Solitaire Read online

  ‘Did Kitty hear Joel say how much the diamond weighed?’ asked Barney. He felt extraordinarily light-headed, and his voice seemed to echo flatly inside his ears. So the giant diamond was more than a drunken kaffir’s fantasy: it was real. And what was more incredible about the whole story, the diamond was his. Or it would have been his, if Joel had not taken charge of it.

  ‘Two and a half ounces.’

  Barney made a quick calculation. Then, awed, he mouthed to Mooi Klip, ‘Two and a half ounces is three hundred and fifty-five carats. Do you know how much a stone like that could be worth?’

  Mooi Klip shook her head. ‘I don’t care what it’s worth. It’s your fortune, Barney. It’s all yours.’

  Solitaire

  Graham Masterton

  © Graham Masterton 1982 *

  *Indicates the year of first publication.

  Contents

  Prologue

  One

  Two

  About the Author

  Prologue

  His mother had always been able to surprise him. It had been her way. But she had never surprised him as much as this. He lifted the huge diamond out of the dark blue velvet socket of her jewellery box, and held it up in the curtained dimness of her bedroom with a sensation of sudden vertigo. It was a brilliant, fiery, rectangular-cut stone, larger than a man could comfortably swallow, and it was still unmounted; untouched and untampered-with since the brilliandeer had buffed it up to its final dazzling polish.

  He had no exact idea of how much diamonds were worth, although he had heard that if they were monstrously large, as this one was, they could no longer be valued carat for carat: that would put them beyond the reach of even the world’s richest men. But even at auction, this diamond would have to be valued at hundreds of thousands of pounds, perhaps millions.

  ‘I’m a millionaire,’ he thought to himself. It was like emerging from a wine-cellar into the open air and discovering that he was drunk.

  He had no doubt at all that the stone was real. He remembered as he turned it around and around in his fingers what his mother had whispered to him only five weekends ago on the wisteria-wrapped verandah of the Reverend Ponsford’s house at Herne Hill, when everybody else had been playing croquet on the sun-blinded lawns.

  ‘Your father made sure you were taken care of,’ she had said. ‘Your real father, that is. He provided for you, and for your children, but secretly; so that when I go, you shall never want.’

  ‘You’re not going to go,’ he had smiled at her, and taken her hand between his. In its white summer glove, it had felt like a dead starling, all bones and feathers.

  But whether she had experienced a premonition or not, a kind of Tarot-reading from the weather, and the clouds, and the postures of the reverend gentlemen who were playing croquet, she had gone, within three weeks of the croquet party, of a summer cold that turned to pneumonia. At the age of thirty-three, Peter Ransome found himself to be an orphan.

  The effect had caught him off-balance. He had not been prepared for the abrupt loneliness of it; nor for the pain that he would suffer as he tidied up his mother’s affairs with Messrs Winchell & Golightly, Solicitors and Commissioners for Oaths, of Croydon; and as he cleared up his mother’s house in Kennington, in South London, not far from the Oval cricket ground. As he came across photographs and memorabilia from his mother’s past: a sepia print of his stepfather with the Bishop of Woolwich, another of his mother arm-in-arm in some scrubby landscape with Cecil Rhodes, a lion’s-tooth necklet, a silver snuffbox with an embossed view of Victoria Falls, he began to feel as if he no longer knew who he was, or why he was here. He had inherited all of these fragments from other people’s lives, but there was no longer anybody in the whole world to whom he was directly related.

  His stepfather, the Reverend Hugh Ransome, had died of a seizure the day before Queen Victoria’s Jubilee celebrations, on 21 June 1897. The excitement of arranging a party for Kennington’s children and old folks had been too much for him: that, and the heat.

  His real father had died a year before that, drowned, after a well-publicised incident on the cruise liner, Andromeda, off Madagascar. One witness had insisted that Mr Blitz had ‘recklessly and with aforethought’ hurled himself over the rail of the quoits deck into the Indian Ocean, and had swallowed enough water to sink himself before the ship could be brought about. But Mrs Blitz had strenuously denied any suggestions of suicide. Her husband had been ‘in bustling health’, she had told the coroner, prettily, and he had been eager to start up a new property business in Cape Town.

  But now Peter was here, in the big redbrick house in Montacute Road, overlooking a tired triangle of grass and plane trees, with his mother’s jewellery case open in front of him, and a diamond between his fingers that was bigger than he would have thought possible. It had to be real, he was convinced of it, even though he had no expertise in diamonds, and no means of testing the stone, apart from using it to scratch his name on the bedroom window, which somehow did not seem like a very reverent idea. In the five years since his stepfather had died, Peter had gradually become aware that the love between his mother and his real father had been something intense, and very special, and that even their eventual separation had not been able to extinguish it.

  If the love between his mother and his real father had been only half as fierce as his mother had described it (and being a modest woman, a vicar’s widow, it had probably been twice as passionate, and twice as jealous as she had told him), then this diamond which symbolised it just had to be authentic, and flawless, too.

  His mother’s maid, Olive, came into the bedroom, with a japanned carpet sweeper, her hair a chaos of henna-stained curls and tortoise-shell combs. ‘It wouldn’t be disrespectful to open the curtains, do you think, sir?’ she suggested. ‘I would hate to think of you straining your eyes. My ’enry strained his eyes, fighting in the dark at Nicholson’s Nek.’

  Peter clasped the diamond protectively in both hands, and turned around in a way that was stiffer and more mannered than he would have liked. ‘By all means draw them,’ he said. ‘I don’t think Mother would have wanted to see the house so gloomy in any case, do you?’

  Olive drew back the thick brocade drapes with a rattle of brass rings. The London sunlight fell across the patterned rug, and on to the white-covered bed on which only a fortnight ago his mother had closed her eyes for the last time, as if asleep. On the wall beside the bed hung a plain wooden crucifix: his mother used to tell Peter that she had been given it by a missionary in South Africa, when she was still a young girl – before she could even speak English.

  ‘You’d like some tea, sir?’ enquired Olive.

  Peter kept his hands clasped tight together. ‘Yes, tea,’ he said. ‘I shall be down directly.’

  ‘Very good, sir.’

  When Olive had gone, he left the dressing-table and walked across to the oval cheval-glass by the window. In it, he saw a dark, shy-looking young man in a plainly-tailored grey suit; a young man whose complexion was too dusky to be English, and yet whose short straight nose and sharply-defined forehead were too European to be those of a pure-blooded African. Racially, he was a thrice-cut cake: a third Dutch, a third Hottentot, and a third German-Jewish.

  He was used to the difficulties of having tinted skin. He was an automobile mechanic, working for the Vulcan motor car company in Southport, Cheshire, but he knew that for all of his talent with a spanner he would never make chief engineer. He raced, too, a little, whenever there was a spare 10-hp car and enough ethyl. But he would never be allowed to make the grade as a first-class driver. This was an England which tolerated half-castes as the inevitable outcome of a far-flung colonial empire, but which scarcely ever admitted a ‘fuzzy-wuzzy’ to the inner circles of society. />
  It had helped Peter that his stepfather had been the Reverend Hugh Ransome, much respected for his work amongst the poor of south London, and amongst the heathen in South Africa. His stepfather had taught him manners, and proper dress, and all the niceties of small conversation. But none of these graces had really been enough to whiten his face, and he had known ever since he was at school that only an Act of God could win him admission to the prizewinner’s enclosure of Edwardian society.

  Perhaps this diamond was it. The one miracle which could change everything. He opened his hand, and the huge stone was warm, already infused with his own heat. The sun caught it, just the tip of it, and it flared up with brilliant rainbows and shatteringly bright triangles of reflected and re-reflected light, a spangled hall-of-mirrors in miniature.

  ‘Your father made sure you were taken care of,’ his mother had whispered, and the words fell on his memory like sheets of soft tissue paper.

  He recalled sitting by his mother’s knee almost twenty years ago on a winter’s night in the old vicarage, toasting muffins on the end of a fork, his cheeks hot as baked apples, and he remembered his mother saying, ‘Did I ever tell you the story of the man who gave up everything he had, all his possessions, even the estates that he adored so much, just to buy his secret love the most precious stone in the whole world?’

  He had said no, tell me. But she had simply smiled in an absent-minded sort of way, and tousled his hair, and told him to be careful not to drop his muffin into the coals. Now, however, he knew what she had meant.

  He looked through the drawers of his mother’s dressing-table until he found a silk drawstring sachet that had been used for carrying a gold powder compact. He dropped the diamond into the sachet, tightened the string, and slipped it into his pocket. Then he straightened his necktie in the looking-glass, and went downstairs to the front parlour, where Olive was setting out the tea things. There was a large Rockingham pot of fragrant Ceylon, and a small plate of rather stale rock cakes.

  ‘You’re looking pale, sir, if you don’t mind my saying,’ said Olive. ‘You’re not considering going down with the fever?’

  ‘I didn’t have it in mind,’ said Peter. ‘Would you pour?’

  Olive poured, and the steam from the cup twisted up into the sunlight like the Indian rope-trick. ‘I keep dwelling on your mother, sir,’ said Olive, sadly. ‘Such a lovely woman, you know; and even lovelier when she was younger.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Peter, sipping his scalding tea. He didn’t really want to share his memories with Olive. ‘I miss her very much.’

  He finished his tea alone. He tried one of the buns, but they were too dry and somehow they tasted of death. At last, at three o’clock, he left the house and walked down to the end of the road, to wait for the horse-drawn omnibus to take him over the river into London. Across the street, as he waited, two barefoot street Arabs were trying to shin up the gas-lamp on the corner, watched in awe by another boy in a boater hat and a sailor suit, whose nanny had paused to gossip on the pavement with a postman.

  The omnibus arrived late. Because it was a fine summer’s day, Peter sat up on the roof, and smoked a cigarette. There was a traffic jam on Blackfriars Bridge, and the omnibus had to wait there for almost ten minutes, while a cool breeze blew up the Thames from the docks, fragrant with spices and peppers from unloading ships and warehouses. Peter took out another cigarette, but tossed it half-smoked on to the road.

  He arrived at a small jeweller’s shop just opposite Holborn Circus a few minutes before five o’clock. The late afternoon was crowded with carriages and cabs and horse-drawn drays, and the noise of horseshoes and iron-bound wheels grinding on the wooden road-blocks was almost deafening. A bell jangled as he stepped into the door, and then there was silence as he closed it behind him.

  The shop was very small. There were mahogany-and-glass showcases on all sides, crammed with rings and pendants and silver perfume-holders – lower middle-class jewellery, the kind of jewellery that a jobbing clerk might give to his lady-love at Christmas, or a shopkeeper buy for his wife on their wedding anniversary. There was a smell of dust and silver polish and jeweller’s rouge.

  From a door at the back of the shop came a man as lanky as a tailor, with blond hair which flopped over his right eye. ‘My dear fellow!’ he said, as soon as he saw it was Peter. ‘What a complete surprise!’

  Peter held out his hand. ‘How are you, Samuel? You’re not getting any plumper.’

  ‘Not for want of eating, though,’ said Samuel. ‘Business has never been so brisk. Have you come down for anything special, or just for a jaw?’

  Samuel Kellogg had been a schoolfriend of Peter’s in Kennington, although when Samuel’s father had died of consumption he had moved to Bloomsbury to live with his Uncle Max, and help in the family jewellery business. Still, the friends had kept in touch from time to time, even when Peter went to Southport, and only last summer they had met for supper in Oxford Street, at Runcorn’s Chop House.

  ‘My mother passed away,’ said Peter. ‘I’ve been down in Kennington clearing up the house.’

  ‘My dear chap,’ said Samuel, sympathetically.

  ‘She was frailer than I thought,’ Peter told him. ‘I suppose she never really was cut out for the British climate. She always used to suffer from colds, and the influenza.’

  ‘All the same, I’m very sorry,’ said Samuel.

  ‘Thanks,’ said Peter, trying to brighten up.

  ‘Won’t you come through to the back?’ asked Samuel. ‘I have some tea left in the pot, and some capital veal pie.’

  He lifted the mahogany flap of the counter, and Peter followed him through into a dark back room, where there was a badly dilapidated sofa, a fireplace still clogged with last winter’s ashes, and a jeweller’s workbench, cluttered with silver wire and forceps and soldering irons. On the wall was a saucy calendar of a naked theatre girl with plumes of ostrich feathers in her hair and strings of pearls around her ankles.

  ‘I don’t suppose you’ve seen anything of Walter,’ said Samuel, taking the lid off the teapot and peering into it suspiciously.

  ‘Not a peek. I heard he went off to Malaya to plant rubber.’

  ‘He always did have the look of a rubber-planter, I must admit.’

  Peter moved four or five tattered copies of The London Illustrated News from the sofa, and sat down. ‘I don’t know. What does a rubber-planter look like?’

  Samuel shrugged. ‘Rubbery, I suppose. Shall I brew some fresh?’

  ‘Don’t bother. What I really came about was more in the line of business.’

  ‘I see,’ said Samuel, sitting down. He cut a piece of veal pie off a twenty-one pound slab, and pushed it into his mouth. ‘I suppose your poor mama left you quite a bit of disposable jewellery?’

  ‘I haven’t been through it all yet,’ Peter told him. ‘But I was mainly concerned about this,’ and he produced from his pocket the small drawstring purse, which he loosened, and then turned upside-down over Samuel’s workbench.

  The diamond rolled out on to the bench, and lay on its side, sparkling in the gaslight. Samuel, his mouth still stuffed with pie, stared at it as if God had just dropped a third tablet of commandments from the heavens above.

  ‘What on earth …?’ he asked. ‘You’re not telling me that’s a real stone?’

  Peter nodded. ‘I’m pretty well convinced of it.’

  ‘But that’s a diamond,’ said Samuel. ‘You don’t find diamonds in that sort of size. That’s as big as the Regent. Bigger. It can’t be real. Where on earth did you get it?’

  ‘My mother’s jewellery box.’

  ‘Not even in a safe? It can’t be real. My dear chap, if that were a real diamond, it would be worth … a million pounds. Maybe more. You wouldn’t keep it in a jewellery box. You’d have it locked up, in Coutts.’

  ‘Maybe you would, and maybe you wouldn’t. What burglar would ever suspect that a vicar’s wife would have a million-pound diamond in her jewellery box? A co
uple of rings, maybe; a pinchbeck pendant. But not a million-pound diamond.’

  Samuel picked the diamond up and frowned at it. Then he reached for his jeweller’s loupe, his 10 × magnifying lens, and peered at it even more closely.

  ‘It’s difficult to tell in gaslight,’ he said. ‘But if it is a real diamond, it’s magnificent. A slight pinkish tinge to it, don’t you see? Very slight, but enough to make it a “fancy” diamond, and increase its value four to five times over, if you can find anyone to pay that sort of money.’

  ‘Then you think it’s genuine?’

  ‘My dear chap, I couldn’t tell you for certain. This is the whole illusion of the diamond business. Not even quite reputable dealers are capable of telling whether some diamonds are real diamonds or not. There are plenty of very capable fakes around these days: and if they’re mounted, they’re even harder to detect. Some tricksters set inferior diamonds in a fine gold or silver setting, you see, and paint the back of the gems so that they reflect more light. There was the famous rainbow necklace of the Romanoffs, for instance. George Kunz, an American gemologist, and a very sceptical fellow, discovered by scratching the backs of the diamonds with his finger-nail that they were nothing but second-rate stones with paint on them.’

  ‘But this stone isn’t mounted,’ said Peter.

  ‘No,’ replied Samuel. ‘But it could be topaz, or strass, which is high-density lead glass, or even quartz; although I doubt that it’s quartz, because it appears too brilliant.’

  Peter was silent for a moment, watching his friend examine the stone through his loupe, but then he said, ‘I have to tell you something which may make you change your opinion.’

  ‘Well, do,’ said Samuel, ‘because if this is a real diamond, then you’re in the money for the rest of your life, and I’m not joking.’

  ‘The Reverend Ransome wasn’t my real father,’ said Peter. ‘I know that I always pretended he was, when I was at school, but that was only because I was embarrassed about it. My real father was Barney Blitz.’