Straight

by Dick Francis

  “I’ll drive you for nowt,” he said, hoarsely.

  “It isn’t the money.” I was surprised by the strength of his feelings. “I just thought you’d be tired of all the waiting about.”

  He shook his head vigorously, his eyes positively pleading.

  “All right, then,” I said. “London tomorrow, Ipswich on Friday, OK?”

  “Yerss,” he said with obvious relief.

  “And I’ll pay you, of course.”

  He looked at me dumbly for a moment, then ducked his head into the car to fetch the big brown envelope from Greville’s house, and he waited while I unlocked my door and made sure that there were no unwelcome visitors lurking.

  Everything was quiet, everything orderly. Brad nodded at my all-clear, gave me the envelope and loped off into the night more tongue-tied than ever. I’d never wondered very much about his thoughts during all the silent hours; had never tried, I supposed, to understand him. I wasn’t sure that I wanted to. It was restful the way things were.

  I ate a microwaved chicken pie from the freezer and made an unenthusiastic start on Greville’s letters, paying his bills for him, closing his accounts, declining his invitations, saying sorry, sorry, very sorry.

  After that, in spite of good resolutions, I did not attack my own backlog but read right through Greville’s notebook looking for diamonds. Maybe there were some solid gold nuggets, maybe some pearls of wisdom, but no helpful instructions like turn right at the fourth apple tree, walk five paces and dig.

  I did however find the answer to one small mystery, which I read with wry amusement.

  “The green soapstone box pleases me as an exercise in misdirection and deviousness. The keyhole has no key because it has no lock. It’s impossible to unlock men’s minds with keys, but guile and pressure will do it, as with the box.”

  Even with the plain instruction to be guileful and devious it took me ages to find the secret. I tried pressing each of the two hinges, pressing the lock, twisting, pressing everything again with the box upside down. The green stone stayed stubbornly shut.

  Misdirection, I thought. If the keyhole wasn’t a lock, maybe the hinges weren’t hinges. Maybe the lid wasn’t a lid. Maybe the whole thing was solid.

  I tried the box upside down again, put my thumb on its bottom surface with firm pressure and tried to push it out endways, like a slide. Nothing happened. I reversed it and pushed the other way and as if with a sigh for the length of my stupidity the bottom of the box slid out reluctantly to halfway, and stopped.

  It was beautifully made, I thought. When it was shut one couldn’t see the bottom edges weren’t solid stone, so closely did they fit. I looked with great curiosity to see what Greville had hidden in his ingenious hiding place, not really expecting diamonds, and brought out two well-worn chamois leather pouches with drawstrings, the sort jewelers use, with the name of the jeweler indistinctly stamped on the front.

  Both of the pouches were empty, to my great disappointment. I stuffed them back into the hole and shut the box, and it sat on the table beside the telephone all evening, an enigma solved but useless.

  It wasn’t until I’d decided to go to bed that some switch or other clicked in my brain and a word half-seen became suddenly a conscious thought. Van Ekeren, stamped in gold. Perhaps the jeweler’s name stamped on the chamois pouches was worth another look.

  I opened the box and pulled the pouches out again and in the rubbed and faded lettering read the full name and address.

  JACOB VAN EKEREN

  PELIKANSTRAAT 70

  ANTWERP

  There had to be, I thought, about ten thousand jewelers in Antwerp. The pouches were far from new, certainly not only a few weeks old. All the same ... better find out.

  I took one and left one, closing the box again, and in the morning bore the crumpled trophy to London and through international telephone inquiries found Jacob van Ekeren’s number.

  The voice that answered from Antwerp spoke either Dutch or Flemish, so I tried French, “Je veux parler avec Monsieur Jacob van Ekeren, s’il vous plait.”

  “Ne quittez pas.”

  I held on as instructed until another voice spoke, this time in French, of which I knew far too little.

  “Monsieur van Ekeren n’est pas ici maintenant, monsieur.”

  “Parlez-vous anglais?” I asked. “I’m speaking from England.”

  “Attendez.”

  I waited again and was rewarded with an extremely English voice asking if he could help.

  I explained that I was speaking from Saxony Franklin Ltd., gemstone importers in London.

  “How can I help you?” He was courteous and noncommittal.

  “Do you,” I said baldly, “cut and polish rough diamonds?”

  “Yes, of course,” he answered. “But before we do business with any new client we need introductions and ref erences.”

  “Um,” I said. “Wouldn’t Saxony Franklin Limited be a client of yours already? Or Greville Saxony Franklin, maybe? Or just Greville Franklin? It’s really important.”

  “May I have your name?”

  “Derek Franklin. Greville’s brother.”

  “One moment.” He returned after a while and said he would call me back shortly with an answer.

  “Thank you very much,” I said.

  “Pas du tout.” Bilingual besides.

  I put down the phone and asked both Annette and June, who were busily moving around, if they could find Jacob van Ekeren anywhere in Greville’s files. “See if you can find any mention of Antwerp in the computer,” I added to June.

  “Diamonds again!”

  “Yup. The van Ekeren address is 70 Pelikanstraat.”

  Annette wrinkled her brow. “That’s the Belgian equivalent of Hatton Garden,” she said.

  It disrupted their normal work and they weren’t keen, but Annette was very soon able to say she had no record of any Jacob van Ekeren, but the files were kept in the office for only six years, and any contact before that would be in storage in the basement. June whisked in to confirm that she couldn’t find van Ekeren or Pelikanstraat or Antwerp in the computer.

  It wasn’t exactly surprising. If Greville had wanted his diamond transaction to be common knowledge in the of fice he would have conducted it out in the open. Very odd, I thought, that he hadn’t. If it had been anyone but Greville one would have suspected him of something underhanded, but as far as I knew he always had dealt with honor, as he’d prayed.

  The telephone rang and Annette answered it. “Saxony Franklin, can I help you?” She listened. “Derek Franklin? Yes, just a moment.” She handed me the receiver and I found it was the return of the smooth French-English voice from Belgium. I knew as well as he did that he had spent the time between the two calls getting our number from international inquiries so that he could check back and be sure I was who I’d said. Merely prudent. I’d have done the same.

  “Mr. Jacob van Ekeren has retired,” he said. “I am his nephew Hans. I can tell you now after our researches that we have done no business with your firm within the past six or seven years, but I can’t speak for the time before that, when my uncle was in charge.”

  “I see,” I said. “Could you, er, ask your uncle?”

  “I will if you like,” he said civilly. “I did telephone his house, but I understand that he and my aunt will be away from home until Monday, and their maid doesn’t seem to know where they went.” He paused. “Could I ask what all this is about?”

  I explained that my brother had died suddenly, leaving a good deal of unfinished business which I was trying to sort out. “I came across the name and address of your firm. I’m following up everything I can.”

  “Ah,” he said sympathetically. “I will certainly ask my uncle on Monday, and let you know.”

  “I’m most grateful.”

  “Not at all.”

  The uncle, I thought morosely, was a dead-end.

  I went along and opened the vault, telling Annette that Prospero Jenks wan
ted all the spinel. “And he says we have a piece of rock crystal like the Eiger.”

  “The what?”

  “Sharp mountain. Like Mont Blanc.”

  “Oh.” She moved down the rows of boxes and chose a heavy one from near the bottom of the far end. “This is it,” she said, humping it onto the shelf and opening the lid. “Beautiful.”

  The Eiger, filling the box, was lying on its side and had a knobby base so that it wouldn’t stand up, but I supposed one could see in the lucent faces and angled planes that, studded with diamond stars and given the Jenks’ sunlight treatment, it could make the basis of a fantasy worthy of the name.

  “Do we have a price for it?” I asked.

  “Double what it cost,” she said cheerfully. “Plus tax, plus packing and transport.”

  “He wants everything sent by messenger.”

  She nodded. “He always does. Jason takes them in a taxi. Leave it to me, I’ll see to it.”

  “And we’d better put the pearls away that came yesterday.”

  “Oh, yes.”

  She went off to fetch them and I moved down to where I’d given up the day before, feeling certain that the search was futile but committed to it all the same. Annette returned with the pearls, which were at least in plastic bags on strings, not in the awkward open envelopes, so while she counted and stored the new intake, I checked my way through the old.

  Boxes of pearls, all sizes. No diamonds.

  “Does CZ mean anything to you?” I asked Annette idly.

  “CZ is cubic zirconia,” she said promptly. “We sell a fair amount of it ”

  “Isn’t that, um, imitation diamond?”

  “It’s a manufactured crystal very like diamond,” she said, “but about ten thousand times cheaper. If it’s in a ring, you can’t tell the difference.”

  “Can’t anyone?” I asked. “They must do.”

  “Mr. Franklin said that most jewelers can’t at a glance. The best way to tell the difference, he said, is to take the stones out of their setting and weigh them.”

  “Weigh them?”

  “Yes. Cubic zirconia’s much heavier than diamond, so one carat of cubic zirconia is smaller than a one-carat diamond.”

  “CZ equals C times one point seven,” I said slowly.

  “That’s right,” she said surprised. “How did you know?”

  9

  From noon on, when I closed the last box-lid unproductively on the softly changing colors of rainbow opal from Oregon, I sat in Greville’s office reading June’s print-out of a crash course in business studies, beginning to see the pattern of a cash flow that ended on the side of the angels. Annette, who as a matter of routine had been banking the receipts daily, produced a sheaf of checks for me to sign, which I did, feeling that it was the wrong name on the line, and she brought the day’s post for decisions, which I strugglingly made.

  Several people in the jewelry business telephoned in response to the notices of Greville’s death which appeared in the papers that morning. Annette, reassuring them that the show would go on, sounded more confident than she looked. “They all say Ipswich is too far, but they’ll be there in spirit,” she reported.

  At four there was a phone call from Elliot Trelawney, who said he’d cracked the number of the lady who didn’t want Greville’s name spoken in her house.

  “It’s sad, really,” he said with a chuckle. “I suppose I shouldn’t laugh. That lady can’t and won’t forgive Greville because he sent her upper-crust daughter to jail for three months for selling cocaine to a friend. The mother was in court, I remember her, and she talked to the press afterward. She couldn’t believe that selling cocaine to a friend was an offense. Drug peddlers were despicable, of course, but that wasn’t the same as selling to a friend.”

  “If a law is inconvenient, ignore it, it doesn’t apply to you.”

  “What?”

  “Something Greville wrote in his notebook.”

  “Oh yes. It seems Greville got the mother’s phone number to suggest ways of rehabilitation for the daughter, but Mother wouldn’t listen. Look.” He hesitated. “Keep in touch now and then, would you? Have a drink in the Rook and Castle occasionally?”

  “All right.”

  “And let me know as soon as you find those notes.”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “We want to stop Vaccaro, you know.”

  “I’ll look everywhere,” I promised.

  When I put the phone down I asked Annette.

  “Notes about his cases?” she said. “Oh no, he never brought those to the office.”

  Like he never bought diamonds, I thought dryly. And there wasn’t a trace of them in the spreadsheets or the ledgers.

  The small insistent alarm went off again, muffled inside the desk. Twenty past four, my watch said. I reached over and pulled open the drawer and the alarm stopped, as it had before.

  “Looking for something?” June said, breezing in.

  “Something with an alarm like a digital watch.”

  “It’s bound to be the world clock,” she said. “Mr. Franklin used to set it to remind himself to phone suppliers in Tokyo, and so on.”

  I reflected that as I wouldn’t know what to say to suppliers in Tokyo I hardly needed the alarm.

  “Do you want me to send a fax to Tokyo to say the pearls arrived OK?” she said.

  “Do you usually?”

  She nodded. “They worry.”

  “Then please do.”

  When she’d gone Jason with his orange hair appeared through the doorway and without any trace of insolence told me he’d taken the stuff to Prospero Jenks and brought back a check, which he’d given to Annette.

  “Thank you,” I said neutrally.

  He gave me an unreadable glance, said, “Annette said to tell you,” and took himself off. An amazing improvement, I thought.

  I stayed behind that evening after they’d all left and went slowly round Greville’s domain looking for hiding places that were guileful and devious and full of misdirection.

  It was impossible to search the hundreds of shallow drawers in the stockrooms and I concluded he wouldn’t have used them, because Lily or any of the others might easily have found what they weren’t meant to. That was the trouble with the whole place, I decided in the end. Greville’s own policy of not encouraging private territories had extended also to himself, as all of his staff seemed to pop in and out of his office familiarly whenever the need arose.

  Hovering always was the uncomfortable thought that if any pointer to the diamonds’ whereabouts had been left by Greville in his office, it could have vanished with the break-in artist, leaving nothing for me to find; and indeed I found nothing of any use. After a fruitless hour I locked everything that locked and went down to the yard to find Brad and go home.

  The day of Greville’s funeral dawned cold and clear and we were heading east when the sun came up. The run to Ipswich taking three hours altogether, we came into the town with generous time to search for Greville’s car.

  Inquiries from the police had been negative. They hadn’t towed, clamped or ticketed any ancient Rover. They hadn’t spotted its number in any public road or car-park, but that wasn’t conclusive, they’d assured me. Finding the car had no priority with them as it hadn’t been stolen but they would let me know if, if.

  I explained the car-finder to Brad en route, producing a street map to go with it.

  “Apparently when you press this red button the car’s lights switch on and a whistle blows,” I said. “So you drive and I’ll press, OK?”

  He nodded, seeming amused, and we began to search in this slightly bizarre fashion, starting in the town center near to where Greville had died and very slowly rolling up and down the streets, first to the north, then to the south, checking them off on the map. In many of the residential streets there were cars parked nose to tail outside houses, but nowhere did we get a whistle. There were public car-parks and shop car-parks and the station car-park, but nowhere did we
turn lights on. Rover 3500s in any case were sparse: when we saw one we stopped to look at the plates, even if the paint wasn’t gray, but none of them was Greville’s.

  Disappointment settled heavily. I’d seriously intended to find that car. As lunchtime dragged toward two o’clock I began to believe that I shouldn’t have left it so long, that I should have started looking as soon as Greville died. But last Sunday, I thought, I hadn’t been in any shape to, and anyway it wasn’t until Tuesday that I knew there was anything valuable to look for. Even now I was sure he wouldn’t have left the diamonds themselves vulnerable, but some reason for being in Ipswich at all ... given luck, why not?

  The crematorium was set in a garden with neatly planted rose trees: Brad dropped me at the door and drove away to find some food. I was met by two black-suited men, both with suitable expressions, who introduced themselves as the undertaker I’d engaged and one of the crematorium’s officials. A lot of flowers had arrived, they said, and which did I want on the coffin.

  In some bemusement I let them show me where the flowers were, which was in a long covered cloister beside the building, where one or two weeping groups were looking at wreaths of their own.

  “These are Mr. Franklin’s,” the official said, indicating two long rows of bright bouquets blazing with colorful life in that place of death.

  “All of these?” I said, astonished.

  “They’ve been arriving all morning. Which do you want inside, on the coffin?”

  There were cards on the bunches, I saw.

  “I sent some from myself and our sisters,” I said doubtfully. “The card has Susan, Miranda and Derek on it. I’ll have that.”

  The official and the undertaker took pity on the crutches and helped me find the right flowers; and I came first not to the card I was looking for but to another that shortened my breath.

  I think of you every day at four-twenty.

  Love, C.

  The flowers that went with it were velvety red roses arranged with ferns in a dark green bowl. Twelve sweet-smelling blooms. Dozen Roses, I thought. Heavens above.