‘And you found nothing bad, else you wouldn’t be here. And I found plenty that was good, else you wouldn’t be here either!’

He glanced down at a sheet of paper on the arm of his chair.

Maggie said, ‘That my life story you’ve got there, Mr Gidman?’

‘Not all of it,’ he answered, unperturbed. ‘Just from the age of eighteen. You were doing one of them gap years, working with VSO in Africa, when you got news that your mammy and daddy had been killed in a car accident, right?’

She went very still.

He leaned forward and looked into her eyes.

‘You miss them, don’t you?’

‘Yes, Mr Gidman,’ she said quietly. ‘I miss my parents very much.’

‘I can see that, and I’m truly sorry for your loss. Theirs too, not getting the chance to see what a great job they’d done bringing you up. But what I want to ask is, why, after you done your college course, did you go for an office job at ChildSave rather than heading back out to Africa or somewhere to work on the ground?’

Good question, thought Dave, recalling his own uncharitable thoughts about her suitability for a career of digging latrines for fuzzy-wuzzies.

‘I don’t see that it’s relevant, Mr Gidman,’ she replied, ‘but I looked at my abilities, such as they were, and decided I could do more good by looking after ChildSave’s profile at home than being a general dogsbody in a Third World village.’

‘Good answer, Miss Pinchbeck,’ said Gidman. ‘And by all accounts, you done so well at ChildSave, I bet that soon as they got a notion you were getting restless, they started throwing money at you to try and keep you. Which brings me to my next question. You such a bright girl, knowing your own abilities like you do, why would you want to leave ChildSave and work for my boy? Whatever else he is, he ain’t no charity!’

The pair of them, the dignified old man and the slight, unprepossessing young woman, exchanged a smile.

‘No, he’s not,’ said Maggie. ‘But from what I read, your son could end up having more power to do good than all the UK charities put together, if he’s steered right. And I’d like to be around to help with the steering. So, pure self-interest, Mr Gidman.’

‘Hey, you two, I am still here,’ protested Dave the Third, feeling excluded.

‘We know that, boy,’ said his father. ‘And if you’ve been paying attention, you’ll be about to offer this young lady the job. If she doesn’t like the salary, up it and I’ll pay the difference, OK?’

‘I’m not worried about the money, Mr Gidman,’ said Maggie.

‘Maybe you’re not, but how you value yourself is one thing, how other folk value you is something else. If I thought you could be bought, I wouldn’t waste a penny on you. So why don’t you go and have a think while I talk to my boy? You got some deciding to do. Either you believe all them rumours, in which case I’m sorry. Or you think they’re crap and you’d like the job. It’s been a real pleasure talking to you. You’ll find Flo in the kitchen. With luck she’ll be doing apple turnovers. Try one. You won’t have tasted better. So remember this before you decide. Work for my son, and you’ll never be further than a phone call from them turnovers!’

Maggie left the room, looking slightly shell-shocked.

Dave, always keen to learn, said, ‘Why’d you tell her to see Mom before we left?’

‘’Cos after ten minutes talking to your mother, sometimes I find myself believing I can’t be all that bad! You hire her, boy. She’s what you need. Bright as a button and she’ll work for you ’cos she believes in you.’

And so it had proved. And now she was indispensable.

But like the song says, sometimes the honesty’s too much. Having someone to keep you straight’s fine. But straight can get boring; occasionally a man needs to stray.

Once, early on in her employment, he’d asked her to factor a diversion into a Continental trip so that he could contrive an assignation with the wife of a British Embassy official. She had simply refused, leaving it up to him to react as he would.

If she’d preached about the dangers of such activities, he’d have carried on regardless. But she said nothing. After that he didn’t try to involve her in his private life.

He’d come to see what his father had spotted at once. Maggie Pinchbeck had all the qualifications. Super efficient, very bright, a smoother of paths, a sniffer of perils, an organizer sans pareil, she knew all the tricks common to PR and politics-the spinning, the wheeling and dealing, the compromising, the shortcutting. But she was only willing to play those ambiguous games if and when she believed the end was just. That was the quality that Goldie had spotted. You couldn’t buy that.

But sometimes he still found himself fantasizing about those two-metre models…

As now, when that dry cough, which others probably never noticed but which rang out to him like the Lutine Bell, warned him he’d spent long enough in prayer. Any longer and people would be wondering what he had to pray about.

He straightened up. As if this were a signal, the organ boomed, and the congregation rose as the vicar and the choir made their way up the aisle singing the processional hymn, ‘Now thank we all our God, with heart and hands and voices’.

David Gidman the Third joined in lustily, aware that he had much to be thankful for. Already blessed through birth with countless gifts of love, wealth and opportunity, he could not doubt that it was his destiny to enjoy many more wondrous things.

Truly his future shone so bright it took the eye of an eagle to look into it.

Bring it on!

As soon as Andy Dalziel entered his living room, he knew something was wrong.

He stood in the doorway and tried to isolate it. But his mind, though building up to its old speeds, was not quite there yet. He moved from intuition to examination. By the time he’d checked everything off and found nothing missing, nothing moved, nothing open that had been shut, or shut that had been open, no muddy footprints on the carpet, no greasy fingerprints on the door handle, he had to admit that everything was exactly as he’d left it, which meant that his sense of something not right was a load of bollocks, just another example of the continuing fragility of his mental processes.

‘Oh well, Rome weren’t rebuilt in a fortnight,’ he reassured himself, and sat down next to the answer machine with the intention of listening to Mick Purdy’s message.

But as his finger hovered over the playback button, it came to him.

Yes, everything was exactly as he’d left it, but it shouldn’t have been!

He’d heard the start of Purdy’s message as he made for the front door. When Purdy rang off, the presence of a new message on the machine should have been registered by a red light around the play button.

There was no light, meaning someone had played the message.

Or maybe the red bulb had simply failed.

He pressed the button and found himself listening not to Purdy but to a message Cap had left six days ago, reminding him to eat a casserole she’d put in his fridge.

This confirmed it.

When the red light showed, what you got was new messages.

Otherwise when you pressed play, you got all the messages unerased from your tape, the oldest first.

He left the tape playing, armed himself with a heavy brass candlestick, and went through every room in the house.

Two conclusions: one, the place was absolutely empty; two, it was becoming a bit of a tip. His regular cleaner had defaulted during his long lay-off. Cap Marvell had seen that the place was spick and span for his return, but if you leave a horse to muck out its own stable, you’ll soon be knee-deep in manure. Time to get organized afore Cap organized something for him. He liked to pick his own staff, in and out of work.

The machine was playing Purdy’s message when he returned to the living room. Now he was listening to it rather than leaving it behind him, it struck him that there was a note of strain here with the attempt at banter sounding false and forced.