“So no one who broke in here would expect to find anything valuable lying about?”
She paused with a sheaf of papers in one hand, her brow wrinkling.
“It’s odd, isn’t it? They wouldn’t expect to find anything valuable lying about in an office if they knew anything about the jewelry trade. And if they didn’t know anything about the jewelry trade, why pick this office?”
The same old unanswerable question.
June with her incongruous motherliness brought in the typist’s chair again for me to put my foot on. I thanked her and asked if her stock control computer kept day-to-day tabs on the number and value of all the polished pebbles in the place.
“Goodness, yes,” she said with amusement. “Dates and amounts in, dates and amounts out. Prices in, prices out, profit margin, tax, you name it, the computer will tell you what we’ve got, what it’s worth, what sells slowly, what sells fast, what’s been hanging around here wasting space for two years or more, which isn’t much.”
“The stones in the vault as well?”
“Sure.”
“But no diamonds?”
“No, we don’t deal in them.” She gave me a bright incurious smile and swiftly departed, saying over her shoulder that the Christmas rush was still going strong and they’d been bombarded by fax orders overnight.
“Who reorders what you sell?” I asked Annette.
“I do for ordinary stock. June tells me what we need. Mr. Franklin himself ordered the faceted stones and anything unusual.”
She went on sorting the papers, basically unconcerned because her responsibility ended on her way home. She was wearing that day the charcoal skirt of the day before but topped with a black sweater, perhaps out of respect for Greville. Solid in body, but not large, she had good legs in black tights and a settled, well-groomed, middle-aged air. I couldn’t imagine her being as buoyant as June even in her youth.
I asked her if she could lay her hands on the company’s insurance policy and she said as it happened she had just refiled it. I read its terms with misgivings and then telephoned the insurance company. Had my brother, I asked, recently increased the insurance? Had he increased it to cover diamonds to the value of one point five million dollars? He had not. It had been discussed only. My brother had said the premium asked was too high, and he had decided against it. The voice explained that the premium had been high because the stones would be often in transit, which made them vulnerable. He didn’t know if Mr. Franklin had gone ahead with buying the diamonds. It had been an inquiry only, he thought, three or four months ago. I thanked him numbly and put down the receiver.
The telephone rang again immediately and as Annette seemed to be waiting for me to do so, I answered it.
“Hello?” I said.
A male voice said, “Is that Mr. Franklin? I want to speak to Mr. Franklin, please.”
“Er... could I help? I’m his brother.”
“Perhaps you can,” he said. “This is the clerk of the West London Magistrates Court. Your brother was due here twenty minutes ago and it is unlike him to be late. Could you tell me when to expect him?”
“Just a minute.” I put my hand over the mouthpiece and told Annette what I’d just heard. Her eyes widened and she showed signs of horrified memory.
“It’s his day for the Bench! Alternate Tuesdays. I’d clean forgotten.”
I returned to the phone and explained the situation.
“Oh. Oh. How dreadfully upsetting.” He did indeed sound upset, but also a shade impatient. “It really would have been more helpful if you could have alerted me in advance. It’s very short notice to have to find a replacement.”
“Yes,” I agreed, “but this office was broken into during the weekend. My brother’s appointments diary was stolen, and in fact we cannot alert anybody not to expect him.”
“How extremely inconvenient.” It didn’t seem an inappropriate statement to him. I thought Greville might find it inconvenient to be dead. Maybe it wasn’t the best time for black humor.
“If my brother had personal friends among the magistrates,” I said, “I would be happy for them to get in touch with me here. If you wouldn’t mind telling them.”
“I’ll do that, certainly.” He hesitated. “Mr. Franklin sits on the licensing committee. Do you want me to inform the chairman?”
“Yes, please. Tell anyone you can.”
He said goodbye with all the cares of the world on his shoulders and I sighed to Annette that we had better begin telling everyone as soon as possible, but the trade was to expect business as usual.
“What about the papers?” she asked. “Shall we put it in The Times and so on?”
“Good idea. Can you do it?”
She said she could, but in fact showed me the paragraph she’d written before phoning the papers. “Suddenly, as the result of an accident, Greville Saxony Franklin JP, son of...” She’d left a space after “son of” which I filled in for her “the late Lt. Col. and Mrs. Miles Franklin.” I changed “brother of Derek” to “brother of Susan, Miranda and Derek,” and I added a few final words, “Cremation, Ipswich, Friday.”
“Have you any idea,” I asked Annette, “what he could have been doing in Ipswich?”
She shook her head. “I’ve never heard him mention the place. But then he didn’t ever tell me very much that wasn’t business.” She paused. “He wasn’t exactly secretive, but he never chatted about his private life.” She hesitated. “He never talked about you.”
I thought of all the times he’d been good company and told me virtually nothing, and I understood very well what she meant.
“He used to say that the best security was a still tongue,” she said. “He asked us not to talk too much about our jobs to total strangers, and we all know it’s safer not to, even though we don’t have precious stones here. All the people in the trade are security mad and the diamantaires can be paranoid.”
“What,” I said, “are diamantaires?”
“Not what, who,” she said. “They’re dealers in rough diamonds. They get the stones cut and polished and sell them to manufacturing jewelers. Mr. Franklin always said diamonds were a world of their own, quite separate from other gemstones. There was a ridiculous boom and a terrible crash in world diamond prices during the eighties and a lot of the diamantaires lost fortunes and went bankrupt and Mr. Franklin was often saying that they must have been mad to overextend the way they had.” She paused. “You couldn’t help but know what was happening all round us in this area, where every second business is in gemstones. No one in the pubs and restaurants talked of much else. So you see, I’m sure the bank manager must be wrong. Mr. Franklin would never buy diamonds.”
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?”