Straight (41 page)

I almost stopped breathing. Time stood still. I couldn’t believe it. Not after everything ...

With shaking fingers I counted them, setting them in small clumps of five.

Ten ... fifteen ... twenty ... twenty-five.

Twenty-five meant I’d got fifty percent. Half of what Greville had bought. With half, Saxony Franklin would be safe. I offered heartbursting thanks to the fates. I came dangerously near to crying.

Then, with a sense of revelation, I knew where the rest were. Where they had to be. Greville really had taken them with him to Ipswich, as he’d told Pross. I guessed he’d taken them thinking he might give them to the Maarten-Pagnier partner to take back to Antwerp for cutting.

I’d searched through the things in his car and had found nothing, and I’d held his diamonds in my hand and not known it.

They were ... they had to be ... in that other scarlet and orange can, in the apparent can of shaving cream in his overnight bag, safe as Fort Knox now under the stairs of Brad’s mum’s house in Hungerford. She’d taken all Greville’s things in off the street, out of my car, to keep them safe in a dodgy neighborhood. In memory I could hear Brad’s pride in her.

“Smart, our mum ...”

The DF 118 was at last taking the edge off the worst.

I rolled the twenty-five precious pebbles around under my fingers with indescribable joy and thought how relieved Greville would have been. Sleep easy, pal, I told him, uncontrollably smiling. I’ve finally found them.

He’d left me his business, his desk, his gadgets, his enemies, his horses, his mistress. Left me Saxony Franklin, the Wizard, the shaving cream cans, Prospero Jenks and Nicholas Loder, Dozen Roses, Clarissa.

I’d inherited his life and laid him to rest; and at that moment, though I might hurt and I might throb, I didn’t think I had ever been happier.