Page 13 of The Impossible Fortune (Thursday Murder Club Mysteries #5)

One by one the barns in the lower fields are collapsing.

There was a time when Lord Townes would have a team who would head down and patch them up, or maybe they’d throw a few quid at the problem and knock up a whole new barn altogether.

The team is long gone though, as is most of the money.

And so the barns were now headed the same way.

In his great-grandfather’s day Headcorn Hall had sat at the heart of four thousand acres of Sussex countryside, stretching from the cliffs, across the Downs and into the low valleys of Kent.

His grandfather had sold off the odd packet of land here and there, more as favours to friends than anything else.

His father had split the estate in two, selling nearly two thousand acres and ploughing the profits of the deal into the casinos of Mayfair.

It would have been quicker simply to give the land to the casinos.

In actuality he’d sold a lot of it to house builders, and entire new villages had sprung up, much to the horror of the old villages already there; some had gone to the Ministry of Defence, which, in true government style, had wildly overpaid.

The latter was, very briefly, good news for his father, but, in the longer term, good news for the Grosvenor Casino.

So Lord Townes, Robert if you must, had inherited a tract of land and a mountain of debt, and had diligently set about managing both.

Headcorn Hall now has just eighty acres to call its own.

Lord Townes could have driven the estate quad bike around the perimeter in less than an hour, if he hadn’t already had to sell the estate quad bike.

He used to hire out Headcorn Hall for film shoots, which was tremendous fun.

They’d had Joanna Lumley filming something here at one point, and there was an advert for Snickers that they’d shot in the Grand Ballroom.

In the end he’d stopped hiring it out when he discovered that one particular company was using it to shoot pornographic films, something he’d discovered only when a friend down from London sheepishly admitted that he recognized the damask curtains in one of the guest bedrooms.

It is possible, however, that things are looking up. Holly Lewis and Nick Silver’s visit was unexpected. Could he give them advice? Well, of course he could. Giving advice to people with money has always been his job. While diverting a little to himself in the process.

In any deal there are angles, and your only job is to spot more of them than the other man.

Robert Townes has never been the most ruthless of men; he would have achieved a great deal more if he had been.

Some of the very worst people he’d ever worked with were now some of the very richest. Miserable, almost certainly, but their barns were not falling down.

When he’d started at the Culpepper Ward Bank in the mid-eighties, the mantra was ‘You can make friends, or you can make money’, and, as Robert already had money, he chose to make friends. People really seemed to like him.

But now that he has no money left? Where have the friends all disappeared to?

Over two hundred years Headcorn Hall has got smaller and smaller, as each successive Lord Townes has shrunk the estate. So much power and wealth disappearing under the auctioneer’s hammer long before Robert was born.

Lord Townes pours himself a whisky. The expensive stuff for once. Because who’s to say the fortunes of the family aren’t about to be reversed?