The Yellow Diamond

by Andrew Martin

  Reynolds had something of the look of Quinn generally. Eventually, he’d be receding in the same way. There was something of Jude Law about him, as there had been about Quinn in his nightclubbing days. Victoria liked Jude Law. When he was Hamlet in the West End, she went four times, admitting only two to Rachel Reade. Reynolds did not shiver his leg while sitting down, and she believed that he would not whistle, even if feeling happy. A lot of detectives whistled.

  Victoria was in the kitchen again, watching the cat cleaning itself under the table. Water. She filled a bowl, and put it near the cat. The cat got up and walked away from the water. That was it. She picked the cat up, and set it back on the window ledge. The cat tried to look as if it couldn’t handle this situation, but Victoria knew very well that it could.

  She closed the window and went into her bedroom. She opened the locked drawer, and took out the red notebook and inspected it carefully. She thought about putting it under her pillow. But she put it back in the drawer alongside the Glock pistol. She locked the drawer again. She sat on the edge of the bed, and took the handkerchief from the sleeve of her cardigan. She blew her nose, and closed her eyes. On sitting down she had automatically crossed her legs as she tended to do. Now she uncrossed them and smoothed her skirt. She closed her eyes tighter. She was praying for Quinn.

  6

  On that same night of Monday 8 December, Queen for a Day was bounding east through the Straits of Gibraltar, fully rigged in twenty knots of south-westerly wind, which was more than enough for her to have passed two big motor cruisers since Malta. That, Captain Grant Williams hoped, would have been a salutary experience for those aboard the cruisers: to be outstripped by a craft both morally and aesthetically superior. The Queen flew with white wings, and was just about the most gorgeous craft Captain Williams had seen afloat, let alone worked on. She was three-masted, like a modern-day clipper, but with an Alustar aluminium hull and full automation. All evening, as he’d been standing at the wheel, Williams had been enjoying watching the automatic foredeck lights coming on in stages. First came a gentle illumination to mark the coming of dusk and keep the navigation lights company. Then the compass in its housing had begun to glow a pretty orange, after which appeared a few more fairy lights for cocktail hour, followed by a mellower, bluer ambience for any late-night smooching. But there were no cocktail drinkers, diners or dancers this evening, just Captain Williams and his skeleton crew of seven.

  First mate Vaughan, who was on the next watch, was asleep in the master cabin, which he was not really supposed to be occupying, but they were two nights out of Monaco before Captain Williams realised he was occupying it, the Queen being so big … So Williams had let that go. Vaughan liked the master cabin, as you would do, given all that bespoke carpentry in Burmese teak and the sixty-inch plasma screen. Phillips, the bosun, was up in the crow’s nest. It was the first time Phillips had been on a boat with a crow’s nest as high as sixty metres, and an elevator to reach it by, and he was still not over the novelty. He’d said he wanted to look at the lights of Tunis from what was the equivalent in height of a twenty-storey building, but Captain Williams believed he was smoking weed.

  On the bridge deck with Williams was Jones the cook. Jones wasn’t normally a watch-stander, but he’d brought Williams a hot chocolate and a cigar, and then just hung about. Actually, he’d gone away for a minute, only to return with a can of beer, which he ought not to be drinking on the bridge any more than Phillips ought to be getting stoned in the crow’s nest, but he was savouring the Queen from the best vantage point, centre-stage, and Williams had thought, yes, the guy should look and learn.

  You couldn’t handle an eighty-metre schooner like Queen for a Day with any fewer than eight, even with everything being automatic, but they weren’t exactly overtaxed. An even less strenuous time had been in prospect: a month of sun-worshipping as sole occupants (apart from the servants) of the owner’s villa at St Barth’s, before all the guests turned up. But three days previously, when they were just off the Azores, Williams had received a call on the satellite phone from the owner’s private office. Williams was to turn around and head back to Port Hercules, Monaco. It was not his place to ask why. ‘Might I know the reason?’ was the nearest you came to it with those sorts of guys, and you were only allowed a couple of those before you were out on your ear.

  He’d seen the madness on the days when the Queen was fully staffed, and cruising off the Riviera in party mode. Fifty miles out in the Med, one of the guests would say he wanted all the black towels replaced with white ones even if that meant calling in at the next port … or all the black towels replaced with other black towels that had to be exactly the same except not the same actual towels. He’d seen that sort of perversity, and the more you saw it, the less you questioned it. Williams regarded himself as the captain of a cruise ship where all the cruisers were psychologically disturbed, unhinged by money, so that the pillows on their beds had to be propped up vertically or they’d have a fit; no bottle of toiletries must ever be less than half full; the temperature of the hot tub must be tested in advance by means of a servant sitting in it, like the person who tasted the king’s food.

  In most cases, it would do your head in to even wonder why. Maybe Williams had been asked to turn back because something was wrong, but what could be wrong when you had a couple of billion stashed in the Caymans, as Captain Williams believed was the case with the owner? Would the owner be waiting to board in Monaco? He could just as easily have ’coptered out to Gib and Williams could have called in there to collect the guy. If all he wanted was a lift to the villa at St Barth’s, then why wasn’t he jetting out from Northolt? If he wanted to cruise there, then why hadn’t he joined the Queen when she set out a fortnight ago? When you had that sort of cash, the options were limitless; therefore you might very easily miss the best option. You might actually find that you had more money than sense.

  But Captain Williams doubted that the owner wanted to cruise out to St Barth’s. That would take three weeks, and the owner had never spent more than two or three nights aboard as far as Williams could recollect. Williams liked the owner. Unlike many of his spoilt guests and other associates, he was a class act, restrained, indulging in nothing more decadent, from what Williams could see, than black tea and reading books. He was never seen in the media lounge, more often in the library. Williams too would often browse there. The owner had all the right nautical titles: Conrad, Forester, O’Brien. The dude was actually the spitting image of Joseph Conrad, Williams liked to think, and Williams knew about Conrad, because he was the only truly cool person to have lived in Lowestoft, where Captain Williams had been born. Whether he could really sail himself, Williams had never talked to the owner long enough to discover, but he did have the looks of a sea dog, with that cap of grey hair, neatly trimmed grey beard, deep-set blue eyes, and he was always beautifully turned out.

  But in May of last year, Williams had found him in the water, about thirty yards off the stern when they’d been half a mile off Nice, going nowhere in particular but having a cruise about the Riviera. The owner’s business partner had been on board at the time: Rostov, the original Russian bear. Also Porter, slathered in sunblock and wearing his pressed khaki shorts. Williams himself had gone out for the owner in the tender. He’d said, ‘Sorry to put you out, Captain. Absurd business – sat on the railing; slipped.’ And that had been all that was said.

  One of many mysteries about the owner was why he had no wife or long-term partner. At the age of sixty-three or so he must be one of the two or three most eligible guys on the planet. He’d had a wife once, evidently, hence that very hot daughter of his. Williams had spent a very happy half hour a couple of years back watching her playing about in the infinity pool while they drifted aimlessly in the Leewards.

  The Queen took a mighty – but still graceful – leap forwards, and glittering spots of spray flew onto the illuminated windows of the wheel house. Any more of that and the six wiper blades would start swin
ging. ‘Might want to power down those topsails,’ observed Jones the cook.

  Williams grinned back but he was shaking his head. This force five was undoubtedly strengthening, but for now he was running free with his hundred-and-fifty-million-dollar Queen, and he meant to enjoy the moment.

  7

  On Tuesday morning, Reynolds was heading along Old Bond Street, which was to the south, he realised for the first time, of New Bond Street, but he believed it was all just ‘Bond Street’ to the super-rich. It had turned cold overnight, and the slow-moving clouds threatened snow, but there were also golden gleams in the sky, matching the gold of the Christmas decorations overhead, and the gilded shop signs: Prada, Tiffany, Cartier, Rolex … whose golden clock showed ten past ten. Most of the shops had banners or flags, twisting in the occasional gusts, like the flags of embassies. It made a change to be coming to work this way, rather than along the battered, windy streets of Charing Cross, which had taken him to the headquarters of West End Murder.

  Come seven o’clock in the morning, he thought he’d hardly slept, the flat being so stuffy. But he must have slept at some point because he was suddenly in Quinn’s flat, in the little bedroom, and it had become one of those mocked-up historic rooms you see behind glass in a museum. There had been a waxwork figure in old-fashioned clothes lying on the bed: Quinn. The figure had come to life, sitting up and opening a locker by the bed, and taking out a book, a sort of ledger, and this had contained all the details of the investigation Quinn had been engaged upon at the time of his shooting, and all the details that accounted for his shooting. He held out the ledger for Reynolds to take, and there the dream ended.

  Reynolds watched a long black Bentley going north along the street, as if window-shopping. It was impossible to see inside because the windows were tinted. The registration was DUBAI 1563. The owner would presumably get round to giving it a British registration before too long. The car was a deeply polished black – ‘lacquered’, that was the word, like a grand piano. Reynolds was glad not to see a recklessly parked Lamborghini in the street, being attended by a young constable of the Safer Neighbourhoods team, because that would be an indication he was set on exactly the same course as Quinn. And look how that had ended up.

  Reynolds walked on, thinking of that one proper conversation he’d had with Quinn at the Yard. Donnie Gray had been what you might call a problem drinker, in that he stabbed people in cheap pubs when drunk, twice with fatal results. Quinn had very charmingly asked questions about the case in a way that allowed Reynolds to shine. After Reynolds had given a description of Gray, Quinn had said, ‘So he was an alcoholic?’

  ‘And a miser,’ Reynolds said. ‘It was always the cheapest pubs. That’s how we tracked him.’

  ‘But there are many cheap pubs,’ Quinn had said.

  ‘But Gray would look for the pub that was absolutely the cheapest in any given area of North London.’

  ‘By what benchmark?’

  ‘The price of a pint.’

  ‘A pint of what?’ Quinn had asked, smiling.

  ‘London Particular. A real ale, sold all over London. At first we just thought that’s his favoured tipple but it began to seem that …’

  ‘He never drank anything else?’

  ‘Exactly. We knew he was committed to it, because he once assaulted a barman who told him it was off.’

  ‘And he never revisited a pub where he’d done an attack?’

  ‘No. So then he would have to find the next cheapest pub that sold London Particular. We had a lot of help from the brewery.’

  Quinn had smiled again, nodding. A less classy individual would have said, ‘Good work,’ or some such thing; come over all CEO. Reynolds had liked to think that Quinn had identified in him a possible successor or protégé; and perhaps that really had been the case.

  Reynolds stopped and looked at some diamond-encrusted watches in the window of Cartier. He was joined by a futuristic-looking Japanese woman, who might actually be able to afford what was in the window. Reynolds turned away … and saw a Person of Interest.

  The Person of Interest was looking into the window of Graff, the jewellers over the road, while taking a long time about lighting a cigarette. He wore the slicked-back hair popular in New Bond Street and his coat was over his shoulders: mafioso was probably the intended effect. The man was looking at a diamond necklace that had an entire small display window to itself. The doorman stationed outside Graff did not look at the man, but he had an earpiece in his ear and a microphone on his lapel, through which he now spoke to someone inside the shop. ‘Standby,’ Reynolds supposed he had said, whereupon the Person of Interest lit his cigarette, and walked on, pleased. That was all he’d been trying to do: wind up the doorman, just like the Lamborghini man.

  As Reynolds himself walked on, the sky was darkening over Bond Street, and something very like snow was beginning to fall.

  8

  In the office at the top of the tall, thin house in Down Street, Victoria Clifford waited by the window with arms folded. She looked down through slowly descending sleet at the disused Tube station. It had closed in 1932. The mystery, for Quinn, had been why they’d built it in the first place. ‘Nobody in Mayfair ever needed the Tube,’ he would muse. They preferred chauffeur-driven cars, then as now.

  You wouldn’t have thought residents of Mayfair – even at this scruffier western end of it – would need a newsagent-cum-sweetshop any more than they’d need a Tube station, but one of those now occupied part of the facade of the closed-down station. Mini-Mart, it called itself. There was an appealing dowdiness about Down Street, a forgotten quality. Up at the north end, there was a tapas bar that kept itself to itself, and opposite that was that blackened church that didn’t appear to have an entrance. The church stood on the corner of Brick Street, which harboured an outpost of Justerini & Brooks, Wine Merchants, just to remind you this was Mayfair.

  She had set Quinn’s desk up at right angles to the window. The idea had been that he could watch the door, or look down into the street. His desk, like hers, was a tacky, veneered job brought over from the Yard by one of these white-van men who seemed to do so much back-up for the Met, and who, she wouldn’t have been very surprised to learn, was actually some sort of detective.

  The sleet, or whatever it was, had stopped. The sky was now straightforwardly purple. Somebody had written a song about Down Street Tube station, oddly enough. Steve Harley and Cockney Rebel. She and Quinn liked Cockney Rebel. Come Up and See Me. In her mind’s eye, she saw Quinn dancing at Tramp in about 1979. He had a subtle, shuffling style, always with fag in hand, and sometimes with a suspicion of eyeliner. She began thinking of the half-dozen times she’d slept with Quinn. While doing paperwork at the Yard, on days very much like this, they would both be overcome with the urge to behave badly. So Quinn might buy a bottle of wine, and they’d check into one of the many dowdy little hotels near Victoria. Quinn would climb into the bed, and she might sit on a chair with no clothes on, and she’d accept one of his cigarettes, and they’d talk, both before and after the sex. Why had that stopped happening? She supposed that she and Quinn had become more respectable, like those little hotels near Victoria. And in both their cases, those afternoons had represented a divergence from the norm – that being homosexuality for Quinn and celibacy for her.

  Victoria Clifford looked away from the window. She’d hung a couple of decent coats on the back of the door. They were old ones of Quinn’s, but might be considered unisex. She’d placed Quinn’s Lalique ashtray on what was to have been his desk. He’d want it there if he ever came back. She’d taken the ashtray from Quinn’s flat, right under the nose of the man Chamberlain – also the notebook, and … a couple of other items besides. If Quinn died, then Chamberlain would execute the will. That was a bad look-out, since he was an idiot. Big computer terminals sat on each desk, and each was like a ball and chain, by which she and Quinn were to have been kept connected to the Yard, via email and intranet. The white-van man had inst
alled these, and the telephones … and he’d obviously made the old-fashioned entryphone work because it was buzzing now. She picked up the receiver, pressed the button.

  ‘Victoria?’ she heard. ‘It’s Blake Reynolds.’

  Blake. Ridiculous name – a little flash of romanticism from the suburban parents. They must have been thinking of Sexton Blake.

  ‘Top floor,’ she said, and she pressed the button to admit him. He’d sounded a bit nervous, which was all to the good. She waited a moment before replacing the receiver, in case he should mutter to himself, or clear his throat, or show some other sign of weakness. He did not, but a few seconds had passed before she heard the door slam behind him. Perhaps his eye had been caught by the brass plaques announcing the other tenants, and he’d read the names: Al Hasan Risk Modelling; Fincham Acquisitions; some estate-management firm and D’Arblay Fine Art. In spite of all the money implied by those names, the lift didn’t work. So Reynolds wouldn’t appear for a while.

  There was a small mirror on the mantelpiece; it had mainly been put there for Quinn’s benefit, but she walked over to it now and straightened her hair. She’d walked through the rain to get here, and she wanted to look her best for Reynolds, who did bear a slight resemblance to Jude Law, after all. She then walked over to the desk she had designated for herself. On it lay the notebook, on top of that the two memory sticks, and the invitation to the drinks given by Plyushkin’s Gardeners. She heard footsteps on the stairs, and then in the corridor. Reynolds, in his Marks & Spencer shoes. He was a decent man, so he would knock. She heard the knock. ‘Enter,’ she called out, and there was Reynolds in the doorway. He hadn’t slept much the night before. He wore a mac that didn’t suit him and he carried an unforgivably telescoped umbrella and a fairly reprehensible laptop bag. But his hair was wavy and grey in just the way she liked. It was actually better hair than Jude Law’s. He looked around the room, then at her, blushing slightly. He smiled.