Dick Francis: Straight

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 MgAI 2O 4, 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.