned the papers— The Times and the Telegraph, as well as the financial papers, as they always report on their own more fully—and read until my eyes popped out of my head and the library closed. I learned a little, but very far from enough.
    The death first. Here the newspapers were singularly uninformative. Lord Ravenscliff had been discovered by a passerby lying on the ground outside his house at two in the morning of 27 March 1909. He was still alive, but had died soon after. Death was due to head injuries sustained from a fall from a second-floor window. It was believed he had tripped on a carpet. He was sixty-eight years old.
    The details were much as his wife and McEwen had related, and gave little else besides. The similarity between the various reports was striking. Evidently not a single one of the reporters had written the account himself. They all had a common source, who must have more or less dictated the report. More than that, the brief summary of events appeared in all the papers some three days after the death—that is on 30 March, an unusual delay in reporting the sudden and violent death of a peer, even if one of recent creation. Ordinarily events would have proceeded thus: Ravenscliff found, police summoned. Police go back to their station to report, man on desk informs journalist, who comes in for routine enquiries, as one does every morning. If it is not the stuff of which great scoops are made (and this would not have been considered such), he informs his colleagues in the pub at about eleven. All make whatever enquiries they see fit, and the first account appears in