Straight

by Dick Francis

  Jason’s voice, full of the cocky street-smart aggression that went with the orange spiky hair, clicked off eventually into silence. Prospero Jenks worked some saliva into his mouth and carefully made sure the recorder was not still alive and listening.

  “Jason wasn’t talking to me,” he said unconvincingly. “He was talking to someone else.”

  “Jason was the regular messenger between you and Greville,” I said. “I sent him round here myself last week. Jason wouldn’t take much seducing to bring you information along with the merchandise. But Greville found out. It compounded his sense of betrayal. So when you and he were talking in the Orwell at Ipswich, what was his opinion of Jason?”

  He made a gesture of half-suppressed fury.

  “I don’t know how you know all this,” he said.

  It had taken nine days and a lot of searching and a good deal of guessing at possibilities and probabilities, but the pattern was now a reliable path through at least part of the maze, and no other interpretation that I could think of explained the facts.

  I said again, “What did he say about Jason?”

  Prospero Jenks capitulated. “He said he’d have to leave Saxony Franklin. He said it was a condition of us ever doing business again. He said I was to tell Jason not to turn up for work on the Monday.”

  “But you didn’t do that,” I said.

  “Well, no.”

  “Because when Greville died, you decided to try to steal not only five stones but the lot.”

  The blue eyes almost smiled. “Seemed logical, didn’t it?” he said. “Grev wouldn’t know. The insurance would pay. No one would lose.”

  Except the underwriters, I thought. But I said, “The diamonds weren’t insured. Are not now insured. You were stealing them directly from Greville.”

  He was almost astounded, but not quite.

  “Greville told you that, didn’t he?” I guessed.

  Again the little-boy shame. “Well, yes, he did.”

  “In the Orwell?”

  “Yes.”

  “Pross,” I said, “did you ever grow up?”

  “You don’t know what growing up is. Growing up is being ahead of the game.”

  “Stealing without being found out?”

  “Of course. Everyone does it. You have to make what you can.”

  “But you have this marvelous talent,” I said.

  “Sure. But I make things for money. I make what people like. I take their bread, whatever they’ll pay. Sure, I get a buzz when what I’ve made is brilliant, but I wouldn’t starve in a garret for art’s sake. Stones sing to me. I give them life. Gold is my paintbrush. All that, sure. But I’ll laugh behind people’s backs. They’re gullible. The day I understood all customers are suckers is the day I grew cup.”

  I said, “I’ll bet you never said all that to Greville.”

  “Do me a favor. Grev was a saint, near enough. The only truly good person through and through I’ve ever known. I wish I hadn’t cheated him. I regret it something rotten.”

  I listened to the sincerity in his voice and believed him, but his remorse had been barely skin deep, and nowhere had it altered his soul.

  “Jason,” I said, “knocked me down outside St. Catherine’s Hospital and stole the bag containing Greville’s clothes.”

  “No.” The Jenks denial was automatic, but his eyes were full of shock.

  I said, “I thought at the time it was an ordinary mugging. The attacker was quick and strong. A friend who was with me said the mugger wore jeans and a woolly hat, but neither of us saw his face. I didn’t bother to report it to the police because there was nothing of value in the bag.”

  “So how can you say it was Jason?”

  I answered his question obliquely.

  “When I went to Greville’s firm to tell them he was dead,” I said, “I found his office had been ransacked. As you know. The next day I discovered that Greville had bought diamonds. I began looking for them, but there was no paperwork, no address book, no desk diary, no reference to or appointments with diamond dealers. I couldn’t physically find the diamonds either. I spent three days searching in the vault, with Annette and June, her assistant, telling me that there never were any diamonds in the office, Greville was far too security conscious. You yourself told me the diamonds were intended for you, which I didn’t know until I came here. Everyone in the office knew I was looking for diamonds, and at that point Jason must have told you I was looking for them, which informed you that I didn’t know where they were.”

  He watched my face with his mouth slightly open, no longer denying, showing only the stunned disbelief of the profoundly found out.

  “The office staff grew to know I was a jockey,” I said, “and Jason behaved to me with an insolence I thought inappropriate, but I now think his arrogance was the result of his having had me facedown on the ground under his foot. He couldn’t crow about that, but his belief in his superiority was stamped all over him. I asked the office staff not to unsettle the customers by telling them that they were now trading with a jockey, not a gemologist, but I think it’s certain that Jason told you.”

  “What makes you think that?” He didn’t say it hadn’t happened.

  “You couldn’t get into Greville’s house to search it,” I said, “because it’s a fortress. You couldn’t swing any sort of wrecking ball against the windows because the grilles inside made it pointless, and anyway they’re wired on a direct alarm to the police station. The only way to get into the house is by key, and I had the keys. So you worked out how to get me there, and you set it up through the trainer I ride for, which is how I know you were aware I was a jockey. Apart from the staff, no one else who knew I was a jockey knew I was looking for diamonds, because I carefully didn’t tell them. Come to the telephone in Greville’s house for information about the diamonds, you said, and I obediently turned up, which was foolish.”

  “But I never went to Greville’s house ...” he said.

  “No, not you, Jason. Strong and fast in the motorcycle helmet which covered his orange hair, butting me over again just like old times. I saw him vault the gate on the way out. That couldn’t have been you. He turned the house upside down but the police didn’t think he’d found what he was looking for, and I’m sure he didn’t.”

  “Why not?” he asked, and then said, “That’s to say ...”

  “Did you mean Jason to kill me?” I asked flatly.

  “No! Of course not!” The idea seemed genuinely to shock him.

  “He could have done,” I said.

  “I’m not a murderer!” His indignation, as far as I could tell, was true and without reservation, quite different to his reaction to my calling him a thief.

  “What were you doing two days ago, on Sunday afternoon?” I said.

  “What?” He was bewildered by the question but not alarmed.

  “Sunday afternoon,” I said.

  “What about Sunday afternoon? What are you talking about?”

  I frowned. “Never mind. Go back to Saturday night. To Jason giving me a concussion with half a brick.”

  The knowledge of that was plain to read. We were again on familiar territory.

  “You can kill people,” I said, “hitting them with bricks.”

  “But he said ...” He stopped dead.

  “You might as well go on,” I said reasonably, “we both know that what I’ve said is what happened.”

  “Yes, but ... what are you going to do about it?”

  “I don’t know yet.”

  “I’ll deny everything.”

  “What did Jason say about the brick?”

  He gave a hopeless little sigh. “He said he knew how to knock people out for half an hour. He’d seen it done in street riots, he said, and he’d done it himself. He said it depended on where you hit.”

  “You can’t time it,” I objected.

  “Well, that’s what he said.”

  He hadn’t been so wrong, I supposed. I’d beaten his estimate by maybe
ten minutes, not more.

  “He said you’d be all right afterward,” Pross said.

  “He couldn’t be sure of that.”

  “But you are, aren’t you?” There seemed to be a tinge of regret that I hadn’t emerged punch-drunk and unable to hold the present conversation. Callous and irresponsible, I thought, and unforgivable, really. Greville had forgiven treachery; and which was worse?

  “Jason knew which office window to break,” I said, “and he came down from the roof. The police found marks up there.” I paused. “Did he do that alone, or were you with him?”

  “Do you expect me to tell you?” he said incredulously.

  “Yes, I do. Why not? You know what plea bargaining is, you just tried it with five diamonds.”

  He gave me a shattered look and searched his common sense; not that he had much of it, when one considered.

  Eventually, without shame, he said, “We both went.”

  “When?”

  “That Sunday. Late afternoon. After he brought Grev’s things back from Ipswich and they were a waste of time.”

  “You found out which hospital Greville was in,” I said, “and you sent Jason to steal his things because you believed they would include the diamonds which Greville had told you he had with him, is that right?”

  He rather miserably nodded. “Jason phoned me from the hospital on the Saturday and said Grev wasn’t dead yet but that his brother had turned up, some frail old creature on crutches, and it was good because he’d be an easy mark ... which you were.”

  “Yes.”

  He looked at me and repeated, “Frail old creature,” and faintly smiled, and I remembered his surprise at my physical appearance when I’d first come into this room. Jason, I supposed, had seen only my back view and mostly at a distance. I certainly hadn’t noticed anyone lurking, but I probably wouldn’t at the time have noticed half a ship’s company standing at attention. Being with the dying, seeing the death, had made ordinary life seem unreal and unimportant, and it had taken me until hours after Jason’s attack to lose that feeling altogether.

  “All right,” I said, “so Jason came back empty-handed. What then?”

  He shrugged. “I thought I’d probably got it wrong. Grev couldn’t have meant he had the diamonds with him.” He frowned. “I thought that was what he said, though.”

  I enlightened him. “Greville was on his way to Harwich to meet a diamond cutter coming from Antwerp by ferry, who was bringing your diamonds with him. Twelve teardrops and eight stars.”

  “Oh.” His face cleared momentarily with pleasure but gloom soon returned. “Well, I thought it was worth looking in his office, though Jason said he never kept anything valuable there. But for diamonds ... so many diamonds ... it was worth a chance. Jason didn’t take much persuading. He’s a violent young bugger....”

  I wondered fleetingly if that description mightn’t be positively and scatologically accurate.

  “So you went up to the roof in the service lift,” I said, “and swung some sort of pendulum at the packing room window.”

  He shook his head. “Jason brought grappling irons and a rope ladder and climbed down that to the window, and broke the glass with a baseball bat. Then when he was inside I threw the hooks and the ladder down into the yard, and went down in the lift to the eighth floor, and Jason let me in through the staff door. But we couldn’t get into the stockrooms because of Grev’s infernal electronic locks, or into the showroom, same reason. And that vault ... I wanted to try to beat it open with the bat but Jason said the door is six inches thick.” He shrugged. “So we had to make do with papers ... and we couldn’t find anything about diamonds. Jason got angry ... we made quite a mess.”

  “Mm.”

  “And it was all a waste of time. Jason said what we really needed was something called a Wizard, but we couldn’t find that either. In the end, we simply left. I gave it up. Grev had been too careful. I got resigned to not having the diamonds unless I paid for them. Then Jason said you were hunting high and low for them, and I got interested again. Very. You can’t blame me.”

  I could and did, but I didn’t want to switch off the fountain.

  “And then,” he said, “like you guessed, I inveigled you into Grev’s garden, and Jason had been waiting ages there getting furious you took so long. He let his anger out on the house, he said.”

  “He made a mess there too, yes.”

  “Then you woke up and set the alarms off and Jason said he was getting right nervous by then and he wasn’t going to wait around for the handcuffs. So Grev had beaten us again ... and he’s beaten you too, hasn’t he?” He looked at me shrewdly. “You haven’t found the diamonds either.”

  I didn’t answer him. I said, “When did Jason break into Greville’s car?”

  “Well ... when he finally found it in Greville’s road. I’d looked for it at the hotel and round about in Ipswich, but Grev must have hired a car to drive there, because his own car won’t start.”

  “When did you discover that?”

  “Saturday. If the diamonds had been in it, we wouldn’t have needed to search the house.”

  “He wouldn’t have left a fortune in the street,” I said.

  Pross shook his head resignedly. “You’d already looked there, I suppose.”

  “I had.” I considered him. “Why Ipswich?” I said.

  “What?”

  “Why the Orwell Hotel at Ipswich, particularly? Why did he want you to go there?”

  “No idea,” he said blankly. “He didn’t say. He’d often ask me to meet him in odd places. It was usually because he’d found some heirloom or other and wanted to know if the stones would be of use to me. An ugly old tiara once, with a boring yellow diamond centerpiece filthy from neglect. I had the stone recut and set it as the crest of a rock crystal bird and hung it in a golden cage ... it’s in Florida, in the sun.”

  I was shaken with the pity of it. So much soaring priceless imagination and such grubby, perfidious greed.

  I said, “Had he found you a stone in Ipswich?”

  “No. He told me he’d asked me to come there because he didn’t want us to be interrupted. Somewhere quiet, he said. I suppose it was because he was going to Harwich.”

  I nodded. I supposed so also, though it wasn’t on the most direct route which was farther south, through Colchester. But Ipswich was where Greville had chosen, by freak mischance.

  I thought of all Pross had told me, and was struck by one unexplored and dreadful possibility.

  “When the scaffolding fell,” I said slowly, “when you ran across the road and found Greville lethally injured ... when he was lying there bleeding with the metal bar in him ... did you steal his wallet?”

  Pross’s little-boy face crumpled and he put his hands to cover it as if he would weep. I didn’t believe in the tears and the remorse. I couldn’t bear him any longer. I stood up to go.

  “You thought he might have diamonds in his wallet,” I said bitterly. “And then, even then, when he was dying, you were ready to rob him.”

  He said nothing. He in no way denied it.

  I felt such anger on Greville’s behalf that I wanted suddenly to hurt and punish the man before me with a ferocity I wouldn’t have expected in myself, and I stood there trembling with the self-knowledge and the essential restraint, and felt my throat close over any more words.

  Without thinking I put my left foot down to walk out and felt the pain as an irrelevance, but then after three steps used the crutches to make my way to his doorway and round the screen into the shop and through there out onto the sidewalk, and I wanted to yell and scream at the bloody injustice of Greville’s death and the wickedness of the world and call down the rage of angels.

  17

  I stood blindly on the sidewalk oblivious to the passersby finding me an obstacle in their way. The swamping tidal wave of fury and desolation swelled and broke and gradually ebbed, leaving me still shaking from its force, a tornado in the spirit.

  I l
oosened a jaw I hadn’t realized was clamped tight shut and went on feeling wretched.

  A grandmotherly woman touched my arm and said, “Do you need help?” and I shook my head at her kindness because the help I needed wasn’t anyone’s to give. One had to heal from the inside: to knit like bones.

  “Are you all right?” she asked again, her eyes concerned.

  “Yes.” I made an effort. “Thank you.”

  She looked at me uncertainly, but finally moved on, and I took a few sketchy breaths and remembered with bathos that I needed a telephone if I were ever to move from that spot.

  A hairdressing salon having (for a consideration) let me use their phone, Brad came within five minutes to pick me up. I shoved the crutches into the back and climbed wearily in beside him, and he said, “Where to?” giving me a repeat of the grandmotherly solicitude in his face if not his words.

  “Uh,” I said. “I don’t know.”

  “Home?”

  “No ...” I gave it a bit of thought. I had intended to go to Greville’s house to change into my suit that was hanging in his wardrobe before meeting Clarissa at seven, and it still seemed perhaps the best thing to do, even if my energy for the project had evaporated.

  Accordingly we made our way there, which wasn’t far, and when Brad stopped outside the door, I said, “I think I’ll sleep here tonight. This house is as safe as anywhere. So you can go on to Hungerford now, if you like.”

  He didn’t look as if he liked, but all he said was, “I come back tomorrow?”

  “Yes, please,” I agreed.

  “Pick you up. Take you to the office?”

  “Yes, please.”

  He nodded, seemingly reassured that I still needed him. He got out of the car with me and opened the gate, brought my overnight bag and came in with me to see, upstairs and down, that the house was safely empty of murderers and thieves. When he’d departed I checked that all the alarms were switched on and went up to Greville’s room to change.

  I borrowed another of his shirts and a navy silk tie, and shaved with his electric razor which was among the things I’d picked up from the floor and put on his white chest of drawers, and brushed my hair with his brushes for the same reason, and thought with an odd frisson that all of these things were mine now, that I was in his house, in his room, in his clothes ... in his life.