The Yellow Diamond

by Andrew Martin

  She then stood in a line with Eva, who was at least a foot taller – probably a model, Reynolds belatedly realised – and two others. They prepared to have a group photo taken by the phone of another woman whose nationality was not clear from the accent with which she spoke English. She called out, ‘All the beautiful Russian ladies!’ at which the subjects tipped up their heads and closed their eyes. The photographer didn’t mind this. She seemed to have expected it, and was very happy with the result. Then they all made for the exit, with Anna Samarina giving a special smile to Reynolds that told him she knew far more than had been said.

  He walked over to a white table and picked up a glass of champagne. He was very sad that Anna Samarina had left, and that was not good.

  24

  Reynolds wandered through Mayfair. He had quit the party half an hour before. Since then he had been walking through streets in which many other parties were continuing. No doubt somebody had paid for the moon to be full – and tinted a spectacular orange – over the number one cocktail city.

  He had found himself in South Audley Street, off Mount Street, and then – two corner turns later – in the mews where he had nearly been run down. It did not look a particularly innocent street, even in the absence of the car, and two of the decorative bay trees still lay on their sides, as if a great wind had blown through. Their owners were not around to set them upright, being in the Caribbean, or wherever was the best place to be at this particular time. He was pretty sure that was London, but some of the rich had jumped early to the next square on the board. On behalf of all Londoners, he had thought: Let’s wait until they all go, then reclaim their houses. But he wasn’t really a Londoner himself. He wasn’t sure that any such person existed any more. There were just ten million people spinning in the whirlpool of money, of which he was currently in the centre.

  He turned a further two corners, and there was the house he knew to be Samarin’s. It was off Berkeley Square, a perfect Georgian house, neat and well proportioned, but big. The bricks were painted black, and so it looked like a present wrapped in black crepe paper. The doorbell looked highly sophisticated: biometric, perhaps. The house suggested both Jane Austen and James Bond – the latter because an Aston Martin was parked outside: a metallic grey classic in perfect condition; James Bond’s car. Reynolds believed that this was about the most expensive ‘classic’ car it was possible to buy. It was worth possibly half a million quid. It might have been Samarin’s because he was notoriously tasteful. There was no sign of an electrical car, but that could be in the mews at the back.

  The interior of the Aston was flawless, like the exterior. But there was one stray item: a folded tabloid newspaper poised on the edge of the cream leather back seat. Reynolds did not recognise the typeface. So it was a local paper, or a trade paper. He looked up and down the street, which was empty. Samarin’s front door remained shut. The house seemed asleep, since the shutters were closed. The fanlight over the door was illuminated; that didn’t mean that Samarin was in, but looking up to the roof, Reynolds saw a thread of smoke coming up from the chimney. Samarin was perhaps making an offering to the carbon gods that had made him rich.

  The Aston dated from the sixties. It might well not have an alarm. Reynolds shoved the edge of the roof with the palm of his hand. The beautiful car immediately began shrieking with indignation, and Reynolds walked away fast towards Berkeley Square. Even if he didn’t quite run, it was undignified to move so rapidly. But the newspaper had fallen off the seat, and its name had been revealed: the Northumberland Guardian. How many men associated with Samarin and Rostov would also have a connection with Northumberland? He believed this car belonged to Porter, whose gamekeeper had shot the dog.

  He walked to Piccadilly, watching the slow black river of taxis. He crossed the road, picturing a little pub tucked away in the back streets of St James’s, and thinking of it as a haven, where everything would be all right for half an hour, and he would be able to decide what to do about Anna Samarina.

  He was in front of the big restaurant on the south side of Piccadilly: the Wolseley. The girl who’d been witness to the shooting of Quinn had been planning to go there with her French boyfriend. The Wolseley was a good-time venue. Yet it was all black marble, like a funeral parlour; the doormen wore black. Come to that, so did most of the diners. Looking through the smoked window his eye snagged on a silvery, distinguished-looking gent. He recognised the man, but couldn’t put a name to him. He could put a name to his dining companion though: Victoria Clifford, and she provided the context for him to name the older man: Deputy Assistant Commissioner Croft, the boss of Quinn, and now the boss of Reynolds himself. Clifford was sipping wine rather than eating – she never really did eat – and doing all the talking. Croft would nod occasionally. Every so often he’d lay down his knife and fork especially in order to nod. Reynolds knew that if he stared at Clifford for long enough, she would look up and see him, because she noticed everything eventually. Therefore he remained in place by the window. Judging by the look the doorman was giving him, he might have to flash his warrant card in a minute. His eyes met Clifford’s; then she leant towards Croft with pretend animation. Reynolds walked on, looking for the pub.

  When he found it, he ordered white wine. He asked the barmaid, ‘Are you Russian?’

  ‘Ukrainian,’ she said. ‘Some people think it’s the same.’

  ‘Do you mind if I ask you to translate a word?’ and he pronounced the Russian word that Anna Samarina had told him to look up: ‘Ny-ev-in-ov-nost.’

  The barmaid said, ‘It means … “innocent”.’ He thanked her.

  When Reynolds had sat down with his drink, she came over collecting glasses and said, ‘No, different. It means “innocence”,’ and he thanked her again. He sipped his wine, and googled Anna Samarina once again. He put in her name alongside the name Eva. A picture of the two together came up. They were at a fashion show called Rus Looks. He searched under that for a while and found somebody’s blog, some intercontinental airhead. ‘So, Rus Looks, my friends. Thursday 4 December, 5 p.m. to 8 p.m., Plaza Inn, Heathrow. All proceeds to children’s charities. And I am just SO excited!!!’ Reynolds set aside his phone. Quinn had been shot at soon after six on that day. He imagined that Heathrow Airport was about as far outside central London as Anna Samarina ever went, except for those times when she actually boarded a plane there. She could not have been in St James’s Park shooting George Quinn, and partying at the Plaza Inn – not that he ever thought she had shot Quinn. It was nice to have it confirmed though, and he repented of his animus against the intercontinental airhead.

  25

  Reynolds let himself into the hallway of the flat, where, after Mayfair, everything looked cracked and faded; and the place was far too hot, in a cheap sort of way. ‘Hello!’ he called out, but no answer. These domestic Hellos came out as ‘Hullo’ in a silly way he didn’t like. He caught a glimpse through the opened kitchen door of the scrubbed pine table. There was an unconvincing Victorian-farmhouse theme to the decor, and it was his fault since he’d furnished the flat himself. Everything needed replacing, and he realised this accounted for the fusty smell: it was the smell of unreplaced items; the smell of lack of money. He walked through to the living room where in the half-light the armchairs and sofa looked overstuffed, like so many fat, faded dead men. Caroline was sitting on the sofa, under the orange standard lamp. She wore her pyjamas, which normally she did not. Reynolds walked over to kiss her.

  ‘Are you ill?’ he said.

  ‘I called you.’

  ‘Sorry,’ he said, and he took out his phone to look.

  ‘It’s too late now,’ she said, ‘I mean you’re here now. Where were you?’

  ‘At a party. Two parties. It was noisy. Actually, at the first one I had to turn it off, because it was in a library.’

  That didn’t go down very well.

  ‘Where did you get that suit?’

  ‘Place in Jermyn Street.’

  ‘This n
ew job of yours …’

  ‘As I said, I’ve been transferred to—’

  ‘Are you sure you haven’t been transferred right out of the police and into a PR agency? Or a film-production company or something?’

  He always liked Caroline in her pyjamas; she looked like somebody ready for a nocturnal adventure in a storybook. But he knew something bad was coming. She had assembled all her bedtime things around her in a very poignant way: alarm clock, cup of herbal tea and book: a biography of the cellist Jacqueline du Pré. Caroline was a talented cellist herself. She was a good writer as well, if her emails and texts were anything to go by. All of a sudden – and it was a Quinn-like, romantic thought – she struck Reynolds as someone who had accommodated herself too quickly to the banalities of life, as represented by eBay auctions, two-for-one vouchers … and mortgage applications.

  He said, ‘Have we heard about the mortgage application?’

  They had heard.

  ‘We’ve had an email from the agent. The vendor has had a higher offer.’

  ‘We can match it.’

  ‘No we can’t.’

  He felt ashamed of his fifty-eight thousand a year for causing her such misery. He moved towards her, but this was evidently not going to be welcomed. It was without much hope – since she had adopted a sort of combat posture – that he asked, ‘Why are you on the sofa? Come to bed.’

  ‘I’m staying here.’

  ‘It’s not my fault we can’t get the mortgage, is it?’

  He wondered how he could make up for two years of poor communication, frequent absence and self-absorption, and whether there was any point trying. ‘Look …’ he said, and he always knew he was doomed when he began a sentence with that word, ‘I’ll sleep on the sofa.’

  She just turned away, so he got up and went into the bedroom, making a point of not quite shutting the door, open to negotiation. He sat down on the bed and took out his phone. He had a voice message. He listened. ‘Blake, it’s Xavier. Could we speak about the Holden case please?’

  Reynolds sat on the edge of the bed, holding the phone. It was half past eleven. Too late to call back? But he couldn’t keep avoiding the man, and Anna Samarina could not have shot Quinn, being otherwise occupied at the time … which made it still less likely that she had stabbed her boyfriend. Therefore Reynolds, in protecting her, was surely not protecting a killer. He pressed call return. Hussein picked up.

  ‘Sorry it’s so late, Zav,’ said Reynolds, but that didn’t seem to matter. Hussein was his usual focused self.

  ‘Thanks for putting me onto Rakesh Dutta,’ he said.

  ‘Any use?’

  ‘He confirmed our suspicions that there might be a work tie-in.’

  Silence down the line. Reynolds had to fill it. ‘You already knew that Holden had been onto the Financial Conduct Authority of course?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Have you been onto the employer? Crawford?’

  ‘Just had him in, yes.’

  ‘What was he like?’

  ‘Arrogant. Came in with a big cigar.’

  ‘Any joy?’

  ‘Stonewall.’

  ‘And I gather you’ve got no forensics?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘No footprints either.’

  ‘Too many footprints. A man came out of the flats to have a look. Then he brought his friends.’

  ‘How many friends?’

  ‘Thirty. He was having a drinks party. Some of them were carrying glasses of champagne.’

  ‘What were they doing at the crime scene?’

  ‘The man was a doctor. Thought he could help.’

  ‘But Holden was beyond help at that point.’

  ‘He was.’

  ‘I gather it might have been a robbery? Because the wallet was taken.’

  ‘There was no wallet.’

  ‘That’s what I mean.’

  Another silence down the line. Reynolds was starting to hate Hussein. He thought of the white shoes. The man was supposed to be a plain clothes detective, for God’s sake. ‘I’m just off to bed, Zav,’ Reynolds said guiltily. ‘Anything in particular I can help with?’

  ‘The super-rich,’ said Hussein. ‘The Mayfair world. Holden had a lot of friends; lot of girlfriends.’

  ‘Well now,’ Reynolds blustered, ‘Quinn would have been your man for society women. I’m on a pretty steep learning curve here.’

  Another silence. Reynolds’ eyes roved around the hot, battered bedroom. Reynolds could hear, from beyond the door, the chink of bottle or glass. Caroline was pouring herself a drink. That meant she was steeling herself for something. Reynolds was steeling himself for something else.

  ‘One name that has come up’, Hussein continued relentlessly, ‘is Samarina. Anna Samarina. Daughter of an oligarch. That name mean anything to you, Blake?’

  ‘I’ll do some digging,’ Reynolds said, and he found he was talking just for the sake of getting beyond the name of Anna Samarina. ‘Zav, do you want me to have a go at Crawford? I’ve a few contacts – a few brains I could pick. He might be intimidated to think we’re coming at him from two directions.’

  ‘He’s not going to be intimidated.’

  ‘Annoyed, then.’

  ‘That’s possible,’ Hussein conceded, after a while. Maybe he actually liked the idea. Anyhow, they agreed on it.

  Reynolds sat forward in his bed, turning the phone over and over in his hand. The only possible justification for not ‘sharing’ with Hussein was to crack a bigger case; a bigger one even than Holden’s murder. And it had to be done fast. Reynolds immediately googled ‘Carlton’ yet again. He was pursuing the fact that there were at least three villages of that name in Yorkshire. It was Quinn’s old man living in Yorkshire that had started him thinking along these lines, but he didn’t see where the ‘HT’ came in. Surely that could only be accounted for by Carlton House Terrace? Having hit this familiar dead end, Reynolds looked at his emails. He saw that Caroline had not forwarded the one from the agent. She had wanted the drama of telling him. He stood; began taking off his suit. When he was down to his boxer shorts, she walked in. He knew she’d been emboldened by some wine. She was staring at the bandage on his knee.

  This was going to be momentous, he knew.

  ‘What’s wrong with your leg?’ she demanded.

  Caroline was a kind person, always very solicitous if he was under the weather, or otherwise endangered. He recalled the time, soon after they’d met, when he’d come under fire while on duty. The next day, the two of them had been with another couple at Pizza Express in Muswell Hill. Everyone was talking about their week at work, so Reynolds had told the story of what had, after all, occurred within the last few days of his own working life. He’d been with Lilley, and they’d been moving in on a Turkish gangster and professional killer called (quite amusingly when you thought about it) Ender. The London Turks were interesting. Very entrepreneurial and dynamic, even the bent ones; and they kept their violence – usually heroin-related – in-house. He and Lilley had tracked Ender’s younger brother – fanatically committed to Ender – to a basement social club in North London. Unlike Café Rouge, that had been a fascinating, genuinely foreign-seeming place: sort of seventies wood-veneer with photographs and paintings around the walls apparently showing handsome, middle-aged men in a diversity of hats. But when you looked closer, as Reynolds had done when he’d returned with forensics, they were all pictures of Kemal Atatürk.

  Ender’s brother had been waiting for them in that room with Ender’s machine pistol, the Mac 11, the ‘spray-and-pray’.

  ‘What did you do?’ the man belonging to the other couple had asked.

  ‘We ran away as fast as we possibly could.’

  They had been running under a railway arch when Ender’s brother had emptied the entire thirty-two-round clip in their direction. That had taken two seconds. When the other man in Café Rouge asked Reynolds how he’d not been hit, Reynolds said he had no idea.

  Caroline had
made no comment on the story; but she’d started a campaign to get him out of the force. When that failed she’d stopped asking about his work. It was what came between them; it was also what stopped her living in a desirable property.

  She was eyeing him from the bedroom door.

  ‘It’s over between us,’ she said. ‘I’m seeing someone else and I’m moving in with him. It’s Bob.’

  A longer name, thought Reynolds, would have made a more dramatic culmination. She meant Bob Ballantyne, deputy head at her school. It had always been obvious that she liked him. As deputy head, he would earn more than fifty-eight thousand; he might earn as much as seventy. Reynolds said, ‘You can make a joint mortgage application with him. It’ll be very romantic for you.’

  ‘We will try to buy something, yes.’

  He considered observing that she appeared to have sold herself to the highest bidder, but he didn’t honestly believe that was the case. He glanced over to the wardrobe. He hadn’t put the suit away straight. The suit, rather than Caroline, was his true ally in the room. He went over to the cupboard to adjust it.

  ‘I’m going to let you sleep on the sofa,’ he said.

  26

  ‘Welcome, this Friday morning, to the last of our Tuesday walking tours,’ Margaret had said, making a bit of a joke of it.

  There was a good turnout for the tour, because word had got round that it was the last. There were three of Margaret’s Camberley regulars, and one of the women was accompanied by a child – a little boy – of about ten. Margaret couldn’t help wondering why he wasn’t at school, because there didn’t seem to be anything wrong with him, but she was delighted anyway, because it meant the tour could literally go out with a bang, when they came to the gong. They were in the ballroom now, and everybody was looking at the reflections receding into infinity in the opposing overmantle mirrors. The little boy had to be held up by his mother to see, because he was very small. Perhaps he was too small and that was somehow the trouble. ‘There’s hundreds of me!’ he said, in a very sweet and shy way. Some children, Margaret thought, would take it as nothing less than their due that there should be hundreds of them. Sometimes, when there were children, she would miss out the next room but one – the Blue Drawing Room – because the explanation of the panelling and the porcelain could be a little dry, but he was a bright little boy, and she was looking forward to asking him if he could spot the differences between the two elephant heads on the candelabrum vase.