Maxim Jakubowski - The Mammoth Book of Best British Mysteries 6

He paddled out and rode one or two waves in. The surf was quite high and the water was warmer than usual. He spotted another surfer, some way off, then lost sight of him. It was very quiet. George paddled his board back out, looked up at the perfect pale blue sky, and sighed with contentment.

Then he looked down. His heart gave a lurch as he caught a glimpse of something in the water. He peered into the depths. It was easy to mistake shadows or fronds of seaweed for something they were not. One had to control one’s imagination. He searched the water. A flash of metal, from down below it seemed. Impossible, he thought. Impossible. I told nobody.

And he thought, as he slipped into the water, that life was not supposed to be like this, that it was absurd that parking of all things should have this result. Absurd and unlikely. But now there was only water, and regret.

When a guy presents you with an engagement ring, a socking great oval ruby surrounded by diamonds, it might seem a tad ungrateful to subject it to scrutiny with a jeweller’s eyepiece.

Griff, my adoptive grand-father, business partner, and antique-dealer extraordinaire, wouldn’t ever soil his lips with expressions like looking a gift-horse in the mouth. But he did ask, as he prepared supper that evening, “Surely that breaches all rules of etiquette, my darling Lina?”

I slipped the ornate jewel back onto my ring finger, which I wiggled so that it picked up the candlelight. Griff always made meals an occasion, even worrying about the niceties of what cutlery to use when serving Thai stir-fry in an Elizabethan cottage at the heart of a Kentish village. “I think I was a bit bowled over,” I conceded slowly. “All that bended-knee stuff and the promise of a round-the-world cruise for our honeymoon. For me, Lina Townend!”

“And there I thought chivalry had died out in your generation,” he said.

“Apparently not,” I said coolly. But how could I snub my dearest friend? “Griff, what was I doing? This is Piers Hamlyn, for goodness’ sake!”

“Piers Hamlyn, who, despite his predilection for cords and bodywarmers, is a most dashing piece of manhood,” Griff burbled. “Those shoulders! That neat bum!”

“Those cornflower-blue eyes, perfect complexion, and honey-coloured hair,” I added.

“And second cousin once removed of your own father, Lord Elham,” Griff reflected, with distinctly less enthusiasm.

“Which doesn’t say much for him, does it?” I asked quietly.

“Just because Lord Elham-how strange that neither of us ever refers to him as anything more intimate-is not the purest diamond in the tiara doesn’t mean his cousin is flawed. Though I must admit,” he continued, allowing a tiny quaver to creep into his voice, and sinking into his frail-old-man mode, “it has been what we used to call a whirlwind romance.”

It had. And considering that women of my generation tended not to demand courtship and rings and weddings before-as Griff gracelessly put it-hopping into bed, it was a very romantic romance. Flowers; candlelit dinners; the question popped within two weeks of our first meeting at a big and classy antiques fair at a vast country pile-it belonged to another of his cousins-and no attempt to go beyond a not terribly passionate snog.

What on earth had I been doing? The ring said, in a very snide voice, “Doing pretty well for yourself, considering.”

I whipped it off and peered closely at it again.

“Oh, Griff, why didn’t I tell Piers to ask you for my hand? You could have asked him about his prospects and how he meant to maintain me!” Which would have given me time to think.

“I take it you wouldn’t want me to go so far as to reject him as a suitor?”

“Yes. No. I wish I knew.” I gave the ring another squint. What was wrong with me? Or rather, what was wrong with it? What had got all my divvy’s antennae a-twitch?

Its provenance, for one thing. Every dealer likes to know where an item’s been before it comes to him. You might think it’s enough to know the maker, but forging manufacturer’s marks is easy-peasy to a master, as is copying a painter’s signature on a faked masterpiece. So you want to know who bought it and from whom, all through its life. In the case of a picture, the number of times it’s been exhibited and where. As for a ring like this, it’s tricky and hardly worth bothering, so long as you can see the hallmark on the band, in this case one declaring it was made in Birmingham, that City of a Thousand Trades, way back in 1879. So it was the right age to have a silver mount for the stones, as opposed to the stronger platinum claws used later.

Everything was right about it.

Or not.

“I’d love you to take a look at it,” I said. “After all, it’s not exactly my area, is it?”

“At our level, dear heart, we have to be Jacks and Jills of all trades. I know you can beat most people hollow when it comes to Victorian china, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t turn your hand to other things. I know, I know. You were spot-on with the date-but then,” he added, “I’d have been disappointed if you hadn’t been. You worked hard to learn the assay marks.” He smiled, and tucked a lock of my hair in place. “There’s a good brain between those ears of yours, my child. For all you worry about having no paper qualifications, you’re a very bright young woman.”

I didn’t argue. But school and I had been relative strangers to each other, thanks to my life in care after my mother’s death. You’d have expected my father to take me in, maybe. But not my father, Lord Elham, of Bossingham Court. Lord Elham, old rogue that he was, had taken no more notice of me than he’d taken of my other thirty siblings. But then, he claimed he’d never known about any of us, not in any detail. And indeed, it was me who’d found him, not the other way round. ( “I who’d found him, dear heart,” Griff would have told me gently.) And he hadn’t been especially keen on me, at least not until I’d dug him out of a particularly nasty hole and managed to cast him in the light not of a greedy criminal but of a public benefactor. My father called himself a gentleman-but since I’d always believed in the adage gentleman is as gentleman does, I’d yet to see him deserve the term. Or the title Noble Lord. Lord Elham. And no, that didn’t make me Lady anything, since I was born on what Griff would call the wrong side of the blanket. Well, with all those brothers and sisters in the picture, you’d probably worked that out for yourself. He’d taken the huff when I’d refused to leave Griff and go and live at Bossingham Hall, but that’s another story.

“Now, do I look at this bauble as if admiring your betrothed’s taste, or as if valuing it for auction?”

“As my dearest friend,” I said humbly. “And under a very strong lamp.”

“Tomorrow morning, then.”

Before I washed up I hung the ring on a little Edwardian ring-tree that for as long as I could remember Griff had kept beside the kettle. That was Griff for you. Forward planning. Or, more likely, seeing a charming little item going cheap and giving it a good home. Most of the stuff we bought we had to sell, of course-that’s how dealers make a living. But Griff made it a rule that we only bought what we ourselves liked. Usually.

“If you like something, you find out about it,” he’d told me when he’d first employed me. “And the more you know about something the more people regard you as an expert and come to trust you. Trust is like virtue-it’s its own reward.”

“And it doesn’t damage your prices.”

He’d chuckled. “Clearly, dear heart, you are a dealer in the bud.”