“I didn’t have the chance. I was so flabbergasted by his behaviour. And he didn’t tell me where he was going or what he was going to do. He was so cool about it, it quite took my breath away. It is, as you say, most ga——”

Mallett rang off.

The inspector’s trip to Brighton was postponed to a later hour than he had intended. The afternoon was spent in close conference with Renshaw, the officer in charge of the investigation of the affairs of the London and Imperial Estates Company and its associated concerns. Renshaw was supported by a couple of dour accountants and an enormous sheaf of documents, the first fruits of his enquiries into the ramifications of what the newspapers were already openly calling “the great Ballantine swindle”. Mallett was fond of representing himself as a simple man—which he was not—and as having a horror for complicated figures—which he had. But under the skilful guidance of the experts he found himself being led, fascinated, through endless labyrinths of crooked finance. The details were complicated, as they must always be where every action taken has to be accompanied by half a dozen others whose sole intent is to hide the real meaning of the transaction; but the general effect of the story revealed was plain enough. Ballantine had been practising, with extreme cleverness and several variations of his own devising, a very familiar form of swindle. With a number of companies to play off one against the others, and the means and the ability to rig the market in the shares of any or all of them, he had pursued the old game of robbing Peter to pay Paul and borrowing from Paul when Peter’s balance sheet had to be presented. That was how Mallett, with his usual bluntness of phrase, put the position, and the accountants, though shocked at his unscientific way of expressing it, agreed that roughly—very roughly—that might be said to be the method.

“Only, of course,” Renshaw remarked, “it wasn’t a case of Peter and Paul only, but a whole lot more. In fact, in the City, Ballantine’s companies were known as the Twelve Apostles. One or two of them never seem to have functioned at all. I fancy he just had them registered to make up the round dozen.”

“And all of them, I suppose, with their offices at the same address?” asked the inspector.

“Yes; though oddly enough among his private papers we found a reference to another one—the Anglo-Dutch Rubber and General Trading Syndicate—with an address in Bramston’s Inn, off Fetter Lane. Ballantine paid the rent for the offices monthly, but it never seems to have done any business, and when I went there the place was completely empty and had been for some time, apparently.”