He founded Edmond Metals, known on the Toronto Exchange simply as Emmys, and the price went up. He never sold out, despite the blandishments, never took the gambles proposed to him by banks and financial advisors. That way he avoided the hypes, the bubbles and the crashes. By forty he was a multi-millionaire and by sixty-five, in 1985, he had the elusive mantle of billionaire.
He did not flaunt it, never forgot where he came from, gave much to charity, avoided politics while remaining affable to them all, and was known as a good family man.
Over the years there were indeed a few fools who, taking the mild-mannered exterior for the whole man, sought to cheat, lie or steal. They discovered, often too late from their point of view, that there was as much steel in Steve Edmond as in any aero-engine he had ever sat behind.
He married once, in 1949, just before his big discovery. He and Fay were a love match and it stayed that way until motor neuron disease took her away in 1994. There was one child, their daughter Annie, born in 1950.
In his old age, Steve Edmond doted on her as always, approved mightily of Professor Adrian Colenso, the Georgetown University academic she had married at twenty-two, and loved to bits his only grandson Ricky, then aged twenty, away somewhere in Europe before starting college.
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Most of the time Steve Edmond was a contented man with every right to be so, but there were days when he felt tetchy, ill at ease. Then he would cross the floor of his penthouse office suite high above the city of Windsor, Ontario, and stare again at the young faces in the photo. Faces from far away and long ago.
The internal phone rang. He walked back to his desk.
‘Yes, Jean.’
‘It’s Mrs Colenso on the line from Virginia.’
‘Fine. Put her through.’ He leaned back in the padded swivel chair as the connection was made. ‘Hi, darling. How are you?’
The smile dropped from his face as he listened. He came forward in the chair until he was leaning on the desk.
‘What do you mean “missing”? . . . Have you tried phoning? . . . Bosnia? No lines . . . Annie, you know kids nowadays don’t write . . . maybe it’s stuck in the mail over there . . . yes, I accept he promised faithfully . . . all right, leave it to me. Who was he working for?’
He took a pen and pad and wrote what she dictated.
‘Loaves ‘n’ Fishes. That’s its name? It’s a relief agency? Food for refugees. Fine, then it’ll be listed. They have to be. Leave it to me, honey. Yes, as soon as I have anything.’
When he put the phone down he thought for a moment, then called his chief executive officer.
‘Among all those young Turks you employ, do you have anyone who understands researching on the internet?’ he asked. The executive was stunned.
‘Of course. Scores.’
‘I want the name and private number of the chief of an American charity called Loaves ‘n’ Fishes. No, just that. And I need it fast.’
He had it in ten minutes. An hour later he came off a long call with a gleaming building in Charleston, South Carolina, headquarters of one of those television evangelists, the sort he despised, raking in huge donations from the gullible against guarantees of salvation.
Loaves ‘n’ Fishes was the pompadoured saviour’s charity arm which appealed for funds for the pitiful refugees of Bosnia, then gripped by a vicious civil war. How much of the donated dollars went to the wretched and how much to the reverend’s fleet of limousines was anyone’s guess. But if Ricky Colenso had been working as a volunteer for Loaves ‘n’ Fishes in Bosnia, the voice from Charleston informed him, he would have been at their distribution centre at a place called Travnik.
‘Jean, do you remember a couple of years back a man in Toronto lost a couple of old masters in a burglary at his country home? It was in the papers. Then they reappeared. Someone at the club said he used a very discreet agency to track them down and get them back. I need his name. Call me back.’
This was definitely not on the internet, but there were other nets. Jean Searle, his private secretary of many years, used the secretaries’ net, and one of her friends was secretary to the Chief of Police.
‘Rubinstein? Fine. Get me Mr Rubinstein in Toronto or wherever.’
That took half an hour. The art collector was found visiting the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam to stare, once again, at Rembrandt’s Night Watch. He was taken from his dinner table, given the six-hour time difference. But he was helpful.
‘Jean,’ said Steve Edmond when he had finished, ‘call the airport. Get the Grumman ready. Now. I want to go to London. No, the English one. By sunrise.’
It was 10 June 1995.
CHAPTER FOUR
The Soldier
Cal Dexter had hardly finished taking the oath of allegiance when he was on his way to boot camp for basic training. He did not have far to go; Fort Dix is right there in New Jersey.