The Edge Read Free

despatched funds to far-flung outposts fairly often, but when I walked into the hushed book-lined law office of the senior partner of Cornborough, Cross and George, old Clement Cornborough greeted me with a frown and stayed sitting down behind his desk.
    ‘You’re not … er …’ he said, looking over my shoulder for the one he’d expected.
    ‘Well … yes, I am. Tor Kelsey.’
    ‘Good Lord.’ He stood up slowly, leaning forward to extend a hand. ‘But you’ve changed. You … er …’
    ‘Taller, heavier and older,’ I said, nodding. Also sun-tanned, at that moment, from a spell in Mexico.
    ‘I’d … er … pencilled in lunch,’ he said doubtfully.
    ‘That would be fine,’ I said.
    He took me to a similarly hushed restaurant full of other solicitors who nodded to him austerely. Over roast beef he told me that I would never have to work for a living (which I knew) and in the same breath asked what I was going to do with my life, a question I couldn’tanswer. I’d spent seven years learning how to live, which was different, but I’d had no formal training in anything. I felt claustrophobic in offices and I was not academic. I understood machines and was quick with my hands. I had no overpowering ambitions. I wasn’t the entrepreneur my father had been, but nor would I squander the fortune he had left me.
    ‘What have you been doing?’ old Cornborough said, making conversation valiantly. ‘You’ve been to some interesting places, haven’t you?’
    Travellers’ tales were pretty boring, I thought. It was always better to live it. ‘I mostly worked with horses,’ I said politely. ‘Australia, South America, United States, anywhere. Racehorses, polo ponies, a good deal in rodeos. Once in a circus.’
    ‘Good heavens.’
    ‘It’s not easy now, though, and getting harder, to work one’s passage. Too many countries won’t allow it. And I won’t go back to it. I’ve done enough. Grown out of it.’
    ‘So what next?’
    ‘Don’t know.’ I shrugged. ‘Look around. I’m not getting in touch with my mother’s people, so don’t tell them I’m here.’
    ‘If you say so.’
    My mother had come from an impoverished hunting family who were scandalised when at twenty she married a sixty-five-year-old giant of a Yorkshireman with an empire in second-hand car auctions and no relatives in
Burke’s Peerage.
They’d said it was because he showered her with horses, but it always sounded to me as if she’d been truly attracted. He at any rate was besotted with her, as his sister, my aunt, had often told me, and he’d seen no point in living after she was killed in a hunting accident, when I was two. He’d lasted three years and died of cancer, and because my mother’s family hadn’t wanted me, my aunt Viv Kelsey had taken me over and made my young life a delight.
    To Aunt Viv, unmarried, I was the longed for child she’d had no chance of bearing. She must have been sixty when she took me, though I never thought of her as old. She was always young inside; and I missed her dreadfully when she died.
    Millington’s voice said, ‘The car you are following … are you still following it?’
    ‘Still in sight.’
    ‘It’s registered to a Derry Welfram. Ever heard of him?’
    ‘No.’
    Millington still had connections in the police force and seemed to get useful computerised information effortlessly.
    ‘His address is down as Parkway Mansions, Maida Vale, London,’ he said. ‘If you lose him, try there.’
    ‘Right.’
    Derry Welfram obligingly drove straight to Parkway Mansions and others of Millington’s minions later made a positive identification. Millington tried a photograph of him on each of the witnesses with the unreliable memories and, as he described to me afterwards, ‘They both shit themselves with fear and stuttered they’d never seen the man, never, never.’ But they’d been so effectively frightened, both of them, that Millington could get nothing out of them at