Straight Read online

  With a feeling of being sucked feet first into quicksand I said I would try. I felt I didn’t belong in that place or in those people’s lives, and all I knew about the jewelry business was where to find two red stones in a box marked MgAI,O,, Burma.

  At the fourth try among the Yellow Pages I got a promise of instant action on the window and after that, with office procedure beginning to tick over again all around me, I put a call through to the lawyers.

  They were grave, they were sympathetic, they were at my service. I asked if by any chance Greville had made a will, as specifically I wanted to know if he had left any instructions about cremation or burial, and if he hadn’t, did they know of anyone I should consult, or should I make whatever arrangements I thought best.

  There was a certain amount of clearing of throats and a promise to look up files and call back, and they kept their word almost immediately, to my surprise.

  My brother had indeed left a will: they had drawn it up for him themselves three years earlier. They couldn’t swear it was his last will, but it was the only one they had. They had consulted it. Greville, they said, pedantically, had expressed no preference as to the disposal of his remains.

  “Shall I just ... go ahead, then?”

  “Certainly,” they said. “You are in fact named as your brother’s sole executor. It is your duty to make the decisions.”

  Hell, I thought, and I asked for a list of the beneficiaries so that I could notify them of the death and invite them to the funeral.

  After a pause they said they didn’t normally give out that information on the telephone. Could I not come to their office? It was just across the City, at Temple.

  “I’ve broken an ankle,” I said, apologetically. “It takes me all my time to cross the room.”

  Dear, dear, they said. They consulted among themselves in guarded whispers and finally said they supposed there was no harm in my knowing. Greville’s will was extremely simple; he had left everything he possessed to Derek Saxony Franklin, his brother. To my good self, in fact.

  “What?” I said stupidly. “He can’t have.”

  He had written his will in a hurry, they said, because he had been flying off to a dangerous country to buy stones. He had been persuaded by the lawyers not to go interstate, and he had given in to them, and as far as they knew, that was the only will he ever made.

  “He can’t have meant it to be his last,” I said blankly.

  Perhaps not, they agreed: few men in good health expected to die at fifty-three. They then discussed probate procedures discreetly and asked for my instructions, and I felt the quicksand rising above my knees.

  “Is it legal,” I asked, “for this business to go on running, for the time being?”

  They saw no impediment in law. Subject to probate, and in the absence of any later will, the business would be mine. If I wanted to sell it in due course, it would be in my own interest to keep it running. As my brother’s executor it would also be my duty to do my best for the estate. An interesting situation, they said with humor.

  Not wholeheartedly appreciating the subtlety, I asked how long probate would take.

  Always difficult to forecast, was the answer. Anything between six months or two years, depending on the complexity of Greville’s affairs.

  “Two years!”

  More probably six months, they murmured soothingly. The speed would depend on the accountants and the Inland Revenue, who could seldom be hurried. It was in the lap of the gods.

  I mentioned that there might be work to do over claiming damages for the accident. Happy to see to it, they said, and promised to contact the Ipswich police. Meanwhile, good luck.

  I put the receiver down in sinking dismay. This business like any other, might run on its own impetus for two weeks, maybe even for four, but after that ... After that I would be back on horses, trying to get fit again to race.

  I would have to get a manager, I thought vaguely, and had no idea where to start looking. Annette Adams with furrows of anxiety across her forehead asked if it would be all right to begin clearing up Mr. Franklin’s office, and I said yes, and thought that her lack of drive could sink the ship.

  Please would someone, I asked the world in general, mind going down to the yard and telling the man in my car that I wouldn’t be leaving for two or three hours; and June with her bright face whisked out of the door again and soon returned to relate that my man would lock the car, go on foot for lunch, and be back in good time to wait for me.

  “Did he say all that?” I asked curiously.

  June laughed. “Actually he said, ‘Right. Bite to eat,’ and off he stomped.”

  She asked if I would like her to bring me a sandwich when she went out for her own lunch and, surprised and grateful, I accepted.

  “Your foot hurts, doesn’t it?” she said judiciously.

  “Mm.”

  “You should put it up on a chair.”

  She fetched one without ado and placed it in front of me, watching with a motherly air of approval as I lifted my leg into place. She must have been all of twenty, I thought.

  A telephone rang beside the computer on the far side of the room and she went to answer it.

  “Yes, sir, we have everything in stock. Yes, sir, what size and how many? A hundred twelve-by-ten-millimeter ovals ... yes ... yes ... yes.”

  She tapped the lengthy order rapidly straight onto the computer, not writing in longhand as Annette had done.

  “Yes, sir, they will go off today. Usual terms, sir, of course.” She put the phone down, printed a copy of the order and laid it in a shallow wire tray. A fax machine simultaneously clicked on and whined away and switched off with little shrieks, and she tore off the emergent sheet and tapped its information also into the computer, making a printout and putting it into the tray.

  “Do you fill all the orders the day they come in?” I asked.

  “Oh, sure, if we can. Within twenty-four hours without fail. Mr. Franklin says speed is the essence of good business. I’ve known him to stay here all evening by himself packing parcels when we’re swamped.”

  She remembered with a rush that he would never come back. It did take a bit of getting used to. Tears welled in her uncontrollably as they had earlier, and she stared at me through them, which made her blue eyes look huge.

  “You couldn’t help liking him,” she said. “Working with him, I mean.”

  I felt almost jealous that she’d known Greville better than I had; yet I could have known him better if I’d tried. Regret stabbed in again, a needle of grief.

  Annette came to announce that Mr. Franklin’s room was at least partially clear, so I transferred myself into there to make more phone calls in comparative privacy. I sat in Greville’s black leather swiveling chunk of luxury and put my foot on the typist’s chair June carried in after me, and I surveyed the opulent carpet, deep armchairs and framed maps as in the lobby, and smoothed a hand over the grainy black expanse of the oversized desk, and felt like a jockey, not a tycoon.

  Annette had picked up from the floor and assembled at one end of the desk some of the army of gadgets, most of them matte black and small, as if miniaturization were part of the attraction. Easily identifiable at a glance were battery-operated things like pencil sharpener, handheld copier, printing calculator, dictionary-thesaurus, but most needed investigation. I stretched out a hand to the nearest and found that it was a casing with a dial face, plus a head like a microphone on a lead.

  “What’s this?” I asked Annette, who was picking up a stack of paper from the far reaches of the floor. “Some sort of meter?”

  She flashed a look at it. “A Geiger counter,” she said matter-of-factly, as if everyone kept a Geiger counter routinely among their pens and pencils.

  I flipped the switch from off to on, but apart from a couple of clicks, nothing happened.

  Annette paused, sitting back on her heels as she knelt among the remaining clutter.

  “A lot of large stones change color for the b
etter under gamma radiation,” she said. “They’re not radioactive afterward, but Mr. Franklin was once accidentally sent a batch of topaz from Brazil that had been irradiated in a nuclear reactor and the stones were bordering on dangerous. A hundred of them. There was a terrible lot of trouble because apart from being unsalable they had come in without a radioactivity import license, or something like that, but it wasn’t Mr. Franklin’s fault, of course. But he got the Geiger counter then.” She paused. “He has an amazing flair for stones, you know. He just felt there was something wrong with that topaz. Such a beautiful deep blue they’d made it, when it must have been almost colorless to begin with. So he sent a few of them to a lab for testing.” She paused again. “He’d just been reading about some old diamonds that had been exposed to radium and turned green, and were as radioactive as anything ...”

  Her face crumpled and she blinked her eyes rapidly, turning away from me and looking down to the floor so that I shouldn’t see her distress. She made a great fuss among the papers and finally, with a sniff or two, said indistinctly, “Here’s his desk diary,” and then, more slowly, “That’s odd.”

  “What’s odd?”

  “October’s missing.”

  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 tele
phoned 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?”

  I said gratefully that I could, and reckoned that I’d have to leave soon after two-thirty to be sure of making it. I told Annette, and asked what they did about locking up.

  “Mr. Franklin usually gets here first and leaves last.” She stopped, confused. “I mean ...”

  “I know,” I said. “It’s all right. I think of him in the present tense too. So go on.”

  “Well, the double front doors bolt on the inside. Then the door from the lobby to the offices has an electronic bolt, as you know. So does the door from the corridor to the stockrooms. So does the rear door, where we all come in and out. Mr. Franklin changes ... changed ... the numbers at least every week. And there’s another electronic lock, of course, on the door from the lobby to the showroom, and from the corridor into the showroom ...” She paused. “It does seem a lot, I know, but the electronic locks are very simple, really. You only have to remember three digits. Last Friday they were five, three, two. They’re easy to work. Mr. Franklin installed them so that we shouldn’t have too many keys lying around. He and I both have a key, though, that will unlock all the electronic locks manually, if we need to.”