Dick Francis: Straight

“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...”