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Chapter One

"Congratulations. You have won a prize of £'50,000." The letter from the Premium Bond Office stunned Mark Sheffield at breakfast time on what had promised to be a perfectly ordinary weekday.  Otherwise the post produced nothing unexpected; electricity account, bank statement, a letter addressed in a hand that he vaguely recognised, but couldn't positively identify for the moment, an appeal from Cancer Research.  He could never understand why he received so much mail from charities, since he never responded to any of them, but they kept him in free ballpoints.

Officially, it was not Mark who had won the £50,000.  The winner was actually his mother, who had bought £'10 worth of hitherto unproductive bonds in 1962.  But she had by now been dead for over two years.  She had suffered progressively from Altzheimer's disease and Mark, who had held her power of attorney, maintained a bank account in his own name to receive her pension payments.  As well as her state pension, she was entitled to a widow's pension in right of her husband, a sales representative with Flushing and Gibbon Ltd, paint manufacturers.  Since Mr Sheffield's death the firm had twice been taken over, eventually disappearing into the maw of the giant Confort plc, who were paying the pension.  No one had even asked Mark for confirmation that his mother was still alive.  By now she would have been 67, not a remarkable age these days, and it seemed simplest just to let the payments keep coming.  Occasionally he had misgivings, not from a moral point of view, but on account of the risk of detection.  Surely that was minimal, and anyway the payments were but a drop in the ocean to a multinational like Confort.  Not long ago he had read that the chairman Sir Humphrey Flowerdew, had just been voted a salary increase of £115,000 to bring his remuneration up to £'875,000, plus share options plus heaven knew what fringe benefits.  Mrs Sheffield's monthly pension was a measly £'200, barely sufficient to keep Sir Humphrey in cigars. But the deception couldn't be kept up for much longer, especially in view of this win.  And a new death certificate would be needed sooner or later, since he could hardly use the real one.
     Mark had been the sole executor of his mother's will, under which she had left everything jointly between him and his sister Sybil, three years his senior. So the family home, in the west end of Newcastle, and its contents, had been sold and the proceeds scrupulously divided.  Otherwise their mother had left only some building society money, her accumulated pension monies, and the £10 Premium Bond.  All this too had been divided down the middle, but Sybil didn't know that although the state pension had been stopped, Confort had never been notified of the death, and the bond had never been encashed.  Mark had no intention, either, of telling her of this win. 
     It was not that he harboured any ill will towards his sister, though they had little in common and had never been close even in childhood; it was her husband Derek he couldn't stand.  Derek worked in the Community Tax department of the council offices, was an active Seventh Day Adventist, and wrote what he claimed to be poetry.  Not content with all that he was a teetotaller as well.  Once, he had belonged to an outfit called "Keep Tyneside Left", whose membership was estimated at between thirty and ninety, but as they wasted most of their time and energy in verbal fisticuffs with other fringe left groups, their prospects of building the new Jerusalem on the banks of the Tyne was nil, and anyway Derek, as a sort of Christian, had found himself hemmed in by militant atheists.  But he still nurtured a modest political ambition and so  he had recently joined the Liberal Democrats in the hope of eventual advancement.  This represented a spectacular lurch to the right, but during his time with Keep Tyneside Left he had succeeded in antagonising the leading lights of the local Labour party, just as he had antagonised Mark, whom he was always trying to inveigle into political discussions which inevitably ended in frayed tempers.  Sybil kept out of the politics, but she had joined the Seventh Day Adventists out of loyalty.  They had a small boy, Arran, for whose future Mark feared, though so far he appeared reasonably normal.  Mark had actually been asked to stand as the lad's godfather, which he declined to do on the reasonable ground that as an agnostic he couldn't in conscience undertake that Arran would be brought up in the fear and nurture of the Lord.  But Sybil and Derek took Mark's refusal personally, and it still rankled, even though Mark never failed to remember the boy on his birthday and at Christmas.
     So Mark was damned if Sybil, or especially, Derek, would benefit from this windfall.  But the really funny thing, he reflected, was that he had actually predicted his own good fortune, under the aegis of his alter ego, Lorenzo Romona, who contributed "What's in the stars for you?" to the local paper.  Scorpios were encouraged to expect "a marked improvement on the financial front", so maybe there was something in astrology after all, if only on the principle that even a stopped clock is right twice daily.  These horoscopes constituted Mark's only current form of gainful employment, and although the job bored him beyond measure, it took up very little of his time and he had now been doing it for nearly two years, ever since his predecessor, a woman, had decamped to Morocco with another woman.  Mark happened to be a social member of the same rugby club as Harkness, the paper's editor, who knew him as a bright but idle young man with plenty of time on his hands.  Could Mark help him out, just for a week or two?
     "Writing horoscopes? Are you serious? It's just a load of bollocks."
     "Of course it's a load of bollocks.  But a newspaper has to cater for all tastes.  We'll give you a fancy name, of course.  You can't write this sort of stuff under a name like Mark Sheffield.  Just for, maybe, a month?"
     "What's the pay?"
     Harkness named a sum considerably less that he had been paying the departed seer, but it seemed reasonable enough to Mark since, after all, it was a simple job which was only temporary, and so they shook hands on it.  Next morning he bought a copy of one of the tabloids for the sake of its horoscopes.  It was not a difficult task to produce a slightly amended version and send it in.  The hard part, since the stuff had to be turned out every day except Sunday, was to avoid too much repetition.  He kept copies of all his submissions for reference, and for a long time he had expected a call from Harkness to say that he had made a permanent appointment and his services were being dispensed with, but no call came. Mark was now wondering, in fact, whether he should not apply to the editor for a raise, but he was hesitant, because he was still drawing Income Support.  That, he supposed, had better come to an end now that he would be getting an income from his premium bond winnings. 
     It was six years since he had dropped out of his English course at Newcastle University, which had suddenly seemed irrelevant.  His mother would, once upon a time, have made a fuss, but by then her mind was going.  His fellow students would now be established in their various careers – advertising, teaching, finance, or anything else for which their knowledge of English literature, or rather criticism of English literature, would be of little use.  Mark had tried various jobs – the worst was in the Highways Department of the local council – but could work up no enthusiasm for any of them.  The newspaper job had turned out to be the easiest and so the most durable.  But there was no permanency about it; even his present home was only temporary, because it belonged to Johnny Mitchell, a junior officer in the Merchant Navy, who was at home only infrequently.  Mark, under a very informal arrangement, paid Johnny a modest rent plus the council tax, and also looked after Johnny's two cats and his tropical fish.  He also had the use of a Vauxhall Astra, for which he paid the road tax and servicing.  In short, he had evolved a comfortable and convenient modus vivendi which suited both of them, and since Johnny showed no inclination to leave the sea there was no reason why the arrangement shouldn't last indefinitely.  All the same, he was haunted by a sense of dissatisfaction, he recognised that his life lacked direction and that his friends, who knew he was no fool, looked on him as a loafer.  Sonia, his former girlfriend, certainly did.  Before moving into Johnny Mitchell's maisonette, Mark had lived with Sonia for a few months in her flat, which was conveniently situated in Jesmond, ten minutes by Metro from the city centre.  Sonia, a nursing sister eager for advancement herself, wanted to instil a similar ethic into Mark and turn him into a useful citizen; he should complete his degree course and then go into hospital management, in which the prospects, she claimed, were good.  After many tedious and increasingly acerbic discussions around this theme, Mark moved out, but he remained on quite affectionate terms with Sonia, and even bought her dinner from time to time.  She didn't know of course, about his mother's pension, nor that he was on Income Support. 
     Mark poured out some more coffee, because it was time to get on with his daily task,  but then realised that he hadn't opened the remaining envelope, so he did so now.  Of course. It was from his uncle.
     "Gnarlwood House
     Sunday
     Dear Mark,

Come to dinner Thursday 15th instant at 7 for 7.30 pm.
     Dress: respectable.  I shall expect you.

Yr affec. uncle
     Edmund F R Sheffield"

Uncle Edmund always signed his letters in that formal old-fashioned way, which exactly reflected his personality.  It would not have occurred to him that anyone fortunate enough to receive such an invitation might be unable or unwilling to accept it.  Mark would be invited to dinner once or perhaps twice a year.  Major Sheffield entertained him more as a matter of duty than of pleasure, and Mark turned up in the same spirit.  Sybil and Derek would also be there, but probably no one else apart from the Major's half-sister Penelope, a gentle unassertive widow who was considerably younger than he, so the table talk would hardly go with a swing.  Major Sheffield firmly believed in the military convention that politics and religion were not to be discussed in the Mess and this was as well, as it was vital to the success of the evening that Derek should be headed off.  But they would usually find little else to talk about, so the time was apt to drag.
     His uncle must be about 78 by now, Mark thought, though his appearance hadn't changed much.  Grandfather Sheffield had married twice, and Edmund was the issue of the first marriage.  After the death of his wife, grandfather a few years later, had remarried, and it was this union that had produced Mark's father and aunt Penny, but the half-brothers had nothing in common and in later years there was little contact between them.  Major Sheffield was essentially a loner.  Some years earlier he had staggered his family by entering into a short-lived childless marriage to a much younger woman.  Almost no one outside the family circle was aware of this.  Apart from that brief interlude he had always lived out an ascetic existence in the family home, which, though quite imposing at a distance, was decidedly in need of a facelift.  No one was sure whether this was because the Major was hard up or because of his parsimony, but whoever took it over eventually would be faced with a good deal of expenditure.  Uncle Edmund had never dropped the slightest hint as to the destination of his property but he seemed to have no friends apart from one or two old cronies whom he saw from time to time, and no relations other than Penelope, Mark and Sybil.  Would he leave the house to Aunt Penny? Would he leave it to Mark and Sybil jointly, perhaps with a life interest for Aunt Penny? Because Aunt Penny had no money of her own so far as anybody was aware.  He would have to provide for her somehow or another.  But surely, surely, the place must come to his nephew and niece in the long run, that was what Mark had been counting on, but he tried not to dwell too much on his prospects, since the old man ailed very little apart from a touch of arthritis, and could easily last for many more years.  Years of dreary dinners. 
     "What are you doing these days?" was his invariable greeting to Mark.
     But now it was time for Mark (alias Lorenzo Romona) to get on with tomorrow's predictions "What's in the stars for you?"
     "Aries", he wrote, "Travel plans you have had in mind for some time begin to take shape….."
Dear God, how much longer?

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