Straight (6 page)

Everything, it seemed, came in dozens of shapes and sizes. Annette smiled at my bemused expression and invited me into the room next door.

Floor-to-shoulder-height metal drawers, as before, not only lining the walls this time but filling the center space with aisles, as in a supermarket.

“Cabochons, for setting into rings, and so on,” Annette said. “They’re in alphabetical order.”

Amethyst to turquoise via garnet, jade, lapis lazuli and onyx, with dozens of others I’d only half heard of. “Semiprecious,” Annette said briefly. “All genuine stones. Mr. Franklin doesn’t touch glass or plastic.” She stopped abruptly. Let five seconds lengthen. “He didn’t touch them,” she said lamely.

His presence was there strongly, I felt. It was almost as if he would walk through the door, all energy, saying “Hello, Derek, what brings you here?” and if he seemed alive to me, who had seen him dead, how much more physical he must still be to Annette and June.

And to Lily too, I supposed. Lily was in the third stockroom pushing a brown cardboard box around on a thing like a tea cart, collecting bags of strings of beads and checking them against a list. With her center-parted hair drawn back into a slide at her neck, with her small pale mouth and rounded cheeks, Lily looked like a Charlotte Brontë governess and dressed as if immolation were her personal choice. The sort to love the master in painful silence, I thought, and wondered what she’d felt for Greville.

Whatever it was, she wasn’t letting it show. She raised downcast eyes briefly to my face and at Annette’s prompting told me she was putting together a consignment of rhodonite, jasper, aventurine and tiger eye, for one of the largest firms of jewelry manufacturers.

“We import the stones,” Annette said. “We’re wholesalers. We sell to about three thousand jewelers, maybe more. Some are big businesses. Many are small ones. We’re at the top of the semiprecious trade. Highly regarded.” She swallowed. “People trust us.”

Greville, I knew, had traveled the world to buy the stones. When we’d met he’d often been on the point of departing for Arizona or Hong Kong or had just returned from Israel, but he’d never told me more than the destinations. I at last understood what he’d been doing, and realized he couldn’t easily be replaced.

Depressed, I went back to his office and telephoned to his accountant and his bank.

They were shocked and they were helpful, impressively so. The bank manager said I would need to call on him in the morning, but Saxony Franklin, as a limited company, could go straight on functioning. I could take over without trouble. All he would want was confirmation from my brother’s lawyers that his will was as I said.

“Thank you very much,” I said, slightly surprised, and he told me warmly he was glad to be of service. Greville’s s affairs, I thought with a smile, must be amazingly healthy.

To the insurance company, also, my brother’s death seemed scarcely a hiccup. A limited company’s insurance went marching steadily on, it seemed: it was the company that was insured, not my brother. I said I would like to claim for a smashed window. No problem. They would send a form.

After that I telephoned to the Ipswich undertakers who had been engaged to remove Greville’s body from the hospital, and arranged that he should be cremated. They said they had “a slot” at two o’clock on Friday: would that do? “Yes,” I said, sighing, “I’ll be there.” They gave me the address of the crematorium in a hushed obsequious voice, and I wondered what it must be like to do business always with the bereaved. Happier by far to sell glittering baubles to the living or to ride jump-racing horses at thirty miles an hour, win, lose or break your bones.

I made yet another phone call, this time to the orthopedic surgeon, and as usual came up against the barrier of his receptionist. He wasn’t in his own private consulting rooms, she announced, but at the hospital.

I said, “Could you ask him to leave me a prescription somewhere, because I’ve fallen on my ankle and twisted it, and I’m running out of Distalgesic.”

“Hold on,” she said, and I held until she returned. “I’ve spoken to him,” she said. “He’ll be back here later. He says can you be here at five?”

I said gratefully that I could, and reckoned that I’d have to leave soon after two-thirty to be sure of making it. I told Annette, and asked what they did about locking up.

“Mr. Franklin usually gets here first and leaves last.” She stopped, confused. “I mean ...”

“I know,” I said. “It’s all right. I think of him in the present tense too. So go on.”

“Well, the double front doors bolt on the inside. Then the door from the lobby to the offices has an electronic bolt, as you know. So does the door from the corridor to the stockrooms. So does the rear door, where we all come in and out. Mr. Franklin changes ... changed ... the numbers at least every week. And there’s another electronic lock, of course, on the door from the lobby to the showroom, and from the corridor into the showroom ...” She paused. “It does seem a lot, I know, but the electronic locks are very simple, really. You only have to remember three digits. Last Friday they were five, three, two. They’re easy to work. Mr. Franklin installed them so that we shouldn’t have too many keys lying around. He and I both have a key, though, that will unlock all the electronic locks manually, if we need to.”

“So you’ve remembered the numbers?” I asked.

“Oh, yes. It was just, this morning, with everything ... they went out of my head.”

“And the vault,” I said. “Does that have any electronics?”

“No, but it has an intricate locking system in that heavy door, though it looks so simple from the outside. Mr. Franklin always locks ... locked ... the vault before he left. When he went away on long trips, he made the key available to me.”

I wondered fleetingly about that awkward phrase, but didn’t pursue it. I asked her instead about the showroom, which I hadn’t seen and, again with pride, she went into the corridor, programmed a shining brass doorknob with the open sesame numbers, and ushered me into a windowed room that looked much like a shop, with glass-topped display counters and the firm’s overall ambience of wealth.

Annette switched on powerful lights and the place came to life. She moved contentedly behind the counters, pointing out to me the contents now bright with illumination.

“In here are examples of everything we stock, except not all the sizes, of course, and not the faceted stones in the vault. We don’t really use the showroom a great deal, only for new customers mostly, but I like being in here. I love the stones. They’re fascinating. Mr. Franklin says stones are the only things the human race takes from the earth and makes more beautiful.” She lifted a face heavy with loss. “What will happen without him?”

“I don’t know yet,” I said, “but in the short term we fill the orders and dispatch them, and order more stock from where you usually get it. We keep to all the old routines and practices. OK?”

She nodded, relieved at least for the present.

“Except,” I added, “that it will be you who arrives first and leaves last, if you don’t mind.”

“That’s all right. I always do when Mr. Franklin’s away.”

We stared briefly at each other, not putting words to the obvious, then she switched off the showroom lights almost as if it were a symbolic act, and as we left pulled the self-locking door shut behind us.

Back in Greville’s office I wrote down for her my own address and telephone number, and said that if she felt insecure, or wanted to talk, I would be at home all evening.

“I’ll come back here tomorrow morning after I’ve seen the bank manager,” I said. “Will you be all right until then?”

She nodded shakily. “What do we call you? We can’t call you Mr. Franklin, it wouldn’t seem right.”

“How about Derek?”

“Oh no.” She was instinctively against it. “Would you mind, say ... Mr. Derek?”

“If you prefer it.” It sounded quaintly old-fashioned to me, but she was happy with it and said she would tell the others.

“About the others,” I said, “sort everyone out for me, with their jobs. There’s you, June, Lily ...

“June works the computers and the stock control,” she said. “Lily fills the orders. Tina, she’s a general assistant, she helps Lily and does some of the secretarial work. So does June. So do I, actually. We all do what’s needed, really. There are few hard and fast divisions. Except that Alfie doesn’t do much except pack up the orders. It takes him all his time.”

“And that younger guy with the spiky orange halo?”

“Jason? Don’t worry about the hair, he’s harmless. He’s our muscles. The stones are very heavy in bulk, you know. Jason shifts boxes, fills the stockrooms, does odd jobs and vacuums the carpets. He helps Alfie sometimes, or Lily, if we’re busy. Like I said, we all do anything, whatever’s needed. Mr. Franklin has never let anyone mark out a territory.”

“His words?”

“Yes, of course.”

Collective responsibility, I thought. I bowed to my brother’s wisdom. If it worked, it worked. And from the look of everything in the place, it did indeed work, and I wouldn’t disturb it.

I closed and locked the vault door with Greville’s key and asked Annette which of his large bunch overrode the electronic locks. That one, she said, pointing, separating it.

“What are all the others, do you know?”

She looked blank. “I’ve no idea.”

Car, house, whatever. I supposed I might eventually sort them out. I gave her what I hoped was a reassuring smile, sketched a goodbye to some of the others and rode down in the service elevator to find Brad out in the yard.

“Swindon,” I said. “The medical center where we were on Friday. Would you mind?”

“ ‘Course not.” Positively radiant, I thought.

It was an eighty-mile journey, ten miles beyond home. Brad managed it without further communication and I spent the time thinking of all the things I hadn’t yet done, like seeing to Greville’s house and stopping delivery of his daily paper, wherever it might come from, and telling the post office to divert his letters.... To hell with it, I thought wearily. Why did the damned man have to die?

 

The orthopedist X-rayed and unwrapped my ankle and tut-tutted. From toes to shin it looked hard, black and swollen, the skin almost shiny from the stretching.

“I advised you to rest it,” he said, a touch crossly.

“My brother died ...” I explained about the mugging, and also about having to see to Greville’s affairs.

He listened carefully, a strong sensible man with prematurely white hair. I didn’t know a jockey who didn’t trust him. He understood our needs and our imperatives, because he treated a good many of us who lived in or near the training center of Lambourn.

“As I told you the other day,” he said when I’d finished, “you’ve fractured the lower end of the fibula, and where the tibia and fibula should be joined, they’ve sprung apart. Today, they are farther apart. They’re now providing no support at all for the talus, the heel bones. You’ve now completely ripped the lateral ligament, which normally binds the ankle together. The whole joint is insecure and coming apart inside, like a mortise joint in a piece of furniture when the glue’s given way.”

“So how long will it take?” I said.

He smiled briefly. “In a crepe bandage it will hurt for about another ten days, and after that you can walk on it. You could be back on a horse in three weeks from now, if you don’t mind the stirrup hurting you, which it will. About another three weeks after that, the ankle might be strong enough for racing.”

“Good,” I said, relieved. “Not much worse than before, then.”

“It’s worse, but it won’t take much longer to mend.”

“Fine.”

He looked down at the depressing sight. “If you’re going to be doing all this traveling about, you’d be much more comfortable in a rigid cast. You could put your weight on it in a couple of days. You’d have almost no pain.”

“And wear it for six weeks? And get atrophied muscles?”

“Atrophy is a strong word.” He knew all the same that jump jockeys needed strong leg muscles above all else, and the way to keep them strong was to keep them moving. Inside plaster they couldn’t move at all and weakened rapidly. If movement cost a few twinges, it was worth it.

“Delta-cast is lightweight,” he said persuasively. “It’s a polymer, not like the old plaster of paris. It’s porous, so air circulates and you don’t get skin problems. It’s good. And I could make you a cast with a zip in it so you could take it off for physiotherapy.”

“How long before I was racing?”

“Nine or ten weeks.”

I didn’t say anything for a moment or two and he looked up fast, he eyes bright and quizzical.

“A cast, then?” he said.

“No.

He smiled and picked up a roll of crepe bandage. “Don’t fall on it again in the next month, or you’ll be back to square one.”

“I’ll try not to.”

He bandaged it all tight again from just below the knee down to my toes and back, and gave me another prescription for Distalgesic. “No more than eight tablets in twenty-four hours and not with alcohol.” He said it every time.

“Right.”

He considered me thoughtfully for a moment and then rose and went over to a cabinet where he kept packets and bottles of drugs. He came back tucking a small plastic bag into an envelope, which he held out to me.

“I’m giving you something known as DF 118s. Rather appropriate, as they’re your own initials! I’ve given you three of them. They are serious painkillers, and I don’t want you to use them unless something like yesterday happens again.”

“OK,” I said, putting the envelope into my pocket. “Thanks.”

“If you take one, you won’t feel a thing.” He smiled. “If you take two at once, you’ll be spaced out, high as a kite. If you take all three at once, you’ll be unconscious. So be warned.” He paused. “They are a last resort.”