"No, I didn't," I said slowly. "I told him it was empty and was bricked up twenty years ago." I paused. "What have you put in there?"

Malcolm subsided into his chair, not Altogether relieved of anxiety. "Never you mind," he said.

"You forget that I could go and look."

"I don't forget it."

He stared at me. He'd been interested, all those summers ago, when I'd designed and built the pivoting brick door. He'd come down the garden day after day to watch, and had patted me often on the shoulder and smiled at the secret. The resulting wall looked solid, felt solid, WAS solid. But at one point there was a thick vertical steel rod within it, stretching from a concrete underground foundation up into the beam supporting the roof. Before I'd put the new roof on, I'd patiently drilled round holes in bricks (breaking many) and slid them into the rod, and arranged and mortared the door in neat courses, so that the edges of it dovetailed into the fixed sections next to it.

To open the room, when I'd finished everything, one had first to remove the wedge-like. wooden sill which gave extra support to the bottom course of the door when it was closed, and then to activate the spring latch on the inner side by poking a thin wire through a tiny hole in the mortar at what had been my thirteen-year-old waist height. The design of the latch hadn't been my own, but something 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."

"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 smelled 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 hiatus, and it was difficult to imagine that outside, somewhere, a predator might be searching for the prey.

At one point I said, "You gave Joyce's telephone number on purpose to the film man, didn't you? And Gervase's number to the retarded- children lady? You wanted me with you to see you buy the colt… You made sure that the family knew all about your monster outlays as soon as possible, didn't you?"

"Huh," he said briefly, which after a moment I took as admission. One misdirected telephone call had been fairly possible: two stretched credibility too far.

"Thomas and Berenice," I said, "were pretty frantic over some little adventure of yours. What did you do to stir them up?"

"How the hell do you know all this?"

I smiled and fetched the cassette player and re-ran for him the message tape from my telephone. He listened grimly but with an undercurrent of amusement to Serena, Gervase and Joyce and then read Thomas's letter and when he reached Thomas's intense closing appeal I waited for explosions.

They didn't come. He said wryly, "I suppose they're what I made them."

"No," I said.

"Why not?"

"Personality is mysterious, but it's born in you, not made."

"But it can be brainwashed."

"Yes, OK," I said. "But you didn't do it."

"Vivien and Alicia did… because of me."

"Don't wallow in guilt so much. It isn't like you."

He grinned. "I don't feel guilty, actually."

Joyce, I thought, had at least played fair. A screaming fury she might have been on the subject of Alicia, but she'd never tried to set me against Malcolm. She had agreed in the divorce settlement when I was six that he should have custody of me: she wasn't basically maternal, and infrequent visits from her growing son were all she required. She'd never made great efforts to bind me to her, and it had always been clear to me that she was relieved every time at my departure. Her life consisted of playing, teaching, and writing about bridge, a game she played to international tournament standard, and she was often abroad. My visits had always disrupted the acute concentration she needed for winning, and as winning gave her the prestige essential for lecture tours and magazine articles, I had more often raised impatience in her than comradeship, a feeling she had dutifully tried to stifle.