any more.’
‘All right, if you don’t feel like it. They’ll be gone by six at the latest, you’ll be glad to hear.’ He smiled and went back to his guests.
I read the newspaper before putting it away again. As Charles had said, it was good for the ego. I thought the columnist, whom I’d known for years, had somewhat exaggerated my erstwhile powers. A case of the myth growing bigger than the reality. But still, it was nice. Particularly in view of the galling, ignominious end to the rough-house in which the great Sid had so recently landed himself.
On the following morning Charles and I changed back the labels on the chunks of quartz and packed them up ready to return to the Carver Foundation. When we had finished we had one label left over.
‘Are you sure we haven’t put one stone in the box without changing the label?’ said Charles.
‘Positive.’
‘I suppose we’d better check. I’m afraid that’s what we’ve done.’
We took all the chunks out of the big box again. The gem collection, which Charles under protest had taken to bed with him each night, was complete; but we looked through them again too to make sure the missing rock had not got among them by mistake. It was nowhere to be found.
‘St Luke’s Stone,’ I read from the label. ‘I remember where that was, up on the top shelf on the right hand side.’
‘Yes,’ agreed Charles, ‘a dull looking lump about the size of a fist. I do hope we haven’t lost it.’
‘We have lost it,’ I remarked. ‘Kraye’s pinched it.’
‘Oh no,’ Charles exclaimed. ‘You can’t be right.’
‘Go and ring up the Foundation, and ask them what the stone is worth.’
He shook his head doubtfully, but went to the telephone, and came back frowning.
‘They say it hasn’t any intrinsic value, but it’s an extremely rare form of meteorite. It never turns up in mines or quarrying of course. You have to wait for it to fall from the heavens, and then find it. Very tricky.’
‘A quartz which friend Kraye didn’t have.’
‘But he surely must know I’d suspect him?’ Charles protested.
‘You’d never have missed it, if it had really been part of your cousin’s passed-on collection. There wasn’t any gap on the shelf just now. He’d moved the others along. He couldn’t know you would check carefully almost as soon as he had gone.’
Charles sighed. ‘There isn’t a chance of getting it back.’
‘No,’ I agreed.
‘Well, it’s a good thing you insisted on the insurance,’ he said. ‘Carver’s valued that boring-looking lump more than all the rest put together. Only one other meteorite like it has ever been found: the St Mark’s Stone.’ He smiled suddenly. ‘We seem to have mislaid the equivalent of the penny black.’
FIVE
Two days later I went back through the porticoed columned doorway of Hunt Radnor Associates, a lot more alive than when I last came out.
I got a big hullo from the girl on the switchboard, went up the curving staircase very nearly whistling, and was greeted by a barrage of ribald remarks from the Racing Section. What most surprised me was the feeling I had of coming home: I had never thought of myself as really belonging to the agency before, even though down at Aynsford I had realised that I very much didn’t want to leave it. A bit late, that discovery. The skids were probably under me already.
Chico grinned widely. ‘So you made it.’
‘Well… Yes.’
‘I mean, back here to the grindstone.’
‘Yeah.’
‘But,’ he cast a rolling eye at the clock, ‘late as usual.’
‘Go stuff yourself,’ I said.
Chico threw out an arm to the smiling department. ‘Our Sid is back, his normal charming bloody self. Work in the agency can now begin.’
‘I see I still haven’t got a desk,’ I observed, looking round. No desk. No roots. No real job. As ever.
‘Sit on Dolly’s, she’s kept it dusted for you.’
Dolly looked at Chico, smiling, the mother-hunger showing too vividly in her great blue eyes. She might be the second best head of department the agency possessed, with a cross-referencing filing-index mind like a computer, she might be a powerful, large, self-assured woman of forty-odd with a couple of marriages behind her and an ever hopeful old bachelor at her heels, but she still counted her life a wasteland because her body couldn’t produce children. Dolly was a terrific worker, overflowing with intensely female vitality, excellent drinking company, and very, very sad.
Chico didn’t want to be mothered. He was prickly about mothers. All of them in general, not just those who abandoned their tots in push-chairs at police stations near Barnes Bridge. He jollied Dolly along and deftly avoided her tentative maternal invitations.
I hitched a hip on to a long accustomed spot on the edge of Dolly’s desk, and swung my leg.
‘Well, Dolly my love, how’s the sleuthing trade?’ I said.
‘What we need,’ she said with mock tartness, ‘is a bit more work from you and a lot less lip.’
‘Give me a job, then.’
‘Ah, now.’ She pondered. ‘You could…’ she began, then stopped. ‘Well, no… perhaps not. And it had better be Chico who goes to Lambourn; some trainer there wants a doubtful lad checked on…’
‘So there’s nothing for me?’
‘Er… well…’ said Dolly. ‘No.’ She had said no a hundred times before. She had never once said yes.
I made a face at her, picked up her telephone, pressed the right button, and got through to Radnor’s secretary.
‘Joanie? This is Sid Halley. Yes… back from Beyond, that’s it. Is the old man busy? I’d like a word with him.’
‘Big deal,’ said Chico.
Joanie’s prim voice said, ‘He’s got a client with him just now. When she’s gone I’ll ask him, and ring you back.’
‘O.K.’ I put down the receiver.
Dolly raised her eyebrows. As head of the department she was my immediate boss, and in asking direct for a session with Radnor I was blowing agency protocol a raspberry. But I was certain that her constant refusal to give me anything useful to do was a direct order from Radnor. If I wanted the drain unblocked I would have to go and pull out the plug. Or go on my knees to stay at all.
‘Dolly, love, I’m tired of kicking my heels. Even against your well-worn desk, though the view from here is ravishing.’ She was wearing, as she often did, a cross-over cream silk shirt: it crossed over at a point which on a young girl would have caused a riot. On Dolly it still looked pretty potent, owing to the generosity of nature and the disposal of her arrangements.
‘Are you chucking it in?’ said Chico, coming to the point.
‘It depends on the old man,’ I said. ‘He may be chucking me out.’
There was a brief, thoughtful silence in the department. They all knew very well how little I did. How little I had been content to do. Dolly looked blank, which wasn’t helpful.
Jones-boy clattered in with a tray of impeccable unchipped tea mugs. He was sixteen; noisy, rude, anarchistic, callous, and probably the most efficient office boy in London. His hair grew robustly nearly down to his shoulders, wavy and fanatically clean, dipping slightly in an expensive styling at the back. From behind he looked like a girl, which never disconcerted him. From in front his bony, acned face proclaimed him unprepossessingly male. He spent half his pay packet and his Sundays in Carnaby Street and the other half on week nights chasing girls. According to him, he caught them. No girls had so far appeared in the office to corroborate his story.
