The Yellow Diamond

by Andrew Martin

  The little girl was now laughing, so her mother clicked to what was going on. He saw it from their point of view: a coin climbing over the backs of his fingers like a little living thing, from index finger to pinkie and back. The two were seeing more skill than they knew. Cooper had devoted a good six months of his boyhood to practising the coin roll, and that had been in the pre-decimal days with the half-crown. A big coin was the half-crown, so you had the leverage. It was not so easy with a two-pence piece, the biggest coin available to the modern-day roller, and it was harder still with the ten-pence.

  Why, in actual fact, was he rolling the coin? In the restaurant in Mayfair the night before – the Wolseley – he had found himself shuffling cards one-handed while waiting for the bottle of Rioja to arrive. He always carried a pack of cards. They were his calling cards in a manner of speaking, a means of showing his skills to interested parties, who might become paying customers. But he seldom brought them out in a public place without prompting. Cooper had not been showing off. He could honestly say that he had grown out of showing off. No, it must have been down to the nervous energy left over from his adventure with the Russian girl. That had still not worn off, even though it had been nearly three months ago.

  They were approaching Oxford Circus, and the mother and daughter were preparing to alight. The girl still watched him though, so he wrapped up the show by disappearing the coin. ‘Isn’t he a clever man?’ said the mother, and it did seem that the little girl agreed, because she was still staring at Cooper from the platform when the train rolled away.

  Bond Street next stop, and Cooper would be back in Mayfair. He ought to keep away: stick to his home turf in East London. Better still, take the foreign holiday he could now afford. He fancied the Algarve – for the golf. In Mayfair, he was only putting himself on more and more CCTV, but he was beginning to feel he belonged in Mayfair, in his new outfits, with the restaurant guide always in his pocket, together with that certain other item. Mayfair had been the scene of his greatest triumph; it was just a pity he couldn’t walk around in the alpaca coat, but Almond had warned him off wearing it ever again; and he wasn’t to sell it or give it to Oxfam either. He ought to have been insulted because the idea of the coat was to cover up Cooper’s suit, which was his cabaret suit (he’d been told to wear his best one). But that had not passed muster with Almond or the girl. He had to admit that the alpaca had really done something for him. With all that hair – on the coat and on his head – he had felt a bit like the yeti walking into the Arcade, but he had looked the part, he knew.

  He thought of Almond’s rooms, above that posh antique shop. All the cameras at the entrance, the little lift like a fancy birdcage; and then the room at the top full of all the diamond-dealing gear. Very high-tech it was: computers, scales, lights … Difficult to draw the man out about it though. Cagey – that was Almond. It was incredible that he’d owned such an item as the alpaca coat, even if he’d never worn it. It had been a gift, he’d said, and a sort of semi-joke. When Almond had presented it to Cooper … that was the nearest Cooper had come to seeing him smile. It had been the day before the job, and the girl had been present. She’d briefly taken off her dark glasses to look at Cooper in the coat: ‘The power of cool,’ she’d said. It was one of only about five remarks she’d made to Cooper, which included her suddenly saying she would be coming into the shop with him.

  Well, she was not a girl you could say ‘no’ to, and it turned out she’d had an instinctive understanding of the art of distraction. When they’d come out and he’d given her the lifted ring, she’d kissed him on the cheek. ‘Thank you my friend,’ she’d said. He didn’t know her name, and as far as he knew, she didn’t know his either. She was always in half disguise, and her hair kept changing, but of course he’d know her again, and she hadn’t seemed to mind about that. Presumably she knew what Almond had told him: that if he ever spoke about what had happened, or attempted to contact her, the consequences would be serious.

  In Cooper’s fantasy, she was the daughter he’d never had. He didn’t see her very often – in this fantasy – so when he did see her, he made a big fuss of her. They were kept apart much of the time by the demands of his career. You see, he had a top-rating show on US cable and he had to keep it going for the sake of his support act, Penn and Teller. The rest of the time he was in … He was in the Algarve, where his golf handicap was …

  It was silly.

  He was standing in Hanover Square, on the west side, and he hardly knew how he’d got there. He stopped and checked his top pocket. Yes, still there – the forty grand’s worth. A motorcyclist was sitting on his bike nearby, watching him – Cooper thought – through the dark visor of his helmet. So Cooper walked fast to St George Street, the exit from the Square to the south side. The motorcyclist pulled away, so it was just Cooper in St George Street, with the grey church of the same name, the grey sky … and a very attractive-looking restaurant. He walked over. Like an old Pullman carriage, it was: soft lighting, cosy, with individual booths. It was empty just now, between lunchtime and evening service. There was a menu outside, and Cooper read it as the church bell began to chime four. ‘Roast Norfolk pheasant, cabbage, quince compote, sausage roll.’ Sausage roll! He didn’t know about that. He assumed they didn’t mean the sort of thing you got in Greggs.

  It was lonely in St George Street when the bells had stopped ringing. He headed south, towards Piccadilly. It was always a tonic to be on Piccadilly with money in your pocket, or in his case his credit card and the forty grand’s worth. In the event, he crossed Piccadilly and found himself on St James’s Street. He was looking in a hat shop. Perhaps he should buy a fedora for a hundred and twenty pounds, bring that ‘Man of Mystery’ touch to the cabaret act.

  He was now outside a tobacconist’s. They actually had the wooden Indian standing outside – the universal sign of the tobacconist. ‘Smoking lounge upstairs,’ he read. Should he go in? Trouble was, he didn’t smoke. He had to remember he was not one of the idle rich. There was no point nudging towards his credit limit just for the sake of it, and think of the interest. He’d better cash in his forty grand’s worth sooner rather than later, he thought, as he moved towards the window of the wine merchants called Berry Brothers. It was here that he made his plan. He would buy a decent bottle of wine, and take it to Almond’s place off Bond Street, and he would try to realise his forty grand that very evening. He’d need a bit of Dutch courage for that, so he’d have a couple of G & T’s on the way.

  15

  There had been no Prince of Wales check in a thirty-eight left in Hackett, so Victoria Clifford had taken Reynolds over the road to Ede & Ravenscroft. He had wanted the chalk stripe on grey, single-breasted. But that was parody City gent, which the Russians would think absurd. He had the figure for the hourglass, so they’d come down to two double-breasteds: the charcoal or the mid-blue. She’d had some fun with the trying on. ‘Put your hands in your pockets!’ ‘Take your hands out of your pockets!’ He knew absolutely nothing of how side vents should work, but he knew he looked good. Reynolds and that full-length mirror had rapidly been developing a relationship. She’d let him make the final choice, and he’d gone for the blue, which seemed fortuitous, because Quinn had one just the same. He’d put it on his credit card. She’d tried to steel him for the fight with finance officer Trevor Kennedy. Did Kennedy really think you could deal with billionaires in a Marks & Spencer suit? He probably did because he lived in Orpington. She was quite looking forward to the fight over the suit. There was a clear policing reason for the purchase. Being well presented was an important part of being professional. The standard of dress shall be smart, fit for purpose and convey a favourable impression of the service. She was very familiar with the dress-code toolkit.

  Unfortunately, the trousers had to be taken up, so the M&S suit had had to do for the Mayfair Gazette photo. It would be in the paper the day after tomorrow: the Thursday. The thought that she was trying to launch a new Quinn made her feel guilty
about the old one. And so, at four, she’d gone to the Church of the Immaculate Conception in Farm Street, to light a candle for him. When she’d told Reynolds she would be doing this, he’d remarked, inanely, ‘I didn’t know you were a Catholic.’ What else did he think had screwed her up?

  She had been thinking about Reynolds and clothes as a way of not thinking about what she was about to see, in the private room of St Michael’s Hospital …

  The nurse introduced her to the doctor and they walked fast down a bright, pale-blue corridor. Something about the pale blueness told you it was raining outside. The doctor was talking to her over his shoulder. She knew his surname only: Henderson. He must be one of those rugby-playing types of medical men; muscular Christian: a big man, yet not big enough for the suit he wore. As a consultant anaesthetist, he was presumably excused the white coat. What was the posh sort of rugby? He would play that version of course. Half of them were called Toby. She looked down, and, yes, brown shoes. He obviously wasn’t going to stand still for a minute, so Victoria talked to his back.

  ‘Is there any prospect of a full recovery?’

  ‘I wouldn’t rule it out.’

  ‘Have you taken the bullet out?’

  ‘Not as yet.’

  He had a lot of other things to be getting on with, no doubt.

  The nurse, walking behind, said to Clifford’s back: ‘There’s no infection, so that’s good. Here we are, on the left.’

  Where was the armed guard?

  The doctor wheeled left abruptly, in a way that made Clifford think the nurse had been speaking for his benefit. Clifford lowered her head as she walked through the door. She thought of the big night out that she had coming up. She would wear her Jigsaw party frock; no, the faux-Chanel. She looked up. Quinn was sitting half upright. Because of the oxygen mask on his face he looked almost like the pilot of a supersonic plane, and handsome with it, although they’d brushed his hair the wrong way (which meant, she slowly realised, that his head was not bandaged). It was as if during the course of the flight he’d been hit by a strong wind coming in from the left – and of course they’d got him in some kind of green smock instead of the pale-blue silk Hilditch & Key pyjamas favoured by the conscious Quinn. In her shocked state, she must have made some remark on his posture, because the doctor was lecturing her about how it was normally thirty degrees, but in Quinn’s case more for some strange reason.

  Quinn, Victoria Clifford was thinking, seemed to have no shortage of visitors, but they were all robots. There were half a dozen clustered about the bed and the nurse was introducing them to Clifford: ventilator, monitor, probe … That last one was going into his brain, where the pressure was normal, the nurse was saying. As far as Clifford could see, all he needed to do was wake up. They needed a big brass alarm clock.

  ‘You can hold his hand,’ said the nurse. Victoria looked at the doctor, who gave an encouraging nod. Encouraging and patronising, Clifford thought. She looked at Quinn and she thought of the time she’d gone up with him to his father’s house, and he’d driven off to that gay club. It was in Scarborough, for heaven’s sake. And he’d picked up a man who had a little dog, as he’d told her with great relish when he’d returned. She’d chosen to believe it was an act against his father, and not against her; and you couldn’t blame a man for his true nature. The anomaly was that he’d sometimes slept with her, not that he sometimes slept with men. Mostly, like her, he didn’t sleep with anyone. What they did was talk: in restaurants; in the Yard; in the little hotels of Victoria; at her flat; in the Buddha Room at Annabel’s.

  Crouching by the bed, she took his hand. Quinn, with his eyes closed, and no movement from the rest of him, squeezed her hand, immediately bringing a tear to her eye. The nurse had spotted it – hand-squeeze and tear. Clifford could tell this from a rustle behind her, and she also knew the nurse was smiling. Clifford liked the nurse, but Henderson was on his wretched mobile phone and walking out of the room.

  ‘I’m afraid it’s only a reflex,’ said the nurse. ‘I’m told he’s a brilliant man.’

  Come on Quinn, Clifford thought, don’t let me down. But the tense wasn’t quite right there. What she really meant was: you’d better not turn out to have let me down. Clifford found herself thinking of McKenna, a respectable businessman, or at any rate the owner of a minicab firm.

  He’d had a veritable murder factory in a lock-up garage in east London. Middle-aged working-class women: he stabbed them, and burnt them in barrels of petrol, when they weren’t necessarily dead, but perhaps only full of stab holes. McKenna had been Quinn’s serial killer, the only one he ever came up against, and he’d stopped him after three deaths. Without Quinn there might have been a dozen. Clifford herself had nudged him in the right direction, she had to admit. She’d pointed out that all the women worked late – two of them in bars – in jobs that allowed them to claim the costs of a cab. Well, it had been Clifford’s special subject: expenses! This was before the extension of the Tube to that part of London: public transport was almost non-existent, and everything came back to minicabs.

  But the true dart had come when Quinn realised that none of the victims used McKenna’s firm, even though it was the dominant one in the locality, and the nearest to their homes. This was unconscious. They weren’t deliberately avoiding McKenna. Perhaps they hadn’t even known about his firm. If they had done, and they’d used him, they’d have been on his phone records and so on, and he wouldn’t have touched them.

  The way Quinn had squeezed her hand. It was like the way he told a joke, with no fanfare. You sometimes didn’t know it was a joke until later. Looking at Quinn’s closed eyes, she thought of the word ‘comatose’. It had been flowing in a sinuous way through her head, and she knew why: it was used in the song by … She couldn’t recollect, but she and Quinn would dance to it at Annabel’s. It was one of his regular requests. Another – more of a smoocher, for later in the evening – was called ‘If You Leave Me Now’. She turned away quickly from Quinn. She must act. It appeared that his protection had devolved to hospital security personnel, who were neither armed nor in evidence at the present time. She’d get on to SO1, Specialist Protection. And she’d see about getting this Henderson replaced.

  16

  ‘So I have the fake finger-palmed in the right hand. Held in the fingers but with the fingers straight.’

  Peter Almond lit a Silk Cut. ‘So you’re not clutching it?’ he said, because he thought he’d better seem interested.

  ‘It’s not a clutch,’ Cooper said, ‘so it’s more natural than the true palm, where it’s actually in the palm. Pick up with the left hand, transfer to the right to examine – then back to the left hand for the set-down. It might seem an unnatural movement the first time, but by the second it’s normal, and the third you don’t notice. It’s the rule of three – it’s a flow thing. The third time, I release the fake, transferring that back to the left hand for the set-down, while keeping the target stone in my right hand.’

  Almond nodded.

  ‘Game over,’ said Cooper, pouring himself more wine. ‘Now I didn’t go straight for the pocket with the target stone,’ he continued. ‘The hand goes down to the side. The hand relaxes. I go for the pocket a couple of minutes later.’

  ‘And the girl was there with you?’ said Almond. ‘That seems rather crazy.’

  Cooper shrugged in his chair. ‘Insisted on coming with.’

  ‘But why?’

  ‘You tell me. Maybe she didn’t trust me; thought I’d walk off with the stone.’

  ‘That would not have been very wise.’

  ‘Maybe it was for the thrill. But it wasn’t such a big risk when you look at it. We’re both disguised, and there’s nothing to connect us except …’ He waved towards Almond. ‘I said to her, not wanting to sound big-headed or anything, but even if the shop bod is looking straight at my hand when I do the switch, he won’t see the switch.’

  Almond was thinking about his connection with Cooper. He’d booked him t
o do a show for his kids – the oldest boy’s thirteenth birthday. He’d known even then that he was dodgy. Not a kiddy-fiddler of course, which you might suspect from his line of work. No, Cooper had done time for pickpocketing, and it had become apparent to Almond that this must be the sleight-of-hand expert who’d palmed a biggish stone in an Hatton Garden shop in about 1995. He’d nicked it to order for some thug, and it had been beautifully done, which might also be said of his work in Wilmington’s. But the guy’s success had evidently gone to his head. Three months on and he still hadn’t got over it. He was shaping up as a loose cannon, which was dangerous in light of what had happened.

  ‘I said to her, “If you’re coming with, we might as well use you.”’

  Almond nodded again.

  ‘So she did the distraction. I told her to—’

  ‘It was a good day’s work for the two of us,’ said Almond, trying to make it sound final. He stood up, and walked over to his workbench without any idea of what he was going to do when he got there.

  ‘I wonder if they’ve tumbled yet,’ said Cooper. ‘I know I shouldn’t go back to look.’

  ‘You shouldn’t, no – and you don’t need to. They have tumbled. The fake’s gone from the window. They’ll have spoken to the police.’

  Almond began fiddling with a lantern. It occurred to him that Cooper was within range of a stray business card of Almond’s that featured his phone number. He’d walked over and pocketed it. He returned to the workbench.