Straight

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 spotlights 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 the 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.

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 MgAI₂O₄, 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 better 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.”