Free Straight by Dick Francis Page B

nothing, and I understood very well what she meant.
    “He used to say that the best security was a still tongue,” she said. “He asked us not to talk too much about our jobs to total strangers, and we all know it’s safer not to, even though we don’t have precious stones here. All the people in the trade are security mad and the diamantaires can be paranoid.”
    “What,” I said, “are diamantaires?”
    “Not what, who,” she said. “They’re dealers in rough diamonds. They get the stones cut and polished and sell them to manufacturing jewelers. Mr. Franklin always said diamonds were a world of their own, quite separate from other gemstones. There was a ridiculous boom and a terrible crash in world diamond prices during the eighties and a lot of the diamantaires lost fortunes and went bankrupt and Mr. Franklin was often saying that they must have been mad to overextend the way they had.” She paused. “You couldn’t help but know what was happening all round us in this area, where every second business is in gemstones. No one in the pubs and restaurants talked of much else. So you see, I’m sure the bank manager must be wrong. Mr. Franklin would never buy diamonds.”
    If he hadn’t bought diamonds, I thought, what the hell had he done with one point five million dollars in cash.
    Bought diamonds. He had to have done. Either that or the money was still lying around somewhere, undoubtedly carefully hidden. Either the money or diamonds to the value were lying around uninsured, and if my semisecretive ultra-security-conscious brother had left a treasure-island map with X marking the precious spot, I hadn’t yet found it. Much more likely, I feared, that the knowledge had died under the scaffolding. If it had, the firm would be forfeited to the bank, the last thing Greville would have wanted.
    If it had, a major part of the inheritance he’d left me had vanished like morning mist.
    He should have stuck to his old beliefs, I thought gloomily, and let diamonds strictly alone.
    The telephone on the desk rang again and this time Annette answered it, as she was beside it.
    “Saxony Franklin, can I help you?” she said, and listened. “No, I’m very sorry, you won’t be able to talk to Mr. Franklin personally. Could I have your name, please?” She listened. “Well, Mrs. Williams, we must most unhappily inform you that Mr. Franklin died as a result of an accident over the weekend. We are, however, continuing in business. Can I help you at all?”
    She listened for a moment or two in increasing puzzlement, then said, “Are you there? Mrs. Williams, can you hear me?” But it seemed as though there was no reply, and in a while she put the receiver down, frowning. “Whoever it was hung up.”
    “Do I gather you don’t know Mrs. Williams?”
    “No, I don’t.” She hesitated. “But I think she called yesterday too. I think I told her yesterday that Mr. Franklin wasn’t expected in the office all day, like I told everyone. I didn’t ask for her name yesterday. But she has a voice you don’t forget.”
    “Why not?”
    “Cut glass,” she said succinctly. “Like Mr. Franklin, but more so. Like you too, a bit.”
    I was amused. She herself spoke what I thought of as unaccented English, though I supposed any way of speaking sounded like an accent to someone else. I wondered briefly about the cut-glass Mrs. Williams who had received the news of the accident in silence and hadn’t asked where, or how, or when.
    Annette went off to her own office to get through to the newspapers and I picked Greville’s diary out of my trousers pocket and tried the numbers that had been unreachable the night before. The two at the back of the book turned out to be first his bookmaker and second his barber, both of whom sounded sorry to be losing his custom, though the bookmaker less so because of Greville’s habit of winning.
    My ankle heavily ached; the result, I dared say, of general depression as much as aggrieved bones