The Yellow Diamond

by Andrew Martin

  ‘I told you it was a wig,’ she said. ‘Do you think he was killed by the Russians? Because he’d facilitated the robbery for the girl?’

  Reynolds eyed her. He would not believe that Anna Samarina was a killer or had anything to do with killing. He asked Clifford to put the name Ronald Cooper into Crimintel. This took a little longer, since she would have to log in. When she looked up again, she said, ‘A man’s been arrested for it. Drug and assault convictions. Shopped by his girlfriend.’ And she read out the details. Reynolds was delighted to hear about this unpleasant-sounding pair – Mark and Yvonne by name – because they were extremely unlikely to be anything to do with the Russian milieu of Anna Samarina.

  Reynolds then said, ‘Almond also told me he sold two yellow diamonds to John-Paul Holden.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Clifford, who was paying the bill, ‘I was beginning to think that might be the case.’

  ‘What do you mean? And what did you mean when you said we’d soon find out for certain about the big secret?’ Reynolds had the uneasy feeling that his own discoveries were lagging some way behind those of his personal assistant.

  She said, ‘We haven’t had coffee. So let’s go to Claridge’s.’

  They walked, sharing her umbrella. But she refused to speak on the way. It was preposterous but quite impressive. Her black boots, Reynolds noticed, were worn down at the heels. She wore what looked like a highwayman’s coat, and she did look a little like … well, a highway woman, with her great confidence, her touching smallness and determined walk; and the tokenistic ponytail, Reynolds had just noticed, held by a funereal black ribbon.

  In Claridge’s, the lobby fire burned brightly, if too cleanly. It seemed to frolic in its pristine hearth, a fire kept as a pet. The Claridge’s staff knew Victoria Clifford, and she was relieved of her umbrella as if it were a hospital patient in need of the tenderest and most urgent attention. They were seated in the green-and-white lounge that Reynolds now learnt was called The Foyer. Everything shone with Christmas lustre. Clifford didn’t bother with a menu but ordered two black teas rather than coffee.

  ‘You don’t want milk,’ she informed Reynolds.

  It was four-thirty. Some of the other tea-takers looked so sleek and refined they might have been part of a different species. Soon after their own tea arrived, Clifford touched Reynolds’ arm. He looked up and saw an Indian woman of about twenty. Life must be strange for her, Reynolds thought. Her life must be inverted somehow, since she approximated so closely to the ideal of the opposite sex, except that she was a little too thin. At the moment she sat down, a long pink drink was brought for her, and Reynolds saw her for who she was: the girlfriend of Rakesh Dutta, the Indian hedge-funder who’d blamed the murder of Holden on Eugene Crawford.

  ‘Not the girlfriend,’ said Clifford. ‘Sister. She’s called Robin Dutta. Don’t ask me how that came about. I think one of her parents is part-English.’

  Robin Dutta took a sip of her pink lemonade, and half smiled at Reynolds. Every nuance of her face would have been a very good photograph. A second waiter was advancing towards her. ‘Now this proves she actually eats,’ Clifford was saying. ‘She’s having the apricot and caraway cake.’

  After giving profuse thanks to the waiter, which must surely have set him up for the entire Christmas season, Robin Dutta ate a forkful of the cake with great grace but no false gentility.

  ‘She’s got a criminal record as long as your arm,’ said Clifford.

  ‘Come off it,’ said Reynolds.

  ‘All right. She’s got one conviction. For assault – against a boyfriend. Can’t remember the defence, but it kept her out of jail. Something psychiatric. I don’t know whether she was engaged to Holden, but she was going out with him.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Asking around. Her brother’s obviously very loyal. It’s interesting that he tried to palm you off with Crawford rather than directing you towards Anna Samarina. But I suppose he wanted to avoid the whole question of Holden’s love life.’

  ‘One interview under caution ought to do it,’ Clifford was saying. ‘Oh, and look at her ring.’

  46

  They returned to the office at a quarter to six. At five past six, Clifford had received a delivery by motorcycle courier from forensics at the Yard. It contained two memory sticks. Both, Clifford explained, contained the same material: recovered and cleaned-up versions of data that had been in … not a floppy book, but a floppy disk, an almost equally ancient method of data storage. This, she continued, had been given to her at a sort of patisserie off Edgware Road on the day before Reynolds had left for France. One memory stick was for Reynolds, one for her. She proposed that they now read what was on them. But first, she gave him the background.

  Using the files at Paddington Library, Clifford had tracked down the elderly common-law wife of the late Max Aktin. Since she did not have the same surname as Aktin, that had not been easy. Nor was the woman Russian, but Hungarian. She, like Aktin, had been a Jewish refugee from the Soviet bloc. It appeared that Quinn had also tracked her down, and the woman had been trying to decide whether to agree to his suggestion of a meeting. Clifford had talked her into a meeting with the promise of a nice cake and one thousand pounds in cash, the payment authorised by Croft. In return, the woman had given Clifford the floppy disk.

  After an hour of work, Reynolds had formed his own digest of the material on the disk.

  Max Aktin was anti-Russian, full stop. He had been against the Soviets; later he was against the oligarchs, and he devoted his life to chronicling the iniquities of both. The file – written mainly in English – contained numerous references to a paper archive, the whereabouts of which was currently unknown, and which may have been destroyed in the fire that killed Aktin, and hospitalised his common-law wife.

  Andrei Samarin was probably born in 1954, possibly on one of two islands in the Kara Sea. His mother died when he was very young, and he was brought up by his father, who was perhaps originally a fisherman. That job was incompatible with raising a son, so he moved to the mainland, to Tomsk. He worked – in fairly menial roles – on the railways: on a branch line of the Trans-Siberian. Sometimes his work took him further east along the railway, and his son would be educated in rather makeshift railway schools, but Andrei Samarin was a bright boy. It was at this time that he caught frostbite in his right little finger, which had to be amputated.

  In his early teens, Samarin was sent to a boarding school for gifted children in Novosibirsk, and here he befriended a certain Pyotr Genkin, who looked similar. They shared a passion for literature and architecture. In 1971, when he was seventeen, Samarin won an essay prize and was selected to travel to the UK under the auspices of the Soviet Embassy and a peace campaign by British Quakers. Pyotr Genkin also did well in the essay competition but it was decided that only one student should be selected for the exchange from that particular school.

  Genkin differed from the young Samarin in that he had a mother but not a father, the father having died of cancer. Genkin’s mother was a scientist: a geologist at the university complex of Akademgorodok in Novosibirsk. Her work took her all over Siberia, and so the young Genkin, like the young Samarin, was seldom in the same place for long.

  Preparation for the exchange trip brought Andrei Samarin and possibly also Genkin – even though he didn’t ultimately travel – into contact with a KGB officer from Moscow called Viktor Rostov.

  Max Aktin had discovered little about the next twenty years of Samarin’s life. He was possibly a student of architecture and a teacher of English and French. He may have lived in France for a while, when rules on foreign travel were relaxed under Gorbachev. At the first opportunity, he went into business. It appeared that Samarin actually set up his frozen-food business a couple of years before Yeltsin’s thoroughgoing economic liberalisation of the early nineties, and it was an immediate success. Samarin received protection against gangsters from Rostov, with whom he’d become re-acquainted.

&nbs
p; In 1992 Samarin acquired a chateau west of Nice, and he lived there reclusively for much of the time while Rostov oversaw the business in Russia. By 1992, Samarin had also acquired a daughter. She was probably born in Russia, to a woman who may have died in childbirth. The two were never married. In 1993 – according to Aktin – Samarin and Rostov had an argument at the chateau. Having begun his move into coal, Samarin wanted to pay Rostov off, and make the new departure on his own. But Rostov wanted to continue as a business partner. Rostov killed Samarin, or arranged for him to be killed – and by now, a former Guards officer and amateur racing driver called Graham Porter was probably on the staff.

  Shortly before his death, Samarin had made the fatal mistake of resuming his acquaintance with his equally clever, equally shy, and very similar-looking friend, Pyotr Genkin. He had sought his assistance with a book about architecture. A suicide by drowning in the Ob river of Western Siberia was mocked up for Genkin, who was meanwhile smuggled to the Riviera, where he was substituted for Samarin, and given his name. There was a difference of appearance around the mouth, and Genkin – as Samarin – grew a light beard. There was the problem of the missing finger. Genkin agreed to undergo an amputation, and a French doctor called Ballard amputated the left finger instead of the right. At the centre of the whole conspiracy, a simple mistake over left and right.

  There was also the problem of the daughter, which turned out not to be such a problem. As Aktin had written, ‘Her father was changed.’ She was simply transferred to the new man, who doted on her, presumably stricken by conscience. It was very likely – Aktin surmised – that the girl was too young to know.

  Genkin was an excellent choice as stand-in for Samarin. He, like his predecessor, was intelligent, discreet and reclusive. But Genkin lacked Samarin’s flare for business, and he and Rostov made their money from implementing the late Samarin’s ideas with little further creativity of their own.

  As Aktin had written (ascribing the phrase with some bitterness to Lenin), ‘You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs.’ Some people knew about the switch. Most were paid off. Samarin’s aunt, who had largely raised him, became a very rich woman, and moved to Paris. Unfortunately a few people had to be killed. In 1999, the doctor called Ballard died in a suspicious car crash at a spot called Coudoux on Autoroute 8 in the south of France. One of the students who’d travelled on the exchange with Samarin died of an unfathomable wasting disease in Moscow in 1993. Aktin made the case for a couple of other killings in Russia.

  Then Aktin himself had died in a fire occurring in the small hours at his flat in Conduit Gardens in 2001. Victoria Clifford had not yet unearthed the coroner’s report but she had spoken to her contact in the London Fire Brigade. Evidently the coroner had recorded a verdict of death by misadventure, this largely on the basis of the LFB’s own report, which had concluded that a bird had picked up a lighted cigarette from a patch of nearby grass – the actual dusty garden of Conduit Gardens – and dropped it down the chimney of the building. This had happened on one previous occasion, when a small and non-fatal fire had resulted. Clifford’s LFB contact remembered the Conduit Gardens blaze. Aktin’s roof was accessible from other, nearby roofs. He had told her, ‘You wouldn’t have to be Spiderman to get up there.’

  And then there had been the ‘new’ killings, post-dating the ones Aktin had unearthed. First came the arranged ‘disappearance’ of Joseph Caldwell in the village of Carlton High Top, necessitated by the fact that Quinn had tracked him down. Then came the shooting of Quinn himself.

  Reynolds looked across the office to where Clifford sat. She’d already finished reading her file. She smiled at him, and then his phone rang. When he saw the number, his heart beat fast: Anna Samarina. She wanted to meet him straight away. Somewhat amazingly, she suggested the barriers at Green Park Tube station, and Reynolds said he could be there in ten minutes. When he told Clifford what had occurred, she said quite casually, ‘Are you going to take the Glock?’

  47

  As he approached Green Park station, Piccadilly seemed to become progressively brighter. It was like an ascent from dowdy Down Street: past the Park Lane Hotel, and then the side streets with the beautiful names: Clarges Street, Half Moon Street. He had not taken up Clifford’s offer of the Glock pistol. He had broken free.

  There was a festive crowd outside Green Park station, and a festive crowd inside. Reynolds approached the barriers. He could not see Samarina, but then she came up to him from behind. She touched his shoulder and they kissed. Only on the cheeks, but they hadn’t needed to think about it. She wore her leather jacket. He said, ‘I thought you were coming by Tube.’

  She seemed puzzled. ‘Oh yes, because this is a Tube station! I came by taxi. It’s my favourite form of public transport.’

  ‘Where do you want to go?’ he asked.

  ‘Doesn’t matter.’

  He believed she had decided to talk. Well, he had to believe it. Everything depended on her talking. Surely, she knew her father had been ‘changed’, that her father was not her father? Their physical similarities amounted to little more than the fact that they were both small, slight, good-looking and neat-faced people. He reasoned that she had already been trying to tell him what she knew. Andrei Samarin found the quality of ‘innocence’ in Dead Souls. Well, Chichikov, the central character, had not been party to the deaths of the dead people he exploited. Reynolds had also … not actually read, but read about, the other work by Gogol that she had mentioned, The Overcoat. That might be a good place to start, he thought, as they climbed the steps of the station.

  On Piccadilly, they turned left – east. They walked past some Russians who were climbing out of two white Rolls-Royces.

  ‘Of course, the post-Soviet flashiness is over now,’ Anna said, smiling.

  Reynolds said, ‘I was reading The Overcoat.’

  ‘Not only reading but wearing,’ she said, because he had on the Aquascutum. ‘Is very nice,’ she said, in her parody-Russian voice.

  ‘Do you know why your father likes that story so much?’

  ‘You tell me,’ she said.

  ‘Well, it’s a dreamy story about a clerk called Akaky. He’s a copyist. He never does any original work, but only makes very good copies. His coat is threadbare so he saves up for a new one.’

  ‘As you have done,’ she put in.

  ‘He’s robbed of the coat. He dies. His ghost returns to steal overcoats from men on the streets.’

  ‘So far,’ she said, ‘you have got a B in your exam.’

  ‘The overcoat made Akaky a different person, more dynamic. So there is the theme of the doppelganger, or double: “Dvoinik” in Russian. Of course there’s a Dostoevsky novel all about that.’

  ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘B plus.’

  Reynolds wasn’t sure where all that had got them. They were crossing Piccadilly. They began walking down St James’s Street, going south. This was quieter. They passed Fox’s, the cigar place where he’d spoken to Eugene Crawford. It was closed. They stopped in front of Berry Brothers, the wine merchants. It resembled the Old Curiosity Shop. It too was closed, and all the wine had been taken out of the window. But they had stopped and were looking in. ‘Yes,’ said Anna, ‘some very nice wooden boxes.’

  They walked on, and she put her hand in his. Shortly afterwards she turned towards him with an expression of surprise – as though she hadn’t quite realised what she’d done, but was glad about it anyway. Reynolds believed he had no choice but to utter the sentence that could end his career or gain everything he wanted.

  ‘The jewel theft,’ he said. ‘I can make that go away. There was a more important switch that I want to know about.’

  She said nothing. They simply carried on walking. There were no more than two or three other people in the street. On the right was Le Caprice, attended by expensive cars. But they proceeded beyond – towards St James’s Palace, where they turned right, into quiet, courtly Cleveland Row: a collection of mansions and palaces, outpo
sts of royalty and the Foreign Office. They approached two Georgian houses: one was absurdly pretty: lilac-coloured; its neighbour was traditional brick but equally handsome. They were like an elegant married couple.

  Blake and Anna walked through the gap between the houses, and the night before them was now darker and wilder: gas lamps, and the wind moving giant chestnut trees. They were in Green Park, the one along from St James’s Park, where Quinn had been shot. They were both Royal Parks – no CCTV. I ought not to be here, thought Reynolds. They were on a wide and gracious path bordering the dark grass. They turned left, following the gaslights. It might have been the year 1870. But then a jogger went past, and Reynolds noticed CCTV cameras above the hedges and railings to his left. They protected the gardens of the mansions that overlooked Green Park. He made sure that he and Samarina turned that way.

  One of the cameras moved as the two of them went past. She had removed her hand from his, and gone on a little way. She turned around holding the gun that had obviously been between them all along. Of course it had been there, and as for the CCTV, she hadn’t bothered about that in the jewellery shop, and it wouldn’t deter her now. Well, he had gambled and he had lost. He was perfectly calm about it. Reynolds saw from the corner of his eye that a man was approaching across the grass. Reynolds turned towards the man, and made a gesture, as though trying to push him away. Reynolds turned back towards the girl, and the pointed handgun. He embarked on some rapid statement about the man coming over the grass. He was then deafened and all the birds he’d never noticed were rising up from Green Park. Anna Samarina lay on the pathway. The man on the grass was putting a Metropolitan police baseball cap on his head; he held a monstrous rifle. Another man with another rifle was coming from a different direction. There was body armour beneath their coats. All the birds of the park, having massed in the sky directly above Reynolds and his dead companion, had come to an agreement: they wanted none of what was going on with the humans below, so they flew off to the south.