He studied the tortoise, who by this time had sleepily poked his head out and was staring around him with his beady little eyes unblinking in the light.
"I tell you what, skattie," he answered, "Let's leave this till tomorrow morning when it's properly light. I'll go down to the hardware and see if they've got anything that can dissolve the glue. I wouldn't want to damage the shell now, Frikkie's right, it could kill this animal."
"If you crack a tortoise shell they can die. They get infections, Ma," said Frikkie in a strangled voice. "Leave da Silva, he's not hurting you. He hasn't got any diamonds anywhere."
"Okay, Frik, put him back outside," said my father. "We'll look at him again tomorrow."
"Yirra, just think if that tortoise has been carrying uncut diamonds all this time!" said my mother dreamily. "You know it's not hard to sell those things. There're IDB men everywhere, you just have to know the right person. They pay you cash, no questions asked and even one little diamond can make a person rich. A big tortoise like ours can be carrying fortune. We could move to Cape Town near Auntie Hazel and we could buy a house there. And get a new car."
But in the morning, da Silva was gone. His wooden box was empty.
I suspected that Frikkie had taken him somewhere else until the diamond rush was over, but my mother was furious. She suspected da Silva of foul play, of knowing what our plans were and of deliberately foiling them.
"He's here in the garden somewhere," she muttered, her bony face alight with frustration. She was on her hands and knees, brushing aside the shrubs and poking a garden fork in between the cabbages. "Or maybe someone came and stole him in the night.. if they read the paper they'd know he could be a very valuable animal.". Considering there were about a thousand Karroo tortoises within a hundred metres of the town borders, I thought theft was unlikely, and we continued to search for da Silva until my father burst our bubble. He told us not to be stupid, that having uncut diamonds was a crime and that there was no point in looking, as we'd all go to prison if we found any and didn't hand them straight to the Authorities.