The Strode Venturer Read Online Free

“Well, it’s not for me to discuss the family’s affairs, but I believe there was a son by the Old Man’s second marriage. It’s just gossip, you know. I’ve never met him and I don’t think anybody else has. Was he the one you wanted to see?”
    “Do you know his name?”
    But he shook his head. “No, only that he’s … well, a bit of a rolling stone, if you see what I mean.”
    So that was it and the Strode I’d met was probably still wandering around the world. Feeling suddenly tired I went out again into Leadenhall Street, to the throb of buses and heavy lorries pumping diesel fumes into the narrow gut between the grubby buildings. I would like to have gone back to the hotel and had a bath, perhaps a short sleep, but it was a long way and there was at least one other man I knew in the City, a stockbroker in Copthall Court. The last time I had seen him had been at a party in Harwich Town Hall the night before the North Sea Race. I’d been crewing in one of the R.N.S.A. boats; he’d been racing his own yacht. That had been nearly five years ago.
    I went down Bishopsgate and then turned left into Threadneedle Street, a gleam of watery sunlight softening the façade of the Bank of England. All about me were buildings that seemed to date from the massive Victorian age of greatness, richly ornate, stolid buildings grimed with dirt, their interiors permanently lit by artificial light. Thepeople in the streets, mostly men wearing dark suits, some with bowler hats, looked pale and ill, like busy termites coming out of dark holes in the grey slabs of the buildings. And when I came to Throgmorton Street and the Stock Exchange, the City seemed to swallow me, the narrow street closing in above my head. A top-hatted broker passed me, his pallid features a dyspeptic grey, his mouth a tight line. Youths jostled each other as they scurried hatless from place to place. And on every face, it seemed to me, there was a strange lack of human feeling as though the concentration on finance had bitten deep into all their souls. It was an alien world, far more alien to me than a foreign port.
    Copthall Court was through an archway opposite the Stock Exchange and in a building half-way down it I found the firm I wanted listed among about a hundred others on a great board opposite the lift. Their offices were on the sixth floor, a group of poky little cubby-holes looking out on to the blank wall of the neighbouring building. To my surprise George Latham seemed as bronzed and as fit as when I had last seen him. What is more he recognized me at once. “Come in, dear boy. Come in.” He took me into his office which he shared with two of his partners and an Exchange Telegraph tape machine that tickered away erratically. “Excuse the mess.” There was barely room to move in the litter of desks and papers. “Only got back the other day. Been in the Caribbean and now I’m trying to catch up.” He was a big bull of a man, broad-shouldered, with a massive square-jawed head. “Well now, what can I do for you? No good asking me what to buy. I don’t know. Market should have gone to hell with the collapse of the Common Market talks. But it hasn’t, God knows why.”
    “I want your advice about some Strode Orient shares I hold.”
    At that he raised his eyes heavenwards and heaved a sigh. “For God’s sake, man. What price did you pay?” And when I told him I’d inherited them from my mother who’d been given them in 1940 he seemed relieved. “I thought for a moment you’d been caught when they were run up toover five shillings a couple of months or so back. A takeover rumour, but nothing came of it. Strode & Company blocked it. They own about forty-five per cent of the shares.” He reached for The Financial Times and checked down the list of quotations. “They’re now about two bob nominal. Just a moment. I’ll get the Ex Tel card.” He went to a filing cabinet and came back with a card that gave all the details of the