Free Straight by Dick Francis

comfortably. “That might be the best course. We would expect the Saxony Franklin loan to be repaid on schedule, but we would welcome a dialogue with the purchasers.”
    He produced papers for me to sign and asked for extra specimen signatures so that I could put my name to Saxony Franklin checks. He didn’t ask what experience I’d had in running a business. Instead, he wished me luck.
    I rose to my crutches and shook his hand, thinking of the things I hadn’t said.
    I hadn’t told him I was a jockey, which might have caused a panic in Hatton Garden. And I hadn’t told him that, if Greville had bought one and a half million dollars’ worth of diamonds, I didn’t know where they were.
     
    “Diamonds?” Annette said. “No. I told you. We never deal in diamonds.”
    “The bank manager believes that Greville bought some recently. From something called the DTC of the CSO.”
    “The Central Selling Organization? That’s de Beers. The DTC is their Diamond Trading Company. No, no.” She looked anxiously at my face. “He can’t have done. He never said anything about it.”
    “Well, has the stock-buying here increased over the past three months?”
    “It usually does,” she said, nodding. “The business always grows. Mr. Franklin comes back from world trips with new stones all the time. Beautiful stones. He can’t resist them. He sells most of the special ones to a jewelry designer who has several boutiques in places like Knightsbridge and Bond Street. Gorgeous costume jewelry, but with real stones. Many of his pieces are unique, designed for a single stone. He has a great name. People prize some of his pieces like Fabergé’s.”
    “Who is he?”
    “Prospero Jenks,” she said, expecting my awe at least.
    I hadn’t heard of him, but I nodded all the same.
    “Does he set the stones with diamonds?” I asked.
    “Yes, sometimes. But he doesn’t buy those from Saxony Franklin.”
    We were in Greville’s office, I sitting in his swivel chair behind the vast expanse of desk, Annette sorting yesterday’s roughly heaped higgledy-piggledy papers back into the drawers and files that had earlier contained them.
    “You don’t think Greville would ever have kept diamonds in this actual office, do you?” I asked.
    “Certainly not.” The idea shocked her. “He was always very careful about security.”
    “So no one who broke in here would expect to find anything valuable lying about?”
    She paused with a sheaf of papers in one hand, her brow wrinkling.
    “It’s odd, isn’t it? They wouldn’t expect to find anything valuable lying about in an office if they knew anything about the jewelry trade. And if they didn’t know anything about the jewelry trade, why pick this office?”
    The same old unanswerable question.
    June with her incongruous motherliness brought in the typist’s chair again for me to put my foot on. I thanked her and asked if her stock control computer kept day-to-day tabs on the number and value of all the polished pebbles in the place.
    “Goodness, yes,” she said with amusement. “Dates and amounts in, dates and amounts out. Prices in, prices out, profit margin, tax, you name it, the computer will tell you what we’ve got, what it’s worth, what sells slowly, what sells fast, what’s been hanging around here wasting space for two years or more, which isn’t much.”
    “The stones in the vault as well?”
    “Sure.”
    “But no diamonds?”
    “No, we don’t deal in them.” She gave me a bright incurious smile and swiftly departed, saying over her shoulder that the Christmas rush was still going strong and they’d been bombarded by fax orders overnight.
    “Who reorders what you sell?” I asked Annette.
    “I do for ordinary stock. June tells me what we need. Mr. Franklin himself ordered the faceted stones and anything unusual.”
    She went on sorting the papers, basically unconcerned because her responsibility ended on her way home. She was wearing that day the charcoal