“Oh!” She sat transfixed. “So that’s what he meant.”
“Explain,” I said.
“One morning...” She stopped, her mouth screwing up in an effort not to cry. It took her a while to be able to continue, then she said, “One morning he told me he’d invented a little puzzle for me and he would give me six months to solve it. After six months it would self-destruct. He was smiling so much.” She swallowed. “I asked him what sort of puzzle and he wouldn’t tell me. He just said he hoped I would find it.”
“Did you look?” I asked.
“Of course I did. I looked everywhere in the office, though I didn’t know what I was looking for. I even looked for a new document in the computer, but I just never gave a thought to its being filed as a secret, and my eyes just slid over the word ‘pearl,’ as I see it so often. Silly of me. Stupid.”
I said, “I don’t think you’re stupid, and I’ll honor my brother’s promise.”
She gave me a swift look of pleasure but shook her head a little and said, “I didn’t find it. I’d never have solved it except for you.” She hesitated. “How about ten percent?”
“Twenty,” I said firmly. “I’m going to need your help and your knowledge, and if Annette is Personal Assistant, as it says on the door of her office, you can be Deputy Personal Assistant, with the new salary to go with the job.”
She turned a deeper shade of rose and busied herself with making a printout of Greville’s instruction, which she folded and put in her handbag.
“I’ll leave the secret in the computer,” she said with misty fondness. “No one else will ever find it.” She pressed a few buttons and the screen went blank, and I wondered how many times in private she would call up the magic words that Greville had left her.
I wondered if they would really self-destruct: if one could program something on a computer to erase itself on a given date. I didn’t see why not, but I thought Greville might have given her strong clues before the six months were out.
I asked her if she would print out first a list of everything currently in the vault and then as many things as she thought would help me understand the business better, like the volume and value of a day’s, a week’s, a month’s sales; like which items were most popular, and which least.
“I can tell you that what’s very popular just now is black onyx. Fifty years ago they say it was all amber, now no one buys it. Jewelry goes in and out of fashion like everything else.” She began tapping keys. “Give me a little while and I’ll print you a crash course.”
“Thanks.” I smiled, and waited while the printer spat out a gargantuan mouthful of glittering facets. Then I took the list in search of Annette, who was alone in the stock rooms, and asked her to give me a quick canter round the vault.
“There aren’t any diamonds there,” she said positively.
“I’d better learn what is.”
“You don’t seem like a jockey,” she said.
“How many do you know?”
She stared. “None, except you.”
“On the whole,” I said mildly, “jockeys are like anyone else. Would you feel I was better able to manage here if I were, say, a piano tuner? Or an actor? Or a clergyman?”
She said faintly, “No.”
“OK, then. We’re stuck with a jockey. Twist of fate. Do your best for the poor fellow.”
She involuntarily smiled a genuine smile which lightened her heavy face miraculously. “All right.” She paused. “You’re really like Mr. Franklin in some ways. The way you say things. Deal with honor, he said, and sleep at night.”
“You all remember what he said, don’t you?”
“Of course.”
He would have been glad, I supposed, to have left so positive a legacy. So many precepts. So much wisdom. But so few signposts to his personal life. No visible signpost to the diamonds.
In the vault Annette showed me that, besides its chemical formula, each label bore a number: if I looked at the number on the list June had printed, I would see the formula again, but also the normal names of the stones, with colors, shapes and sizes and country of origin.
“Why did he label them like this?” I asked. “It just makes it difficult to find things.”
“I believe that was his purpose,” she answered. “I told you, he was very security conscious. We had a secretary working here once who managed to steal a lot of our most valuable turquoise out of the vault. The labels read ‘turquoise’ then, which made it easy, but now they don’t.”
“What do they say?”
She smiled and pointed to a row of boxes. I looked at the labels and read Cu Al6(PO4) 4 (OH)8. 4–5 (H2O) on each of them.
“Enough to put anyone off for life,” I said.
“Exactly. That’s the point. Mr. Franklin could read formulas as easily as words, and I’ve got used to them myself now. No one but he and I handle these stones in here. We pack them into boxes ourselves and seal them before they go to Alfie for dispatch.” She looked along the rows of labels and did her best to educate me. “We sell these stones at so much per carat. A carat weighs two hundred milligrams, which means five carats to a gram, a hundred and forty-two carats to an ounce and five thousand carats to the kilo.”
“Stop right there,” I begged.
“You said you learned fast.”
“Give me a day or two.”
She nodded and said if I didn’t need her anymore she had better get on with the ledgers.
Ledgers, I thought, wilting internally. I hadn’t even started on those. I thought of the joy with which I’d left Lancaster University with a degree in Independent Studies, swearing never again to pore dutifully over books and heading straight (against my father’s written wishes) to the steeplechase stable where I’d been spending truant days as an amateur. It was true that at college I’d learned fast, because I’d had to, and learned all night often enough, keeping faith with at least the first half of my father’s letter. He’d hoped I would grow out of the lure he knew I felt for race-riding, but it was all I’d ever wanted and I couldn’t have settled to anything else. There was no long-term future in it, he’d written, besides a complete lack of financial security along with a constant risk of disablement. I ask you to be sensible, he’d said, to think it through and decide against.
Fat chance.
I sighed for the simplicity of the certainty I’d felt in those days, yet, given a second beginning, I wouldn’t have lived any differently. I had been deeply fulfilled in racing and grown old in spirit only because of the way life worked in general. Disappointments, injustices, small betrayals, they were everyone’s lot. I no longer expected everything to go right, but enough had gone right to leave me at least in a balance of content.
With no feeling that the world owed me anything, I applied myself to the present boring task of opening every packet in every box in the quest for little bits of pure carbon. It wasn’t that I expected to find the diamonds there: it was just that it would be so stupid not to look in case they were.
I worked methodically, putting the boxes one at a time on the wide shelf which ran along the right-hand wall, unfolding the stiff white papers with the soft inner linings and looking at hundreds of thousands of peridots, chrysoberyls, garnets and aquamarines until my head spun. I stopped in fact when I’d done only a third of the stock because apart from the airlessness of the vault it was physically tiring standing on one leg all the time, and the crutches got in the way as much as they helped. I refolded the last of the XY3 Z6[(O,Oh,F)4(BO3)3 Si6O18] (tourmaline) and acknowledged defeat.