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What are you doing here?’
    â€˜Observing, as usual. Are you here for their summer school?’
    Max was a friend from several years back, a freelance journalist and ferocious chess player. He scraped a living of sorts writing articles for left-wing newspapers and magazines which all too often went out of existence before they got round to paying him.
    â€˜No, I haven’t joined. What do you know about them?’
    â€˜Interesting lot, mostly the younger and more left-wing generation. A fair bit of support from socialist students at Oxford and Cambridge, but mainly workers from the North and Midlands. Some London garment trade too, as you see.’
    â€˜Why Scipians?’
    â€˜Haven’t you worked that out? You know the Fabians are named after Fabius Cunctator?’
    The Roman general famous for delaying battles rather than fighting them. The timid Fabians all over.
    â€˜H.G. Wells told them they’d got the wrong general. They should have chosen Scipio, who fought battles and won them. The younger lot, and a few of the disgruntled seniors, took him at his word – so there you are.’ A sweep of his long, flannel-shirted arm took in the column winding up the hill in front of us.
    â€˜Then,’ he said, ‘Harry Hawthorne’s coming. He’ll be the main attraction.’
    Of all the quarrelsome political family, Harry Hawthorne was the liveliest and least predictable. He was the son of a Methodist preacher and had exhausted most of the available political organisations, from Liberal, through International Labour, communist, anarchist, socialist, syndicalist and even briefly Fabian (until he got thrown out by them for trying to settle debates with fists instead of statistics). In his forty years or so of life he’d been a fairground prize fighter, docker, steel worker, and deckhand. Above all, he was simply the best public speaker I’d ever heard. When Harry was on form, you expected the very stones to rise up and build themselves into the New Jerusalem.
    â€˜Quite a coup for the Scipians to get Harry,’ I said.
    â€˜More like Harry getting the Scipians. He’s up to something as usual and I’d like to know what.’
    Which partly explained why Max, who was no enthusiast for rural life, had bothered to make the trip to the Cotswolds.
    â€˜Any suspicions?’
    â€˜Only that it’s something financial to do with the Venns.’
    I said nothing but must have made some surprised movement that alerted him.
    â€˜You know them?’
    â€˜A little.’
    Max might be a friend of mine and our cause, but he was a journalist, after all. I asked him why the Scipians had chosen this place for their camp.
    â€˜It’s on Oliver Venn’s estate. You know he’s a dyed-in-the-wool old Fabian?’ I could think of a lot worse things to call him than that, so just nodded. ‘Anyway, he’s got a nephew called Daniel, a composer who seems to think he’s a revolutionary. Daniel’s fallen head over heels in love with the Scipians and invited them to camp in some old buildings on his uncle’s estate. Not sure what Oliver Venn thinks about it, but I suppose he’s having to put up with it.’
    â€˜What’s Oliver’s background?’
    â€˜Made his pile on the Stock Exchange back in the eighties, then discovered a social conscience, though that was probably his wife’s influence as much as anything. You know about Philomena, of course. Would I be right in guessing that your presence here has something to do with her?’
    No point in denying it. He could look up the will if he wanted to.
    â€˜Philomena left us quite a valuable picture,’ I said. ‘I’m here to make the arrangements.’
    He didn’t comment. Ahead of us the rest of the column had turned right through a gateway and was walking along a track beside a wood.
    â€˜It looks as if we part here. Should I wish you