Damian Baxter is very rich and dying. He lives alone, attended by a chauffeur, butler, cook and housemaid, a life of everything and nothing. Before he goes he needs to know if he has a living heir. At stake is his fortune - in excess he reckons, of 500 million pounds. By the time he married he was sterile (the result of adult mumps in his early twenties), but what about before that unfortunate illness? Had he fathered a child as a young man? An anonymous letter from twenty years before suggests so. But finding the truth will not prove easy, as the only man who knows where to look is Damian's sworn enemy [cover].