While his father was his rock his mother was his sword, showing that cut and thrust were not just aggressive moves on the fencing piste but were necessary elements in life. Nothing, his mother repeated to him often, could match the satisfaction felt when a goal was achieved. No ambition no goal, no goal no satisfaction, no satisfaction no contentment and in Daniel’s estimation she had been true to this principle for as long as he could remember. She was the alpha male of the family and in normal times it did their family no harm whatsoever. But the times had not been normal since the affair with the Gadds and his mother had shown a ruthless streak that he had not been aware of before. Intermingled in her normally bright and friendly demeanour were cutting edge remarks and vengeful ideas directed at those she regarded as her adversaries and there were times when Daniel would have liked to challenge her thinking but knew that he had to bite his lip. He never really got to the bottom of what went on with the Gadds and why they did what they did but he wasn’t expecting his uncle to become the new CEO when his grandfather retired and Daniel guessed it was something to do with a leadership battle. His own promotion was a direct result of the Berghoffs stamping their feet down hard to claim possession of the company. He had known the Gadds all his life and liked them and even his first pint in a pub at eighteen had been bought for him by Adam, the younger of the two Gadd brothers.
After attending the grammar school in Market Harborough, the same school where Ella Gadd had, in her day, been an art teacher, Daniel had read business studies at Durham University followed by a year’s internship at a leading advertising agency in London. Then, like his uncle before him Daniel had started his career at WareWork on the lowest rung doing a succession of jobs, menial and physical, before moving on to the next. Being taught how to do each job by the worker who did it habitually was an eye opener for Daniel. What for him was a boring, repetitive job was often seen in a very different light. He was taken aback when many expressed the view that they were comfortable in their job which demanded nothing more of them than to keep up with the factory line. Others didn’t wish to put in anything more than minimum effort, preferring to focus on their lives outside the factory and accepting, mostly in a non-grudging way, that unless they won the lottery they would remain at the bottom of the working heap. And it was these lessons learnt here on the factory floor that would make Daniel such an effective manager of people. With experience in all departments of the expanding company Daniel knew that his skills lay not in the actual trade of the company but in the people who were employed to carry out that trade. When he completed his two-year trainee period he chose a route to management via Human Resources and here he excelled. Understanding what made the workers of the company tick and knowing a little of their aspirations, he learned how to handle disputes and contretemps without fuss or undue blame and as a result the company enjoyed one of its best periods of productivity and staff relations.
Up to his late twenties everything he achieved on his upward path was gained on merit and no finger could be pointed justifiably at nepotism. But the Gadd affair had leapfrogged him to a managerial position which raised eyebrows within his department. His mother, who was the architect of this promotion, had failed to understand the subtleties of workplace relationships and Daniel had to work hard to restore his credibility so that he could continue to straddle the two camps of “them and us” without aligning himself to one in particular. He spent the next couple of years dealing with the ever-changing EU employment laws, reviewing staff benefits and pensions and bolstering morale in the underperforming company which was being surpassed by upstart rivals and was causing angst among their employees about the permanency of their jobs. From the very start of both separate businesses, then through the merger period and later the listing it had been the intention to provide all staff with permanent jobs but like their competitors in the manufacturing industry they now had to reluctantly consider zero-hours contracts. But Daniel’s working life was about to take an unexpected twist with his Uncle Rolf’s severe stroke from which recovery seemed doubtful. Into the leadership vacuum leapt his mother head first, dragging Daniel in with her. Promoted to the board at the age of thirty-two and assigned added responsibilities with which he felt less rapport, he was ill at ease. The manner of his advancement smacked of a medieval dynastic arrangement, one tribesman out – Rolf, one tribesman in – Daniel. Unfortunately it wasn’t a subject about which he dare approach his mother as her expectations of him were unbounded and he was grateful that he could escape to Switzerland for a few days to deal with his duties there as general manager.
Rolf’s innovations and renovations in the mid-seventies to the Swiss branch had stood the test of time and his leadership as boss until recent years, while authoritative, had kept the business profitable, a success story Daniel had reported to the main board when he took over from his uncle as general manager that reflected Rolf’s talent for commerce. In an epoch of low-cost production in emerging countries with weavers and seamstresses working in almost slave conditions and producers of yarns being screwed down to tenths of a penny when selling their cottons and polyesters, the viability of manufacturing in Switzerland had come under close scrutiny. The strength of the Swiss franc was an additional burden as it climbed inexorably to near equivalence with the euro and dollar, thus tightening the screws of an already taut situation and it was the factory’s commercial viability that was at the forefront of his mind for his initial trip to Yverdon as general manager. Arriving by train from Geneva, as he had done in the past with his uncle, Daniel was struck by the kerbside appeal of the factory. The juxtaposition of the original old building with its traditional pitched roof with overhanging eaves and stained wooden fascias with carved motifs was in sharp but agreeable contrast to the new buildings of 1976 with their flat roofs and sleek, ergonomic lines. Alighting from the taxi Daniel stood for a moment reading the inscription on the granite obelisk just outside the reception wing before entering the building. He was completely unaware that a stolen artefact had been hidden in the confines of the factory plot and that its exact whereabouts was currently exercising the brains of a number of people in England.
After introducing himself to the receptionist, a young woman with about as much knowledge of English as he had of French but who it transpired later was filling in for the usual lady who was on three days’ leave to attend the funeral of her brother in Bordeaux, he settled at his desk and thumbed through the staffing statistics of the factory with the manager in overall day-to-day charge, Didier de Meuron. The small workforce of just over thirty together with half a dozen or so support staff in clerical and managerial posts had an astonishingly high production ratio per capita due in part to absenteeism being virtually non-existent and to a fierce concentration on the job in hand resulting in little uneconomic wastage. When led round on a tour of the site by Didier, so that he could meet and greet all the staff, it was soon obvious to Daniel that in return for their hard work they were well treated by the company. On the factory floor the personnel were wearing the latest WareWork overalls in the company colours of royal blue with lime green collar and lime green logo on the upper left sleeve. They looked smart and efficient and were very busy. The clocking in system that had been in force for many years applied to all staff from the most junior to the most senior and, said Didier proudly, that if you studied their clocking off habits closely you would find that if a member of staff was midway through completing a job at clocking off time they would stay on for a few minutes to complete that task regardless of no overtime being paid. It was hard to fault the staff, Daniel reflected, not a single hour had been lost in the past twelve months due to disputes. They were loyal and hardworking and were paid a decent wage in line with Swiss living standards and therein lay the only problem Daniel could see. Governments came and went, legislation was enacted, amended, updated and repealed often with unforeseen repercussions making decisions about where to invest a lottery or at best an intelligent guessing game. And
that was not to mention the traders in the money markets whose love of million dollar bonuses could affect the trading price of the Swiss franc. So long as they made a profit Daniel vowed he would do his best to repay their loyalty by saving their jobs and helping to keep alive the tradition of a Swiss branch.
On his third and final day he had been asked by the stand-in receptionist to help an English-speaking couple who were in reception. They had got lost and wandered in hoping someone could get them a taxi. They had made nice comments about the handkerchief display, which set Daniel thinking that a photographic history of the business with its three-generation family span would also be interesting to show off alongside the handkerchiefs. Before leaving he would ask Didier to see if there were any photographs of the original building and the original staff from 1940 and when he got home he’d ask his mother if she could supply a photo of his grandfather at the factory and his grandmother’s cousin Greta plus husband Eugene. It would make a nice display he thought. The flight home was uneventful. He thought he saw the English couple in the airport departure lounge but the woman had blonde hair and not auburn. He must have been mistaken.
***
It hadn’t taken Ruth long to deal with the jiffy bag. With Doug she had already composed the note. She printed it off and it was posted in a jiffy. Oh! Dear, another of my terrible puns, she thought. Turning her attention to the marbles, she followed Doug’s suggestion of hammer and newspaper but even with a fairly heavy hammer the marble wouldn’t break; it kept slipping around if she caught it only partially and when she did get it full on the head nothing happened. Changing tack she delved into her tool box and selected a pair of heavy-duty pliers with soft-grip light blue plastic sleeves over the chunky metal handles. Checking that she could open the jaws of the pliers sufficiently wide to insert a marble, she placed the first one in the centre of a square of kitchen paper towel and folded the soft, dimpled paper around it so that she could hold the marble in place by twisting a short length of wire to trap it in a sort of sac. She then furled the remainder of the paper tightly to make a stiff rod with which to hold the marble squarely in the pliers’ jaws. With a little trial and error the first marble yielded to a lovely crunching noise and, carefully untwisting the wire to open the little sac, she found a beautiful red gemstone. Twenty-eight marbles later and now with a depleted kitchen roll she commenced her statistics.
The internet was very helpful when she tried to widen her knowledge of precious stones. Most were diamonds, of that she felt sure, even those with tinges of colour but there were some with definite blues and reds and greens which she grouped by colour. Looking carefully through a magnifier, she guessed correctly that the stones had been prised out from settings in rings and necklaces and brooches, as a portion of each stone was without facets and presumably sat down unseen in the jewellery’s setting. It took nearly all day before Ruth had her statistics: eighteen diamonds, excluding the one in Doug’s possession, six rubies, three emeralds and two sapphires. The emeralds and sapphires were of about the same size and Ruth guessed correctly again that they had formed part of the same piece of jewellery. The six rubies were uniform in both depth of colour and lozenge shape although two of them were considerably smaller and possibly had been in the earrings of a matching set in which the other four rubies were in the necklace. The diamonds were the most diverse group in size. They all had a spherical shape but some were considerably larger than others and her forceps had proved useful once again as she measured their diameter against the ruler. But as to an assessment of carats she was beaten despite the information about the subject on the Wikipedia website. The six smallest were all of a similar size and matched the three emeralds and two sapphires. Ruth supposed they might have come from the same piece, a beautiful necklace with a simple single string of six stunning diamonds interspersed with the three emeralds and two sapphires. She could visualise it being worn by a Hollywood actress with a young, firm and slender neck wearing it at a showbiz first night or at a state dinner in a grand, iconic building. Surely there was some way of tracing items of jewellery rather than just odd stones, she thought. People who own them must have taken photos. Most insurance companies insisted on that as the very minimum these days. The reward could be big bucks. ‘We never thought of that. Must tell Doug,’ she said to herself out loud and Paul too.
Paul had told her to ring him on his landline number if she had sensitive information to impart. That evening he was at home when her call came through.
‘Hallo Paul, it’s Ruth speaking,’ she opened. ‘I’ve got news about the marbles. Shall I send it to you by email?’
‘Better not Ruth,’ he replied. ‘You never know these days how secure it is with all the hackers about. You can tell me now and I’ll jot it down.’
She gave him the data that it had taken her all day to compile and told him about the photographs she had taken, one of the six rubies stacked in two columns of three and the other photo of the six small diamonds arranged in a soft arc as if draped around a neck.
‘Can you print copies of them?’ he asked.
‘Yes. No trouble.’
‘Could you send me a print of each by ordinary post? Send it to my home address please and not the office one.’
The black pouch now held gems not marbles. Before placing them in the pouch Ruth had photographed each stone alongside two cardboard squares she had cut out, one a half centimetre in size, the other three-quarters of a centimetre so as to give scale to each stone. She had wanted to make a tiny cardboard cube but it had proved too fiddly so she had added the stub of a pencil to give some indication of height. She put the pouch in the backpack that she often took for holding little essentials like her vacuum flask and clean gardening gloves when she walked to the allotments. The key to the padlock of Rosemary’s shed was in her trouser pocket. Before hefting the seed potatoes from her own hut to Rosemary’s more spacious accommodation she wriggled the black pouch in amongst the potatoes almost to the bottom and into the middle so that no sign of it could be seen through the clear, heavy-duty plastic bag. Flattening the top as much as possible, she sat the onions down firmly on top of the potatoes and pushed the two bags as far under the work bench as they would go before padlocking the door behind her. Back on her own plot with some weeding and watering to do before returning home she got out her Blackberry and emailed Rosemary to let her know that she had stacked her seed potatoes and onion sets in her shed and, as usual, she was very grateful. See you at the Four Feathers this evening for the committee meeting, hope it doesn’t go on for long as I’m having a drink with a friend afterwards and bye for now, she had ended.
In the small, square room off the saloon bar the allotments committee meeting had been underway since 6.45 pm. It was now about 7.30 pm and Ruth was impatient for it to finish so that she could get away to meet Doug promptly at the agreed time of 8.30 pm. The committee were edging through the agenda painfully slowly because Rosemary insisted on recalling to the secretary, who had been on holiday at the time, every nuance of the compost heap drama. Always prone to overstatement, Rosemary was in her element sensationalising the comings and goings of the event. “Financial report” was the fifth item on the agenda and after the chairman had concluded his report Ruth got on with hers in a no-nonsense fashion. In fact it was a month when she had little to report as annual subscriptions for shared amenities such as electricity were collected half-yearly in January and July and apart from one-off expenditures such as the Christmas party or the bulk buying of fertilisers the income and expenditure ledger had seen little action. When the last item on the agenda, “Any other business”, was aired, Ruth thought she was home and dry time-wise but the subject of security, and rightly so Ruth had to admit, was raised and took twenty minutes to arrive at no decision and no action! Shuffling up her papers and slipping them quickly into her folder she excused herself and went into the saloon bar to find Doug. Gone to meet her toy boy, Rosemary giggled.
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br /> Ruth just caught the words “toy boy” as she left the committee room. It startled her for a split second that she and Doug were being considered as an item. It was rather nice, she thought, to be regarded as part of a pair. Doug bought the drinks, lagers again, and they settled into their previous nook in one of the pub’s quieter corners. In the folder with her committee meeting papers she had brought the gems stats together with a single photograph showing all the stones. She inched it out of the folder when she thought no one could get a glimpse of it over Doug’s shoulder. What a collection, he had murmured, covering his mouth with his hand as if gobsmacked with the enormity of the tally.
‘Paul is going to check the insurance companies’ lists of stolen jewellery,’ Ruth said. ‘He thought it wouldn’t be easy with just the stones to make a match but he will try. He also mentioned the subject of rewards.’
‘Yes, it had crossed my mind too,’ replied Doug, ‘go on.’
‘The rewards can be pretty high depending on the value of the goods recovered, of the order of ten percent and in some specific cases a set amount is advertised as reward, a bit like posters in Wild West movies with $10,000 for some bank robber, alive or dead.’
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