The rain got heavier. My old Volvo stuttered and choked in the heavy downpour. Maybe they didn't have rain in Sweden. So I thought about Cindy's Mercedes all the way home: British racing green; paintwork waxed so that even Mr Gaskell approved, and a Vee-eight engine. I wondered what she was asking for it.

When I got to Balaklava Road the downstairs lights were out. The children were in bed and nanny was watching a TV play in her room. Gloria wasn't there. I'd forgotten that she'd changed the night for visiting her parents to Friday. She probably never had the slightest intention of joining me and Cindy for our little drink and discussion in town. Gloria knew she could depend upon me to forget which evenings she went out.

I opened a tin of sardines and a bottle of white burgundy. I put a tape of Citizen Kane in the video and ate my supper from a tray on my knees. But I spent all the time thinking about Bret Rensselaer's anger, Jim Prettyman's murder, Dodo's diatribe and Cindy Matthews' sudden change of mind.

By the time Gloria got home I was in bed. I wasn't surprised that she was late. I guessed that it was something to do with this 'crisis' that her mother said threatened their marriage.

Whatever domestic crisis she'd attended, Gloria didn't arrive back low-spirited. In fact she was bubbling with excitement. I knew what she'd be like even before she came into the house. Her old yellow Mini could only just be fitted into the space between the kitchen and the fence to which our neighbour's cosseted wistaria clung. Even then it meant squeezing out on the passenger side. This tricky feat was not something that Gloria always felt willing to attempt, but on this night I heard her bump over the kerb and, with no slackening of speed, on to the garden path and stop with a squeal of brakes. She gave the accelerator a little jab of satisfaction before switching off the ignition. I could visualize the smile on her face.

'Hello, darling,' she said as she tiptoed into the bedroom still carrying the plastic bag that I knew contained one of her mother's Hungarian walnut cakes and a tub of home-made liptoi cheese, pickles and all sorts of other things that her family felt she needed regular supplies of when not living at home. 'How was Mrs Prettyman?'

'Suddenly silent.'

Gloria looked at me, trying to read the expression on my face. 'Has someone put a gun at her head?'

I laughed. 'Right,' I said. 'A golden gun. Suddenly she's been offered a plum job with the Strasbourg bureaucrats, lots of money, little or no tax. God knows what else.'

'You don't think…'

'I don't know.'

'I wouldn't like to be trying to bribe her,' said Gloria.

'Because she'd ask for more than you had to offer?'

'No, I don't mean that. I just think she'd be touchy. I'd worry that she might write it all down and take it to the newspapers.'

'It's just a soft job in Strasbourg,' I said. 'Not even the reporters from the tabloids could make that into a bribe, unless Cindy declared herself so incompetent that the offer was ridiculously inappropriate.'

'I suppose so.' She put the bag of Hungarian delicacies on the dressing table and began to undress.

'What is it?' I asked, for she had the sort of self-satisfied grin on her face that usually meant I'd done something careless, like locking the cat in the broom closet or absent-mindedly picking up the milkman's money and putting it in my pocket.

'Nothing,' she said, though I could tell by the wanton abandon with which she disrobed and threw aside her clothes that there was some kind of joke to share. But I thought it would be something about her parents or the latest about the egregious Dodo, who'd now been given temporary rent-free use of a comfortable little house near Kingston on Thames.

'That bank,' she said as she got between the sheets and huddled against me. 'Guess who owns that bank?'

'Bank? Schneider, von Schild…'

'And Weber,' she supplied still grinning at her cleverness and at the joke that was to come. 'Yes, that's the bank, my darling. Guess who owns it.'

'Not Mr Schneider, Mr von Schild and Mr Weber?'

'Your precious Bret Rensselaer, that's who.'

'What?'

'I knew that would bring you fully awake.'

'I was already fully awake.'

'At least, it belongs to the Rensselaer family.'

'How did you find out?'

'I didn't have to raid the Yellow Submarine darling. It's public knowledge. Even German banks have to make ownership declarations. My teacher at the Economics class got it from an ordinary data-bank listing. He phoned me back in half an hour and had its history.'

'I should have checked that out.'

'Well, you didn't; I did,' she chuckled like a baby.

'You're such a clever girl,' I said.

'So you've noticed?'

'That you're a clever girl? Yes, I've noticed.'

'Don't do that… at least, don't do it yet.'

'The Rensselaer family?'

'Are you ready for the details? Hold on to your hat, lover, here goes. Back in 1925 a man named Cyrus Rensselaer bought shares in a California bank group. Bret and his brothers worked for them, I guess they had directorships or something. I can get more details… Then, sometime in the Second World War, the old man died. Under the terms of his Will the shares went into a trust, of which Bret's mother was the beneficiary. In a complicated share issue and merger in 1953 the Californian bank became a part of Calibank (International) Serco which began large-scale buying of other banks. One shareholding they acquired gave them a majority holding in Schneider, von Schild and Weber.'

'Anything else?'

'Anything else, he says! My darling, you're insatiable. Has anyone ever told you that?'

'I plead the Fifth Amendment,' I said.

Only desperation would have provoked me to set out on a journey to see Silas Gaunt that Saturday. He'd retired from the Department many years before but he remained one of the most influential individuals in what Dicky Cruyer delicately called 'the intelligence community'. Uncle Silas knew everything and knew everyone. He had been close to my father over many years; was distantly related to my mother-in-law, and was Billy's godfather.

Perhaps I should have visited him more regularly, but he was devoted to my wife Fiona, and her departure had distanced Silas from me. He wasn't likely to appreciate my arriving arm in arm with Gloria, and yet it was a damned long journey to do alone. Now I was doing it alone, and as I drove through a pale prostrate landscape that had still not loosened the shackles of winter, I had a chance to think about what I might say to him. How did I start? Jim Prettyman was dead and Bret Rensselaer was suddenly alive, but neither metamorphosis was going to help me. Dodo was telling anyone who'd listen that I'd been conspiring with Fiona to swindle the Department; while my prime helper, Cindy Prettyman, was suffering the selective amnesia that valued promotion sometimes brings.

'Uncle' Silas lived at 'Whitelands' a middle-sized farm in the Cotswolds, a picturesque place of tan-coloured stone with ill-fitting doors, creaking floorboards and low beams that split the skulls of the tall and unwary. Silas must have been exceptionally wary, for he was a giant of a man and so fat that he was scarcely able to squeeze through some of the narrower doors. Some nineteenth-century tycoon had redone the interior to his own taste, so that there was a surfeit of mahogany and ornamental tiles, and a scarcity of bathrooms. But it suited Silas, and somehow it was difficult to imagine him in any other environment.

In the day time he kept busy. There were discussions with his farm manager, and his house-keeper Mrs Porter, and with the lady from the village who came to deal with his mail but who seemed unable to deal with any telephone caller without coming downstairs and dragging Silas upstairs to the one and only phone.