The second viewing solidified their history for her, allowed her to slot Becker's shards along a time line that began with the marriage of Tessier and Ashpool, a union commented upon, in its day, primarily in the media of corporate finance. Each was heir to a more than modest empire, Tessier to a family fortune founded on nine basic patents in applied biochemistry and Ashpool to the great Melbourne-based engineering firm that bore his father's name. It was marriage as merger, to the journalists, though the resulting corporate entity was viewed by most as ungainly, a chimera with two wildly dissimilar heads.