“Thank you,” I said, holding it with two fingers as I gingerly placed it in my purse. “I’ll get right on it.”
“So, have you bought my birthday present yet?” Martin asked, kicking a pile of Lego pieces.
“You really need to learn the art of subtlety.”
“What’s that?”
“Never mind.”
“So, what did you get me?”
“Something cool and modern.”
“Something street?”
“I can’t afford an entire street, not on my pension.”
That earned me a teenaged eye roll. It was a bad joke, so I suppose I deserved it.
“The birthday party is on Friday at seven.”
“I remember your birthday, Martin.”
“That’s the day after tomorrow.”
“I know.”
“We’re having it at the indoor skate park.”
“I know, I know.”
“We’ll be skating before then, but you don’t have to come for that.”
“Why not? They have beginner’s classes. Maybe I should try.”
That earned me another eye roll.
“Let’s go get some ice cream,” he said, clambering over the wreckage that was his living space. “I think Mom and Dad left some in the freezer.”
I smiled and followed him. Hopefully I’d have this mystery solved in the next couple of days so I could enjoy celebrating Martin turning fourteen with a clear mind and a sense of accomplishment.
That night, with a cup of tea by my side and my tortoiseshell kitten, Dandelion, curled up on my feet, I checked the Internet for everything I could find on the late, great Sir Edmund Montalbion.
I found quite a lot.
First off, I discovered that the “sir” was an actual title from England. He was English, although he had lived much of his life in the United States, and he had earned his knighthood for “services to the realm.” The services turned out to be acting as a go-between to land several lucrative mining deals for British businesses in Africa and Asia. These were all gemstone mines, diamonds mostly. Thanks to him, the English had taken a bite of the diamond industry, something that had been dominated by the Belgians for many decades.
I thought they only gave out knighthoods for slaying dragons or saving damsels in distress. I didn’t know you could get knighted for making private corporations oodles of cash, but what did I know about knights?
These deals had no doubt made him oodles of cash, too, although reading between the lines of his life story, that never seemed to be his primary motivation. He never created his own business, although he certainly had the capital and knowledge to do so, and he never stayed as a consultant with any one company for long. Much of his time was spent at gem shows and auctions in every important capital in the world. He was renowned for his personal collection of rare gems, many of which had stories attached to them.
For example, a couple of years ago he had spent $3.2 million at an auction at Christie’s to buy an emerald-and-ruby diadem that had been owned by the wife of one of India’s richest maharajas in the nineteenth century. This diadem had been the target of an ingenious plan by some of the maharaja’s servants, who had decided to steal it. Knowing that they would be suspected if it went missing, and not wanting to live their lives on the run, they hired a master jeweler to make an exact replica with crystal stones instead of real ones.
The plan would have worked, too, except the jeweler did his job too well. What he didn’t know was that the maharani (that’s a female maharaja, something I didn’t know until I read this story) had dropped the diadem and snapped one of the delicate gold threads. Because of this, the frayed end always jabbed her in the scalp when she put it on. But as the old saying goes, it is better to look good than to feel good, and she would wear the prickly diadem on all state occasions. She was too afraid of her husband, who had quite a temper, to tell him that she had dropped it.
The next time she put it on, however, she noticed there was no snapped gold thread. She immediately guessed the truth and told her husband, who proceeded to show his renowned temper to the servants in quite a bloody manner. Several hot irons and a bath of boiling water later, he wrung a confession from the few servants still remaining alive and learned where the real diadem was hidden.
Quite the history, and our murder victim lapped it up, so much so that he even bought the fake diadem for $500,000, even though the value of its materials was barely worth a tenth of that.
Sir Edmund Montalbion was a collector through and through. He was reputed to have a sample of every gemstone known to man, and even every gemstone known to woman, which is a considerably greater number.
His most recent acquisition was one of his rarest, and most expensive. It was the Volcano Stone of Panama, an immense fire opal. While fire opals are beautiful red gemstones, they tend not to be as expensive as, say, diamonds, but this one was incredibly pure and was the largest cut fire opal in the world, weighing in at twelve thousand carats. It was also unusual in that it was the only fire opal ever to be found in Panama. Fire opals are rare in Guatemala and Honduras, and not found any further south until you get to Brazil. This unusual feature added to its value. He bought it on a private purchase so the details were sketchy, but the estimated market value was well over $1 million.
So the obvious motive for murdering
