Windfall. Desmond Bagley

don’t mind staying on that basis,’ said Hardin.

      Stafford stood up. ‘If you let me have the name of your hotel I’ll be in touch.’

      ‘I have it,’ said Alix.

      ‘Then that’s it for the moment. Thank you, Mr Hardin.’ When Hardin had gone Stafford said, ‘May I use your phone?’

      Alix looked up from clearing away the coffee cups. ‘Of course. You know where it is.’

      Stafford was absent for five minutes. When he came back he said, ‘Jan-Willem Hendrykxx really did exist. I’ve been talking to my man in Jersey who looked him up in the telephone book. His name is still listed. I think Hendrykxx is a Flemish name.’ He picked up the will. ‘That would account for the house in Belgium. I’ve asked my chap to give me a discreet report on the executor of the estate and to find out when and how Hendrykxx died.’

      Alix frowned. ‘You don’t suspect anything…? I mean he must have been an old man.’

      Stafford smiled. ‘I was trained in military intelligence. You never know when a bit of apparently irrelevant information will fit into the jigsaw.’ He scanned the will. ‘The Ol Njorowa Foundation stands to inherit about thirty-four million pounds. I wonder what it does?’ He sat down. ‘Alix, what’s this with you and Dirk? You sounded a shade drear on the phone this morning.’

      She looked unhappy. ‘I can’t make him out, Max. I don’t think fatherhood suits him. We were happy enough until I got in the family way and then he changed.’

      ‘In what way?’

      ‘He became moody and abstracted. And now he’s pushed off back to South Africa just when I need him. The baby’s just three weeks old—you’d think he’d stay around, wouldn’t you?’

      ‘Um,’ said Stafford obscurely. ‘He never mentioned his grandfather at any time?’

      ‘Not that I can remember.’ She made a sudden gesture as if brushing away an inopportune fly. ‘Oh, Max; this is ridiculous. This man—this Fleming with the funny way of spelling his name—is probably no relation at all. It must be a case of mistaken identity.’

      ‘I don’t think so. Hardin came straight to this house like a homing pigeon.’ Stafford ticked off points on his fingers. ‘The American, Hank Hendrix, told him that Dirk was his cousin; Hardin saw the instructions to Gunnarsson from Peacemore, Willis and Franks to turn up descendants of Jan-Willem Hendrykxx with the funny name; in doing so Hardin turns up Hank Hendrix. It’s a perfectly logical chain.’

      ‘I suppose so,’ said Alix. ‘But can you tell me why I’m worried about Dirk inheriting millions?’

      ‘I think I can,’ he said. ‘You’re worried about a bit that doesn’t seem to fit. The shooting of Hank Hendrix in Los Angeles. And I’ve got one other thing on my mind. Why haven’t the Peacemore mob turned up Dirk? Hardin did it in thirty seconds.’

      Curtis, Stafford’s manservant, was mildly surprised at seeing him. ‘The Colonel is back early,’ he observed.

      ‘Yes, I got sidetracked. It wasn’t worth going back to the office.’

      ‘Would the Colonel like afternoon tea?’

      ‘No; but you can bring me a scotch in the study.’

      ‘As the Colonel wishes,’ said Curtis with a disapproving air which stopped just short of insolence.

      Curtis was a combination of butler, valet, chauffeur, handyman and nanny. He was ex-Royal Marines, having joined in 1943 and electing to stay in the service after the war. A 37-year man. At the statutory retiring age of 55 he had been tossed into the strange civilian world of the 1980s, no longer a Colour-Sergeant with authority but just another man-in-the-street. A fish out of water and somewhat baffled by the indiscipline of civilian life. He was a widower, his wife Amy having died five years before of cancer; and his only daughter was married, living in Australia, and about to present him with a third grandchild.

      When Stafford had divorced his wife he had stayed at his club before moving into a smaller flat more suitable for a bachelor. It was then that he remembered Curtis whom he had known from the days when he had been a young officer serving with the British Army of the Rhine. One night, in one of the less salubrious quarters of Hamburg, he had found himself in a tight spot from which he had been rescued by a tough, hammer-fisted Marine sergeant. He had never forgotten Curtis and they had kept in touch, and so he acquired Curtis—or did Curtis acquire Stafford? Whichever way it was they suited each other; Curtis finding a congenial niche in a strange world, and Stafford lucky enough to have an efficient, if somewhat military, Jeeves. Curtis’s only fault was that he would persist in addressing Stafford in the third person by his army title.

      Stafford looked at the chunky, hard man with something approaching affection. ‘How’s your daughter, Sergeant?’

      ‘I had a letter this morning. She says she’s well, sir.’

      ‘What will it be? Boy or girl?’

      ‘Just so that it has one head and the usual number of arms, legs and fingers. Boy or girl—either will suit me.’

      ‘Tell me when it comes. We must send a suitable christening present.’

      ‘Thank you, sir. When would the Colonel like his bath drawn?’

      ‘At the usual time. Let me have that scotch now.’ Stafford went into his study.

      He sat at his desk and thought about Gunnarsson. He had never met Gunnarsson but had sampled his methods through the machinations of Peacemore, Willis and Franks which was the wholly-owned London subsidiary of Gunnarsson Associates, and what he had found he did not like.

      It was the work of Stafford Security Consultants to protect the secrets of the organizations which were their clients. A lot of people imagine security to be a matter of patrolling guards and heavy mesh fencing but that is only a part of it. The weakest part of any organization is the people in it, from the boss at the top down to the charwomen who scrub the floors. A Managing Director making an indiscreet remark at his golf club could blow a secret worth millions. A charwoman suborned can find lots of interesting items in waste paper baskets.

      It followed that if the firm of Stafford Security Consultants was making a profit out of guarding secrets—and it was making a handsome profit—then others were equally interested in ferreting them out, and the people who employed Gunnarsson Associates were the sort who were not too fussy about the methods used. And that went for the Peacemore mob in the United Kingdom.

      Stafford remembered a conversation he had had with Jack Ellis just before he left for the Continent. ‘We’ve had trouble with the Peacemore crowd,’ said Ellis. ‘They penetrated Electronomics just before the merger when Electronomics was taken over. Got right through our defences.’

      ‘How?’

      Jack shrugged. ‘We can guard against everything but stupidity. They got the goods on Pascoe, the General Manager. In bed with a gilded youth. Filthy pictures, the lot. Of course, it was a Peacemore set-up, but I’d have a hell of a job proving it.’

      ‘In this permissive age homosexuality isn’t the handle it once was,’ observed Stafford.

      ‘It was a good handle this time. Pascoe’s wife didn’t know he was double-gaited. He has teenage daughters and it would have ruined his marriage so he caved in. After the merger we lost the Electronomics contract, of course. Peacemore got it.’

      ‘And Pascoe’s peccadilloes came to light anyway.’

      ‘Sure. After the merger he was fired and they gave full reasons. He’d proved he couldn’t be trusted.’

      ‘The bastards have no mercy,’ said Stafford.

      Industrial espionage is not much different from the work of the department called MI6 which the British government refuses to admit exists, or the KGB which everyone knows to exist, or the CIA which