by Zenith Brown
“Yes. Who is Mrs. Royce, please?”
Inspector Bull was writing industriously in his notebook, but he was thinking about something else.
“She is an old friend of my husband’s. I think her husband and Mr. Colton went to school together. He died many years ago and left her well-to-do. Then someone else died about ten years ago and left her more money. My husband of course thought diamonds were a sound investment and persuaded her to buy. The gold-in-the-stocking theory of economics, I suppose you call it.”
Inspector Bull looked up at her.
“Yes. I understand from your statement last night that she was thinking of selling. Had she decided that diamonds were not such a good investment, or did she need money?”
Mrs. Colton smiled faintly. “I don’t know, Mr.—Inspector—Bull. She doesn’t need money, however, and of course diamonds have gone down considerably. Perhaps she thought she’d better unload before they went down more. In fact I remember now my husband did say he’d advised her to sell.”
“When was that, madam?”
“On the way to Colnbrook. After we’d left Windsor. They have gone down four shillings in the pound, I think he said. Something of the sort.”
“Yes. Do you know if they had agreed on last night, previously, as the time he was to get them?”
“I suppose they had. They were to be appraised in Hatton-garden this morning.”
“Who by?” asked Bull quickly.
She thought a moment.
“Would it be Mr. Steiner?” she asked. “I barely heard the name mentioned. It seems like a good name.”
A half-smile appeared for a fleeting second on her lips. Inspector Bull looked at her placidly. The occasion of her amusement passed him by. He noted down two words: “Albert Steiner.”
“Then Mr. Colton was arranging a sale?” he went on.
“I think so. I suppose he probably had a purchaser. Say an American.”
“Oh,” said Bull.
“I don’t know that,” she went on a little hastily. “But my husband was a careful business man. While he was very fond of Mrs. Royce, I don’t think he would have undertaken to sell some old-fashioned stones for her unless he could do it easily. If it was just an idea they’d have done it long ago—I should think. That’s why I think he had a buyer in mind. And I suppose it was an American because everyone else is poor. It’s just guess-work.”
Inspector Bull wrote in the black notebook.
“If it is true, Mrs. Colton,” he said, “there are a good many people who could have known he had the jewels that night.”
She hesitated, and looked reflectively out of the window.
“Yes . . . and no, Inspector. Mr. Steiner, if that’s his name, knew they were to be brought to him this morning, I suppose. I don’t know that he knew my husband was bringing them personally from Windsor last night. Or even that he knew they were in Windsor.”
“What about your husband’s clerks, madam?”
Again the half-smile, quickly vanishing.
“My husband’s clerk is Mr. Smith,” she said very seriously. “He would probably know about it. He’s seventy-four and he’s been with the firm longer than my husband had. Then there’s the boy. His name is Gates. He wouldn’t know.”
Inspector Bull only looked his question.
“Because he only polishes the silver and opens the door. You see, he’s just fifty.”
In spite of himself Bull glanced up at her. In his earnest fashion he had thought he detected an unbecoming levity in her voice. But she was perfectly composed. There was even a trace of distinct unhappiness in the calm eyes.
Then as she caught his glance she said impulsively, “Oh, you see it’s always seemed so absurd to me—all the fuss and bother about shop and important clients and all of it. I only persuaded my husband to stop wearing a top hat and dress like a human being a few months ago. Oh, it’s ghastly, all of it.”
The mask of composure had slipped a little, and Inspector Bull was glad of it. The eyes flashed, and again there was a glint of pain in them.
“I see,” he said soberly. “How many people are there in Mrs. Royce’s household?”
“There’s her son. He, by the way, brought the jewels from the vault in the Midland Bank in Windsor yesterday afternoon.”
“Then he knew her plans about them?”
“I don’t know, I’m sure.”
“If he did, that makes five people who knew about them, including yourself. Steiner of Hatton-garden; Mrs. Royce; her son; your husband’s clerk Smith. Your driver makes a possible sixth, and I suppose there are servants in the Royce house who could have overheard something. Then there’s a chance that somebody at the bank talked about it.”
The telephone at the low table beside Mrs. Colton’s chair rang.
“Hello. Oh, yes, Mr. Field. Yes, if you will. I didn’t want to disturb you last night. Very well. Thank you.”
She turned to Bull.
“It’s my husband’s solicitor. He’s coming out now. He can tell you about my husband’s affairs. I suppose he might even know who was going to buy the stones.”
“I’ll have to see him later, madam,” Inspector Bull said, getting to his feet. “Just one more point. Please give me the best description you can of the man who stopped you in the Colnbrook Road.”
She shrugged her shoulders helplessly.
“I’ve tried so hard to remember what he was like! But I can’t, except vaguely. He was about my husband’s height and not so heavy; and that’s really all I can think of about him. If I’d only not tried to help! When we started out my husband took the revolver out of his pocket and said, ‘You see how silly it is to be alarmed. I’ll put this here in sight.’ He put it in the pocket by the arm rest. When he didn’t take it I reached for it. I thought I could frighten the man. Then I nearly fainted. That’s really all I know.”
Bull put his notebook in his pocket.
“Thank you. I’ll trouble you as little as I can. I’d like to see the chauffeur now, please.”
She rang the bell, “Do you want him to come here?”
“I’ll see him in the garage, please.”
Mrs, Colton directed the maid to take Inspector Bull to see the chauffeur. Inspector Bull followed the trim little maid mechanically, thinking of several things very hard. They went out a side door towards the back of the house. Bull suddenly noticed that the maid was surreptitiously looking at him, as they went along, with intense curiosity, shaking with excitement. They came around a corner of the house.
“Ah!” the maid whispered suddenly. “There’s Peskett now, talking to Miss Agatha.”
Bull saw a man of middle size standing by a large Daimler in the driveway. He was looking sullenly at the ground and kicking pebbles along the drive. A young woman was talking urgently to him.
As Bull advanced the girl turned quickly around and came forward. She was about twenty-five, Bull thought, rather pretty, with black eyes, dark curling hair and a mouth closed as tightly as a steel trap. Without looking at Bull she went quickly into the house by an open f rench window.
“Who’s that?” Bull said to the maid, who was standing by the corner of the house.
“Oh, sir, that’s Miss Agatha. The master’s daughter, sir.”
Bull went along to the driveway where Peskett was polishing the windows of the big car. He could not see the two pairs of eyes that were watching him through lace curtains. One pair of calm hazel eyes upstairs, one pair of burning black eyes behind the french window.
“I’d like to talk to you a minute, Peskett,” he said. “I’m Inspector Bull of Scotland Yard.”
CHAPTER FIVE
Peskett was not the type of man that Bull would have picked for George Colton’s chauffeur. He was clearly not the sort of man to touch his cap and hold the door open with any kind of grace or suavity, even for a very respectable and prosperous merchant. Servants generally, male servants in particular, belong to that great class of people whose public and private lives have no connectio
n with each other . . . like labour cabinet ministers, and interior decorators whose fathers are dukes. Publicly and privately their set-ups are as different as Fulham-road and Grosvenor-square. When they disappear from the eye of their public they reach a different plane of feeling and conduct; when they reappear they wear a mask that disguises them. Oliver Peskett was not like that, Inspector Bull thought. He could not place him.
“I want you to tell me about last night, Peskett.”
He conceded, in spite of whatever ideas he might have had from a first sight of the man, that the chauffeur’s story was simple, direct and explicit. Though not in exactly the same words, it differed in no essential, as far as Bull could remember, from the statement taken at the police station in Colnbrook and from that just given him by Mrs. Colton.
When Peskett had finished Bull thought it over a moment.
“What did you do when he shot?” he asked
“I didn’t do anything,” Peskett said. “I didn’t want to get shot myself, and I didn’t have a gun. I don’t think he would have fired if Mrs. Colton had kept her head. He didn’t look as if he meant to, anyway. I suppose she thought she’d scare him off.”
Bull thought again.
“How much were those diamonds worth?”
“I heard Mrs. Colton tell the sergeant at Colnbrook they were worth around £ 30,000.”
“That’s the first you knew of it?”
“That’s right.”
“But you knew he was carrying jewels of some value?”
“I didn’t. Nothing of the sort. I knew when I saw him get in the car at Windsor that he had jewels with him. He always carried them in that little black satchel. The day he took the Austrian crown jewels to Cheltenham to show them to Lady Morgan that’s the way he carried them. But I carried a gun that day. Some of those roads are pretty lonesome. He thought it was foolish. I never could figure him out about that.”
“Did he carry stones about often, in that satchel?”
“Never saw him carry them any other way, and I’ve been driving him two years.”
Bull wondered if he noticed a shade of defiance in the man’s voice.
“You weren’t armed last night, though?” he asked.
“Mr. Colton wouldn’t have it. Sometimes I used to take a gun without his knowing it, when I knew he had stones with him. I didn’t know he would, last night, so I didn’t have one. I guess it wouldn’t have been much good anyway. That fellow was pretty quick on the draw.”
Bull looked at him with a hardly perceptible but increased interest.
“Where are you from, by the way?”
“I came to Mr. Colton from Manchester.”
“Born there?”
“No. I worked there from 1919 on”.
“What doing?”
“I drove a lorry for Weber and Ernst.”
“You say Mr. Colton was opposed to firearms. Do you mean he didn’t carry them himself, or didn’t want you to?”
“Both. He said they invited murder. I guess he thought more about his hide than he did of money. That’s saying a lot.”
“How do you account for the gun he had in the side pocket of the car last night?”
Perhaps the placidity of Inspector Bull’s tone had the slightest dangerously silky quality.
The driver gave a short mirthless laugh.
“I don’t. I could swear he never had one there before.”
“When the man stopped you, you didn’t see he was masked until you let down the window, I understand.”
“That’s right. Then I saw he had a couple of guns. I did just what I was told.”
“You must have had time to get a pretty fair idea of what he was like, didn’t you?”
“Yes and no.”
Peskett hesitated a little.
“I couldn’t see his face at all, you see. Cap over his forehead, goggles over his eyes, mask over the rest. But I thought of one thing. His voice was faked, it was too deep. He was putting on, if you know what I mean. And he bit off his words, like he didn’t want to talk any more than he had to.”
Inspector Bull thought hard about that.
“What else?” he said.
“Well, he was taller than Mr. Colton. Then there was something about him. I don’t know what it was. But I’d know him if I saw him again.”
Bull looked at him thoughtfully. “What kind of a machine did he have?”
“Dunlop four.”
“Did you see it?”
“No. Heard it.”
“You know a lot about motorcycles?”
“I know enough to know what kind of an engine it’s got when I hear it go.”
“What did Miss Colton want out here a minute ago?”
The driver reached in his pocket for a cigarette. There was a noticeable hesitation.
“She wanted to know why I happened to take the Colnbrook Road instead of the by-pass,” he said then.
The faint glint of amusement in Inspector Bull’s eyes did strange things to his stolid, simple face.
“That’s just what I was going to ask you myself,” he said pleasantly.
“And I was going to tell you just what I told her/* the driver said calmly. “That Mr. Colton told me to take it when we left Windsor. I suppose he wanted to keep away from that place on the by-pass where there’s been three hold-ups the last fortnight.”
Bull nodded. “Reason enough, too. Well, good-morning. I’ll be seeing you later.”
He got into his car and set off for Windsor, with the germs of several ideas tucked away safely in his mind.
“Mr. Peskett isn’t as clever as he thinks,” Inspector Bull thought with some complacency.
CHAPTER SIX
Mrs. Royce lived, so Inspector Bull discovered without much trouble, in a four-storey red brick Georgian house in the Windsor High-street. She would have preferred to live in one of her houses in the country—she had two, with adequate funds for maintenance and operation—but her principles would not permit it. Mrs. Royce believed that it was someone’s duty to protect the rear view of the royal household. When new tea-shops were opened in the High-street she wrote letters to the Times. Her letters seemed not to deter Messrs. Lyons, or whoever it might be, but they exhibited Mrs. Royce doing her duty as a British subject. She refused all offers for her own house with great violence. Once, Bull learned, she had called in a surprised constable to eject a still more surprised London agent who had not fully realised that she really did not mean to sell.
Mrs. Royce—though Inspector Bull would not have put it this way—was an Edwardian. Edwardians are much worse than Victorians, for the reason that when they reverted to type after the wicked but thin veneering of the gay Nineties they reverted even further than type. More than that, they had had a sip of life, and knew just how heady a drink it really was. This the Victorians in their innocence had only guessed.
Mrs. Royce had had a gay youth. A royal prince had passed her house every morning for a week just to catch a glimpse of her. That was in 1887. She had managed to push a kitten out of the drawing-room window. The Prince had actually picked it up and returned it to her. Mrs. Royce thus knew very well how dangerous life could be, and how delightful. So when, in her middle age, she started to go native —for surely the Victorians are the quintessence of English-ness—she went native with a vengeance. She became a veritable dragon. Only a sharp observer could see a fiery twinkle in the old grey eyes under the grizzled Lily Langtry coiffure.
Mrs. Royce wore heavy purple grosgrain silk dresses with beaded collars in the winter, and lavender grosgrain silk dresses with a black velvet band around her neck in the summer. In the winter her hats were black velvet, resembling a section of stovepipe, topped with mink tails. In the summer they were straw with pansies. In all seasons she was a formidable figure. She never hesitated to express herself in a manner as terrifying as her person. She had once said to George Colton, her friend and business adviser, “ ’Pon my soul, George, I do believe you’re the only person I know in
England who doesn’t shiver when I appear. It’s most extraordinary, ’pon my soul it is. And my own son at that.”
That was true, in spite of the non sequitur, which was characteristic. Mr. Colton was not afraid of her; her own son was very much so, or so people thought.
“Mother’s so beastly unpredictable,” was his chief comment in the thirty years of his existence by her. He hardly knew, when he opened his morning’s mail, whether he would have a letter from her solicitor cutting him off without a shilling, or one directing him to step around to the Piccadilly show rooms to view the Mercedes she had ordered for him.
When Inspector Bull arrived mother and son were, it appeared, in the upstairs drawing room. He was shown up. It was a room after his own heart. Everything on which an ob-jet could be placed was covered, and draped landscapes and portraits on easels, sofas and chairs with velvet fringes and white antimacassars, palms, aspidistras, huge Chinese vases, and elaborate screens with portraits in the panels completely filled the room except for a narrow passage that led from each door to a small clear space, like an oasis (with palms outside) in the centre. Into this space Inspector Bull tried to insinuate his great bulk without tipping anything, or everything, over.
Mrs. Royce sat in state against her formidable background. Bull could not see her very clearly, he discovered. The heavy, long, dark green silk window drapes were partly drawn, giving to a naturally light room a depressing twilight gloom. That in spite of the fact that outside the sun was shining mildly—indeed brightly, for February.
Her son was standing behind her. It was obvious that he felt no more at home in his mother’s drawing room than Bull did. He was a discordant note, Bull felt at once; even more so than the expensive wireless set in the corner behind a section of the palms.
“So you’re the police, young man!”
Bull almost jumped at the sound of that deep bass voice. He had never felt so keenly his personal inadequacy to represent New Scotland Yard.
“And have you found my diamonds? And who killed George Colton, eh?”
“Not yet, ma’am,” Bull said.
“Well, my son says you never will. Not that I take much stock in what he says.”
