All across America that afternoon there were wild celebrations. In San Francisco, the whole city took to the streets and danced and drank until the following morning. In Chicago, a seven-mile parade of cheering people kept the traffic blocked for hours. In Sacramento, within hearing distance of 54 K Street, thirty new locomotives of the Sierra Pacific Railroad lined up to blow their whistles in triumphant unison.

And in Utah, Collis Edmonds was standing apart from the hoopla all around him, leaning heavily on his ebony cane, when a red-cheeked boy came running towards him. The boy held up a handful of telegraph messages. ‘They’re for you, sir. Shilling took them down this morning but Mr McCormick said we should wait until now for you to have them.’

There were three envelopes. Collis tore them open one by one.

The first read: ‘Congratulations and warmest regards from your fellow directors of the Sierra Pacific Railroad.’

The second read: ‘A grand and meritorious achievement. Best wishes, President Ulysses S. Grant.’

The third telegraph read: ‘You are the talk of the town. All San Francisco salutes you and even Father is impressed! I am back at home now, much improved, and shall persuade Father to invite you to dinner. Your favourite, Sarah.’

The locomotive blew its shrill whistle as Collis flung Sarah’s telegraph exuberantly into the air and made his way into the crowd, in search of champagne. Behind him, the telegraph floated gracefully to the ground and was trampled, obscuring Shilling’s handwriting so that all anyone could have read were the telling words ‘Your favourite’.

Solitaire

Graham Masterton

Prologue

His mother had always been able to surprise him. It had been her way. But she had never surprised him as much as this. He lifted the huge diamond out of the dark blue velvet socket of her jewellery box, and held it up in the curtained dimness of her bedroom with a sensation of sudden vertigo. It was a brilliant, fiery, rectangular-cut stone, larger than a man could comfortably swallow, and it was still unmounted; untouched and untampered-with since the brilliandeer had buffed it up to its final dazzling polish.

He had no exact idea of how much diamonds were worth, although he had heard that if they were monstrously large, as this one was, they could no longer be valued carat for carat: that would put them beyond the reach of even the world’s richest men. But even at auction, this diamond would have to be valued at hundreds of thousands of pounds, perhaps millions.

‘I’m a millionaire,’ he thought to himself. It was like emerging from a wine-cellar into the open air and discovering that he was drunk.

He had no doubt at all that the stone was real. He remembered as he turned it around and around in his fingers what his mother had whispered to him only five weekends ago on the wisteria-wrapped veranda of the Reverend Ponsford’s house at Herne Hill, when everybody else had been playing croquet on the sun-blinded lawns.