Read Online The Amber Knight by Katherine John - Free Book Online Page A

seen him.’
    ‘You exhibit him?’
    ‘Only since last week. Russian from Riga. He sent me an illustrated catalogue. I liked what I saw and took half a dozen on a sale or return basis.’
    ‘Georgiana’s meeting him here tomorrow,’ Adam warned her.
    ‘Then let’s hope he arrives. Like his stuff?’ She pointed him in the direction of a framed acrylic depicting a pile of pastel sticks heaped on a black background.
    ‘Crayons in repose?’
    ‘You really are a barbarian.’
    ‘Perhaps something in the composition escapes me. Must love you and leave you.’
    ‘You can’t fool me,’ she shouted after him. ‘I know you only dropped in to count your ornaments.’
    He ran up the spiral staircase, an art deco version of the one in the Historical Museum, and out on to the back stairs. His apartment was empty, just as Waleria had told him it would be, but there were signs that Helga had made full use of everything the place had to offer. Wet towels slopped in pools of water on the bathroom floor; the shower door was open, the tops left off his shampoo and shower gel and a fine scattering of talcum powder overlaid the mess.
    Damp footsteps led out of the bathroom across the deep pile of the living room carpet to the sofa where a soggy imprint of her body flattened the cushions. They’d even been conveniently arranged at a comfortable angle for the telephone.
    Coffee grounds littered the worktop of the tiny triangular kitchen cut from a corner of the living room. A bottle of wine was missing from the fridge. On the mezzanine the make-up-smeared sheets lay tumbled on the bed. Her hairs were in his brush. There was no note.
    It took him an hour to restore order. After pushing the sheets into the linen basket and straightening the newly jacketed duvet on the bed, he checked around one last time, even opening the drawer where he kept his cutlery. Waleria had made him paranoid. The odd bottle of wine, yes, but there was no way Helga would take any of the utilitarian pieces he had furnished the place with.
    Suppressing the urge to phone Helga and tell her precisely what he thought of her personal habits, he locked the door and returned downstairs.
    ‘About time, I was just going to throw whatever’s in this bag to the birds,’ Waleria nudged the carrier bag with the toe of her shoe.
    ‘Be my guest.’
    ‘You serious?’ Waleria picked up the bag and examined the contents.
    ‘I’m not hungry any more.’
    ‘And Edmund Dunst?’
    ‘He can send out for a sandwich.’
    ‘Feed you dinner tonight in exchange?’
    ‘Flaki?’ Adam asked suspiciously.
    ‘I was thinking of pork cutlets but if you’d prefer tripe I’ll get some.’ She knew he hated the Polish national dish. ‘Eight o’clock?’
    ‘I’ll bring my appetite.’
     
CHAPTER FIVE
     
    Stepping on to the small veranda that fronted the street, Adam noticed that the door to Feliks Malek’s basement jewellery shop opposite was open, and the glass case he kept his most modestly priced tourist pieces in set out on the pavement.
    ‘If you’re looking for Feliks he isn’t here.’ Elizbieta Hirsz, the pretty, eighteen-year-old redhead Feliks employed as an assistant informed him as he descended the steps.
    ‘Is he likely to be long?’
    ‘Who knows? A supply of amber is due in. He’s gone to see what he can get.’
    ‘From Kaliningrad?’
    ‘Where else? No one’s prepared to pay Polish rates while the Russians can mine it for a third of the price.’ She bent her head over the earrings she was working on, laying hair-thin gold wires on to beaten silver leaves.
    ‘What do you know about Ludwig Krefta?’ Adam asked, aware that Elizbieta’s family’s pedigree as silver- and amber-smiths was even longer than Feliks’s.
    ‘The younger or the elder?’
    ‘Is the elder dead?’
    ‘Since 1951.’
    ‘Then it has to be the younger.’
    ‘It doesn’t make much difference. The younger hasn’t done anything worth shouting about since 1970. You been offered