Estelle sits in the former smoking room. She’s enjoyed her ten days back at Bread Street. The place has changed, but she recognises that it is for the better in many ways. When Harry was still chairman, everything had to wait for him. It wasn’t that he couldn’t delegate, it was just that he couldn’t see the need to discuss anything. His idea of delegation was a strict order to be carried out by a minion. In his mind he and the bank were indivisible. So the directors, including Julian, were terrified of confronting him. For thirty-two years Estelle was the gatekeeper to his office. She knew exactly how to approach him; memos and suggestions and policy papers were always presented to him through her and phrased so that he would make the right decision. The directors knew that there was no other way and some of them muttered that she was running the show.

But it wasn’t that at all; although he wouldn’t have admitted it, Harry needed her, her organisational ability and her protective feelings for him. It was also true that his vanity – and if she’s honest, his snobbery – would never allow him to acknowledge her publicly. She knew that he sometimes said ‘The dragon-lady has decided’, but she understood him too well to take offence. When Julian suggested to his father that they start a hedge fund, she reminded Harry of what had happened to his friends in Baring’s. She asked him if after three hundred years he wanted to run a casino instead of a bank. Now the phrase ‘casino banking’ has come to haunt the City. Harry believed that he had coined it. A year before his retirement, speaking at the Guildhall, he said, ‘It is my belief that banks like ours would be serving our customers very poorly by embarking on casino banking after three hundred years.’ It was widely reported in the financial press. They were her words. He was impossible, but she misses him: she feels his brooding spirit hanging over the bank. She tries to speak to him when she’s alone in bed at her sister’s poky little house.

In the last ten days, busy though she has been with the funeral, the memorial service to come and all the tasks to do with Antibes and Harry’s possessions and Fleur’s future, she has seen the evidence of what she had guessed, that Julian and Nigel have lost tens of millions with the hedge fund and with some other risky financial manoeuvres. Casino banking came to Bread Street after all.