Straight Read online

  2

  I had for three years rented the ground floor of an old house in a turning off the main road running through the ancient country town. There was a bedroom and bathroom facing that street and the sunrise, and a large all-purpose room to the rear into which sunset flooded. Beyond that, a small stream-bordered garden, which I shared with the owners of the house, an elderly couple upstairs.

  Brad’s mother had cooked and cleaned for them for years; Brad mended, painted and chopped when he felt like it. Soon after I’d moved in, mother and son had casually extended their services to me, which suited me well. It was all in all an easy uncluttered existence, but if home was where the heart was, I really lived out on the windy Downs and in stable yards and on the raucous racetracks where I worked.

  I let myself into the quiet rooms and sat on the sofa with icepacks along my leg, watching the sun go down on the far side of the stream and thinking I might have done better to stay in the Ipswich hospital. From the knee down my left leg was hurting abominably, and it was still getting clearer by the minute that falling had intensified Thursday’s damage disastrously. My own surgeon had been going off to Wales for the weekend, but I doubted that he would have done very much except say “I told you so,” and in the end I simply took another Distalgesic and changed the icepacks and worked out the time zones in Tokyo and Sydney.

  At midnight I telephoned to those cities where it was already morning and by good luck reached both of the sisters. “Poor Greville,” they said sadly, and, “Do whatever you think best.” “Send some flowers for us.” “Let us know how it goes.”

  I would, I said. Poor Greville, they repeated, meaning it, and said they would love to see me in Tokyo, in Sydney, whenever. Their children, they said, were all fine. Their husbands were fine. Was I fine? Poor, poor Greville.

  I put the receiver down ruefully. Families did scatter, and some scattered more than most. I knew the sisters by that time only through the photographs they sometimes sent at Christmas. They hadn’t recognized my voice.

  Taking things slowly in the morning, as nothing was much better, I dressed for the day in shirt, tie and sweater as before, with a shoe on the right foot, sock along on the left, and was ready when Brad arrived five minutes early.

  “We’re going to London,” I said. “Here’s a map with the place marked. Do you think you can find it?”

  “Got a tongue in my head,” he said, peering at the maze of roads. “Reckon so.”

  “Give it a go, then.”

  He nodded, helped me inch onto the back seat, and drove seventy miles through the heavy morning traffic in silence. Then, by dint of shouting at street vendors via the driver’s window, he zig-zagged across Holborn, took a couple of wrong turns, righted himself, and drew up with a jerk in a busy street round the corner from Hatton Garden.

  “That’s it,” he said, pointing. “Number fifty-six. That office block.”

  “Brilliant.”

  He helped me out, gave me the crutches, and came with me to hold open the heavy glass entrance door. Inside, behind a desk, was a man in a peaked cap personifying security, who asked me forbiddingly what floor I wanted.

  “Saxony Franklin,” I said.

  “Name?” he asked, consulting a list.

  “Franklin.”

  “Your name, I mean.”

  I explained who I was. He raised his eyebrows, picked up a telephone, pressed a button and said “A Mr. Franklin is on his way up.”

  Brad asked where he could park the car and was told there was a yard round the back. He would wait for me, he said. No hurry. No problem.

  The office building, which was modern, had been built rubbing shoulders to the sixth floor with Victorian curlicued neighbors, soaring free to the tenth with a severe lot of glass.

  Saxony Franklin was on the eighth floor, it appeared. I went up in a smooth elevator and elbowed my way through some heavy double doors into a lobby furnished with a reception desk, several armchairs for waiting in and two policemen.

  Behind the policeman was a middle-aged woman who looked definitely flustered.

  I thought immediately that news of Greville’s death had already arrived and that I probably hadn’t needed to come, but it seemed the Force was there for a different reason entirely.

  The flustered lady gave me a blank stare and said, “That’s not Mr. Franklin. The guard said Mr. Franklin was on his way up.”

  I allayed the police suspicions a little by saying again that I was Greville Franklin’s brother.

  “Oh,” said the woman. “Yes, he does have a brother.”

  They all swept their gaze over my comparative immobility.

  “Mr. Franklin isn’t here yet,” the woman told me.

  “Er ...” I said, “what’s going on?”

  They all looked disinclined to explain. I said to her, “I’m afraid I don’t know your name.”

  “Adams,” she said distractedly. “Annette Adams. I’m your brother’s personal assistant.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said slowly, “but my brother won’t be coming at all today. He was involved in an accident.”

  Annette Adams heard the bad news in my voice. She put a hand over her heart in the classic gesture as if to hold it still in her chest and with anxiety said, “What sort of accident? A car crash? Is he hurt?”

  She saw the answer clearly in my expression and with her free hand felt for one of the armchairs, buckling into it with shock.

  “He died in hospital yesterday morning,” I said to her and to the policemen,. “after some scaffolding fell on him last Friday. I was with him in the hospital.”

  One of the policemen pointed at my dangling foot. “You were injured at the same time, sir?”

  “No. This was different. I didn’t see his accident. I meant, I was there when he died. The hospital sent for me.”

  The two policemen consulted each other’s eyes and decided after all to say why they were there.

  “These offices were broken into during the weekend, sir. Mrs. Adams here discovered it when she arrived early for work, and she called us in.”

  “What does it matter? It doesn’t matter now,” the lady said, growing paler.

  “There’s a great deal of mess,” the policemen went on, “but Mrs. Adams doesn’t know what’s been stolen. We were waiting for your brother to tell us.”

  “Oh dear, oh dear,” said Annette, gulping.

  “Is there anyone else here?” I asked her. “Someone who could get you a cup of tea?” Before you faint, I thought, but didn’t say it.

  She nodded a fraction, glancing at a door behind the desk, and I swung over there and tried to open it. It wouldn’t open: the knob wouldn’t turn.

  “It’s electronic,” Annette said weakly. “You have to put in the right numbers ...” She flopped her head back against the chair and said she couldn’t remember what today’s number was; it was changed often. She and the policemen had come through it, it seemed, and let it swing shut behind them.

  One of the policemen came over and pounded on the door with his fist, shouting “Police” very positively, which had the desired effect like a reflex. Without finesse he told the much younger woman who stood there framed in the doorway that her boss was dead and that Mrs. Adams was about to pass out and was needing some strong hot sweet tea, love, like five minutes ago.

  Wild-eyed, the young woman retreated to spread more consternation behind the scenes and the policemen nullified the firm’s defenses by wedging the electronic door open, using the chair from behind the reception desk.

  I took in a few more details of the surroundings, beyond my first impression of gray. On the light greenish-gray of the carpet stood the armchair in charcoal and the desk in matt black unpainted and unpolished wood. The walls, palest gray, were hung with a series of framed geological maps, the frames black and narrow and uniform in size. The propped-open door, and another similar door to one side, still closed, were painted the same color as the walls. The total effect, lit by recessed spotli
ghts in the ceiling, looked both straightforward and immensely sophisticated, a true representation of my brother.

  Mrs. Annette Adams, still flaccid from too many unpleasant surprises on a Monday morning, wore a cream shirt, a charcoal-gray skirt and a string of knobbly pearls. She was dark-haired, in her late forties, perhaps, and from the starkness in her eyes, just beginning to realize, I guessed, that the upheaval of the present would be permanent.

  The younger woman returned effectively with a scarlet steaming mug and Annette Adams sipped from it obediently for a while, listening to the policemen telling me that the intruder had not come in this way up the elevator, which was for visitors, but up another elevator at the rear of the building which was used by the staff of all floors of offices, and for freight. That elevator went down into a rear lobby which, in its turn, led out to the yard where cars and vans were parked: where Brad was presumably waiting at that moment.

  The intruder had apparently ridden to the tenth floor, climbed some service stairs to the roof, and by some means had come down outside the building to the eighth floor, where he had smashed a window to let himself in.

  “What sort of means?” I asked.

  “We don’t know, sir. Whatever it was, he took it with him. Maybe a rope.” He shrugged. “We’ve had only a quick preliminary look around up there. We wanted to know what’s been stolen before we ... er ... See, we don’t want to waste our time for nothing.”

  I nodded. Like Greville’s stolen shoes, I thought.

  “This whole area round Hatton Garden is packed with the jewel trade. We get break-ins, or attempted break-ins, all the time.”

  The other policeman said, “This place here is loaded with stones, of course, but the vault’s still shut and Mrs. Adams says nothing seems to be missing from the other stockrooms. Only Mr. Franklin has a key to the vault, which is where their more valuable faceted stones are kept.”

  Mr. Franklin had no keys at all. Mr. Franklin’s keys were in my own pocket. There was no harm, I supposed, in producing them.

  The sight of what must have been a familiar bunch brought tears to Annette Adams’s eyes. She put down the mug, searched around for a tissue and cried, “He really is dead, then,” as if she hadn’t thoroughly believed it before.

  When she’d recovered a little I asked her to point out the vault key, which proved to be the longest and slenderest of the lot, and shortly afterward we were all walking through the propped-open door and down a central corridor with spacious offices opening to either side. Faces showing shock looked out at our passing. We stopped at an ordinary-looking door which might have been mistaken for a closet but certainly looked nothing like a vault.

  “That’s it,” Annette Adams insisted, nodding; so I slid the narrow key into the small ordinary keyhole, and found that it turned unexpectedly counterclockwise. The thick and heavy door swung inward to the right under pressure and a light came on automatically, shining in what did indeed seem exactly like a large walk-in closet, with rows of white cardboard boxes on several plain white-painted shelves stretching away along the left-hand wall.

  Everyone looked in silence. Nothing seemed to have been disturbed.

  “Who knows what should be in the boxes?” I asked, and got the expected answer: my brother.

  I took a step into the vault and took the lid off one of the nearest boxes, which bore a sticky label saying MgAl2O4, Burma. Inside the box there were about a dozen glossy white envelopes, each taking up the whole width. I lifted one out to open it.

  “Be careful!” Annette Adams exclaimed, fearful of my clumsiness as I balanced on the crutches. “The packets unfold.”

  I handed to her the one I held, and she unfolded it carefully on the palm of her hand. Inside, cushioned by white tissue, lay two large red translucent stones, cut and polished, oblong in shape, almost pulsing with intense color under the lights.

  “Are they rubies?” I asked, impressed.

  Annette Adams smiled indulgently. “No, they’re spinel. Very fine specimens. We rarely deal in rubies.”

  “Are there any diamonds in here?” one of the policemen asked.

  “No, we don’t deal in diamonds. Almost never.”

  I asked her to look into some of the other boxes, which she did, first carefully folding the two red stones into their packet and restoring them to their right place. We watched her stretch and bend, tipping up random lids on several shelves to take out a white packet here and there for inspection, but there were clearly no dismaying surprises, and at the end she shook her head and said that nothing at all was missing, as far as she could see.

  “The real value of these stones is in quantity,” she said. “Each individual stone isn’t worth a fortune. We sell stones in tens and hundreds ...” Her voice trailed off into a sort of forlornness. “I don’t know what to do,” she said, “about the orders.”

  The policemen weren’t affected by the problem. If nothing was missing, they had other burglaries to look into, and they would put in a report, but goodbye for now, or words to that effect.

  When they’d gone, Annette Adams and I stood in the passage and looked at each other.

  “What do I do?” she said. “Are we still in business?”

  I didn’t like to tell her that I hadn’t the foggiest notion. I said, “Did Greville have an office?”

  “That’s where most of the mess is,” she said, turning away and retracing her steps to a large corner room near the entrance lobby. “In here.”

  I followed her and saw what she meant about mess. The contents of every wide-open drawer seemed to be out on the floor, most of it paper. Pictures had been removed from the walls and dropped. One filing cabinet lay on its side like a fallen soldier. The desk top was a shambles.

  “The police said the burglar was looking behind the pictures for a safe. But there isn’t one ... just the vault.” She sighed unhappily. “It’s all so pointless.”

  I looked around. “How many people work here altogether?” I said.

  “Six of us. And Mr. Franklin, of course.” She swallowed. “Oh, dear.”

  “Mm,” I agreed. “Is there anywhere I can meet everyone?”

  She nodded mutely and led the way into another large office where three of the others were already gathered, wide-eyed and rudderless. Another two came when called; four women and two men, all worried and uncertain and looking to me for decisions.

  Greville, I perceived, hadn’t chosen potential leaders to work around him. Annette Adams herself was no aggressive waiting-in-the-wings manager but a true second-in-command, skilled at carrying out orders, incapable of initiating them. Not so good, all things considered.

  I introduced myself and described what had happened to Greville.

  They had liked him, I was glad to see. There were tears on his behalf. I said that I needed their help because there were people I ought to notify about his death, like his lawyer and his accountant, for instance, and his closest friends, and I didn’t know who they were. I would like, I said, to make a list, and sat beside one of the desks, arming myself with paper and pen.

  Annette said she would fetch Greville’s address book from his office but after a while returned in frustration: in all the mess she couldn’t find it.

  “There must be other records,” I said. “What about that computer?” I pointed across the room. “Do you have addresses in that?”

  The girl who had brought the tea brightened a good deal and informed me that this was the stock control room, and the computer in question was programmed to record “stock in,” “stock out,” statements, invoices and accounts. But, she said encouragingly, in her other domain across the corridor there was another computer which she used for letters. She was out of the door by the end of the sentence and Annette remarked that June was a whirl-wind always.

  June, blonde, long-legged, flat-chested, came back with a fast print-out of Greville’s ten most frequent correspondents (ignoring customers), which included not only the lawyers and the accountants but also th
e bank, a stockbroker and an insurance company.

  “Terrific,” I said. “Can you now get through to the big credit card companies, and see if Greville was a customer of theirs and say his cards have been stolen, and he’s dead.”

  I then asked if any of them knew the make and number of Greville’s car. They all did. It seemed they saw it every day in the yard. He came to work in a ten-year-old Rover 3500 without radio or cassette player because the Porsche he’d owned before had been broken into twice and finally stolen altogether.

  “That old car’s still bursting with gadgets, though,” the younger of the two men said, “but he keeps them all locked in the trunk.”

  Greville had always been a sucker for gadgets, full of enthusiasm for the latest fidgety way of performing an ordinary task. He’d told me more about those toys of his, when we’d met, than ever about his own human relationships.

  “Why did you ask about his car?” the young man said. He had rows of badges attached to a black leather jacket and orange spiky hair set with gel. A need to prove he · existed, I supposed.

  “It may be outside his front door,” I said. “Or it may be parked somewhere in Ipswich.”

  “Yeah,” he said thoughtfully. “See what you mean.”

  The telephone rang on the desk beside me, and Annette after a moment’s hesitation came and picked up the receiver. She listened with a worried expression and then, covering the mouthpiece, asked me, “What shall I do? It’s a customer who wants to give an order.”

  “Have you got what he wants?” I asked.

  “Yes, we’re sure to have.”

  “Then say it’s OK.”

  “But do I tell him about Mr. Franklin?”

  “No,” I said instinctively, “just take the order.”

  She seemed glad of the direction and wrote down the list, and when she’d disconnected I suggested to them all that for that day at least they should take and send out orders in the normal way, and just say if asked that Mr. Franklin was out of the office and couldn’t be reached. We wouldn’t start telling people he was dead until after I’d talked to his lawyers, accountants, bank and the rest, and found out our legal position. They were relieved and agreed without demur, and the older man asked if I would soon get the broken window fixed, as it was in the packing and dispatch room, where he worked.