Straight (9 page)

If he hadn’t bought diamonds, I thought, what the hell had he done with one point five million dollars in cash.

Bought diamonds. He had to have done. Either that or the money was still lying around somewhere, undoubtedly carefully hidden. Either the money or diamonds to the value were lying around uninsured, and if my semisecretive ultra-security-conscious brother had left a treasure-island map with X marking the precious spot, I hadn’t yet found it. Much more likely, I feared, that the knowledge had died under the scaffolding. If it had, the firm would be forfeited to the bank, the last thing Greville would have wanted.

If it had, a major part of the inheritance he’d left me had vanished like morning mist.

He should have stuck to his old beliefs, I thought gloomily, and let diamonds strictly alone.

The telephone on the desk rang again and this time Annette answered it, as she was beside it.

“Saxony Franklin, can I help you?” she said, and listened. “No, I’m very sorry, you won’t be able to talk to Mr. Franklin personally. Could I have your name, please?” She listened. “Well, Mrs. Williams, we must most unhappily inform you that Mr. Franklin died as a result of an accident over the weekend. We are, however, continuing in business. Can I help you at all?”

She listened for a moment or two in increasing puzzlement, then said, “Are you there? Mrs. Williams, can you hear me?” But it seemed as though there was no reply, and in a while she put the receiver down, frowning. “Whoever it was hung up.”

“Do I gather you don’t know Mrs. Williams?”

“No, I don’t.” She hesitated. “But I think she called yesterday too. I think I told her yesterday that Mr. Franklin wasn’t expected in the office all day, like I told everyone. I didn’t ask for her name yesterday. But she has a voice you don’t forget.”

“Why not?”

“Cut glass,” she said succinctly. “Like Mr. Franklin, but more so. Like you too, a bit.”

I was amused. She herself spoke what I thought of as unaccented English, though I supposed any way of speaking sounded like an accent to someone else. I wondered briefly about the cut-glass Mrs. Williams who had received the news of the accident in silence and hadn’t asked where, or how, or when.

Annette went off to her own office to get through to the newspapers and I picked Greville’s diary out of my trousers pocket and tried the numbers that had been unreachable the night before. The two at the back of the book turned out to be first his bookmaker and second his barber, both of whom sounded sorry to be losing his custom, though the bookmaker less so because of Greville’s habit of winning.

My ankle heavily ached; the result, I dared say, of general depression as much as aggrieved bones and muscle. Depression because whatever decisions I’d made to that point had been merely commonsense, but there would come a stage ahead when I could make awful mistakes through ignorance. I’d never before handled finances bigger than my own bank balance and the only business I knew anything about was the training of racehorses, and that only from observation, not from hands-on experience. I knew what I was doing around horses: there, I could tell the spinel from the ruby. In Greville’s world, I could be taken for a ride and never know it. I could lose badly before I’d learned even the elementary rules of the game.

Greville’s great black desk stretched away to each side of me, the wide kneehole flanked to right and left by twin stacks of drawers, four stacks in all. Most of them now contained what they had before the break-in, and I began desultorily to investigate the nearest on the left, looking vaguely for anything that would prompt me as to what I’d overlooked or hadn’t known was necessary to be done.

I first found not tasks but the toys: the small black gadgets now tidied away into serried ranks. The Geiger counter was there, also the handheld copier and a variety of calculators, and I picked out a small black contraption about the size of a paperback book and, turning it over curiously, couldn’t think what it could be used for.

“That’s an electric measurer,” June said, coming breezily into the office with her hands full of paper. “Want to see how it works?”

I nodded and she put it flat on its back on the desk. “It’ll tell you how far it is from the desk to the ceiling,” she said, pressing knobs. “There you are, seven feet five and a half inches. In meters,” she pressed another knob, “two meters twenty-six centimeters.”

“I don’t really need to know how far it is to the ceiling,” I said.

She laughed. “If you hold it flat against a wall, it measures how far it is to the opposite wall. Does it in a flash, as you saw. You don’t need to mess around with tape measures. Mr. Franklin got it when he was redesigning the stockrooms. And he worked out how much carpet we’d need, and how much paint for the walls. This gadget tells you all that.”

“You like computers, don’t you?” I said.

“Love them. All shapes, all sizes.” She peered into the open drawer. “Mr. Franklin was always buying the tiny ones.” She picked out a small gray leather slipcover the size of a pack of cards and slid the contents onto her palm. “This little dilly is a travel guide. It tells you things like phone numbers for taxis, airlines, tourist information, the weather, embassies, American Express.” She demonstrated, pushing buttons happily. “It’s an American gadget, it even tells you the TV channels and radio frequencies for about a hundred cities in the U.S., including Tucson, Arizona, where they hold the biggest gem fair every February. It helps you with fifty other cities round the world, places like Tel Aviv and Hong Kong and Taipei where Mr. Franklin was always going.”

She put the travel guide down and picked up something else. “This little round number is a sort of telescope, but it also tells you how far you are away from things. It’s for golfers. It tells you how far you are away from the flag on the green, Mr. Franklin said, so that you know which club to use.”

“How often did he play golf?” I said, looking through the less than four-inch-long telescope and seeing inside a scale marked Green on the lowest line with diminishing numbers above, from 200 yards at the bottom to 40 yards at the top. “He never talked about it much.”

“He sometimes played at weekends, I think,” June said doubtfully. “You line up the word
Green
with the actual green, and then the flag stick is always eight feet high, I think, so wherever the top of the stick is on the scale, that’s how far away you are. He said it was a good gadget for amateurs like him. He said never to be ashamed of landing in life’s bunkers if you’d tried your best shot.” She blinked a bit. “He always used to show these things to me when he bought them. He knew I liked them too.” She fished for a tissue and without apology wiped her eyes.

“Where did he get them all from?” I asked.

“Mail order catalogues, mostly.”

I was faintly surprised. Mail order and Greville didn’t seem to go together, somehow, but I was wrong about that, as I promptly found out.

“Would you like to see our own new catalogue?” June asked, and was out of the door and back again before I could remember if I’d ever seen an old one and decide I hadn’t. “Fresh from the printers,” she said. “I was just unpacking them.”

I turned the glossy pages of the 50-page booklet, seeing in faithful colors all the polished goodies I’d met in the stockrooms and also a great many of lesser breeding. Amulets, heart shapes, hoops and butterflies: there seemed to be no end to the possibilities of adornment. When I murmured derogatorily that they were a load of junk, June came fast and strongly to their defense, a mother hen whose chicks had been snubbed.

“Not everyone can afford diamonds,” she said sharply, “and, anyway, these things are pretty and we sell them in thousands, and they wind up in hundreds of High Street shops and department stores and I often see people buying the odd shapes we’ve had through here. People do like them, even if they’re not your taste.”

“Sorry,” I said.

Some of her fire subsided. “I suppose I shouldn’t speak to you like that,” she said uncertainly. “But you’re not Mr. Franklin...” She stopped with a frown.

“It’s OK,” I said. “I am, but I’m not. I know what you mean.”

“Alfie says,” she said slowly, “that there’s a steeplechase jockey called Derek Franklin.” She looked at my foot as if with new understanding. “Champion jockey one year, he said. Always in the top ten. Is that ... you?”

I said neutrally, “Yes.”

“I
had
to ask you,” she said. “The others didn’t want to.”

“Why not?”

“Annette didn’t think you could be a jockey. You’re too tall. She said Mr. Franklin never said anything about you being one. All she knew was that he had a brother he saw a few times a year. She said she was going to ignore what Alfie thought, because it was most unlikely.” She paused. “Alfie mentioned it yesterday, after you’d gone. Then he said... they all said... they didn’t see how a jockey could run a business of this sort. If you were one, that is. They didn’t want it to be true, so they didn’t want to ask.”

“You tell Alfie and the others that if the jockey doesn’t run the business their jobs will be down the tubes and they’ll be out in the cold before the week’s over.”

Her blue eyes widened. “You sound just like Mr. Franklin!”

“And you don’t need to mention my profession to the customers, in case I get the same vote of no confidence I’ve got from the staff.”

Her lips shaped the word “Wow” but she didn’t quite say it. She disappeared fast from the room and presently returned, followed by all the others, who were only too clearly in a renewed state of anxiety.

Not one of them a leader. What a pity.

I said, “You all look as if the ship’s been wrecked and the lifeboat’s leaking. Well, we’ve lost the captain, and I agree we’re in trouble. My job is with horses and not in an office. But, like I said yesterday, this business is going to stay open and thrive. One way or another, I’ll see that it does. So if you’ll all go on working normally and keep the customers happy, you’ll be doing yourselves a favor because if we get through safely you’ll all be due for a bonus. I’m not my brother, but I’m not a fool either, and I’m a pretty fast learner. So just let’s get on with the orders, and, er, cheer up.”

Lily, the Charlotte Brontë lookalike, said meekly, “We don’t really doubt your ability...”

“Of course we do,” interrupted Jason. He stared at me with half a snigger, with a suggestion of curling lip. “Give us a tip for the three-thirty, then.”

I listened to the street-smart bravado which went with the spiky orange hair. He thought me easy game.

I said, “When you are personally able to ride the winner of any three-thirty, you’ll be entitled to your jeer. Until then, work or leave, it’s up to you.”

There was a resounding silence. Alfie almost smiled. Jason looked merely sullen. Annette took a deep breath, and June’s eyes were shining with laughter.

They all drifted away still wordlessly and I couldn’t tell to what extent they’d been reassured, if at all. I listened to the echo of my own voice saying I wasn’t a fool, and wondering ruefully if it were true: but until the diamonds were found or I’d lost all hope of finding them, I thought it more essential than ever that Saxony Franklin Ltd. should stay shakily afloat. All hands, I thought, to the pumps.

June came back and said tentatively, “The pep talk seems to be working.”

“Good.”

“Alfie gave Jason a proper ticking off, and Jason’s staying.”

“Right.”

“What can I do to help?”

I looked at her thin alert face with its fair eyelashes and blonde-to-invisible eyebrows and realized that without her the save-the-firm enterprise would be a nonstarter. She, more than her computer, was at the heart of things. She more than Annette, I thought.

“How long have you worked here?” I asked.

“Three years. Since I left school. Don’t ask if I like the job, I love it. What can I do?”

“Look up in your computer’s memory any reference to diamonds,” I said.

She was briefly impatient. “I told you, we don’t deal in diamonds.”

“All the same, would you?”

She shrugged and was gone. I got to my feet—foot—and followed her, and watched while she expertly tapped her keys.

“Nothing at all under diamonds,” she said finally. “Nothing. I told you.”

“Yes.” I thought about the boxes in the vault with the mineral information on the labels. “Do you happen to know the chemical formula for diamonds?”

“Yes I do,” she said instantly. “It’s C. Diamonds are pure carbon.”

“Could you try again, then, under C?”

She tried. There was no file for C.

“Did my brother know how to use this computer?” I asked.

“He knew how to work all computers. Given five minutes or so to read the instructions.”

I pondered, staring at the blank unhelpful screen.

“Are there,” I asked eventually, “any secret files in this?”

She stared. “We never use secret files.”

“But you could?”

“Of course. Yes. But we don’t need to.”

“If,” I said, “there were any secret files, would you know that they were there?”

She nodded briefly. “I wouldn’t know, but I could find out.”

“How?” I asked. “I mean, please would you?”

“What am I looking for? I don’t understand.”

“Diamonds.”

“But I told you, we don’t...”

“I know,” I said, “but my brother said he was going to buy diamonds and I need to know if he did. If there’s any chance he made a private entry on this computer some day when he was first or last in this office, I need to find it.”

She shook her head but tapped away obligingly, bringing what she called menus to the screen. It seemed a fairly lengthy business but finally, frowning, she found something that gave her pause. Then her concentration increased abruptly until the screen was showing the word “Password?” as before.