Straight (10 page)

“I don’t understand,” she said. “We gave this computer a general password, which is ‘Saxony,’ though we almost never use it. But you can put in any password you like on any particular document to supersede Saxony. This entry was made only a month ago. The date is on the menu. But whoever made it didn’t use Saxony as the password. So the password could be anything, literally any word in the world.”

I said, “By document you mean file?”

“Yes, file. Every entry has a document name, like, say, ‘oriental cultured pearls.’ If I load ‘oriental cultured pearls’ onto the screen I can review our whole stock. I do it all the time. But this document with an unknown password is listed under ‘pearl’ in the singular, not ‘pearls’ in the plural, and I don’t understand it. I didn’t put it there.” She glanced at me. “At any rate, it doesn’t say ‘diamonds.’ ”

“Have another try to guess the password.”

She tried “Franklin” and “Greville” without result. “It could be
anything,”
she said helplessly.

“Try ‘Dozen Roses.’ ”

“Why ‘Dozen Roses’?” She thought it extraordinary.

“Greville owned a horse—a racehorse—with that name.”

“Really? He never said. He was so nice, and awfully private.”

“He owned another horse called Gemstones.”

With visible doubt she tried “Dozen Roses” and then “Gemstones.” Nothing happened except another insistent demand for the password.

“Try ‘diamonds,’ then,” I said.

She tried “diamonds.” Nothing changed.

“You knew him,” I said. “Why would he enter something under ‘pearl’?”

“No idea.” She sat hunched over the keys, drumming her fingers on her mouth. “Pearl. Pearl. Why pearl?”

“What is a pearl?” I said. “Does it have a formula?”

“Oh.” She suddenly sat up straight. “It’s a birthstone.”

She typed in “birthstone,” and nothing happened.

Then she blushed slightly.

“It’s one of the birthstones for the month of June,” she said. “I could try it, anyway.”

She typed “June,” and the screen flashed and gave up its secrets.

W
e hadn’t found the diamonds. The screen said:

“Oh!” She sat transfixed. “So that’s what he meant ”

“Explain,” I said.

“One morning...” She stopped, her mouth screwing up in an effort not to cry. It took her a while to be able to continue, then she said, “One morning he told me he’d invented a little puzzle for me and he would give me six months to solve it. After six months it would self-destruct. He was smiling so much.” She swallowed. “I asked him what sort of puzzle and he wouldn’t tell me. He just said he hoped I would find it.”

“Did you look?” I asked.

“Of course I did. I looked everywhere in the office, though I didn’t know what I was looking for. I even looked for a new document in the computer, but I just never gave a thought to its being filed as a secret, and my eyes just slid over the word ‘pearl,’ as I see it so often. Silly of me. Stupid.”

I said, “I don’t think you’re stupid, and I’ll honor my brother’s promise.”

She gave me a swift look of pleasure but shook her head a little and said, “I didn’t find it. I’d never have solved it except for you.” She hesitated. “How about ten percent?”

“Twenty,” I said firmly. “I’m going to need your help and your knowledge, and if Annette is Personal Assistant, as it says on the door of her office, you can be Deputy Personal Assistant, with the new salary to go with the job.”

She turned a deeper shade of rose and busied herself with making a printout of Greville’s instruction, which she folded and put in her handbag.

“I’ll leave the secret in the computer,” she said with misty fondness. “No one else will ever find it.” She pressed a few buttons and the screen went blank, and I wondered how many times in private she would call up the magic words that Greville had left her.

I wondered if they would really self-destruct: if one could program something on a computer to erase itself on a given date. I didn’t see why not, but I thought Greville might have given her strong clues before the six months were out.

I asked her if she would print out first a list of everything currently in the vault and then as many things as she thought would help me understand the business better, like the volume and value of a day’s, a week’s, a month’s sales; like which items were most popular, and which least.

“I can tell you that what’s very popular just now is black onyx. Fifty years ago they say it was all amber, now no one buys it. Jewelry goes in and out of fashion like everything else.” She began tapping keys. “Give me a little while and I’ll print you a crash course.”

“Thanks.” I smiled, and waited while the printer spat out a gargantuan mouthful of glittering facets. Then I took the list in search of Annette, who was alone in the stock rooms, and asked her to give me a quick canter round the vault.

“There aren’t any diamonds there,” she said positively.

“I’d better learn what is.”

“You don’t seem like a jockey,” she said.

“How many do you know?”

She stared. “None, except you.”

“On the whole,” I said mildly, “jockeys are like anyone else. Would you feel I was better able to manage here if I were, say, a piano tuner? Or an actor? Or a clergyman?”

She said faintly, “No.”

“OK, then. We’re stuck with a jockey. Twist of fate. Do your best for the poor fellow.”

She involuntarily smiled a genuine smile which lightened her heavy face miraculously. “All right.” She paused. “You’re really like Mr. Franklin in some ways. The way you say things. Deal with honor, he said, and sleep at night.”

“You all remember what he said, don’t you?”

“Of course.”

He would have been glad, I supposed, to have left so positive a legacy. So many precepts. So much wisdom. But so few signposts to his personal life. No visible signpost to the diamonds.

In the vault Annette showed me that, besides its chemical formula, each label bore a number: if I looked at the number on the list June had printed, I would see the formula again, but also the normal names of the stones, with colors, shapes and sizes and country of origin.

“Why did he label them like this?” I asked. “It just makes it difficult to find things.”

“I believe that was his purpose,” she answered. “I told you, he was very security conscious. We had a secretary working here once who managed to steal a lot of our most valuable turquoise out of the vault. The labels read ‘turquoise’ then, which made it easy, but now they don’t.”

“What do they say?”

She smiled and pointed to a row of boxes. I looked at the labels and read Cu Al
₆
(PO
₄
) 4 (OH)
₈
. 4-5 (H
₂
O) on each of them.

“Enough to put anyone off for life,” I said.

“Exactly. That’s the point. Mr. Franklin could read formulas as easily as words, and I’ve got used to them myself now. No one but he and I handle these stones in here. We pack them into boxes ourselves and seal them before they go to Alfie for dispatch.” She looked along the rows of labels and did her best to educate me. “We sell these stones at so much per carat. A carat weighs two hundred milligrams, which means five carats to a gram, a hundred and forty-two carats to an ounce and five thousand carats to the kilo.”

“Stop right there,” I begged.

“You said you learned fast.”

“Give me a day or two.”

She nodded and said if I didn’t need her anymore she had better get on with the ledgers.

Ledgers, I thought, wilting internally. I hadn’t even started on those. I thought of the joy with which I’d left Lancaster University with a degree in Independent Studies, swearing never again to pore dutifully over books and heading straight (against my father’s written wishes) to the steeplechase stable where I’d been spending truant days as an amateur. It was true that at college I’d learned fast, because I’d had to, and learned all night often enough, keeping faith with at least the first half of my father’s letter. He’d hoped I would grow out of the lure he knew I felt for race-riding, but it was all I’d ever wanted and I couldn’t have settled to anything else. There was no long-term future in it, he’d written, besides a complete lack of financial security along with a constant risk of disablement. I ask you to be sensible, he’d said, to think it through and decide against.

Fat chance.

I sighed for the simplicity of the certainty I’d felt in those days, yet, given a second beginning, I wouldn’t have lived any differently. I had been deeply fulfilled in racing and grown old in spirit only because of the way life worked in general. Disappointments, injustices, small betrayals, they were everyone’s lot. I no longer expected everything to go right, but enough had gone right to leave me at least in a balance of content.

With no feeling that the world owed me anything, I applied myself to the present boring task of opening every packet in every box in the quest for little bits of pure carbon. It wasn’t that I expected to find the diamonds there: it was just that it would be so stupid not to look in case they were.

I worked methodically, putting the boxes one at a time on the wide shelf which ran along the right-hand wall, unfolding the stiff white papers with the soft inner linings and looking at hundreds of thousands of peridots, chrysoberyls, garnets and aquamarines until my head spun. I stopped in fact when I’d done only a third of the stock because apart from the airlessness of the vault it was physically tiring standing on one leg all the time, and the crutches got in the way as much as they helped. I refolded the last of the XY
₃
Z
₆
[(O,Oh,F)
₄
(BO
₃
)
₃
Si
₆
0,8] (tourmaline) and acknowledged defeat.

“What did you learn?” Annette asked when I reappeared in Greville’s office. She was in there, replacing yet more papers in their proper files, a task apparently nearing completion.

“Enough to look at jewelry shops differently,” I said.

She smiled. “When I read magazines I don’t look at the clothes, I look at the jewelry.”

I could see that she would. I thought that I might also, despite myself, from then on. I might even develop an affinity for black onyx cuff links.

It was by that time four o’clock in the afternoon of what seemed a very long day. I looked up the racing program in Greville’s diary, decided that Nicholas Loder might well have passed over going to Redcar, Warwick and Folkestone, and dialed his number. His secretary answered, and yes, Mr. Loder was at home, and yes, he would speak to me.

He came on the line with almost none of the previous evening’s agitation, bass resonances positively throbbing down the wire.

“I’ve been talking to Weatherby’s and the Jockey Club,” he said easily, “and there’s fortunately no problem. They agree that before probate the horses belong to Saxony Franklin Limited and not to you, and they will not bar them from racing in that name.”

“Good,” I said, and was faintly surprised.

“They say of course that there has to be at least one registered agent appointed by the company to be responsible for the horses, such appointment to be sealed with the company’s seal and registered at Weatherby’s. Your brother appointed both himself and myself as registered agents, and although he has died I remain a registered agent as before and can act for the company on my own.”

“Ah,” I said.

“Which being so,” Loder said happily, “Dozen Roses runs at York as planned.”

“And trots up?”

He chuckled. “Let’s hope so.”

That chuckle, I thought, was the ultimate in confidence.

“I’d be grateful if you could let Saxony Franklin know whenever the horses are due to run in the future,” I said.

“I used to speak to your brother personally at his home number. I can hardly do that with you, as you don’t own the horses.”

“No,” I agreed. “I meant, please will you tell the company? I’ll give you the number. And would you ask for Mrs. Annette Adams? She was Greville’s second-in-command.”

He could hardly say he wouldn’t, so I read out the number and he repeated it as he wrote it down.

“Don’t forget, though, that there’s only a month left of the Flat season,” he said. “They’ll probably run only once more each. Two at the very most. Then I’ll sell them for you, that would be best. No problem. Leave it to me.”

He was right, logically, but I still illogically disliked his haste.

“As executor, I’d have to approve any sale,” I said, hoping I was right. “In advance.”

“Yes, yes, of course.” Reassuring heartiness. “Your injury,” he said, “what exactly is it?”

“Busted ankle.”

“Ah. Bad luck. Getting on well, I hope?” The sympathy sounded more like relief to me than anything else, and again I couldn’t think why.

“Getting on,” I said.

“Good, good. Goodbye then. The York race should be on the television on Saturday. I expect you’ll watch it?”

“I expect so.”

“Fine.” He put down his receiver in great good humor and left me wondering what I’d missed.

Greville’s telephone rang again immediately, and it was Brad to tell me that he had returned from his day’s visit to an obscure aunt in Walthamstow and was downstairs in the front hall; all he actually said was, “I’m back.”

“Great. I won’t be long.”

I got a click in reply. End of conversation.

I did mean to leave almost at once but there were two more phone calls in fairly quick succession. The first was from a man introducing himself as Elliot Trelawney, a colleague of Greville’s from the West London Magistrates Court. He was extremely sorry, he said, to hear about his death, and he truly sounded it. A positive voice, used to attention: a touch of plummy accent.