Killer Diamonds

by Rebecca Chance

  There had also been some wonderful shots where Vivienne, laughing, pretended to backhand Randon in the face with the ring as he cringed away theatrically, feigning fear. But to Christine’s great disappointment, Vivienne had absolutely refused to allow any of those images to be part of the sale. She had actually gone white on seeing the pictures, staring at them in silence for some time. Finally, she had gathered up the photographs, stacked them together and given them to Christine, saying quietly:

  ‘Shred them, please. And if there are negatives, shred them too. They bring back a painful memory.’

  Christine had started to protest: the pictures were so fun and playful, she had pointed out, it would be a real shame for them to be lost to posterity. But Vivienne had held up her hand and said: ‘This subject is not up for further discussion, Christine,’ in a voice as sharp as the culet of the diamond.

  So that had been that. Christine had obeyed her, feeding the photographs into the shredder with great regret. Still, the remaining ones had been quite enough to make the hedge-funder’s eyes light up avariciously. Christine was as sure as she could be that he would ring her up tomorrow with a counter-offer – she had priced the ring and photo rights at eight million pounds – and, after going back and forth for a couple of days, they would come to a mutually satisfactory agreement.

  Normally the security guard, who was always present when clients were viewing such expensive jewellery, would have waited while Christine packed away the rings in their numbered cases to be taken back to the basement safe. Instead, she had heard herself asking the guard to get himself a cup of tea from the kitchenette in the main office; clients had to be supervised with the jewels, but she did not. She needed some time to work out why she was feeling like this; time, and space. Hence the pacing; she was hoping that the movement would shake loose the nagging concern from the back of her brain to the front, where it would be easily retrievable.

  Was it the ring that was bothering her? Or the photos? No, it wasn’t the latter. She examined her reaction to the photographs and couldn’t find a single flicker of concern or distress. Whereas as soon as she thought of the ring again, there it was: a distant distress call, like a flare going up far away over a dark ocean from a tiny storm-tossed ship.

  So was it the ring that was worrying her? That too was quickly answered. The ring was fine. She knew that with absolute certainty. Christine had an excellent eye, considerably superior to the average gemmologist; she knew how highly she was regarded by her colleagues in the jewellery business. And although the unusual setting of the diamond meant that it was harder to assess how light travelled through it, Christine paused by her desk to look down at the diamond, resting in the black velvet display tray, and could find nothing to trouble her in its lustre and transparency, its near-colourless hue.

  Colourless, because almost all diamonds were delicately tinted with shades of yellow or brown that an untrained observer would never detect; truly neutral ones were very rare, and very valuable. Christine was intimately familiar with this one’s particular faint hint of yellow. Her eye was so attuned to the diamonds she put up for sale that she could have distinguished them immediately, one after another, as swiftly as they were placed in front of her.

  Her gaze moved to the other rings she had shown the hedge-funder, and the warning flare went off again as she looked at the seven-carat purple diamond. It had been another gift from Randon, chosen to echo the violet of Vivienne’s eyes; he had paid a few hundred thousand pounds for it thirty years ago, and now it was worth at least twelve million even before the considerations of provenance and attached photo rights. Large green and purple diamonds were so rare that pricing them was known colloquially by jewellers as ‘pick a number’. It would have made a classic investment gem, one that was never set, but kept loose in a safe or bank vault – to be sold off, usually, after the owner died and the children started wrangling over the inheritance.

  Christine focused more closely on the extraordinary stone. It was emerald-cut; the shallow steps to the wide table at the centre, the flashes of deep light from its planes, were perfect. The colour was not only intense, but markedly even –

  Wait. Hang on. The colour is amazingly even for a stone that was purchased thirty years ago, isn’t it? It looks . . . treated.

  This was not good, not good at all. Precious gems all had natural imperfections, which were one of the factors in identifying a particular stone. However, in recent decades a variety of treatments had become increasingly common. With the judicious use of heat, you could lighten or darken the colour of a gemstone, even alter it entirely; you could improve its clarity and its brightness. To give them a more consistent colour, emeralds were routinely soaked in oil.

  Laboratory tests could detect whether a stone had been heated, and a ruby or a sapphire, in particular, that had not would be rare and hence valuable. The most expensive stones, in general, were untreated. Careful examination would reveal the imperfections that made them not only unique, but highly prized to the one per cent of buyers who were serious connoisseurs; the other ninety-nine just liked their stones big and flawless.

  But the widespread use of these treatments had only happened after Vivienne amassed the vast majority of her jewel collection. Which meant that Christine should not, now, be staring at the purple diamond ring thinking that the colour was so consistent, it looked suspiciously as if it had been treated with coloured oil.

  Her heart was racing. The closer she looked at the diamond, the more her initial view was confirmed. Its colour was simply too uniform, too perfect for it to be a natural, untreated gemstone. Christine summoned the memory of the last time she had seen this ring: two weeks ago, more or less. She was absolutely sure that the diamond had not looked so suspiciously consistent in shade then.

  It was as if someone had dug a lino cutter into her abdomen and carved a hole the size of that seven-carat diamond directly beneath her sternum bone. Slowly, she found herself glancing over at a twelve-carat cushion-cut orange diamond cocktail ring. It was a huge knuckleduster, the massive orange stone surrounded by smaller white half-carat diamonds. With horrible certainty, she realized that her verdict on this was identical. Its colour was so even that any flaws were impossible to spot. And it had not looked so incredibly perfect the last time she had brought it out to show a client.

  Christine drew a long, deep breath. Anyone who worked in her field was aware that rings were the easiest item of jewellery to steal. Compact enough to fit in the palm of a hand, they were ideal for the classic jewellery store switch, which involved the potential customer bringing an exact replica of the piece to the viewing so that they could replace the real with the fake. Employees were taught to be particularly alert with the smaller pieces, never to leave the customer alone with them; but someone skilled in sleight of hand could pull off a substitution right in front of a jeweller. Certification and assessment were done before customers viewed the pieces, so it would take a particularly sharp-eyed assistant to notice that the ring they returned to its box didn’t sparkle quite the same way as it had when they took it out. CCTV was installed in all jewellery shops, of course, but there was none in Christine’s office – no record of her meetings, nothing to play back so that she could try to spot who had swapped the rings.

  Christine picked up the orange diamond, surprised to notice that her hand wasn’t shaking too badly considering the circumstances. She pulled her DiamondSure machine out of a desk drawer, a recently invented screening device that tested diamonds, distinguishing real ones from synthetics. It was terrifying how sophisticated the process of growing synthetics in a laboratory was now; physically and chemically, they were diamonds. Although the coloured ones were easier to make, they were also easier to spot, as their colour saturation was unnaturally even – just what Christine was concerned about with the purple and orange stones.

  With colourless diamonds, however, it was impossible to tell the difference without testing equipment. The DiamondSure could only test colou
rless diamonds from a small percentage of a carat up to a maximum of ten carats. Generally you put a loose diamond on the sample dish with a fibre-optic probe at its base, but the probe could also be released to test mounted diamonds. It was this that Christine did now, moving the probe over one, then another, of the smaller white diamonds.

  If someone had done what she suspected, every diamond in this ring would be synthetic. No one would grow a huge orange one and surround it in a setting with genuine smaller stones; there would be no point, as the central one would be the only stone to draw attention. So when both of the white diamonds turned out to be artificial, she knew that the orange diamond must be a fake too – which meant, almost certainly, that the purple one was as well.

  It was the worst disaster possible. The reputational damage would be horrendous. If Berkeley could not be trusted to keep extremely valuable items safe on its own premises, it would never be taken seriously as an auction house again. Thefts happened, of course; there were always stories of cover-ups and payoffs and scandals barely averted; but the point was that they had been averted. This could be covered up, no doubt. But if she told anyone at Berkeley what had happened, her head would roll.

  No one took these jewels out to show but Christine. She was the expert, the point of contact with the clients, the repository of all the detailed knowledge about Vivienne’s personal history that added so much extra value. She would be blamed, and that would be only fair, because these jewels were her responsibility.

  Christine’s desk phone shrilled. She had been sitting in such deathly silence, the sound of her own racing heartbeat the only noise in the room, that she jumped almost out of her skin. Automatically, she reached for it, to hear Angel’s dulcet voice cooing from the receiver: ‘Darling, are you ready? I’m five minutes away in a cab.’

  She had completely lost any sense of time. Angel had been due to pick her up at six thirty, and he was impressively punctual. Her first instinct was to tell him that she couldn’t join him that evening, that she needed to stay in the office and run through her records of the client visits she had scheduled recently, to narrow down a list of who had viewed the purple and the orange rings.

  But then Christine realized that she didn’t need to check her notes. She was living, breathing, sleeping this auction; every detail of it was immediately accessible to her. Those two rings had only been shown together on one occasion, and she knew immediately who had been at that appointment. To her great surprise, the revelation was much less of a shock than she might have anticipated.

  ‘Do you mind driving around the block for a bit if there isn’t a place to wait outside?’ she said, her voice clear and calm. ‘The last meeting ran a little late. I’ll be out in a quarter of an hour.’

  Summoning the guard, she followed him downstairs and supervised the return of the jewellery to the safe. Then she returned to her office and changed out of her grey Jaeger suit into jeans and a Muubaa sheepskin jacket. Vivienne’s gift of aquamarines glinted in her ears and at her throat as Christine picked up her bag, left her office, and glided through the building, looking unusually serene – a serenity that Angel noticed immediately as she climbed into the black cab where he waited. She greeted him with a kiss but refused a glass of champagne; he had brought a bottle plus two flutes. Angel would have been horrified by the idea of drinking champagne out of anything but glass.

  He stared at Christine narrowly as he stowed the second glass back in its leather carry case, wondering why she looked so distant, so unusually poised. It had been pleasantly easy to convince her that he was in therapy for his years of abuse at boarding school. He had been subdued, yet attentive, in the time he spent with Christine, while alluding to afternoon appointments with his therapist. In practice these were, more often than not, intense sex sessions with Nicole, and Angel most definitely considered them therapy of a sort. They certainly took the edge off enough to allow him to make gentle love to Christine a few evenings a week – so gentle that he suspected she was getting rather frustrated with the change of pace.

  Pure vanilla, all the way. Not even a raspberry swirl every now and then. Christine had wanted this, and she’d got it. As the cab went down Park Lane, heading for Hyde Park Corner, he asked if anything was wrong, but her explanation that she was distracted by all the work she had to get through was completely believable. It was only a matter of weeks until the New Year’s Eve auction in Geneva, and as well as the near-constant viewings, Christine was organizing every painstaking detail of the transport of the jewels to their Geneva auction house with Malca-Amit, the specialist high-value cargo service.

  ‘Here we are!’ Angel said amiably, as the cab turned into the driveway that led to the south entrance gate of Kensington Palace. ‘Look at all the paps still hanging round in the cold weather! Will they ever get tired of trying to get photos of Toby and Missy, I wonder?’

  ‘No,’ Christine said with a faint smile as the cab slowed down, the mass of journalists and photographers rushing forward to see who was inside. The gates were swinging open and even as the camera flashes went off, bright in the evening darkness, capturing the passengers inside the cab in case they were important, the vehicle was moving up the central driveway, around the main bulk of the building, past the orangery, heading for Apartment 3 in one of the side wings.

  Lights blazed in Apartment 6, the four-story house at the corner of the main wing. It was far enough away from the State Apartments to give Prince Hugo, his wife Chloe and the two little princesses some distance from the camera phones of the tourists who visited Kensington Palace. By seven o’clock, the routine of dinner, bath and bed for the small girls was well underway. Chloe’s mother and father were staying for a week, and the atmosphere was cheerful, cosy family chaos, Hugo supervising bathtime with the doting grandparents while Chloe made pasta for dinner. The upper classes mocked Chloe for her middle-class lifestyle, but after his privileged but neglected upbringing, Hugo thoroughly relished every moment of happy domesticity.

  Apartment 3 was generally a complete contrast to Apartment 6: Toby’s bachelor pad was much more spartan and functional. Its edges were currently softened, however, by the masses of candles and flowers he had bought to celebrate Missy’s latest flying visit from Romania, where she was filming a medieval action movie in which she played a Saracen general’s daughter who teamed up with a renegade Knight Templar. Pulling out all the stops, Toby had ordered several bouquets from the Pimlico branch of the florist Wild at Heart and a crate of Neom organic candles from Selfridges; almost as soon as Toby opened the front door, Angel started sneezing at the overwhelming scent of a cluster of candles that surrounded a huge bouquet of roses on the hall table.

  ‘Sorry,’ Toby said apologetically. ‘Bit much, I know. I lit them earlier to make the place smell nice for Missy, instead of the usual Eau de Sweaty Jockstrap, but then the kids came round and Chloe kicked off because she said it wasn’t safe to have sprogs over with things burning, so then I blew them all out but it ponged madly because of all the smoke, and Chloe said I did it wrong and you’re supposed to snuff them—’

  ‘She’s right,’ Missy called from the kitchen.

  ‘So then I lit them all again to cover the smell of the smoke,’ Toby explained. ‘Missy says I’m an idiot and I should have got non-scented ones if I was going to light so many, but I think it looks romantic with all of them lit, don’t you?’

  Angel was still sneezing as he and Christine took off their jackets. Ignoring the hall cupboard, Toby chucked them into the spare bedroom as they walked down the corridor, managing to get them to land more or less on the bed.

  ‘Come into the kitchen,’ he said. ‘Missy’s making dinner.’

  It was a symbol of how madly in love Toby was with Missy that he beamed cheerfully at the snacks she had laid out on the huge central kitchen island: homemade kale crisps, plus edamame and wasabi hummus with celery and gluten-free crackers to dip in it.

  ‘Hi guys! It’s quinoa stir-fry with king prawns and ca
uliflower rice for dinner,’ Missy said over her shoulder, her face make-up free and shiny with steam from the stove, her cheeks pink. ‘It’ll be ready in about twenty.’

  She was thin enough that Toby’s apron nearly wrapped round her twice; when she visited Toby, her assistant scheduled deliveries from Planet Organic the day of her arrival so that Missy could make sure she had everything she needed for her extremely strict, nutritionist-planned diet. She and Toby preferred to stay in when she was in London, as whenever they went out the paparazzi attention was relentless. The pattern they had slipped into was to invite Angel and Christine over regularly, the bond forged on the ill-fated charity expedition as strong as ever.

  Though it was not mentioned to Christine, there was not a sliver of embarrassment about the three of them having shared a memorable night at base camp. Missy was an actress and Toby a jet-setting prince; although they might have decided that they wanted to be exclusive now, they both came from worlds where, sexually, anything was possible.

  Christine greeted Missy and took a seat on a high stool on the far side of the island. Behind Missy’s back, Angel pulled an appalled face at the array of healthy snacks.

  ‘So virtuous!’ he drawled. ‘Don’t you find yourself craving Pringles, Tobes?’

  Toby rolled his eyes as he unstopped a bottle of champagne.

  ‘I can’t have those in the house,’ Missy said from the stove. ‘They’re a trigger food.’

  ‘I’ve got Guinness – I could whip up a Black Velvet if you fancy one?’ Toby was saying to Angel. He handed Christine her usual glass of champagne as Missy continued:

  ‘It’s killing me that I can’t get toasted crickets from Whole Foods over here! The UK is so behind the curve! In LA they do this great Moroccan spice version, really low in salt and high in protein – Angel, I know you’re going to snark on me but honestly, guys, crickets are real low in fat and cholesterol and they’re totally environmentally friendly. If you think of them as the shellfish of the air, you’ll be a lot cooler about the idea of eating them –’