Straight

4

There were only three telephone numbers in the addresses section at the back, all identified merely by initials. One, NL, was Nicholas Loder’s. I tried the other two, which were London numbers, and got no reply.

Scattered through the rest of the diary were three more numbers. Two of them proved to be restaurants in full evening flood, and I wrote down their names, recognizing one of them as the place I’d last dined with Greville, two or three months back. On July 25, presumably, as that was the date on which he’d written the number. It had been an Indian restaurant, I remembered, and we had eaten ultra-hot curry.

Sighing, I turned the pages and tried a number occurring on September 2, about five weeks earlier. It wasn’t a London number, but I didn’t recognize the code. I listened to the bell ringing continuously at the other end and had resigned myself to another blank when someone lifted the distant receiver and in a low breathy voice said, “Hello?”

“Hello,” I replied. “I’m ringing on behalf of Greville Franklin.”

“Who?”

“Greville Franklin.” I spoke the words slowly and clearly.

“Just a moment.”

There was a long uninformative silence and then someone else clattered on sharp heels up to the receiver and decisively spoke, her voice high and angry.

“How dare you!” she said. “Don’t ever do this again. I will not have your name spoken in this house.”

She put the receiver down with a crash before I could utter a word, and I sat bemusedly looking at my own telephone and feeling as if I’d swallowed a wasp.

Whoever she was, I thought wryly, she wouldn’t want to send flowers to the funeral, though she might have been gladdened by the death. I wondered what on earth Greville could have done to raise such a storm, but that was the trouble, I didn’t know him well enough to make a good guess.

Thankful on the whole that there weren’t any more numbers to be tried, I looked again at what few entries he had made, more out of curiosity than looking for helpful facts.

He had noted the days on which his horses had run, again only with initials. DR, Dozen Roses, appeared most, each time with a number following, like 300 at 8s, which I took to mean the amounts he’d wagered at what odds. Below the numbers he had put each time another number inside a circle which, when I compared them with the form book, were revealed as the placings of the horse at the finish. Its last three appearances, all with 1 in the circle, seemed to have netted Greville respectively 500 at 14s, 500 at 5s, 1000 at 6/4. The trot-up scheduled for Saturday, I thought, would be likely to be at odds on.

Greville’s second horse, Gemstones, appearing simply as G, had run six times, winning only once but profitably; 500 at 100/6.

All in all, I thought, a moderate betting pattern for an owner. He had made, I calculated, a useful profit overall, more than most owners achieved. With his prize money in addition to offset both the training fees and the capital cost of buying the horses in the first place, I guessed that he had come out comfortably ahead, and it was in the business sense, I supposed, that owning horses had chiefly pleased him.

I flicked casually forward to the end of the book and in the last few pages headed “Notes” came across a lot of doodling and then a list of numbers.

The doodling was the sort one does while listening on the telephone, a lot of boxes and zigzags, haphazard and criss-crossed with lines of shading. On the page facing, there was an equation: CZ = C × 1.7. I supposed it had been of sparkling clarity to Greville, but of no use to me.

Overleaf I found the sort of numbers list I kept in my own diary: passport, bank account, national insurance. After those, in small capital letters farther down the page, was the single word DEREK. Another jolt, seeing it again in his writing.

I wondered briefly whether, from its placing, Greville had used my name as some sort of mnemonic, or whether it was just another doodle: there was no way of telling. With a sigh I riffled back through the pages and came to something I’d looked at before, a lightly penciled entry for the day before his death. Second time around, it meant just as little.

Koningin Beatrix? he had written. Just the two words and the question mark. I wondered idly if it were the name of a horse, if he’d been considering buying it; my mind tended to work that way. Then I thought that perhaps he’d written the last name first, such as Smith, Jane, and that maybe he’d been going to Ipswich to meet a Beatrix Koningin.

I returned to the horse theory and got through to the trainer I rode for, Milo Shandy, who inquired breezily about the ankle and said would I please waste no time in coming back.

“I could ride out in a couple of weeks,” I said.

“At least that’s something, I suppose. Get some massage.”

The mere thought of it was painful. I said I would, not meaning it, and asked about Koningin Beatrix, spelling it out.

“Don’t know of any horse called that, but I can find out for you in the morning. I’ll ask Weatherby’s if the name’s available, and if they say yes, it means there isn’t a horse called that registered for racing.”

“Thanks a lot.”

“Think nothing of it. I heard your brother died. Bad luck.”

“Yes... How did you know?”

“Nicholas Loder called me just now, explaining your dilemma and wanting me to persuade you to lease him Dozen Roses.”

“But that’s crazy. His calling you, I mean.”

He chuckled. “I told him so. I told him I could bend you like a block of teak. He didn’t seem to take it in. Anyway, I don’t think leasing would solve anything. Jockeys aren’t allowed to own racing horses, period. If you lease a horse, you still own it.”

“I’m sure you’re right.”

“Put your shirt on it.”

“Loder bets, doesn’t he?” I asked. “In large amounts?”

“So I’ve heard.”

“He said Dozen Roses would trot up at York on Saturday.”

“In that case, do you want me to put a bit on for you?”

Besides not being allowed to run horses in races, jockeys also were banned from betting, but there were always ways round that, like helpful friends.

“I don’t think so, not this time,” I said, “but thanks anyway.”

“You won’t mind if I do?”

“Be my guest. If Weatherby’s lets it run, that is.”

“A nice little puzzle,” he said appreciatively. “Come over soon for a drink. Come for evening stables.”

I would, I said.

“Take care.”

I put down the phone, smiling at his easy farewell colloquialism. Jump jockeys were paid not to take care, on the whole. Not too much care.

Milo would be horrified if I obeyed him.

In the morning, Brad drove me to Saxony Franklin’s bank to see the manager who was young and bright and spoke with deliberate slowness, as if waiting for his clients’ intelligence to catch up. Was there something about crutches, I wondered, that intensified the habit? It took him five minutes to suspect that I wasn’t a moron. After that he told me Greville had borrowed a sizable chunk of the bank’s money, and he would be looking to me to repay it. “One point five million United States dollars in cash, as a matter of fact.”

“One point five million dollars,” I repeated, trying not to show that he had punched most of the breath out of me. “What for?”

“For buying diamonds. Diamonds from the DTC of the CSO are of course normally paid for in cash, in dollars.”

Bank managers around Hatton Garden, it seemed, saw nothing extraordinary in such an exercise.

“He doesn’t... didn’t deal in diamonds,” I protested.

“He had decided to expand and, of course, we made the funds available. Your brother dealt with us for many years and as you’ll know was a careful and conscientious businessman. A valued client. We have several times advanced him money for expansion and each time we have been repaid without difficulty. Punctiliously, in fact.” He cleared his throat. “The present loan, taken out three months ago, is due for repayment progressively over a period of five years, and of course as the loan was made to the company, not to your brother personally, the terms of the loan will be unchanged by his death.”

“Yes,” I said.

“I understood from what you said yesterday that you propose to run the business yourself?” He seemed happy enough where I might have expected a shade of anxiety. So why no anxiety? What wasn’t I grasping?

“Do you hold security for the loan?” I asked.

“An agreement. We lent the money against the stock of Saxony Franklin.”

“All the stones?”

“As many as would satisfy the debt. But our best security has always been your brother’s integrity and his business ability.”

I said, “I’m not a gemologist. I’ll probably sell the business after probate.”

He nodded comfortably. “That might be the best course. We would expect the Saxony Franklin loan to be repaid on schedule, but we would welcome a dialogue with the purchasers.”

He produced papers for me to sign and asked for extra specimen signatures so that I could put my name to Saxony Franklin checks. He didn’t ask what experience I’d had in running a business. Instead, he wished me luck.

I rose to my crutches and shook his hand, thinking of the things I hadn’t said.

I hadn’t told him I was a jockey, which might have caused a panic in Hatton Garden. And I hadn’t told him that, if Greville had bought one and a half million dollars’ worth of diamonds, I didn’t know where they were.

“Diamonds?” Annette said. “No. I told you. We never deal in diamonds.”

“The bank manager believes that Greville bought some recently. From something called the DTC of the CSO.”

“The Central Selling Organization? That’s de Beers. The DTC is their Diamond Trading Company. No, no.” She looked anxiously at my face. “He can’t have done. He never said anything about it.”

“Well, has the stock-buying here increased over the past three months?”

“It usually does,” she said, nodding. “The business always grows. Mr. Franklin comes back from world trips with new stones all the time. Beautiful stones. He can’t resist them. He sells most of the special ones to a jewelry designer who has several boutiques in places like Knightsbridge and Bond Street. Gorgeous costume jewelry, but with real stones. Many of his pieces are unique, designed for a single stone. He has a great name. People prize some of his pieces like Fabergé’s.”

“Who is he?”

“Prospero Jenks,” she said, expecting my awe at least.

I hadn’t heard of him, but I nodded all the same.

“Does he set the stones with diamonds?” I asked.

“Yes, sometimes. But he doesn’t buy those from Saxony Franklin.”

We were in Greville’s office, I sitting in his swivel chair behind the vast expanse of desk, Annette sorting yesterday’s roughly heaped higgledy-piggledy papers back into the drawers and files that had earlier contained them.

“You don’t think Greville would ever have kept diamonds in this actual office, do you?” I asked.

“Certainly not.” The idea shocked her. “He was always very careful about security.”

“So no one who broke in here would expect to find anything valuable lying about?”

She paused with a sheaf of papers in one hand, her brow wrinkling.

“It’s odd, isn’t it? They wouldn’t expect to find anything valuable lying about in an office if they knew anything about the jewelry trade. And if they didn’t know anything about the jewelry trade, why pick this office?”

The same old unanswerable question.

June with her incongruous motherliness brought in the typist’s chair again for me to put my foot on. I thanked her and asked if her stock control computer kept day-to-day tabs on the number and value of all the polished pebbles in the place.

“Goodness, yes,” she said with amusement. “Dates and amounts in, dates and amounts out. Prices in, prices out, profit margin, tax, you name it, the computer will tell you what we’ve got, what it’s worth, what sells slowly, what sells fast, what’s been hanging around here wasting space for two years or more, which isn’t much.”

“The stones in the vault as well?”

“Sure.”

“But no diamonds?”

“No, we don’t deal in them.” She gave me a bright incurious smile and swiftly departed, saying over her shoulder that the Christmas rush was still going strong and they’d been bombarded by fax orders overnight.

“Who reorders what you sell?” I asked Annette.

“I do for ordinary stock. June tells me what we need. Mr. Franklin himself ordered the faceted stones and anything unusual.”

She went on sorting the papers, basically unconcerned because her responsibility ended on her way home. She was wearing that day the charcoal skirt of the day before but topped with a black sweater, perhaps out of respect for Greville. Solid in body, but not large, she had good legs in black tights and a settled, well-groomed, middle-aged air. I couldn’t imagine her being as buoyant as June even in her youth.

I asked her if she could lay her hands on the company’s insurance policy and she said as it happened she had just refiled it. I read its terms with misgivings and then telephoned the insurance company. Had my brother, I asked, recently increased the insurance? Had he increased it to cover diamonds to the value of one point five million dollars? He had not. It had been discussed only. My brother had said the premium asked was too high, and he had decided against it. The voice explained that the premium had been high because the stones would be often in transit, which made them vulnerable. He didn’t know if Mr. Franklin had gone ahead with buying the diamonds. It had been an inquiry only, he thought, three or four months ago. I thanked him numbly and put down the receiver.

The telephone rang again immediately and as Annette seemed to be waiting for me to do so, I answered it.

“Hello?” I said.

A male voice said, “Is that Mr. Franklin? I want to speak to Mr. Franklin, please.”

“Er... could I help? I’m his brother.”

“Perhaps you can,” he said. “This is the clerk of the West London Magistrates Court. Your brother was due here twenty minutes ago and it is unlike him to be late. Could you tell me when to expect him?”

“Just a minute.” I put my hand over the mouthpiece and told Annette what I’d just heard. Her eyes widened and she showed signs of horrified memory.

“It’s his day for the Bench! Alternate Tuesdays. I’d clean forgotten.”

I returned to the phone and explained the situation.

“Oh. Oh. How dreadfully upsetting.” He did indeed sound upset, but also a shade impatient. “It really would have been more helpful if you could have alerted me in advance. It’s very short notice to have to find a replacement.”

“Yes,” I agreed, “but this office was broken into during the weekend. My brother’s appointments diary was stolen, and in fact we cannot alert anybody not to expect him.”

“How extremely inconvenient.” It didn’t seem an inappropriate statement to him. I thought Greville might find it inconvenient to be dead. Maybe it wasn’t the best time for black humor.

“If my brother had personal friends among the magistrates,” I said, “I would be happy for them to get in touch with me here. If you wouldn’t mind telling them.”

“I’ll do that, certainly.” He hesitated. “Mr. Franklin sits on the licensing committee. Do you want me to inform the chairman?”

“Yes, please. Tell anyone you can.”

He said goodbye with all the cares of the world on his shoulders and I sighed to Annette that we had better begin telling everyone as soon as possible, but the trade was to expect business as usual.

“What about the papers?” she asked. “Shall we put it in The Times and so on?”

“Good idea. Can you do it?”

She said she could, but in fact showed me the paragraph she’d written before phoning the papers. “Suddenly, as the result of an accident, Greville Saxony Franklin JP, son of...” She’d left a space after “son of” which I filled in for her “the late Lt. Col. and Mrs. Miles Franklin.” I changed “brother of Derek” to “brother of Susan, Miranda and Derek,” and I added a few final words, “Cremation, Ipswich, Friday.”

“Have you any idea,” I asked Annette, “what he could have been doing in Ipswich?”

She shook her head. “I’ve never heard him mention the place. But then he didn’t ever tell me very much that wasn’t business.” She paused. “He wasn’t exactly secretive, but he never chatted about his private life.” She hesitated. “He never talked about you.”

I thought of all the times he’d been good company and told me virtually nothing, and I understood very well what she meant.

“He used to say that the best security was a still tongue,” she said. “He asked us not to talk too much about our jobs to total strangers, and we all know it’s safer not to, even though we don’t have precious stones here. All the people in the trade are security mad and the diamantaires can be paranoid.”

“What,” I said, “are diamantaires?”

“Not what, who,” she said. “They’re dealers in rough diamonds. They get the stones cut and polished and sell them to manufacturing jewelers. Mr. Franklin always said diamonds were a world of their own, quite separate from other gemstones. There was a ridiculous boom and a terrible crash in world diamond prices during the eighties and a lot of the diamantaires lost fortunes and went bankrupt and Mr. Franklin was often saying that they must have been mad to overextend the way they had.” She paused. “You couldn’t help but know what was happening all round us in this area, where every second business is in gemstones. No one in the pubs and restaurants talked of much else. So you see, I’m sure the bank manager must be wrong. Mr. Franklin would never buy diamonds.”

If he hadn’t bought diamonds, I thought, what the hell had he done with one point five million dollars in cash.

Bought diamonds. He had to have done. Either that or the money was still lying around somewhere, undoubtedly carefully hidden. Either the money or diamonds to the value were lying around uninsured, and if my semisecretive ultra-security-conscious brother had left a treasure-island map with X marking the precious spot, I hadn’t yet found it. Much more likely, I feared, that the knowledge had died under the scaffolding. If it had, the firm would be forfeited to the bank, the last thing Greville would have wanted.

If it had, a major part of the inheritance he’d left me had vanished like morning mist.

He should have stuck to his old beliefs, I thought gloomily, and let diamonds strictly alone.

The telephone on the desk rang again and this time Annette answered it, as she was beside it.

“Saxony Franklin, can I help you?” she said, and listened. “No, I’m very sorry, you won’t be able to talk to Mr. Franklin personally. Could I have your name, please?” She listened. “Well, Mrs. Williams, we must most unhappily inform you that Mr. Franklin died as a result of an accident over the weekend. We are, however, continuing in business. Can I help you at all?”

She listened for a moment or two in increasing puzzlement, then said, “Are you there? Mrs. Williams, can you hear me?” But it seemed as though there was no reply, and in a while she put the receiver down, frowning. “Whoever it was hung up.”

“Do I gather you don’t know Mrs. Williams?”

“No, I don’t.” She hesitated. “But I think she called yesterday too. I think I told her yesterday that Mr. Franklin wasn’t expected in the office all day, like I told everyone. I didn’t ask for her name yesterday. But she has a voice you don’t forget.”

“Why not?”

“Cut glass,” she said succinctly. “Like Mr. Franklin, but more so. Like you too, a bit.”

I was amused. She herself spoke what I thought of as unaccented English, though I supposed any way of speaking sounded like an accent to someone else. I wondered briefly about the cut-glass Mrs. Williams who had received the news of the accident in silence and hadn’t asked where, or how, or when.

Annette went off to her own office to get through to the newspapers and I picked Greville’s diary out of my trousers pocket and tried the numbers that had been unreachable the night before. The two at the back of the book turned out to be first his bookmaker and second his barber, both of whom sounded sorry to be losing his custom, though the bookmaker less so because of Greville’s habit of winning.

My ankle heavily ached; the result, I dared say, of general depression as much as aggrieved bones and muscle. Depression because whatever decisions I’d made to that point had been merely commonsense, but there would come a stage ahead when I could make awful mistakes through ignorance. I’d never before handled finances bigger than my own bank balance and the only business I knew anything about was the training of racehorses, and that only from observation, not from hands-on experience. I knew what I was doing around horses: there, I could tell the spinel from the ruby. In Greville’s world, I could be taken for a ride and never know it. I could lose badly before I’d learned even the elementary rules of the game.

Greville’s great black desk stretched away to each side of me, the wide kneehole flanked to right and left by twin stacks of drawers, four stacks in all. Most of them now contained what they had before the break-in, and I began desultorily to investigate the nearest on the left, looking vaguely for anything that would prompt me as to what I’d overlooked or hadn’t known was necessary to be done.

I first found not tasks but the toys: the small black gadgets now tidied away into serried ranks. The Geiger counter was there, also the handheld copier and a variety of calculators, and I picked out a small black contraption about the size of a paperback book and, turning it over curiously, couldn’t think what it could be used for.

“That’s an electric measurer,” June said, coming breezily into the office with her hands full of paper. “Want to see how it works?”

I nodded and she put it flat on its back on the desk. “It’ll tell you how far it is from the desk to the ceiling,” she said, pressing knobs. “There you are, seven feet five and a half inches. In meters,” she pressed another knob, “two meters twenty-six centimeters.”

“I don’t really need to know how far it is to the ceiling,” I said.

She laughed. “If you hold it flat against a wall, it measures how far it is to the opposite wall. Does it in a flash, as you saw. You don’t need to mess around with tape measures. Mr. Franklin got it when he was redesigning the stockrooms. And he worked out how much carpet we’d need, and how much paint for the walls. This gadget tells you all that.”

“You like computers, don’t you?” I said.

“Love them. All shapes, all sizes.” She peered into the open drawer. “Mr. Franklin was always buying the tiny ones.” She picked out a small gray leather slipcover the size of a pack of cards and slid the contents onto her palm. “This little dilly is a travel guide. It tells you things like phone numbers for taxis, airlines, tourist information, the weather, embassies, American Express.” She demonstrated, pushing buttons happily. “It’s an American gadget, it even tells you the TV channels and radio frequencies for about a hundred cities in the U.S., including Tucson, Arizona, where they hold the biggest gem fair every February. It helps you with fifty other cities round the world, places like Tel Aviv and Hong Kong and Taipei where Mr. Franklin was always going.”

She put the travel guide down and picked up something else. “This little round number is a sort of telescope, but it also tells you how far you are away from things. It’s for golfers. It tells you how far you are away from the flag on the green, Mr. Franklin said, so that you know which club to use.”

“How often did he play golf?” I said, looking through the less than four-inch-long telescope and seeing inside a scale marked Green on the lowest line with diminishing numbers above, from 200 yards at the bottom to 40 yards at the top. “He never talked about it much.”

“He sometimes played at weekends, I think,” June said doubtfully. “You line up the word Green with the actual green, and then the flag stick is always eight feet high, I think, so wherever the top of the stick is on the scale, that’s how far away you are. He said it was a good gadget for amateurs like him. He said never to be ashamed of landing in life’s bunkers if you’d tried your best shot.” She blinked a bit. “He always used to show these things to me when he bought them. He knew I liked them too.” She fished for a tissue and without apology wiped her eyes.

“Where did he get them all from?” I asked.

“Mail order catalogues, mostly.”

I was faintly surprised. Mail order and Greville didn’t seem to go together, somehow, but I was wrong about that, as I promptly found out.

“Would you like to see our own new catalogue?” June asked, and was out of the door and back again before I could remember if I’d ever seen an old one and decide I hadn’t. “Fresh from the printers,” she said. “I was just unpacking them.”

I turned the glossy pages of the 50-page booklet, seeing in faithful colors all the polished goodies I’d met in the stockrooms and also a great many of lesser breeding. Amulets, heart shapes, hoops and butterflies: there seemed to be no end to the possibilities of adornment. When I murmured derogatorily that they were a load of junk, June came fast and strongly to their defense, a mother hen whose chicks had been snubbed.

“Not everyone can afford diamonds,” she said sharply, “and, anyway, these things are pretty and we sell them in thousands, and they wind up in hundreds of High Street shops and department stores and I often see people buying the odd shapes we’ve had through here. People do like them, even if they’re not your taste.”

“Sorry,” I said.

Some of her fire subsided. “I suppose I shouldn’t speak to you like that,” she said uncertainly. “But you’re not Mr. Franklin...” She stopped with a frown.

“It’s OK,” I said. “I am, but I’m not. I know what you mean.”

“Alfie says,” she said slowly, “that there’s a steeplechase jockey called Derek Franklin.” She looked at my foot as if with new understanding. “Champion jockey one year, he said. Always in the top ten. Is that... you?”

I said neutrally, “Yes.”

“I had to ask you,” she said. “The others didn’t want to.”

“Why not?”

“Annette didn’t think you could be a jockey. You’re too tall. She said Mr. Franklin never said anything about you being one. All she knew was that he had a brother he saw a few times a year. She said she was going to ignore what Alfie thought, because it was most unlikely.” She paused. “Alfie mentioned it yesterday, after you’d gone. Then he said... they all said... they didn’t see how a jockey could run a business of this sort. If you were one, that is. They didn’t want it to be true, so they didn’t want to ask.”

“You tell Alfie and the others that if the jockey doesn’t run the business their jobs will be down the tubes and they’ll be out in the cold before the week’s over.”

Her blue eyes widened. “You sound just like Mr. Franklin!”

“And you don’t need to mention my profession to the customers, in case I get the same vote of no confidence I’ve got from the staff.”

Her lips shaped the word “Wow” but she didn’t quite say it. She disappeared fast from the room and presently returned, followed by all the others, who were only too clearly in a renewed state of anxiety.

Not one of them a leader. What a pity.

I said, “You all look as if the ship’s been wrecked and the lifeboat’s leaking. Well, we’ve lost the captain, and I agree we’re in trouble. My job is with horses and not in an office. But, like I said yesterday, this business is going to stay open and thrive. One way or another, I’ll see that it does. So if you’ll all go on working normally and keep the customers happy, you’ll be doing yourselves a favor because if we get through safely you’ll all be due for a bonus. I’m not my brother, but I’m not a fool either, and I’m a pretty fast learner. So just let’s get on with the orders, and, er, cheer up.”

Lily, the Charlotte Brontë lookalike, said meekly, “We don’t really doubt your ability...”

“Of course we do,” interrupted Jason. He stared at me with half a snigger, with a suggestion of curling lip. “Give us a tip for the three-thirty, then.”

I listened to the street-smart bravado which went with the spiky orange hair. He thought me easy game.

I said, “When you are personally able to ride the winner of any three-thirty, you’ll be entitled to your jeer. Until then, work or leave, it’s up to you.”

There was a resounding silence. Alfie almost smiled. Jason looked merely sullen. Annette took a deep breath, and June’s eyes were shining with laughter.

They all drifted away still wordlessly and I couldn’t tell to what extent they’d been reassured, if at all. I listened to the echo of my own voice saying I wasn’t a fool, and wondering ruefully if it were true: but until the diamonds were found or I’d lost all hope of finding them, I thought it more essential than ever that Saxony Franklin Ltd. should stay shakily afloat. All hands, I thought, to the pumps.

June came back and said tentatively, “The pep talk seems to be working.”

“Good.”

“Alfie gave Jason a proper ticking off, and Jason’s staying.”

“Right.”

“What can I do to help?”

I looked at her thin alert face with its fair eyelashes and blonde-to-invisible eyebrows and realized that without her the save-the-firm enterprise would be a nonstarter. She, more than her computer, was at the heart of things. She more than Annette, I thought.

“How long have you worked here?” I asked.

“Three years. Since I left school. Don’t ask if I like the job, I love it. What can I do?”

“Look up in your computer’s memory any reference to diamonds,” I said.

She was briefly impatient. “I told you, we don’t deal in diamonds.”

“All the same, would you?”

She shrugged and was gone. I got to my feet — foot — and followed her, and watched while she expertly tapped her keys.

“Nothing at all under diamonds,” she said finally. “Nothing. I told you.”

“Yes.” I thought about the boxes in the vault with the mineral information on the labels. “Do you happen to know the chemical formula for diamonds?”

“Yes I do,” she said instantly. “It’s C. Diamonds are pure carbon.”

“Could you try again, then, under C?”

She tried. There was no file for C.

“Did my brother know how to use this computer?” I asked.

“He knew how to work all computers. Given five minutes or so to read the instructions.”

I pondered, staring at the blank unhelpful screen.

“Are there,” I asked eventually, “any secret files in this?”

She stared. “We never use secret files.”

“But you could?”

“Of course. Yes. But we don’t need to.”

“If,” I said, “there were any secret files, would you know that they were there?”

She nodded briefly. “I wouldn’t know, but I could find out.”

“How?” I asked. “I mean, please would you?”

“What am I looking for? I don’t understand.”

“Diamonds.”

“But I told you, we don’t...”

“I know,” I said, “but my brother said he was going to buy diamonds and I need to know if he did. If there’s any chance he made a private entry on this computer some day when he was first or last in this office, I need to find it.”

She shook her head but tapped away obligingly, bringing what she called menus to the screen. It seemed a fairly lengthy business but finally, frowning, she found something that gave her pause. Then her concentration increased abruptly until the screen was showing the word “Password?” as before.

“I don’t understand,” she said. “We gave this computer a general password, which is ‘Saxony,’ though we almost never use it. But you can put in any password you like on any particular document to supersede Saxony. This entry was made only a month ago. The date is on the menu. But whoever made it didn’t use Saxony as the password. So the password could be anything, literally any word in the world.”

I said, “By document you mean file?”

“Yes, file. Every entry has a document name, like, say, ‘oriental cultured pearls.’ If I load ‘oriental cultured pearls’ onto the screen I can review our whole stock. I do it all the time. But this document with an unknown password is listed under ‘pearl’ in the singular, not ‘pearls’ in the plural, and I don’t understand it. I didn’t put it there.” She glanced at me. “At any rate, it doesn’t say ‘diamonds.’ ”

“Have another try to guess the password.”

She tried “Franklin” and “Greville” without result. “It could be anything,” she said helplessly.

“Try ‘Dozen Roses.’ ”

“Why ‘Dozen Roses’?” She thought it extraordinary.

“Greville owned a horse — a racehorse — with that name.”

“Really? He never said. He was so nice, and awfully private.”

“He owned another horse called Gemstones.”

With visible doubt she tried “Dozen Roses” and then “Gemstones.” Nothing happened except another insistent demand for the password.

“Try ‘diamonds,’ then,” I said.

She tried “diamonds.” Nothing changed.

“You knew him,” I said. “Why would he enter something under ‘pearl’?”

“No idea.” She sat hunched over the keys, drumming her fingers on her mouth. “Pearl. Pearl. Why pearl?”

“What is a pearl?” I said. “Does it have a formula?”

“Oh.” She suddenly sat up straight. “It’s a birthstone.”

She typed in “birthstone,” and nothing happened.

Then she blushed slightly.

“It’s one of the birthstones for the month of June,” she said. “I could try it, anyway.”

She typed “June,” and the screen flashed and gave up its secrets.