Part 31 (2/2)

'I'm not a murderer!' His indignation, as far as I could tell, was true and without reservation, quite different from his reaction to my calling him a thie - 'What were you doing two days ago, on Sunday afternoon?'

I said.

'What?' He was bewildered by the question but not alarmed.

'Sunday afternoon,' I said.

'What about Sunday afternoon? What are you talking about?'

I frowned. 'Never mind. Go back to Sat.u.r.day night.

To Jason giving me concussion with half a brick.'

The knowledge of that was plain to read. We were again on familiar territory.

'You can kill people,' I said, hitting them with bricks.'

'But he said . . .' He stopped dead.

'You might as well go on,' I said reasonably, 'we both know that what I've said is what happened.'

'Yes, but . . . what are you going to do about it?'

'I don't know yet.'

'I'll deny everything.'

'What did Jason say about the brick?'

He gave a hopeless little sigh. 'He said he knew how to knock people out for half an hour. He'd seen it done in street riots, he said, and he'd done it himself. He said it depended on where you hit.'

'You can't time it,' I objected.

'Well, that's what he said.'

He hadn't been so wrong, I supposed. I'd beaten his estimate by maybe ten minutes, not more.

'He said you'd be all right afterwards,' Pross said.

'He couldn't be sure of that.'

'But you are, aren't you?' there seemed to be a tinge of regret that I hadn't emerged punch drunk and unable to hold the present conversation. Callous and irresponsible, I thought, and unforgivable, really. Greville had forgiven treachery; and which was worse?

'Jason knew which office window to break,' I said, and he came down from the roof. The police found marks up there.' I paused. 'Did he do that alone, or were you with him?'

Do you expect me to tell you?' he said incredulously.

'Yes, I do. Why not? You know what plea bargaining is, you just tried it with five diamonds.'

He gave me a shattered look and searched his common sense; not that he had much of it, when one considered.

Eventually, without shame, he said, 'We both went.'

'When?'

'That Sunday. Late afternoon. After he brought Grev's things back from Ipswich and they were a waste of time.'

'You found out which hospital Greville was in,' I said' 'and you sent Jason to steal his things because you believed they would include the diamonds which Greville had told you he had with him, is that right?'

He rather miserably nodded. 'Jason phoned me from the hospital on the Sat.u.r.day and said Grev wasn't dead yet but that this brother had turned up, some frail old creature on crutches, and it was good because he'd be an easy mark . . . which you were.'

'Yes'

He looked at me and repeated, 'Frail old creature,'

and faintly smiled, and I remembered his surprise at my physical appearance when I'd first come into this room.

Jason, I supposed, had seen only my back view and mostly at a distance. I certainly hadn't noticed anyone lurking, but I probably wouldn't at the time have noticed half a s.h.i.+p's company standing at attention.

Being with the dying, seeing the death, had made ordinary life seem unreal and unimportant, and it had taken me until hours after Jason's attack to lose that feeling altogether.

'All right,' I said, 'so Jason came back empty-handed.

What then?'

He shrugged. 'I thought I'd probably got it wrong.

Grev couldn't have meant that he had the diamonds with him.' He frowned. 'I thought that was what he said, though.'

I enlightened him. 'Greville was on his way to Harwich to meet a diamond cutter coming from Antwerp by ferry, who was bringing your diamonds with him.

Twelve tear drops and eight stars'

'Oh.' His face cleared momentarily with pleasure but gloom soon returned. 'Well, I thought it was worth looking in his office, though Jason said he never kept anything valuable there. But for diamonds... so many diamonds... it was worth a chance. Jason didn't take much persuading. He's a violent young b.u.g.g.e.r . . .'

I wondered fleetingly if that description mightn't be positively and scatologically accurate.

'So you went up to the roof in the service lift,' I said, 'and swung some sort of pendulum at the packing room window.'

He shook his head. 'Jason brought grappling irons and a rope ladder and climbed down tbat to the window, and broke the gla.s.s with a baseball bat. Then when he was inside I threw the hooks and the ladder down into the yard, and went down in the lift to the eighth floor, and Jason let me in through the staff door.

But we couldn't get into the stock-rooms because of Grev's infernal electronic locks or into the showroom, same reason. And that vault . . . I wanted to try to beat it open with the bat but Jason said the door is six inches thick.' He shrugged. 'So we had to make do with papers . . . and we couldn't find anything about diamonds. Jason got angry . . . we made quite a mess'

'Mm.'

'And it was all a waste of time. Jason said what we really needed was something called a Wizard, but we couldn't find that either. In the end, we simply left. I gave up. Grev had been too careful. I got resigned to not having the diamonds unless I paid for them. Then Jason said you were hunting high and low for them, and I got interested again. Very. You can't blame me.'

<script>