The Yellow Diamond

by Andrew Martin

  Clifford picked at her food. She said, ‘Will you excuse me?’

  It was a purely rhetorical question, because she left the basement in a hurry with her phone in her hand. Reynolds thought about the notebook she’d lifted. It was odds-on she’d taken something else from the flat as well. He remembered the gun. Quinn had booked a pistol out of the Charing Cross armoury a week or so before he’d been shot, and it had never been returned. Quinn was licensed to carry. He’d done the ‘basic shot’ course at Bisley, and it was down to Quinn that he himself had done the same course. Quinn had recommended it while congratulating him over the Gray case. Reynolds might not be so lucky another time.

  Clifford returned with rain in her hair, and her nose a little reddened. This suited her, Reynolds thought. She offered half her curry to Reynolds, and her tone had changed slightly. She said she would let him see some things that might be ‘evidentially material’ the next morning.

  When they came out of the restaurant, it had stopped raining, and Reynolds found that he liked walking next to Victoria Clifford. She was a trim figure, in a good-quality tweed coat and surprisingly modern, stacked shoes. It seemed she didn’t mind walking next to him either. They certainly took a very roundabout way to Green Park Underground. She was perhaps giving him a tour of the patch she and Quinn had been about to make their own – the territory of the super-rich – and Reynolds looked at Mayfair as if for the first time.

  The entrances of the hotels and restaurants were like the entrances of coaching inns. Lanterns or flares burned before the doors, which were guarded by liveried men in greatcoats and top hats. The women were often as perfect as women in magazines, whereas a lot of the men were laughably unprepossessing given the amount of money they obviously had; but there was a consistent sleekness. If they didn’t have much hair, they slicked it right back, which gave them a ruthless look. They favoured loafers and quilted jackets.

  On Berkeley Square, Reynolds saw men of that type going into the private clubs, leaving their Bentleys or Rollers outside with the drivers, who were similar-looking men, but who would be spending the evening playing with their smartphones. He kept seeing cigar stubs in the gutters. Cigar smoke was also very much in the air, and when two Americans walked past, one saying to the other, ‘In Bangkok, I spent twelve hundred dollars on Cubans,’ Victoria Clifford touched Reynolds’ arm, saying, ‘He means cigars, of course.’ On Berkeley Street, Reynolds found he was flattered when a Ferrari stopped for the two of them at a crossing, and he was then annoyed with himself for feeling so. They then turned left into Hay Hill, where Victoria Clifford stopped, and indicated that Reynolds should stop too.

  ‘This was where Quinn saw the abandoned car,’ she said. ‘About ten days before he was shot. I was walking with him. It was incredibly low – the car – barely up to knee-height. What would it have been?’

  Reynolds frowned.

  ‘It was orange,’ Clifford added.

  ‘A Ferrari?’ said Reynolds. (But weren’t they usually red?)

  Clifford shook her head.

  ‘A Lamborghini?’

  ‘That’s it,’ said Clifford, and they were walking on again now. ‘It was parked half on the pavement. A community policeman was standing over it – just a boy. He’d taken down the VIN number and radioed it through to control, but there were no plates on the car. Quinn tested the door, which the boy hadn’t thought to do, and it was open. Quinn leant in and touched a switch that opened a compartment you wouldn’t have known was there. He took out an envelope, gave it to the boy. “Count that,” he said, and there was ten thousand pounds in it. Then the boy carried on watching the car, occasionally looking up and down the street.’

  ‘He was giving the owner a chance to return,’ said Reynolds. ‘It’s recommended procedure.’

  ‘After a while,’ said Clifford, ‘Quinn asked the boy, “How long are you planning to wait?”’

  ‘And how long was the kid planning to wait?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Clifford, ‘because Quinn said, “I suggest this car’s been abandoned, and you should get it towed away.” The boy asked him, “Why would anyone abandon a car that must be worth quarter of a million, and with another ten thousand in the dashboard?” Quinn said, “That’s exactly why.”’

  Now a big white Jaguar was coming along Hay Hill, going too fast. A trail of orange sparks signified a cigar stub thrown from a window, like the end of a firework.

  Reynolds said, ‘How did he know the money was in the dash?’

  ‘He didn’t know. But that’s where the cash is often kept – in special compartments. So you see the car has to be right outside the shop – preferably on a double-yellow line.’

  The owner of the Lamborghini, Reynolds thought, had been winding up the police, letting them know he was beyond their reach. Because what were they going to do? Fine him a hundred and fifty quid for illegal parking? So the moral appeared to be that Quinn hated the super-rich? But Reynolds believed there was more to it than that.

  They turned into Old Bond Street, where the Christmas decorations were up … as if it wasn’t Christmas every day for the regular shoppers here. The theme appeared to be gold, so that was about right.

  By the time they reached the Tube station, it was raining again. Just inside the entrance of the station – which seemed to belong in a different city from the one that harboured Bond Street – they agreed to meet the next morning at the Down Street office of the unit. As they approached the ticket barriers, Reynolds said to Clifford, ‘You have a flat in Belgravia?’ because that’s what he’d heard.

  ‘Victoria,’ she said.

  ‘Then it must be easy for you to remember where you live.’

  She didn’t exactly laugh, but she said, ‘It’s also a Victorian flat.’

  Reynolds’ phone rang, and so he answered while Clifford went through the barriers alone. The caller was his line manager, Detective Superintendent Ray Flanagan of the Homicide and Serious Crime Command. Flanagan was a restless, red-faced Irishman, forever shuffling the pack of the murder teams he oversaw. He did this for reasons known only to himself, sometimes with good results and sometimes not.

  ‘Evening, sir,’ said Reynolds, as he watched Clifford step onto the escalator and descend. He had thought she might glance back his way. She did not.

  ‘What did you make of Victoria Clifford?’ Flanagan asked, in his fast, flurried way. He appeared to be at some sort of noisy social event.

  ‘How do you mean, sir?’ said Reynolds.

  ‘Did you get anything out of her? About Quinn.’

  ‘Apparently she’s going to give me some stuff that might be evidentially material.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Tomorrow.’

  ‘Well, that’s very good of her I must say. She’s not there with you now?’

  ‘She’s just got on the Tube. I had the idea she doesn’t see why she should be very forthcoming since the unit’s no sooner been set up than it’s going to be closed down. And she’ll be out of a job.’

  ‘Doesn’t she want to catch the bad sod who shot her boss?’ Reynolds believed that she did, but that in the meantime she was on a power trip. He said something like that to Flanagan, who said, ‘She’s a complicated woman. And it would be as well to bear in mind that she was probably in love with the man.’

  ‘Has he died, sir?’

  ‘Died?’ said Flanagan. ‘As far as I know he’s in intensive care under armed guard. Look, it’s late and I’m knackered so let’s get this sorted now.’

  This was – what was the phrase? – a non sequitur. It put Reynolds on his guard. Flanagan was accelerating towards something big.

  ‘We play it like this,’ Flanagan said. ‘Quinn’s unit – it’s going to be carrying on. You’re to be the new principal, and you’ll be working from the office Quinn created in that little street in Mayfair.’

  ‘You’re transferring me from West End Murder?’

  ‘I am. Just until Quinn recovers.’

 
Which he probably wouldn’t.

  ‘Does Lilley want me off Murder?’

  ‘Nothing to do with Lilley. It’s all cleared with Croft.’

  Deputy Assistant Commissioner Croft of Specialist Crime and Ops: Quinn’s boss.

  ‘So now Victoria Clifford’s my secretary?’

  ‘Personal assistant. Don’t for Christ’s sake call her a secretary. The woman’s a big feminist, you know.’

  Reynolds had had her down as a Tory. Perhaps you could be both.

  ‘I have to go now,’ said Flanagan, who was threatening to be overwhelmed by whatever was making the noise in the background. ‘You’re telling me that so far you’ve no notion of what Quinn was up to?’

  ‘Hold on, sir. Is Croft going to be my supervisor?’

  But Flanagan had gone.

  Reynolds moved over to the barrier, which didn’t seem to know that he’d just been put in charge of an OCU, since it refused his Oyster card. His reward for topping up the card was half an hour on a packed Piccadilly Line train to Wood Green, then twenty minutes on the bus that roared noisily but slowly through the rain towards his flat. Reynolds was trying to figure out why he’d been transferred to the new unit. Was he being promoted? That would have been an obvious question to ask Flanagan. It was the first thing Caroline would ask when he got to the flat. Perhaps he’d be ‘acting up’ as a DCI, in which case his pay would also go up. He currently earned £57,657 per annum. Had he ever heard of a mere DI running an OCU? No.

  Another way of putting the same question was to ask why he’d been given Victoria Clifford as a project. Or could it be that she had chosen him? Had she called Croft when she’d left the Indian restaurant in the middle of the meal, and said, ‘I’ll have Reynolds. He’s passed the test’? Reynolds believed Clifford was as close to Croft as Quinn had been. Croft was elusive. His nickname was ‘Undercroft’, because he always went under rather than over. It was not impossible that Croft had known what Quinn was on to when he’d been shot.

  There was nobody on the dark and rainy streets of what the estate agents called the Wood Green–Palmers Green borders. The double ‘green’ was a provocation to Reynolds, since neither suburb was exactly leafy. The houses were not very big, and yet subdivided, and Reynolds always thought of the way corpses were stacked in the Met’s forensic suite attached to the Westminster Public Mortuary … the very likely destination of Quinn, where the bullet would be removed from his brain without need of anaesthetic. A doctor had once told him that there was less need to remove a bullet quickly these days. The risk of infection was less because bullets had got cleaner somehow. It was progress of a sort, Reynolds supposed, as he turned into his own road.

  Reynolds’ flat occupied one third of a house, and this was the revelation of London life to a northerner like himself: you wouldn’t even have a house to yourself.

  Caroline was in the flat, with Newsnight turned down and the central heating turned right up. It was never the other way round. She was on the sofa, surrounded by property details because they were trying to buy a property together. At first ‘property’ had meant a house, but now they had lowered their sights to another flat. This present flat was Reynolds’. Caroline had another, smaller still – way beyond even Palmers Green – and currently let out. Reynolds didn’t see the point of buying another flat; he already had a flat. He had not quite said as much to Caroline.

  They kissed and she asked why he was late, which was the kind of thing he wished she wouldn’t ask, which was why she asked it.

  ‘I’ve been transferred to a new unit that’s investigating the super-rich.’

  ‘That’s ironic,’ she said.

  5

  In her rambling and dusty mansion flat, Victoria Clifford opened the fridge. Was there any Sainsbury’s Prosecco left? She ought not to be so bothered. Yes, a whole half-bottle, and she poured a glass. The cat from the next-door flat was on the window ledge, like valuable china on a mantelpiece, glowing white against the darkness of the night. The cat was called Debbie, preposterously enough. It got onto the ledge via the down-pointing branch of the big oak outside. That branch was shaped like a fork of lightning, Clifford always thought. She put the glass on the table, and opened the sash window. With a brief miaow that said, ‘What took you?’ the cat dropped onto the kitchen lino and began slinking around. That’s right, Clifford thought, ignore the person who’s just done you a big favour. She took a bowl and poured cat food into it. The cat food was dry, and reminded her of cornflakes, so she kept it in the cupboard with her cornflakes, which was the kind of thing you could do if you lived alone. The cat had come to regard this as its second home, which was Victoria’s fault for feeding it. She would quite like a cat of her own, but she mustn’t buy one, because then she’d be a cat lady.

  Glass in hand, she wandered through several rooms, hung with the dusty and undistinguished Victorian paintings she had inherited and never really bothered about until recently. She had started to take an interest … and then something had caused her to go off the subject of pictorial art. She finished up in the study, where she sat down and switched on her laptop, which was old and came to life very slowly and groggily. It was quite dirty as well, she noticed; she ought to get one of those expensive packs of wipes that you were supposed to use instead of a damp cloth with a bit of Fairy Liquid on it. Then again, she might soon have to rip out the hard disk and throw it in the river, since the bloody thing could not, apparently, be destroyed. The sea would be better, being bigger, and she saw herself walking the length of the pier at Brighton with the thing in her handbag.

  Reynolds … She liked his northern accent: quite mellifluous, even if it signified lack of breeding. She had frightened him a bit. She wasn’t sure how tough he was, and he was going to have to be very tough. He was well regarded at the Yard, but not a flyer. Well, he was a semi-flyer. Not noisy or political enough to be truly airborne, but he knew his worth, and she detected a streak of vanity, negatively manifest. He saw himself as being above angling for drinks with a Chief Super. He had come top Met-wide in his sergeant’s exams, or maybe second. He’d probably finish up with five years as a Detective Superintendent before retiring, which might be considered a waste of his first-class degree in law. But then she was biased on that point. She would like to have been a lawyer herself, and she couldn’t imagine why Reynolds had not practised. He had a live-in partner. The two of them had a flat in Palmers Green, London N13, no apostrophe. There were no children, which was on the way to being odd, since he was forty-three.

  One way or another, it was now or never for DI Reynolds, and she believed that deep down, he knew that. He’d blotted his copybook only that one time, in the Clubs Squad. Got too close to a girl. She’d been eighteen; he’d have been in his late thirties. He’d protected her, acted in a chivalrous manner, but still … too close.

  She had four emails. The first was from Dorothy Carter, with whom she thought she had fallen out over certain aspects of Dorothy’s husband’s behaviour. The Spouse Mouse, she called him. It was amazing how so meek and inoffensive a man could be so offensive. He could speak French, and therefore he did. He would speak it unnecessarily, as for instance when speaking to English people who are all speaking English. He wore a bracelet – a sort of strip of rag around his wrist. He was sixty years old, for God’s sake. And he chuckled. It was hard to define chuckling, but you knew it when you heard it. Dorothy Carter’s email had been sent from her Blackberry. ‘God, Vicky,’ Dorothy began, ‘don’t you ever switch your phone on …?’

  Get on with it, can’t you?

  ‘I’m up from Bucks for a meeting, practically on your doorstep. A solo jaunt so I’m free and easy. Lunch in a pub? Dot xx.’ An olive branch. Another one. The first had been something about a pub quiz, and Clifford had never got beyond those two words. She obviously hadn’t connected the news reports of the shooting with Clifford; or hadn’t read the news reports. The second was from her better and closer – or at least older – friend, Rachel Reade, sayi
ng she was so sorry to hear about Quinn, and was there anything she could do? That was more like it. Rachel Reade said she would pray for him, which reminded her, did she want to go to Mass on Sunday? They could have lunch afterwards at Wilton’s if she was in funds; or perhaps Evensong in which case dinner to follow? It was a whole year since they’d been to Wilton’s. And by the way here was a link to a good pedestal desk going for £600. Victoria clicked on the link … she didn’t like the desk; and there was no Evensong at St George’s. St George’s was C of E. Rachel Reade was C of E. Clifford was a Catholic who occasionally attended C of E services. So why did she know there was no Evensong at St George’s, whilst Rachel Reade … It was not worth going into.

  The third email was from World of Interiors. Did she want to renew her subscription? She did, oddly enough. Clifford was trying to take her Victorian mansion flat in hand, and Rachel Reade was trying to take her Victorian mansion flat in hand. They would get all their fireplaces working (they had about seven between them), then the plan was that they’d invite around a good-looking man that Rachel Reade knew who was sometimes on Antiques Road-show, and was a great expert on Victorian furniture. Victoria would have him for drinks, then Rachel would have him for dinner, all on the same night, poor man. Rachel’s aim seemed not so much to get off with this chap, as to have him around and observe him not being grossly offended by the decor of her flat.

  That was her emailing done. Nothing needed replying to immediately, and she would let Dorothy Carter stew for a couple of weeks.

  She googled Reynolds’ street, and was none the wiser. Some appropriately dour female poet had lived in Palmers Green. She couldn’t recall the name. She closed the laptop, thinking of Reynolds. He had the figure for a good suit. Maybe she would point him in the way of Hackett’s. Quinn thought the Hackett profile rather spivvy, but Victoria had liked the Prince of Wales check, and she’d got Quinn into a Hackett’s suit eventually. Then of course, he’d worn it more than some of his Savile Row ones. In Brighton, he’d arrested Kennett in that suit after a proper car chase. Unfortunately for the aesthetics of the operation, the armed support officers had made Quinn wear body armour on top of the suit. She thought of Kennett, that gorilla of a man, murderer and drug dealer. He was very well connected; had friends in low places. His tentacles could stretch out from Wakefield nick or wherever he was, but she knew for certain he wasn’t behind the shooting of Quinn.