Going Away and Other Stories Page 12

  I knew nothing about diamonds or their value. But that’s undoubtedly what the stone was. I can’t remember the exact moment when I decided to keep it. At first, I felt very nervous. I didn’t know where to hide the thing. I kept moving it around; first in one pocket and then in another. Often I walked around the streets of Holborn ‘wrestling with my conscience’, I think it’s called. I was miserable in the basement. They’d stopped giving me any new work to do. They were presumably giving it to the new partner. He didn’t seem a bad sort of chap. A bit haughty, but not unkind. Obviously they wanted me to leave. At home Andrew had become totally and unhealthily attached to Audrey. He cried if she disappeared from his sight, even to go to the bathroom. So she took him with her wherever she went and even started sleeping in a small bed in his room. Andrew was her child and I had no part in his life, nor, it seemed, in hers.

  I half expected that Gladys had left a note or something mentioning the diamond. If such a note turned up I resolved that I would feign ignorance of the secret drawer but go and investigate and find the drawer empty. Anyone could have taken the stone or Gladys could have given it away. But no note about the diamond emerged from the piles of paper. Even without the diamond, I could see Audrey would now be worth a small fortune – but that didn’t concern me, for I had the diamond!

  Four weeks after Gladys’s death, I disappeared from East Finchley and Holborn and, like Mr Stonehouse some years later, wound up here in Australia. That was the easy bit. I felt no guilt at leaving the firm or my wife and son. Audrey would in due course no doubt claim the house that I’d paid for and get the money from my life insurance. Turning the diamond into cash was the difficult bit . . .

  At that moment there was a shout of rage and the exercise book was wrenched from my hands.

  ‘You’re not to read it. It’s mine!’

  It was taken with such force that I lost my balance and fell off the seat. As I sprawled on the ground, I turned my head to see a grey-haired and bearded figure in jeans and a T-shirt with a butcher’s apron tied over them running away across the street, clutching the exercise book to his chest. He then disappeared into one of the restaurants that lined the seafront.

  As I sat up trying to recover my composure, a young man – a typically bronzed young Australian – came and helped me up.

  ‘Don’t worry, mate, he’s really quite harmless, although he gets excited at times. A bit off his head. Washes up in the restaurant over there. You okay?’

  ‘I think so,’ I said. ‘Thank you.’

  But it had spoiled my trip to Manly. Not only was I shaken up by my fall, I was disturbed by the story in the exercise book. I knew the details were totally exact for the period as I’d been practising as a solicitor in London myself in the 1950s. As I stood by the rail on the return boat and looked back at the wake it was making, I thought about the past.

  I had briefly become a partner at that time in a firm in Bedford Row, displacing a young solicitor from his office. He’d been very resentful, and then I heard that he had disappeared. I wondered . . . it seemed so unlikely!