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 wanted 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.