My name is Benjamin Tarram, but I prefer to be called Bennie.   I was fourteen when the climax of this story happened, but it really all started more than a decade before that.

I am the youngest of three children; my sisters are named Ellen and Suzanna.   As children we lived with our parents Alexander (or Lex, as he preferred to be called) and Gwendolen (although she would always ignore you if you called her anything but Gwen) and our maternal grandmother Agnetha Chambers, or Grannie Agnetha as we called her, having been sternly warned never to dare call her Grannie Aggie.   Although our father was known to call her Aggie behind her back, though never to her face.

I guess this story is really about Grannie Agnetha, more than anything else.   She lived with us from as far back as I can remember, right up until I left home at the age of nineteen.   I never did know her real age, although she seemed well over a hundred to Eli, Susie and I, even before we were old enough to start school (though Eli and Susie both started a year or two before me).

Apart from her almost Egyptian mummy-like, shrivelled completion, and twisted, claw-like hands, the thing I remember most about Grannie Agnetha was her jewellery.   She seemed to be almost a walking jewellery shop, with gaudy glass and plastic trinkets dangling from her ears, from her neck in long chains, some of which dangled down to her knees like the beads that Julie Andrews wore in Thoroughly Modern Milly.   And, of course, her hands were covered with tawdry rings, up to half-a-dozen on a single finger.   Some of the glass baubles were almost as big as hens’ eggs and had to be fakes; as my father, Lex, loved to point out.   However, Grannie Agnetha would become furious at this, insisting that her jewels were all genuine.

“Family heirlooms passed down through the Chambers family for generation after generation, some of them for hundreds, or even thousands of years,” she would insist.   However, some of the settings were patently Bakelite, if not actually plastic, and so they could not possibly date back further than the early 1940s at the most.   Besides, as my father pointed out, some of the “rocks” were so large that they would have put to shame, for size if not quality, anything owned by Elizabeth Taylor or Zsa Zsa Gabor, so if the gems were real Grannie Agnetha would have been the richest woman on Earth.