The River of Diamonds

I was oblivious of the superb machinery in the sorting-room — the six-foot-high glass retorts and six-inch-diameter transparent tubes through which sea water, still carrying its deep-sea life in the shape of lobsters and small fish, made its way to the gravitational sorter; the grease table with its greasy yellow roller to catch the stones; the surrealist electro-static separator flickering with a savage blue charge of 25,000 volts; the aluminium-decked vibrator shaking stones into fourteen categories at a rate faster than the eye could follow… I saw none of these. I saw a man with a sieve standing where his daughter stood now, skilfully swilling the diamond-bearing gravel round in the old-fashioned way on the Oyster Line, and I was sensible of the presence of Destiny, his inescapable, malign fellow-traveller, who had snatched his life's-search from the precious gravel not once, but three times in a short life.

'You should have used Caldwell's trommel.' The words thudded in my brain like the pulse of the Mazy Zed's pumps.

They all turned and looked at me. The wash of water in the tubes and the heart-beat of the pumps filled the long silence.

Then Mary said, wide-eyed, 'Why do you say that?'

The forceps in her fingers played idly, unseeingly, in the pile of diamonds before her.

We stared at one another. 'The first diamonds from the sea — a Caldwell has made history again. Perhaps you've killed the Caldwell jinx, too.'

Rhennin frowned. 'You've had a going-over, John. Better get a change and clean-up. Draw some fresh clothes from the stores.' He turned to Mary. 'You're the wardrobe mistress — Mike and Jim can go ahead with the sorting — will you fix John up?'

I said, 'Shelborne would have called it the slop-chest, not wardrobe.'

Mary was puzzled, uncertain, but excitement brought a remarkable clarity to her hazel eyes. She undid a top button of her surgeon's smock, pulled out a magnifying glass, the sort jewellers use, and held it out on a thin gold chain to me. I walked over to her, frowning, for something which had been dredged up in my mind at the sight of those first sea-diamonds now eluded me, something important on the point of definition. But it was gone now.

Mary held a stone in her forceps. There was an intricate tracery of fine lines which seemed at first glance to be a blurring.

She cupped the diamonds into a small pile. 'Look! They're frosty!'

The blurring, on looking closer, resolved into a mass of fine cobwebs. There was a green at the heart of it like the green I had seen in Shelborne's eyes.

I handed back the glass. 'Felix, I want to tell you how Shelborne

There's plenty of time to talk. Get Mary to find you the clothes first. How many carats are there, Mary?'

Twenty, thirty maybe.'

Rhennin spoke to the group at the sorting-table. 'We've found sea-diamonds, and that's a pretty big thrill for all of us. Remember, though, that what's here on the table isn't a quarter enough to pay her way for one day.

You all know that it could simply be an isolated pocket…'

Mary gestured to me and we went to a big room in the Mazy Zed's 'flatland' which was filled with shirts, overalls, jackets, jerseys, trousers, shoes, socks. It looked like a small department store for men.

'Is this really part of your job?' I asked.

She laughed. 'Woman's touch and all that. Being the only female aboard, Mr Rhennin put the slop-chest, as you call it, in my care.' She looked at me appraisingly. 'Sixteen collar, forty vest?'

I nodded. She put them into my hands.

'Why did you say "Caldwell's trommel" the way you did?'

'It seemed appropriate that what the father missed the daughter should have.'

She shook her head. 'That explains the words, yes. But not the way you said them.' She paused when I did not reply. 'And Shelborne?'

'When a man has just tried to kill you, it is difficult to get it out of your mind.'

'Kill your

I told her about the Praying Mantis and the Borchardt.

She said flatly, 'Shelborne isn't the type. There is some other explanation.'

'Are you trying to find excuses for your father's murderer?'

She flushed. 'I don't believe that either.'

'He made me a nice goodbye speech, practically saying it would be the last time we would meet. He was pleased, too, that I'd helped you get this job — why, I don't know. I think that was the reason he showed me over Mercury.'

She handed me a pair of shoes and socks. 'John, I know in my heart that Shelborne isn't a killer. He is complex, brilliant, and there's something inward-looking about him which I find hard to define or comprehend. And I feel an affinity — a rapport, you could call it that — with him which I cannot understand…'

The whole thing's quite simple: Shelborne got your father to Strandloper's Water, extorted the concession from him, and then did away with him. How, we shall never know.'

'He's not like that at all. I know it, I feel it. Shelborne lives on different planes — and one of them is an exalted state where it is difficult to come anywhere close to him. Rarefied, maybe, but exciting and unique, not murderous. If something on one plane stood in the way of his ideas on another…'

'In other words, Shelborne has his price, too. Like Strandloper's Water. I wish I knew what the price was — the concession wasn't the half of it.'

She said angrily, 'It isn't like that either, and you know it. You're oversimplifying. You're working the facts backwards to try to incriminate Shelborne. It doesn't work. He…'

'Look, Mary, I saw your father's own pistol, with his name engraved on it — F. W. Caldwell. Shelborne had it, but no one parts with a gun like that, custom-made for his own hand only…'

'You know a lot about guns,' she flashed at me.

'Yes,' I said, 'I do. I've collected them, studied them, used them…'

She remained silent and I went on: 'To act the way Shelborne is capable of acting, or think the way he thinks, you have to have a motive — a compulsive motive force. I sat on his stoep, his quarter-deck, and watched his mental processes at work not longer than a couple of days ago. He frightens me, just as his island frightens me. Look at the facts: a sea-bed diamond concession, some guano islands which are literally only for the birds, and he refuses a handsome offer to cooperate with the Mazy Zed outfit. It doesn't add up to the man who sat there with me on that grim little island. Caldwell

'Why do you keep bringing my father into it?'

'Because I feel him as a presence. In the sorting-room back there too. I know, I know — he's been dead thirty-odd years. But Caldwell is diamonds.'

'Now Mary Caldwell is diamonds too,' she added quietly.

I waited before I spoke. 'What if Shelborne has in his hands the luck that eluded Caldwell?'

She stared at me, wide eyes. 'What do you mean?'

'Caldwell became the legend because the world knew it was really he who found the great strikes, — but each was taken from him at the moment of putting the golden cup to his lips, so to speak, by a cruel stroke of luck. Oranjemund is the star example. He should have been a millionaire half a dozen times over.' I chose my words slowly, carefully. 'What if there were something else, his biggest strike of all?'

'What are you trying to say?'

'A great prospector with a kindly, gentle and, it seems, slightly credulous nature, walks out on his home, his child, on everything that is dear to him, vanishes, and is seen only once again at Strandloper's Water. He just went prospecting? No!'

'But he had the German concession for the sea-bed.'

'Why?' I demanded. 'Why the sea-bed, why, why, why?'

'Because he thought…'

'Caldwell didn't think, he didn't go on guess-work — he knew. Shelborne knows too.'

'What, John, for God's sake?'

I told her. Until that moment it had been undefined, uncrystallized in my mind.

She looked carefully at me. Then she burst out. 'No! No! You must be mad. It's too big…'