Frizzie was uncomfortable. She urged him to either not give evidence, or to be a bit vague about the identification.
He said to her, “Anyone would think that you wanted that guy to get off just because his brother helps you with your surfboard. What am I to think? That you’re having an affair with him or something?”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” she said.
Two weeks before the trial was due to take place, he went surfing. It was early in the morning, the time he liked best, when there was virtually nobody around at Cottesloe Beach other than the occasional dog owner taking a dog for a run along the sand. Such beauty, he thought. The sky so wide. The sea. The sand. Such beauty in this country. All around one.
He paddled out and rode one or two waves in. The surf was quite high and the water was warmer than usual. He spotted another surfer, some way off, then lost sight of him. It was very quiet. George paddled his board back out, looked up at the perfect pale blue sky, and sighed with contentment.
Then he looked down. His heart gave a lurch as he caught a glimpse of something in the water. He peered into the depths. It was easy to mistake shadows or fronds of seaweed for something they were not. One had to control one’s imagination. He searched the water. A flash of metal, from down below it seemed. Impossible, he thought. Impossible. I told nobody.
And he thought, as he slipped into the water, that life was not supposed to be like this, that it was absurd that parking of all things should have this result. Absurd and unlikely. But now there was only water, and regret.
<
* * * *
GIRL’S BEST FRIEND
Judith Cutler
When a guy presents you with an engagement ring, a socking great oval ruby surrounded by diamonds, it might seem a tad ungrateful to subject it to scrutiny with a jeweller’s eyepiece.
Griff, my adoptive grand-father, business partner, and antique-dealer extraordinaire, wouldn’t ever soil his lips with expressions like looking a gift-horse in the mouth. But he did ask, as he prepared supper that evening, “Surely that breaches all rules of etiquette, my darling Lina?”
I slipped the ornate jewel back onto my ring finger, which I wiggled so that it picked up the candlelight. Griff always made meals an occasion, even worrying about the niceties of what cutlery to use when serving Thai stir-fry in an Elizabethan cottage at the heart of a Kentish village. “I think I was a bit bowled over,” I conceded slowly. “All that bended-knee stuff and the promise of a round-the-world cruise for our honeymoon. For me, Lina Townend!”
“And there I thought chivalry had died out in your generation,” he said.
“Apparently not,” I said coolly. But how could I snub my dearest friend? “Griff, what was I doing? This is Piers Hamlyn, for goodness’ sake!”
“Piers Hamlyn, who, despite his predilection for cords and bodywarmers, is a most dashing piece of manhood,” Griff burbled. “Those shoulders! That neat bum!”
“Those cornflower-blue eyes, perfect complexion, and honey-coloured hair,” I added.
“And second cousin once removed of your own father, Lord Elham,” Griff reflected, with distinctly less enthusiasm.
“Which doesn’t say much for him, does it?” I asked quietly.
“Just because Lord Elham—how strange that neither of us ever refers to him as anything more intimate—is not the purest diamond in the tiara doesn’t mean his cousin is flawed. Though I must admit,” he continued, allowing a tiny quaver to creep into his voice, and sinking into his frail-old-man mode, “it has been what we used to call a whirlwind romance.”
It had. And considering that women of my generation tended not to demand courtship and rings and weddings before—as Griff gracelessly put it—hopping into bed, it was a very romantic romance. Flowers; candlelit dinners; the question popped within two weeks of our first meeting at a big and classy antiques fair at a vast country pile—it belonged to another of his cousins—and no attempt to go beyond a not terribly passionate snog.
What on earth had I been doing? The ring said, in a very snide voice, “Doing pretty well for yourself, considering.”
I whipped it off and peered closely at it again.
“Oh, Griff, why didn’t I tell Piers to ask you for my hand? You could have asked him about his prospects and how he meant to maintain me!” Which would have given me time to think.
“I take it you wouldn’t want me to go so far as to reject him as a suitor?”
“Yes. No. I wish I knew.” I gave the ring another squint. What was wrong with me? Or rather, what was wrong with it? What had got all my divvy’s antennae a-twitch?
Its provenance, for one thing. Every dealer likes to know where an item’s been before it comes to him. You might think it’s enough to know the maker, but forging manufacturer’s marks is easy-peasy to a master, as is copying a painter’s signature on a faked masterpiece. So you want to know who bought it and from whom, all through its life. In the case of a picture, the number of times it’s been exhibited and where. As for a ring like this, it’s tricky and hardly worth bothering, so long as you can see the hallmark on the band, in this case one declaring it was made in Birmingham, that City of a Thousand Trades, way back in 1879. So it was the right age to have a silver mount for the stones, as opposed to the stronger platinum claws used later.
Everything was right about it.
Or not.
“I’d love you to take a look at it,” I said. “After all, it’s not exactly my area, is it?”
“At our level, dear heart, we have to be Jacks and Jills of all trades. I know you can beat most people hollow when it comes to Victorian china, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t turn your hand to other things. I know, I know. You were spot-on with the date—but then,” he added, “I’d have been disappointed if you hadn’t been. You worked hard to learn the assay marks.” He smiled, and tucked a lock of my hair in place. “There’s a good brain between those ears of yours, my child. For all you worry about having no paper qualifications, you’re a very bright young woman.”
I didn’t argue. But school and I had been relative strangers to each other, thanks to my life in care after my mother’s death. You’d have expected my father to take me in, maybe. But not my father, Lord Elham, of Bossingham Court. Lord Elham, old rogue that he was, had taken no more notice of me than he’d taken of my other thirty siblings. But then, he claimed he’d never known about any of us, not in any detail. And indeed, it was me who’d found him, not the other way round. (“I who’d found him, dear heart,” Griff would have told me gently.) And he hadn’t been especially keen on me, at least not until I’d dug him out of a particularly nasty hole and managed to cast him in the light not of a greedy criminal but of a public benefactor. My father called himself a gentleman—but since I’d always believed in the adage gentleman is as gentleman does, I’d yet to see him deserve the term. Or the title Noble Lord. Lord Elham. And no, that didn’t make me Lady anything, since I was born on what Griff would call the wrong side of the blanket. Well, with all those brothers and sisters in the picture, you’d probably worked that out for yourself. He’d taken the huff when I’d refused to leave Griff and go and live at Bossingham Hall, but that’s another story.
“Now, do I look at this bauble as if admiring your betrothed’s taste, or as if valuing it for auction?”
“As my dearest friend,” I said humbly. “And under a very strong lamp.”
“Tomorrow morning, then.”
Before I washed up I hung the ring on a little Edwardian ring-tree that for as long as I could remember Griff had kept beside the kettle. That was Griff for you. Forward planning. Or, more likely, seeing a charming little item going cheap and giving it a good home. Most of the stuff we bought we had to sell, of course—that’s how dealers make a living. But Griff made it a rule that we only bought what we ourselves liked. Usually.
“If you like something, you find out about it,” he’d told me when he’d first employed me. “And the more you know about something the
more people regard you as an expert and come to trust you. Trust is like virtue—it’s its own reward.”
“And it doesn’t damage your prices.”
He’d chuckled. “Clearly, dear heart, you are a dealer in the bud.”
Over the next two or three years, I’d blossomed a bit. What I was best at was restoring damaged Victorian china, and not passing it as perfect. Unlike some I could name. So people trusted me when I said something was good, you see. And my prices rose accordingly. Occasionally other dealers would come to me when they found something hard to shift. If it was pukka, and only then, I’d pop it on our stall and sell it at the usual commission. Not that I would be selling Piers’s ring on my stall, for goodness’ sake!
“What worries me,” Griff said as he wiped up, “is that despite his lineage Piers works at the lowest end of the market. Collectibles, indeed! Junk, in other words.”
“There’s room for all sorts—and we’re not exactly at the top end ourselves.”
I wished the words back: What Griff was really afraid of was that I’d abandon him.
If only I could have talked Piers over with a woman. But I hadn’t many women friends my own age, thanks to my miserable upbringing, and Griff, though he was dearer to me than anyone seemed able to imagine, was hardly a role model for someone as young and romantic as me (or should that be I?): He’d been in a settled if semidetached relationship for more years than he cared to remember.
Washing-up done, I dried my hands and slapped on some cream. As beauty routines went, it didn’t go far, and Griff tended to nag when I didn’t use sunblock or moisturiser. I had to admit that the ring looked better on well-tended mitts than it would have done on my pre-Griff paws. Or did it look too good? Despite Griff’s offer, I took it and the eyeglass up to my workroom and switched on the strong spotlight I need for the most delicate restoration work. And then I called Griff.
“You’ve got better eyes than I have,” he said, somewhat grudgingly since I’d hauled him from his favourite television program, a docudrama about civilians being tested to SAS standards. “But you’re right. Those two stones aren’t exactly the same as the others. Pretty close. But a ring that age is bound to have been repaired.”
“Cleaned and repaired?”
“Why not? The young man wants to impress his beloved.”
“Piers didn’t say anything about a repair. He said it came straight from a sale—he’d only cleaned it up a bit to see what he’d got.”
“He’s cleaned it very well indeed. To professional standards,” Griff mused. “So why didn’t he come clean—as clean as this ring, in fact—and simply tell you it had come with two stones missing and he’d had them replaced?”
“Why indeed?”
* * * *
Next time we met, this time in a church hall in the Cotswolds so cold that Griff’s knuckles turned bluey-white, the rest of his fingers purple, Piers presented me with another ring.
“I’m not asking you to choose between them,” he said pettishly as I slipped it admiringly onto my right hand: It was a sapphire version of my ruby, with a lovely Sri Lankan stone, much lighter than you get these days, that put it back into the Victorian period.
I bit my lip: I’d better not tell him I preferred it.
“I’m asking you to sell it. It’s too good for my stall: It’ll just disappear amongst all the collectibles. But you’ve got nice, classy stuff. Everything guaranteed antique, with nothing less than a hundred years old.”
I nodded. We were totally out of place at this fair, as Griff bitterly acknowledged, to which we’d only come because Griff had a Thespian friend in the area and because I could meet up with Piers.
“China, glass, and treen,” I said. “No jewellery.”
“Then it’ll stand out all the better, especially with a spotlight trained on it. And your hand to model it.” He kissed it with enough passion to tempt me.
“I’ll have to ask Griff,” I said.
“He lets you fly solo with your restored china,” he pointed out. “I can’t see how he could object if you want to branch out into jewellery, particularly stuff as nice as this.”
“I’ll ask,” I said coldly, “because I value his opinion.” He should have known by now never to argue about anything concerning Griff.
* * * *
“Do I recollect that you come of age shortly, my child?”
“You know I do. And we agreed to have no fuss.” Largely because Griff was increasingly terrified by his own birthdays, and in any case celebrating being twenty-one was a bit old-fashioned these days.
“It occurs to me that you are so attracted to that sapphire ring that it would make an ideal gift.”
I looked him in the eye. “Not so much attracted as suspicious, Griff. You look.” I passed the lovely thing to him.
“The sapphire’s exquisite,” he sighed. Then he stopped. “How many dodgy stones do you make it?”
“Three this time. I shall have to mark it sold as seen.”
“And the price? If you do that it’ll never reach what he’s asking. And I have an idea you were relying on the commission to buy your wedding dress.”
“Wedding, shmedding.” I took the ruby ring off as well. The two big stones blinked enticingly at me. The diamonds surrounding them didn’t.
* * * *
“Shame,” Piers greeted my confession that we’d not been able to sell the ring. “But why don’t you keep trying? And I was hoping you’d shift these earrings for me.” He produced an elaborate case, fine leather and watered silk, containing a dazzling pair with free-hanging emeralds and diamonds on tiny springs.
“Victorian again.” They were so fine I’d have expected to see them at Christie’s.
“Got this aunt who’s fallen on hard times. Doesn’t want anyone to know.” He tapped the side of his nose. “Noblesse oblige, and all that.”
My eyes widened at the price he wanted. “That’s well above our usual range—but still not enough for such a lovely set.” I braced myself. “Are you sure these aren’t off the back of some lorry, Piers?”
“From the collection of Lady Olivia Spedding.” He looked coldly down at me, rather like the Duke of Wellington, now I came to think of it, holding out his hand for the earrings.
I returned them, shrugging. “No skin off my nose,” I informed him, my voice at its most common, all accent and attitude.
I wasn’t so much surprised as taken aback when, as we packed up at the end of a not especially profitable day, Piers sidled up, dropping the familiar jeweller’s box on our stall. “Usual commission,” he said, and disappeared.
It was Griff who got first look at them with the eyeglass this time. “Continental,” he said. “And all good stones.”
“You mean—?”
“What do you think?”
I peered. “Beautifully clean. Everything hunky-dory for the period. Feel the weight—they wouldn’t half stretch the old ear-lobes. Lovely quality stones—all of them. I’d be honoured to sell these.”
I thought I heard Griff mutter something about sprats catching mackerel, but perhaps I was mistaken.
* * * *
A couple of weeks later I handed over the cash for the earrings in the traditional brown envelope. It was hardly out of my hand when another slightly battered jewel case appeared, purple leather outside, purple silk in, showing off a diamond pendant and matching earrings to perfection. Victorian, again, and perhaps a bit fussy for modern tastes.
It was all so low-key we might have been business partners, not engaged to become life partners. Theoretically engaged. Anyone who could palm off a piece with stones I could feel in my bones were false was no longer my fiancé. I said nothing yet. Grassing someone up was something not to be done lightly. But in a trade that totally depended on trust, what else could I do?
* * * *
Griff removed the eyepiece and rubbed his face. “And what four-letter word, first letter S, last letter M, springs to your suspicious mind?”
&nbs
p; “Scam,” I said flatly.
“A profitable one, too. You buy a couple of these so-called man-made diamonds for a song, remove two decent-sized but not particularly noticeable stones from pieces where no one will immediately notice the exchange, replace them with the fakes, and pocket the difference. If you got brave enough to replace a one-carat diamond, say, with a fake one, you could profit by four or five thousand pounds.”
I nodded. “To get away with it, you really need someone totally reliable like us. If by any chance people found they’d bought a wrong ‘un they’d hotfoot it back to us and complain. And we could only say we’d had them from someone else and terribly sorry and here’s your money back.”
“And you complain to Piers, who laughs in your face. Or says his great-aunt or whatever must have replaced them to raise cash for her gambling habit. Or his aunt’s dead, and he reminds us it’s caveat emptor.”
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