Malcolm looked at me. "Did it seem like that to you?"

"No."

"Why not?" West asked.

"The rate of acceleration, I suppose."

"Foot on accelerator going down absent -mindedly during search for cigarettes?"

"Headlights, full beam," I said.

"A sloppy driver? Had a few drinks?"

"Maybe." I shook my head. "The real problem is that if the car had hit us – or Malcolm – there might have been witnesses. The driver might have been stopped before he could leave the sales area. The car number might have been taken."

West smiled sorrowfully. "It's been done successfully before now, in broad daylight in a crowded street."

"Are you saying," Malcolm demanded of me, "that the car wasn't trying to kill me?"

"No, only that the driver took a frightful risk."

"Did any witnesses rush to pick us up?" Malcolm asked forcefully. "Did anyone so much as pass a sympathetic remark? No, they damned well didn't. Did anyone try to stop the driver or take his number? The hell they did."

"All the same, "West said, "your son is right. Hit-and-run in a public place has its risks. If it was tried here, and sirs, I'm not saying it wasn't, the putative gain must have outweighed the risk, or, erin other words -"

"in other words," Malcolm interrupted with gloom, "Ian is right to think they'll try again."

Norman West momentarily looked infinitely weary, as if the sins of the world were simply too much to contemplate. He had seen, I supposed, as all investigators must, a lifetime's procession of sinners and victims; and, moreover, he looked roughly seventy and hadn't slept all night.

"I'll take your job," he said without enthusiasm, radiating minimum confidence, and I glanced at Malcolm to see if he really thought this was the best we could do in detectives, signs of intelligence or not. Malcolm appeared to have no doubts, howeverand spent the next five minutes discussing fees which seemed ominously moderate to me.

"And I'll need a list," West said finally, "of the people you want checked. Names and addresses and normal habits."

Malcolm showed unexpected discomfort, as if checking that amorphous entity "the family" was different from checking each individual separately, and it was I who found a piece of Savoy writing paper to draw up the list.

"OK," I said, "first of all there's Vivien, my father's first wife. Mrs Vivien Pembroke."

"Not her," Malcolm objected. "It's ridiculous."

"Everyone," I said firmly. "No exceptions. That makes it fair on everyone… because there are going to be some extremely angry relations when they all realise what's happening."

"They won't find out," Malcolm said.

Fat chance, I thought.

To West, I said, "They all telephone each other all the time, not by any means always out of friendship but quite often out of spite. They won't gang up against you because they seldom form alliances among themselves. Some of them are pretty good liars. Don't believe everything they say about each other."

"Ian!" Malcolm said protestingly.

"I'm one of them, and I know," I Said.

After Vivien's name on the list I wrote the names of her children: Donald

Lucy

Thomas

"Thomas," I said, "is married to Berenice." I added her name beside his. "He is easy to deal with, she is not."

"She's a five-star cow," Malcolm said.

West merely nodded.

"Lucy," I Said, "married a man called Edwin Bugg. She didn't like that surname, and persuaded him to change it to hers, and she is consequently herself a Mrs Pembroke."

West nodded.

"Lucy is a poet," I said. "People who know about poetry say her stuff is the real thing. She makes a big production of un worldliness which Edwin, I think, has grown to find tiresome."

"Huh," Malcolm said. "Edwin's an out-and-out materialist, always tapping me for a loan."

"Do you give them to him?" I said interestedly.

"Not often. He never pays me back."

"Short of money, are they?" West asked.

"Edwin Bugg," Malcolm said, "married Lucy years ago because he thought she was an heiress, and they've scraped along ever since on the small income she gets from a trust fund I set up for her. Edwin's never done a stake of work in his parasitic life and I can't stand the fellow."

"They have one teenage schoolboy son," I said, smiling, "who asked me the last time I saw him how to set about emigrating to Australia."

West looked at the list and said to Malcolm, "What about Donald, your eldest?"

"Donald," said his father, "married a replica of his mother, beautiful and brainless. A girl called Helen. They live an utterly boring virtuous life in Henley-on-Thames and are still billing and cooing like newlyweds although Donald must be nearly forty-five, I suppose."

No one commented. Malcolm himself, rising sixty-nine, could bill and coo with the best, and with a suppressed shiver I found myself thinking for the first time about the sixth marriage, because certainly, in the future, if Malcolm survived, there would be one. He had never in the past lived long alone. He liked rows better than solitude.

"Children?" Norman West asked into the pause.

"Three," Malcolm said. "Pompous little asses."

West glanced at me questioningly, and yawned.

"Are you too tired to take all this in?" I asked.

"No, go ahead."

"Two of Donald's children are too young to drive a car. The eldest, a girl at art school, is five foot two and fragile, and I cannot imagine her being physically capable of knocking Malcolm out and carrying his body from garden to garage and inserting him into Moira's car."

"She hasn't the courage either," Malcolm said.

"You can't say that," I disagreed. "Courage can pop up anywhere and surprise you."

West gave me a noncommittal look. "Well," he said, taking the list himself and adding to it, "this is what we have so far. Wife number one: Vivien Pembroke. Her children: Donald (44), wife Helen, three offspring. Lucy, husband Edwin (ne Bugg), school-age son. Thomas, wife Berenice…?"

"Two young daughters."

"Two young daughters," he repeated, writing.

"My grandchildren," Malcolm protested, "are all too young to have murdered anybody."

"Psychopaths start in the nursery," West said laconically. "Any sign in any of them of abnormal violent behaviour? Excessive cruelty, that sort of thing? Obsessive hatreds?"

Malcolm and I both shook our heads but with a touch of uncertainty; his maybe because of something he did know, mine because of all I didn't know, because of all the things that could be hidden.

"Does greed, too, begin in the nursery?" I said.

"I wouldn't say so, would you?" West answered.

I shook my head again. "I'd say it was nastily adult and grows with opportunity. The more there is to grab, the greedier people get."

Malcolm said, only half as a question, "My fortune corrupts… geometrically?"

"You're not alone," I said dryly. "Just think of all those multi- billionaire families where the children have already had millions settled on them and still fight like cats over the pickings when their father dies."

"Bring it down to thousands," West said unexpectedly. "Or to hundreds. I've seen shocking spite over hundreds. And the lawyers rub their hands and syphon off the cream." He sighed, half disillusionment, half weariness. "Wife number two?" he asked, and answered his own question, "Mrs Joyce Pembroke."

"Right," I said. "I'm her son. She had no other children. And I'm not married."

West methodically wrote me down.

"Last Friday evening," I said, "I was at work in a racing stable at five o'clock with about thirty people as witnesses, and last night I was certainly not driving the car that nearly ran us over."

West said stolidly, "I'll write you down as being cleared of primary involvement. That's all I can do with any of your family, Mr Pembroke." He finished the sentence looking at Malcolm who said, "Hired assassin" between his teeth, and West nodded. "If any of them hired a good professional, I doubt if I'll discover it."