She stood up and brought me the desk diary, which proved to be a largish appointments calendar showing a month at a glance. The month on current display was November, with a few of the daily spaces filled in but most of them empty. I flipped back the page and came next to September.
“I expect October’s still on the floor, torn off,” I said.
She shook her head doubtfully, and in fact couldn’t find it.
“Has the address book turned up?” I asked.
“No.” She was puzzled. “It hasn’t.”
“Is anything else missing?”
“I’m not really sure.”
It seemed bizarre that anyone should risk breaking in via the roof simply to steal an address book and a page from a desk diary. Something else had to be missing.
The Yellow Pages glaziers arrived at that point, putting a stop to my speculation. I went along with them to the packing room and saw the efficient hole that had been smashed in the six-by-four-foot window. All the glass that must have been scattered over every surface had been collected and swept into a pile of dagger-sharp glittering triangles, and a chill little breeze ruffled papers in clipboards.
“You don’t break glass this quality by tapping it with a fingernail,” one of the workmen said knowledgeably, picking up a piece. “They must have swung a weight against it, like a wrecking ball.”
3
While the workmen measured the window frame I watched the oldest of Greville’s employees take transparent bags of beads from one cardboard box, insert them into bubble-plastic sleeves and stack them in another brown cardboard box. When all was transferred he put a list of contents on top, crossed the flaps and stuck the whole box around with wide reinforced tape.
“Where do the beads come from?” I asked.
“Taiwan, I daresay,” he said briefly, fixing a large address label on the top.
“No... I meant, where do you keep them here?”
He looked at me in pitying astonishment, a white-haired grandfatherly figure in storemen’s brown overalls. “In the stockrooms, of course.”
“Of course.”
“Down the hall,” he said.
I went back to Greville’s office and in the interests of good public relations asked Annette if she would show me the stockrooms. Her heavyish face lightened with pleasure and she led the way to the far end of the corridor.
“In here,” she said with obvious pride, passing through a central doorway into a small inner lobby, “there are four rooms.” She pointed through open doorways. “In there, mineral cabochons, oval and round; in there, beads; in there, oddities, and in there, organics.”
“What are organics?” I asked.
She beckoned me forward into the room in question, and I walked into a windowless space lined from floor to shoulder height with column after column of narrow gray metal drawers, each presenting a face to the world of about the size of a side of a shoe box. Each drawer, above a handle, bore a label identifying what it contained.
“Organics are things that grow,” Annette said patiently, and I reflected I should have worked that out for myself. “Coral, for instance.” She pulled open a nearby drawer which proved to extend lengthily backward, and showed me the contents: clear plastic bags, each packed with many strings of bright red twiglets. “Italian,” she said. “The best coral comes from the Mediterranean.” She closed that drawer, walked a few paces, pulled open another. “Abalone, from abalone shells.” Another: “Ivory. We still have a little, but we can’t sell it now.” Another: “Mother of pearl. We sell tons of it.” “Pink mussel.” “Freshwater pearls.” Finally, “Imitation pearls. Cultured pearls are in the vault.”
Everything, it seemed, came in dozens of shapes and sizes. Annette smiled at my bemused expression and invited me into the room next door.
Floor-to-shoulder-height metal drawers, as before, not only lining the walls this time but filling the center space with aisles, as in a supermarket.
“Cabochons, for setting into rings, and so on,” Annette said. “They’re in alphabetical order.”
Amethyst to turquoise via garnet, jade, lapis lazuli and onyx, with dozens of others I’d only half heard of. “Semiprecious,” Annette said briefly. “All genuine stones. Mr. Franklin doesn’t touch glass or plastic.” She stopped abruptly. Let five seconds lengthen. “He didn’t touch them,” she said lamely.
His presence was there strongly, I felt. It was almost as if he would walk through the door, all energy, saying “Hello, Derek, what brings you here?” and if he seemed alive to me, who had seen him dead, how much more physical he must still be to Annette and June.
And to Lily too, I supposed. Lily was in the third stockroom pushing a brown cardboard box around on a thing like a tea cart, collecting bags of strings of beads and checking them against a list. With her center-parted hair drawn back into a slide at her neck, with her small pale mouth and rounded cheeks, Lily looked like a Charlotte Brontë governess and dressed as if immolation were her personal choice. The sort to love the master in painful silence, I thought, and wondered what she’d felt for Greville.
Whatever it was, she wasn’t letting it show. She raised downcast eyes briefly to my face and at Annette’s prompting told me she was putting together a consignment of rhodonite, jasper, aventurine and tiger eye, for one of the largest firms of jewelry manufacturers.
“We import the stones,” Annette said. “We’re wholesalers. We sell to about three thousand jewelers, maybe more. Some are big businesses. Many are small ones. We’re at the top of the semiprecious trade. Highly regarded.” She swallowed. “People trust us.”
Greville, I knew, had traveled the world to buy the stones. When we’d met he’d often been on the point of departing for Arizona or Hong Kong or had just returned from Israel, but he’d never told me more than the destinations. I at last understood what he’d been doing, and realized he couldn’t easily be replaced.
Depressed, I went back to his office and telephoned to his accountant and his bank.
They were shocked and they were helpful, impressively so. The bank manager said I would need to call on him in the morning, but Saxony Franklin, as a limited company, could go straight on functioning. I could take over without trouble. All he would want was confirmation from my brother’s lawyers that his will was as I said.
“Thank you very much,” I said, slightly surprised, and he told me warmly he was glad to be of service. Greville’s s affairs, I thought with a smile, must be amazingly healthy.
To the insurance company, also, my brother’s death seemed scarcely a hiccup. A limited company’s insurance went marching steadily on, it seemed: it was the company that was insured, not my brother. I said I would like to claim for a smashed window. No problem. They would send a form.
After that I telephoned to the Ipswich undertakers who had been engaged to remove Greville’s body from the hospital, and arranged that he should be cremated. They said they had “a slot” at two o’clock on Friday: would that do? “Yes,” I said, sighing, “I’ll be there.” They gave me the address of the crematorium in a hushed obsequious voice, and I wondered what it must be like to do business always with the bereaved. Happier by far to sell glittering baubles to the living or to ride jump-racing horses at thirty miles an hour, win, lose or break your bones.
I made yet another phone call, this time to the orthopedic surgeon, and as usual came up against the barrier of his receptionist. He wasn’t in his own private consulting rooms, she announced, but at the hospital.
I said, “Could you ask him to leave me a prescription somewhere, because I’ve fallen on my ankle and twisted it, and I’m running out of Distalgesic.”
“Hold on,” she said, and I held until she returned. “I’ve spoken to him,” she said. “He’ll be back here later. He says can you be here at five?”