The Yellow Diamond Read online

‘Explain about that, would you, Mr Savoury?’

  ‘All our rings are tagged with the GIA number. I am speaking about the number given to the stone by the Gemological Institute of America. The certificate travels with the stone, as proof of title. Also on the tag would be the cut, in this case round brilliant, and the weight and the colour, in this case 2.3 carats fancy intense yellow.’

  ‘Who writes out your tags?’

  ‘I do, or Aisha. Or my partner, Mr Moore.’

  Reynolds said, ‘To make the copy tag, would he have to imitate the handwriting on the original?’

  ‘Well you see, not exactly.’ Mr Savoury fished in a pocket and produced a tagged ring. ‘You can buy these tags by the gross in Hatton Garden.’ The tag was half the size of a postage stamp, and jumbled with letters and figures. ‘It’s so cramped, you see – it’s not like forging a letter. That said, he produced something very like the original, I can assure you. The figures might have been a little unclear, but it would have been unfair to expect Aisha to spot the discrepancy.’

  ‘I’m sorry to ask this, but I assume you have complete trust in Aisha?’

  ‘I should think so! She’s my wife, you see!’

  Reynolds smiled, went crimson. ‘And the perpetrator had an accomplice?’

  ‘An accomplice?’

  ‘The young woman who came in at the same time.’

  ‘Ah. Maybe, yes.’

  It was difficult to say whether Savoury had entertained this thought before, perhaps not, since he was beginning to look at Reynolds with a sort of amused admiration.

  ‘What was the substitute ring made of, Mr Savoury?’

  ‘Zircona. Cubic Zircona. With a coating of gold oxide. I only wish I could show you it, but your forensic people took it away!’

  He seemed positively delighted about that.

  ‘What’s it worth?’

  ‘Well, I won’t be asking for it back, let’s put it like that. Fifty pounds perhaps – as costume jewellery.’

  ‘And the ring that was taken?’

  ‘A nice piece. Cut and mounted in the Deco style. Very Great Gatsby, which is fashionable right now.’

  ‘Worth?’

  ‘It was on sale at £35,000.’

  What had been perplexing Reynolds was the thought that Anna Samarina did not need to be involved in the theft of such a ring. She could easily have bought it. And he did not doubt that the man in the alpaca coat had been stealing it for her. He was not stealing it for himself with her assistance … Because surely most things that happened around Anna Samarina happened for her benefit.

  ‘Where does that put the ring, in the scale of prices?’

  ‘Well, it’s not mega-mega.’

  ‘It is mega though, isn’t it?’

  Savoury considered: ‘It’s entry level for Mayfair.’

  ‘You’re covered by insurance of course?’

  ‘Naturally.’

  ‘You sell new and second-hand diamonds here?’

  ‘Well of course all diamonds are very old, so that’s not the terminology. But yes. We sell what you might call pre-owned diamonds.’

  ‘And was this diamond pre-owned?’

  ‘It was. The stone was – how to put this? – a pre-owned, non-vintage diamond presented in a vintage style.’

  ‘How could you tell it wasn’t really vintage?’

  ‘Excellent question! The round brilliant cut was too perfectly angled to be what you might call an “old” cut. A new cut brings in more light, whereas an old cut gives a more limpid appearance. And the mounting – a platinum loop – showed no signs of wear.’

  ‘Where did you get the stone from?’

  ‘It came in off the street.’

  Reynolds had an image of Quinn’s fat king walking.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean that we bought it off a member of the public who … sold it to us!’

  ‘Who was that?’

  Savoury sat still and smiled. ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Now you’re the first person to ask that.’

  Reynolds was pleased; tried to hide the fact. ‘Do you know?’

  ‘Not offhand, but I can find out.’

  Savoury went into the little office again. He came back holding a flimsy piece of paper and a more important-looking document, laminated. It was headed ‘GIA Coloured Diamond Grading Report’, and there was a drawing of the stone looking a bit like the rough doodle in Quinn’s floppy book. The date on the certificate was 16 December of the previous year. Savoury then held up the flimsy paper. ‘Now this sort of reinforces the certificate. Anyone who sells to us has to sign one.’ Reynolds saw the bad thing coming as Savoury began to read from the paper: ‘I hereby declare that the undermentioned goods are my own personal property and are not subject to any charge. Signed John-Paul Holden.’

  Savoury handed the paper to Reynolds who saw that Holden’s name had been printed in capitals beneath the signature. The paper did not give the price the shop had paid for the ring but there was a date: 12 September, just over eleven weeks ago.

  Reynolds wondered whether Savoury had noticed that he was not taking a note of these disclosures. Reynolds did not want an official record of the fact that he had unearthed a connection between Anna Samarina and John-Paul Holden.

  ‘Mr Savoury,’ said Reynolds, handing back the two documents, ‘towards the end of September a man called John-Paul Holden was murdered.’ Savoury’s smile did not disappear, but it became frozen. ‘The Mayfair Hedge Fund Murder. You might have heard of it?’

  ‘I have now that you mention it. I wonder if it’s the same man?’

  ‘I should think it is, Mr Savoury. Did you buy the stone yourself? I mean do you have any recollection of the seller? Holden was in his late twenties. He was apparently very good-looking.’

  ‘But I didn’t buy this stone. My partner bought it – Mr Moore – and he’s on holiday at the moment.’

  Good, Reynolds was appalled to find himself thinking, I can use that to buy some time. He said, ‘I’m surprised I’m the first person to ask who sold it to you, because surely the person who sold it would be best placed to have the copy made?’

  ‘But you saw who stole it, and there was no young man involved. The stone had been in the window for ten days before it was taken,’ said Mr Savoury. ‘Anyone could have photographed it and made a copy from that. Although I admit they got all the detail right on the tag. So yes … most likely someone who knew the stone.’

  ‘And where did Holden get it from, do you think?’

  ‘Well, I’ll ask Mr Moore when he comes back, but it’s very unlikely he’ll know. Sometimes a seller volunteers the information. We might be offering twenty on a stone, and they’ll say, “Oh, I paid forty for it at Tiffany’s.” But to put the question … It would be tantamount to an accusation you see, and remember we do ask for the certificate, and they do have to sign the declaration of legal title.’

  ‘Could the ring we’re talking about be an engagement ring?’

  ‘Spot on,’ said Savoury. ‘It’s a classic engagement ring.’

  There seemed nothing more to ask. Under the quizzical eye of Savoury, Reynolds re-pocketed his notebook. It was almost as ridiculous an act to put it away as it had been to take it out. As he walked down Mr Savoury’s plush little staircase, Reynolds was thinking of Detective Chief Inspector Xavier Hussein of North London Murder. Hussein always wore white shoes. You’d think a man in white shoes would be flamboyant, but everything about Hussein contradicted those shoes. You might also say that everything about him contradicted everything else about him. He was small, neat and monosyllabic. His accent was partly Midlands and partly something else. Well, he was obviously Middle Eastern in some way but if he was a Muslim, he kept very quiet about it. Reynolds thought it not impossible that he was an Iraqi Kurd, but he had a feeling that no Kurds could be called Hussein. Possibly as a result of the white shoes, with their suggestion of informality, Xavier Hussein was known as Zav. He didn’t seem to mind being called Zav, but he
called himself Xavier. He was reserved, but then again not standoffish, and he had not blocked the HOLMES file on the Holden case, unlike Lilley with the Quinn case. Therefore Reynolds knew that Zav Hussein had nothing: no witness, no motive, no DNA, not so much as a footprint, about which he was entitled to be very pissed off, given that Holden had been found on a muddy track on Hampstead Heath – optimum territory for footprints. But the point was Hussein had nothing. If Reynolds told him what he’d just discovered, then he’d have something. In particular, he’d have the name Anna Samarina. But Reynolds would not be mentioning her name to Hussein. Not yet anyway, because she’d very likely be on a murder charge the moment he did.

  13

  When Reynolds stepped out of Wilmington’s, he saw two people staring at him: the shoeshine boy, and Victoria Clifford. He actually flinched, took a step back. Were they somehow in league, like Sherlock Holmes and the Baker Street Irregulars? But no. The shoeshine boy was just bored, whereas it was the opposite case with Clifford. She walked fast up to Reynolds, took hold of his elbow, and began marching him along the red carpet.

  ‘Did you ask where the stone came from?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Reynolds, with a fatalistic sort of sigh.

  ‘I knew you would. If you hadn’t I’d have sent you back in. It was Holden, wasn’t it? The murdered boy?’

  He nodded. They were on Piccadilly. Rain remained highly likely.

  ‘We knew that,’ said Clifford. ‘Quinn and I.’

  ‘For Christ’s sake,’ said Reynolds, but Clifford wasn’t listening. She was watching the street. What the hell was she going to do? Hail a taxi? She was always likely to do that, and there were plenty going past, their lights already seeming a bright orange at barely noon. But she was pointing at a café over the road. Patisserie Valerie. Reynolds had often passed by, never been in.

  ‘Let’s get a coffee,’ said Clifford, and she was dragging him across Piccadilly.

  In Patisserie Valerie, Christmas was encapsulated in warmth, redness, tinsel, cakes. Clifford had recommended that Reynolds order himself a gluten-free brownie, and she was now eating it.

  ‘It’s noisy here, so we can talk,’ she said. ‘Holden was engaged to the girl in the CCTV. You know her, don’t you? From the clubs?’

  Reynolds eyed her. Now they were coming to it. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I know who she is.’

  ‘Samarina,’ said Clifford, ‘daughter of Samarin. Quinn sort of knew Samarin.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Various cultural events in Mayfair. He was interested in him.’

  ‘You mean he was a person of interest?’

  ‘Not exactly,’ said Clifford, ‘but there were rumours.’

  ‘What rumours?’

  ‘I don’t know. That something was amiss. Quinn had met the girl a couple of times as well; he liked her.’

  ‘I thought Samarin was a recluse.’

  ‘Yes. But he does good works, so he’s got to leave the house occasionally. But please just answer this: did you know that Anna Samarina was engaged to John-Paul Holden?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Obviously you didn’t, because if you did know you’d would have spoken up. You’d have gone to … who runs North London Murder these days?’

  ‘Hussein.’

  ‘You’d have gone to Hussein.’

  ‘How did Quinn know she was engaged to Holden?’

  ‘Tatler,’ said Clifford. ‘Gossip item. “It is believed the gorgeous Anna Samarina has become secretly engaged to the delectable John-Paul Holden.” Or vice-versa.’

  ‘And how come Hussein’s team don’t know it? Because from the HOLMES they don’t.’

  ‘Because they don’t read Tatler. Quinn believed in magazines, you know – more than the internet. He thought more love went into them.’

  ‘Yes, but why didn’t Quinn tell North London Murder about the engagement?’

  ‘I’ve just told you: he liked her. What I mean is: he didn’t think she could have killed Holden.’

  ‘Well, that’s right. Because …’

  ‘Exactly. The dates don’t make sense. Here’s a man who meets her very demanding requirements. He’s apparently successful, charming, very English, which she probably wants after all that Russian chaos. So they get engaged; he gives her a ring. A ring she likes, the value’s not so important, and it symbolises an achievement. He then breaks off the engagement. Quinn said you were a reader. I’m thinking of a novel by Trollope …’

  Reynolds thought: What is this? A game of charades? For a minute he wondered whether she was going to stand up and act it out amid the cakestands. But then he realised he knew the answer: ‘The Eustace Diamonds.’

  She looked sidelong, smiling. ‘It’s different of course because there’s a marriage and the problem comes up after the husband dies, but Lizzie Greystock – is it? – won’t give the stones back to the family of the husband. She believes they’re hers. So you can imagine Anna Samarina … she tricks her brain into thinking the stones are hers. She’s not stealing them, she’s taking back what’s hers. Of course, we can’t know about her motivation. All that’s …’

  ‘Guesswork.’

  ‘No. It’s a dart. You can make darts.’

  Reynolds drained his cup. ‘I’ve played darts,’ he said, ‘in pubs and so on. I can’t say I’ve ever made them.’

  ‘This is drollery, I assume? A northern thing? I’m talking about a lunge after truth. You make the lunge and go where it leads. Fill in the gaps, get the evidence, answer for the consequences … later. Do you want another cake?’

  ‘You said the dates don’t work.’

  ‘She steals back the diamond on 18 September. She then supposedly kills him on 26 September. Surely that can’t be right? She’s executed her revenge. She’s got the stone back. That draws a line under it, wouldn’t you say? The one crime is of a completely different order from the other.’

  ‘What if she killed Holden because he discovered she’d stolen the diamond back?’

  ‘But how would he know? And he didn’t lose anything by that, did he? So why would he broadcast the fact? He’d sold the stone to the shop and been paid a good price for it. He got what he wanted. I mean, I can’t say for certain and nor could Quinn. The question really is this: how mad is Anna Samarina?’

  ‘You brought me into this because you thought I’d protect her, didn’t you?’

  ‘No. Well, yes. Partly. But you see this all leads somewhere else. It’s a bigger picture than one wayward girl, and if we get to that, we’ll find out why Quinn was shot.’

  Reynolds recalled the words of Chamberlain of Argrove: the biggest money crime you could imagine, and murders plural. He said, ‘What if Holden was killed on the girl’s behalf? On the orders of the father, because he’d stumbled on … whatever was amiss?’

  ‘It’s a possibility. But I think this secret is buried pretty deep. The boy would need to have had some sort of proof; and by killing the boy they put the girl in the frame for his murder – to anyone who knows about the engagement.’

  ‘Do you think she shot Quinn?’

  ‘That’s in a way more likely, but still unlikely, I think.’

  They both sat back, momentarily becoming normal customers at Patisserie Valerie. Then Clifford leant forward again. ‘I thought you might be able to find out the big picture, and it is big. You must understand … At first, Quinn was very happy to talk to me about the girl, about Holden, but then, in early November, he went very quiet. He took to spending a lot of time at Annabel’s. You could always tell Quinn was preoccupied when he was taxi-ing off to Annabel’s every weeknight.’

  ‘What would he do there?’

  ‘What do you think you do at Annabel’s? Quinn would dance, preen about in his latest suit, pick up … people. It was like his equivalent of Sherlock Holmes’s pipe, or his violin. He would go there to think, and believe me, if he thought the way to get at what lay beyond the diamond was to hand over to Flying Squad about the robbery or North London Murder ab
out Holden, don’t you think he would have done that? He wasn’t a complete egomaniac. So we try to follow where he led. We’ve got a few days before we have to go to Hussein and Lilley with what we know.’

  ‘Do we have Croft’s blessing on this?’

  She looked at him sharply. ‘We’ll be fine with Croft.’

  Reynolds was beginning to see the usefulness of Clifford: as a sort of unofficial conduit to the top. She was now typing into her phone, which she kept in the most expensive sort of case – calfskin or something.

  As she typed, she was saying, ‘The sweep has yielded … Eaves … financial investigator, and narcissist. He’s just back from leave. He spoke to Quinn by phone in late September.’

  ‘Has Eaves contacted Lilley?’

  ‘Forget Lilley. He’s on the wrong trail. I called Eaves back. He’s extremely busy; he told me that personally. But I’ve pinned him down on Thursday. He’s happy to tell you about what Quinn asked him.’ Clifford was still typing. ‘You can see him before you see Barnes in the pub. Mount Street Deli. Good coffee. Eaves knows about coffee – flat whites and all that.’ Putting aside her phone, she rolled her eyes at Reynolds. ‘Let’s get the bill. And make sure the tip’s on the receipt.’

  When the bill came, Reynolds said, ‘Do we know who Anna Samarina’s accomplice was?’

  ‘The guy in the probable wig? No we don’t, but Quinn was interested in him. I think that’s why he was in touch with Barney Barnes.’

  14

  Destined for Bond Street on a westbound Central Line train, Ronald Cooper was manipulating a ten-pence coin. The manipulation was called a finger-roll, and it was purely instinctive. Not wanting to appear in any way magicianly – in light of what he’d recently been up to – Cooper stopped as soon as he realised he was doing it. But then he noticed that a little girl, sitting opposite with her mother, had been watching him. She had been smiling, so he started the finger-roll again.

  Only the girl was watching, not the mother. Pretty little thing in pink earmuffs – Indian or Pakistani. So it was their secret. She smiled at him, and he looked away, as if rather put out, but he kept rolling the coin, and this combination of being serious but still doing the silly thing amused her even more, as he knew it would from having performed at a thousand children’s parties. A thousand? Who was he kidding? You could double that without risk of exaggeration. Cooper liked performing for children. With adults, they were impressed if you fooled them because they thought they were clever … So they admitted you must be quite clever yourself. But children – they were just impressed full stop.