Straight

8

I borrowed Prospero’s telephone to get Brad, but although I could hear the ringing tone in the car, he didn’t answer. Cursing slightly, I asked Pross for a second call and got through to Annette.

“Please keep on trying this number,” I said, giving it to her. “When Brad answers, tell him I’m ready to go.”

“Are you coming back here?” she asked.

I looked at my watch. It wasn’t worth going back as I had to return to Kensington by five-thirty. I said no, I wasn’t.

“Well, there are one or two things...”

“I can’t really tie this phone up,” I said. “I’ll go to my brother’s house and call you from there. Just keep trying Brad.”

I thanked Pross again for the calls. Anytime, he said vaguely. He was sitting again in front of his vise, thinking and tinkering, producing his marvels.

There were customers in the shop being attended to by the black-suited salesman. He glanced up very briefly in acknowledgment as I went through and immediately returned to watching the customers’ hands. A business without trust; much worse than racing. But then, it was probably impossible to slip a racehorse into a pocket when the trainer wasn’t looking.

I stood on the pavement and wondered pessimistically how long it would take Brad to answer the telephone but in the event he surprised me by arriving within a very few minutes. When I opened the car door, the phone was ringing.

“Why don’t you answer it?” I asked, wriggling my way into the seat.

“Forgot which button.”

“But you came,” I said.

“Yerss.”

I picked up the phone myself and talked to Annette. “Brad apparently reckoned that if the phone rang it meant I was ready, so he saw no need to answer it.”

Brad gave a silent nod.

“So now we’re setting off to Kensington.” I paused. “Annette, what’s a sightholder, and what’s a sight?”

“You’re back to diamonds again!”

“Yes. Do you know?”

“Of course I do. A sightholder is someone who is permitted to buy rough diamonds from the C.S.O. There aren’t so many sightholders, only about a hundred and fifty world-wide, I think. They sell the diamonds then to other people. A sight is what they call the sales C.S.O. hold every five weeks, and a sightbox is a packet of stones they sell, though that’s often called a sight too.”

“Is a sightholder the same as a diamantaire?” I asked.

“All sightholders are diamantaires, but all diamantaires are not sightholders. Diamantaires buy from the sightholders, or share in a sight, or buy somewhere else, not from de Beers.”

Ask a simple question, I thought.

Annette said, “A consignment of cultured pearls has come from Japan. Where shall I put them?”

“Um... Do you mean where because the vault is locked?”

“Yes.”

“Where did you put things when my brother was travelling?”

She said doubtfully. “He always said to put them in the stockroom under ‘miscellaneous beads.’ ”

“Put them in there, then.”

“But the drawer is full with some things that came last week. I wouldn’t want the responsibility of putting the pearls anywhere Mr. Franklin hadn’t approved.” I couldn’t believe she needed direction over the simplest thing, but apparently she did. “The pearls are valuable,” she said. “Mr. Franklin would never leave them out in plain view.”

“Aren’t there any empty drawers?”

“Well, I...”

“Find an empty drawer or a nearly empty drawer and put them there. We’ll see to them properly in the morning.”

“Yes, all right.”

She seemed happy with it and said everything else could wait until I came back. I switched off the telephone feeling absolutely swamped by the prospect she’d opened up: if Greville hid precious things under “miscellaneous beads,” where else might he not have hidden them? Would I find a hundred diamonds stuffed in at the back of rhodochrosite or jasper, if I looked?

The vault alone was taking too long. The four big stockrooms promised a nightmare.

Brad miraculously found a parking space right outside Greville’s house, which seemed obscurely to disappoint him.

“Twenty past five,” he said, “for the pub?”

“If you wouldn’t mind. And... er... would you just stand there now while I take a look-see?” I had grown cautious, I found.

He ducked his head in assent and watched me maneuver the few steps up the front door. No floodlights came on and no dog barked, presumably because it was daylight. I opened the three locks and pushed the door.

The house was still. No movements of air. I propped the door open with a bronze horse clearly lying around for the purpose and went down the passage to the small sitting room.

No intruders. No mess. No amazons waving riot sticks, no wrecking balls trying to get past the grilles on the windows. If anyone had attempted to penetrate Greville’s fortress, they hadn’t succeeded.

I returned to the front door. Brad was still standing beside the car, looking toward the house. I gave him a thumbs-up sign, and he climbed into the driver’s seat while I closed the heavy door and in the little sitting room started taking all the books off the shelves methodically, riffling the pages and putting each back where I found it.

There were ten hollow books altogether, mostly with titles like Tales of the Outback, and With a Mule in Patagonia. Four were empty, including the one that had held Clarissa Williams’s letters. One held the big ornate key. One held an expensive-looking gold watch, the hands pointing to the correct time.

The watch Greville had been wearing in Ipswich was one of those affairs with more knobs than instructions. It lay now beside my bed in Hungerford emitting bleeps at odd intervals and telling me which way was north. The slim gold elegance in the hollow box was for a different mood, a different man, and when I turned it over on my palm I found the inscription on the back: G, my love, C.

She couldn’t have known it was there, I thought. She hadn’t looked for it. She’d looked only for the letters, and by chance had come to them first. I put the watch back into the box and back on the shelf. There was no way I could return it to her, and perhaps she wouldn’t want it, not with that inscription.

Two of the remaining boxes contained keys, again unspecified, and one contained a folded instruction leaflet detailing how to set a safe in a concrete nest. The last revealed two very small plastic cases containing baby recording tapes, each adorned with the printed legend “microcassette.” The cassette cases were all of two inches long by one and a half wide, the featherweight tapes inside a fraction smaller.

I tossed one in my hand indecisively. Nowhere among Greville’s tidy belongings had I so far found a microcassette player, which didn’t mean I wouldn’t in time. Sufficient to the day, I thought in the end, and left the tiny tapes in the book.

With the scintillating titles and their secrets all back on the shelves I stared at them gloomily. Not a diamond in the lot.

Instructions for concrete nests were all very well, but where was the safe? Tapes were OK, but where was the player? Keys were fine, but where were the keyholes? The most frustrating thing about it all was that Greville hadn’t meant to leave such puzzles. For him, the answers were part of his fabric.

I’d noticed on my way in and out of the house that mail was accumulating in the wire container fixed inside the letter box, so to fill in the time before I was due at the pub I took the letters along to the sitting room and began opening the envelopes.

It seemed all wrong. I kept telling myself it was necessary but I still felt as if I were trespassing on ground Greville had surrounded with keep-out fences. There were bills, requests from charities, a bank statement for his private account, a gemology magazine and two invitations. No letters from sightholders, diamantaires or cutters in Antwerp. I put the letters into the gemology magazine’s large envelope and added to them some similar unfinished business that I’d found in the drawer under the telephone, and reflected ruefully, putting it all ready to take to Hungerford, that I loathed paperwork at the best of times. My own had a habit of mounting up into increasingly urgent heaps. Perhaps having to do Greville’s would teach me some sense.

Brad whisked us round to the Rook and Castle at five-thirty and pointed to the phone to let me know how I could call him when I’d finished, and I saw from his twitch of a smile that he found it a satisfactory amusement.

The Rook and Castle was old-fashioned inside as well as out, an oasis of drinking peace without a jukebox. There was a lot of dark wood and Tiffany lampshades and small tables with beer mats. An office-leaving clientele of mostly business-suited men was beginning to trickle in and I paused inside the door both to get accustomed to the comparative darkness and to give anyone who was interested a plain view of the crutches.

The interest level being nil, I judged Elliot Trelawney to be absent. I went over to the bar, ordered some Perrier and swallowed a Distalgesic, as it was time. The morning’s gallop had done no good to the ankle department but it wasn’t to be regretted.

A bulky man of about fifty came into the place as if familiar with his surroundings and looked purposefully around, sharpening his gaze on the crutches and coming without hesitation to the bar.

“Mr. Franklin?”

I shook his offered hand.

“What are you drinking?” he said briskly, eyeing my glass.

“Perrier. That’s temporary also.”

He smiled swiftly, showing white teeth. “You won’t mind if I have a double Glenlivet? Greville and I drank many of them together here. I’m going to miss him abominably. Tell me what happened.”

I told him. He listened intently, but at the end he said merely, “You look very uncomfortable propped against that stool. Why don’t we move to a table?” And without more ado he picked up my glass along with the one the bartender had fixed for him, and carried them over to two wooden armchairs under a multicolored lampshade by the wall.

“That’s better,” he said, taking a sip and eyeing me over the glass. “So you’re the brother he talked about. You’re Derek.”

“I’m Derek. His only brother, actually. I didn’t know he talked about me.”

“Oh, yes. Now and then.”

Elliot Trelawney was big, almost bald, with half-moon glasses and a face that was fleshy but healthy-looking. He had thin lips but laugh lines around his eyes, and I’d have said on a snap judgment that he was a realist with a sense of humor.

“He was proud of you,” he said.

“Proud?” I was surprised.

He glimmered. “We often played golf together on Saturday mornings and sometimes he would be wanting to finish before the two o’clock race at Sandown or somewhere, and it would be because you were riding and it was on the box. He liked to watch you. He liked you to win.”

“He never told me,” I said regretfully.

“He wouldn’t, would he? I watched with him a couple of times and all he said after you’d won was, ‘That’s all right, then.’ ”

“And when I lost?”

“When you lost?” He smiled. “Nothing at all. Once you had a crashing fall and he said he’d be glad on the whole when you retired, as race-riding was so dangerous. Ironic, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“By God, I’ll miss him.” His voice was deep. “We were friends for twenty years.”

I envied him. I wanted intolerably what it was too late to have, and the more I listened to people remembering Greville the worse it got.

“Are you a magistrate?” I asked.

He nodded. “We often sat together. Greville introduced me to it, but I’ve never had quite his gift. He seemed to know the truth of things by instinct. He said goodness was visible, therefore in its absence one sought for answers.”

“What sort of cases did... do you try?”

“All sorts.” He smiled again briefly. “Shoplifters. Vagrants. Possession of drugs. TV license fee evaders. Sex offenders... that’s prostitution, rape, sex with minors, curb crawlers. Greville always seemed to know infallibly when those were lying.”

“Go on,” I said, when he stopped. “Anything else?”

“Well, there are a lot of diplomats in West London, in all the embassies. You’d be astonished what they get away with by claiming diplomatic immunity. Greville hated diplomatic immunity, but we have to grant it. Then we have a lot of small businessmen who ‘forget’ to pay the road tax on the company vehicles, and there are TDA’s by the hundreds — that’s Taking and Driving Away cars. Other motoring offenses, speeding and so on, are dealt with separately, like domestic offenses and juveniles. And then occasionally we get the preliminary hearings in a murder case, but of course we have to refer those to the Crown Court.”

“Does it all ever depress you?” I said.

He took a sip and considered me. “It makes you sad,” he said eventually. “We see as much inadequacy and stupidity as downright villainy. Some of it makes you laugh. I wouldn’t say it’s depressing, but one learns to see the world from underneath, so to speak. To see the dirt and the delusions, to see through the offenders’ eyes and understand their weird logic. But one’s disillusion is sporadic because we don’t have a bench every day. Twice a month, in Greville’s and my cases, plus a little committee work. And that’s what I really want from you: the notes Greville was making on the licensing of a new-style gaming club. He said he’d learned disturbing allegations against one of the organizers and he was going to advise turning down the application at the next committee meeting even though it was a project we’d formerly looked on favorably.”

“I’m afraid,” I said, “that I haven’t so far found any notes like that.”

“Damn... Where would he have put them?”

“I don’t know. I’ll look for them, though.” No harm in keeping an eye open for notes while I searched for C.

Elliot Trelawney reached into an inner jacket pocket and brought out two flat black objects, one a notebook, the other a folded black case a bit like a cigarette case.

“These were Greville’s,” he said. “I brought them for you.” He put them on the small table and moved them toward me with plump and deliberate fingers. “He lent me that one,” he pointed, “and the notebook he left on the table after a committee meeting last week.”

“Thank you,” I said. I picked up the folded case and opened it and found inside a miniature electronic chess set, the sort that challenged a player to beat it. I looked up. Trelawney’s expression, unguarded, was intensely sorrowful. “Would you like it?” I said. “I know it’s not much, but would you like to keep it?”

“If you mean it.”

I nodded and he put the chess set back into his pocket. “Greville and I used to play... dammit...” he finished explosively. “Why should such a futile thing happen?”

No answer was possible. I regretfully picked up the black notebook and opened it at random.

“The bad scorn the good,” I read aloud, “and the crooked despise the straight.”

“The thoughts of Chairman Mao,” Trelawney said dryly, recovering himself. “I used to tease him. He said it was a habit he’d had from university when he’d learned to clarify his thoughts by writing them down. When I knew he was dead I read that notebook from cover to cover. I’ve copied down some of the things in it, I hope you won’t mind.” He smiled. “You’ll find parts of it especially interesting.”

“About his horses?”

“Those too.”

I stowed the notebook in a trousers pocket which was already pretty full and brought out from there the racing diary, struck by a thought. I explained what the diary was, showing it to Trelawney.

“I phoned that number,” I said, turning pages and pointing, “and mentioned Greville’s name, and a woman told me in no uncertain terms never to telephone again as she wouldn’t have the name Greville Franklin spoken in her house.”

Elliot Trelawney blinked. “Greville? Doesn’t sound like Greville.”

“I didn’t think so, either. So would it have had something to do with one of your cases? Someone he found guilty of something?”

“Hah. Perhaps.” He considered. “I could probably find out whose number it is, if you like. Strange he would have had it in his diary, though. Do you want to follow it up?”

“It just seemed so odd,” I said.

“Quite right.” He unclipped a gold pencil from another inner pocket and in a slim notebook of black leather with gold corners wrote down the number.

“Do you make enemies much, because of the court?” I asked.

He looked up and shrugged. “We get cursed now and then. Screamed at, one might say. But usually not. Mostly they plead guilty because it’s so obvious they are. The only real enemy Greville might have had is the gambling club organizer who’s not going to get his license. A drugs baron is what Greville called him. A man suspected of murder but not tried through lack of evidence. He might have had very hard feelings.” He hesitated. “When I heard Greville was dead, I even wondered about Vaccaro. But it seems clear the scaffolding was a sheer accident... wasn’t it?”

“Yes, it was. The scaffolding broke high up. One man working on it fell three stories to his death. Pieces just rained down on Greville. A minute earlier, a minute later...” I sighed. “Is Vaccaro the gambling-license man?”

“He is. He appeared before the committee and seemed perfectly straightforward. Subject to screening, we said. And then someone contacted Greville and uncovered the muck. But we don’t ourselves have any details, so we need his notes.”

“I’ll look for them,” I promised again. I turned more pages in the diary. “Does Koningin Beatrix mean anything to you?” I showed him the entry. “Or CZ equals C times one point seven?”

C, I thought, looking at it again, stood for diamond.

“Nothing,” Elliot Trelawney said. “But as you know, Greville could be as obscure as he was clear-headed. And these were private notes to himself, after all. Same as his notebook. It was never for public consumption.”

I nodded and put away the diary and paid for Elliot Trelawney’s repeat Glenlivet but felt waterlogged myself. He stayed for a while, seeming to be glad to talk about Greville, as I was content to listen. We parted eventually on friendly terms, he giving me his card with his phone number for when I found Greville’s notes.

If, I silently thought. If I find them.

When he’d gone I used the pub’s telephone to call the car, and after five unanswered brr-brrs disconnected and went outside, and Brad with almost a grin reappeared to pick me up.

“Home,” I said, and he said, “Yerss,” and that was that.

On the way I read bits of Greville’s notebook, pausing often to digest the passing thoughts which had clearly been chiefly prompted by the flotsam drifting through the West London Magistrates Court.

“Goodness is sickening to the evil,” he wrote, “as evil is sickening to the good. Both the evil and the good may be complacent.”

“In all income groups you find your average regulation slob who sniggers at anarchy but calls the police indignantly to his burglarized home, who is actively anti-authority until he needs to be saved from someone with a gun.”

“The palm outstretched for a handout can turn in a flash into a cursing fist. A nation’s palm, a nation’s fist.”

“Crime to many is not crime but simply a way of life. If laws are inconvenient, ignore them, they don’t apply to you.”

“Infinite sadness is not to trust an old friend.”

“Historically, more people have died of religion than cancer.”

“I hate rapists. I imagine being anally assaulted myself, and the anger overwhelms me. It’s essential to make my judgment cold.”

Further on I came unexpectedly to what Elliot Trelawney must have meant.

Greville had written, “Derek came to dinner very stiff with broken ribs. I asked him how he managed to live with all those injuries. ‘Forget the pain and get on with the party,’ he said. So we drank fizz.”

I stopped reading and stared out at the autumn countryside which was darkening now, lights going on. I remembered that evening very well, up to a point. Greville had been good fun. I’d got pretty high on the cocktail of champagne and painkillers and I hadn’t felt a thing until I’d woken in the morning. I’d driven myself seventy miles home and forgotten it, which frightening fact was roughly why I was currently and obediently sticking to water.

It was almost too dark to read more, but I flicked over one more page and came to what amounted to a prayer, so private and impassioned that I felt my mouth go dry. Alone on the page were three brief lines:

I felt as if I shouldn’t have read it; knew he hadn’t meant it to be read. May I achieve humility... that prayer was for saints.

When we reached my house I told Brad I would go to London the next day by train, and he looked devastated.

“I’ll drive you for nowt,” he said, hoarsely.

“It isn’t the money.” I was surprised by the strength of his feelings. “I just thought you’d be tired of all the waiting about.”

He shook his head vigorously, his eyes positively pleading.

“All right, then,” I said. “London tomorrow, Ipswich on Friday, OK?”

“Yerss,” he said with obvious relief.

“And I’ll pay you, of course.”

He looked at me dumbly for a moment, then ducked his head into the car to fetch the big brown envelope from Greville’s house, and he waited while I unlocked my door and made sure that there were no unwelcome visitors lurking.

Everything was quiet, everything orderly. Brad nodded at my all-clear, gave me the envelope and loped off into the night more tongue-tied than ever. I’d never wondered very much about his thoughts during all the silent hours; had never tried, I supposed, to understand him. I wasn’t sure that I wanted to. It was restful the way things were.

I ate a microwaved chicken pie from the freezer and made an unenthusiastic start on Greville’s letters, paying his bills for him, closing his accounts, declining his invitations, saying sorry, sorry, very sorry.

After that, in spite of good resolutions, I did not attack my own backlog but read right through Greville’s notebook looking for diamonds. Maybe there were some solid gold nuggets, maybe some pearls of wisdom, but no helpful instructions like turn right at the fourth apple tree, walk five paces and dig.

I did however find the answer to one small mystery, which I read with wry amusement.

“The green soapstone box pleases me as an exercise in misdirection and deviousness. The keyhole has no key because it has no lock. It’s impossible to unlock men’s minds with keys, but guile and pressure will do it, as with the box.”

Even with the plain instruction to be guileful and devious it took me ages to find the secret. I tried pressing each of the two hinges, pressing the lock, twisting, pressing everything again with the box upside down. The green stone stayed stubbornly shut.

Misdirection, I thought. If the keyhole wasn’t a lock, maybe the hinges weren’t hinges. Maybe the lid wasn’t a lid. Maybe the whole thing was solid.

I tried the box upside down again, put my thumb on its bottom surface with firm pressure and tried to push it out endways, like a slide. Nothing happened. I reversed it and pushed the other way and as if with a sigh for the length of my stupidity the bottom of the box slid out reluctantly to halfway, and stopped.

It was beautifully made, I thought. When it was shut one couldn’t see the bottom edges weren’t solid stone, so closely did they fit. I looked with great curiosity to see what Greville had hidden in his ingenious hiding place, not really expecting diamonds, and brought out two well-worn chamois leather pouches with drawstrings, the sort jewelers use, with the name of the jeweler indistinctly stamped on the front.

Both of the pouches were empty, to my great disappointment. I stuffed them back into the hole and shut the box, and it sat on the table beside the telephone all evening, an enigma solved but useless.

It wasn’t until I’d decided to go to bed that some switch or other clicked in my brain and a word half-seen became suddenly a conscious thought. Van Ekeren, stamped in gold. Perhaps the jeweler’s name stamped on the chamois pouches was worth another look.

I opened the box and pulled the pouches out again and in the rubbed and faded lettering read the full name and address.

There had to be, I thought, about ten thousand jewelers in Antwerp. The pouches were far from new, certainly not only a few weeks old. All the same... better find out.

I took one and left one, closing the box again, and in the morning bore the crumpled trophy to London and through international telephone inquiries found Jacob van Ekeren’s number.

The voice that answered from Antwerp spoke either Dutch or Flemish, so I tried French, “Je veux parler avec Monsieur Jacob van Ekeren, s’il vous plait.”

“Ne quittez pas.”

I held on as instructed until another voice spoke, this time in French, of which I knew far too little.

“Monsieur van Ekeren n’est pas ici maintenant, monsieur.”

“Parlez-vous anglais?” I asked. “I’m speaking from England.”

“Attendez.”

I waited again and was rewarded with an extremely English voice asking if he could help.

I explained that I was speaking from Saxony Franklin Ltd., gemstone importers in London.

“How can I help you?” He was courteous and noncommittal.

“Do you,” I said baldly, “cut and polish rough diamonds?”

“Yes, of course,” he answered. “But before we do business with any new client we need introductions and references.”

“Um,” I said. “Wouldn’t Saxony Franklin Limited be a client of yours already? Or Greville Saxony Franklin, maybe? Or just Greville Franklin? It’s really important.”

“May I have your name?”

“Derek Franklin. Greville’s brother.”

“One moment.” He returned after a while and said he would call me back shortly with an answer.

“Thank you very much,” I said.

“Pas du tout.” Bilingual besides.

I put down the phone and asked both Annette and June, who were busily moving around, if they could find Jacob van Ekeren anywhere in Greville’s files. “See if you can find any mention of Antwerp in the computer,” I added to June.

“Diamonds again!”

“Yup. The van Ekeren address is 70 Pelikanstraat.”

Annette wrinkled her brow. “That’s the Belgian equivalent of Hatton Garden,” she said.

It disrupted their normal work and they weren’t keen, but Annette was very soon able to say she had no record of any Jacob van Ekeren, but the files were kept in the office for only six years, and any contact before that would be in storage in the basement. June whisked in to confirm that she couldn’t find van Ekeren or Pelikanstraat or Antwerp in the computer.

It wasn’t exactly surprising. If Greville had wanted his diamond transaction to be common knowledge in the office he would have conducted it out in the open. Very odd, I thought, that he hadn’t. If it had been anyone but Greville one would have suspected him of something underhanded, but as far as I knew he always had dealt with honor, as he’d prayed.

The telephone rang and Annette answered it. “Saxony Franklin, can I help you?” She listened. “Derek Franklin? Yes, just a moment.” She handed me the receiver and I found it was the return of the smooth French-English voice from Belgium. I knew as well as he did that he had spent the time between the two calls getting our number from international inquiries so that he could check back and be sure I was who I’d said. Merely prudent. I’d have done the same.

“Mr. Jacob van Ekeren has retired,” he said. “I am his nephew Hans. I can tell you now after our researches that we have done no business with your firm within the past six or seven years, but I can’t speak for the time before that, when my uncle was in charge.”

“I see,” I said. “Could you, er, ask your uncle?”

“I will if you like,” he said civilly. “I did telephone his house, but I understand that he and my aunt will be away from home until Monday, and their maid doesn’t seem to know where they went.” He paused. “Could I ask what all this is about?”

I explained that my brother had died suddenly, leaving a good deal of unfinished business which I was trying to sort out. “I came across the name and address of your firm. I’m following up everything I can.”

“Ah,” he said sympathetically. “I will certainly ask my uncle on Monday, and let you know.”

“I’m most grateful.”

“Not at all.”

The uncle, I thought morosely, was a dead-end.

I went along and opened the vault, telling Annette that Prospero Jenks wanted all the spinel. “And he says we have a piece of rock crystal like the Eiger.”

“The what?”

“Sharp mountain. Like Mont Blanc.”

“Oh.” She moved down the rows of boxes and chose a heavy one from near the bottom of the far end. “This is it,” she said, humping it onto the shelf and opening the lid. “Beautiful.”

The Eiger, filling the box, was lying on its side and had a knobby base so that it wouldn’t stand up, but I supposed one could see in the lucent faces and angled planes that, studded with diamond stars and given the Jenks’ sunlight treatment, it could make the basis of a fantasy worthy of the name.

“Do we have a price for it?” I asked.

“Double what it cost,” she said cheerfully. “Plus tax, plus packing and transport.”

“He wants everything sent by messenger.”

She nodded. “He always does. Jason takes them in a taxi. Leave it to me, I’ll see to it.”

“And we’d better put the pearls away that came yesterday.”

“Oh, yes.”

She went off to fetch them and I moved down to where I’d given up the day before, feeling certain that the search was futile but committed to it all the same. Annette returned with the pearls, which were at least in plastic bags on strings, not in the awkward open envelopes, so while she counted and stored the new intake, I checked my way through the old.

Boxes of pearls, all sizes. No diamonds.

“Does CZ mean anything to you?” I asked Annette idly.

“CZ is cubic zirconia,” she said promptly. “We sell a fair amount of it.”

“Isn’t that, um, imitation diamond?”

“It’s a manufactured crystal very like diamond,” she said, “but about ten thousand times cheaper. If it’s in a ring, you can’t tell the difference.”

“Can’t anyone?” I asked. “They must do.”

“Mr. Franklin said that most jewelers can’t at a glance. The best way to tell the difference, he said, is to take the stones out of their setting and weigh them.”

“Weigh them?”

“Yes. Cubic zirconia’s much heavier than diamond, so one carat of cubic zirconia is smaller than a one-carat diamond.”

“CZ equals C times one point seven,” I said slowly.

“That’s right,” she said surprised. “How did you know?”