by Zenith Brown
She stared belligerently at him.
“We’ll do our best, ma’am,” he said, recovering what was his best approximation to some sort of professional suavity. “And I’d like any information you can give me.”
“Information indeed,” said Mrs. Royce. “That’s your business, my good man, not mine.”
Bull found himself actively disliking Mrs. Royce. He always and above all things hated to be called “my good man.” It made him unaccountably angry.
“It will save me time, ma’am,” he said stolidly, “if you will answer a few questions.”
Mrs. Royce breathed heavily. Inspector Bull got out his black notebook. Mrs. Royce shook her grizzled curls almost savagely. “Very well!” she said.
“What was the value of the jewels Mr. Colton had last night, please?”
“The assurance people can tell you that better than I can, I’m sure. That’s their business. You know as well as I do that with the market what it is it’s hard to say what anything’s worth.”
“Then approximately, ma’am,” Inspector Bull said patiently.
“Between £ 20,000 and £ 30,000, I’m told.”
“Were they fully insured against theft?”
“Of course they were. With the police what they are you have to insure your false hair.”
Mrs. Royce nodded her old head at him with the grimmest of smiles.
Bull had no gift of repartee, which partly explained his considerable success as a policeman. When unduly goaded he managed, through no particular merit of his own—or none that he would have been aware of—to give the impression of a Newfoundland ignoring the yapping of a Mexican hairless. Not that Mrs. Royce resembled such an animal in the least. Now he managed to remain imperturbable—until, glancing at young Mr. Royce, he saw a twinkle of amusement in his eye. Inspector Bull gave him a glance of placid dislike.
“Who beside yourself knew that Mr. Colton was taking the jewels to town last night, Mrs. Royce?” he said stolidly.
“Mrs. Colton, I suppose. That scatter-brained wife of his. In my time, I can tell you, sensible men didn’t discuss their business with their wives.”
Bull nodded, easily understanding such a reticence on the part of the deceased Mr. Royce. There was a second flicker in the younger man’s eyes.
“My son here knew. He got them from the vault yesterday afternoon. I suppose Mr. Thornton, the manager, knew. Eh, Michael?”
She turned towards Michael.
“Michael, come out here where I can see you. And, Inspector, sit down!”
Michael Royce slipped out into the cleared space. Bull sat down on a tan plush chair with castors that made it a precarious seat until his weight anchored it into the rug.
“Yes, I told Thornton, Mother. He was worried about letting them go. I told him Colton was taking them into town that night.”
“Well, then. I’m sure that’s all. Of course that person in Hatton-gardens may have known.”
“Hatton-garden, ma’am,” said Inspector Bull politely. “Mr. Steiner.”
Whatever Mrs. Royce might be, Bull saw, she was not dull. She gave him a fierce stare. It was followed by a subterranean chuckle.
“You’re not as big a fool as I thought you were, Inspector. What difference does it make what it’s called or what he’s called. I don’t even know that Colton told him when he was bringing the jewels. And I’m sure that’s all.”
“Servants, ma’am?”
“Stuff and nonsense. Murry is sixty-five and as deaf as a post. The parlour maid is too stupid to be in an institution* much less conduct a robbery.”
“Are they your only servants?”
“Don’t be inane, young man. Certainly not. There’s the cook; the chauffeur, and the house-maid. Out of the question.”
Bull thought about it. He wondered.
Mrs. Royce continued.
“The diamonds are all very well, young man.” Her voice was grim, and she fixed Bull with an unflinching eye. “But what I want to see is that ruffian hanged who shot George Colton down in cold blood. George Colton was the best friend I ever had. When I think it was a few paltry baubles of mine that were responsible for his death, I’m ashamed, Inspector. I’m ashamed!”
Bull felt himself strangely moved just then. There was something almost gentle about the old woman. The deep hoarse voice demanding justice for her friend was curiously tender. Inspector Bull happened to glance at Michael Royce. That young man was obviously ill at ease.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Inspector Bull was distinctly uncomfortable. He was tired of hearing about the inefficiency of the police. He was even more tired of hearing their supposed inefficiency condoned on the grounds that their powers were limited by such and such an Act. At the same time he was forced to admit that, with many possibilities, he saw little positive enlightenment.
A description of the jewels by the Continental Bonding and Assurance Company, Ltd., with premises in Thread-needle-street, was on his desk when he returned to the Embankment after lunch. Also the information that the stones were insured by Mrs. Royce for £ 35,000. Further, that the company had put two of their private detectives on the job of recovering them.
Inspector Bull snorted, thought, got his hat and coat and called on the company’s manager by way of bus from Trafalgar-square. Mr. Smedley was glad to see him. Inspector Bull, he trusted, could easily understand their position in the matter.
Bull agreed without enthusiasm.
“Mrs. Royce tells me the jewels are fully covered by your company?”
“Fully indeed,” said Mr. Smedley. He had, for a second, forgot the elegance of the well-bred manager. Bull looked at him inquiringly.
“Very fully, Inspector. Very fully indeed. That’s the great trouble.”
Inspector Bull’s mild blue eyes remained on the manager.
“Last week, Inspector, I discussed this matter with one of our directors. I told him that Mrs. Royce’s diamonds were insured far beyond their present value. In spite of the decreased production—which is purely artificial—the price of diamonds has gone down twenty per cent, this year. I don’t know if you know all this. Now, in addition, the efforts to bolster up present prices brought a sharp reduction in the value of old stones. For example, the fashion in cutting has changed. You know, of course, how such changes are brought about. That is particularly applicable to Mrs. Royce’s stones. I should say that their present value is between £ 10,000 and £ 15,000.
“I explained that to our directors. I said I thought we were laying ourselves open to just this sort of thing.”
“What action did you take?” Inspector Bull asked.
The man hesitated and rubbed his thin dry hands together.
“As a matter of fact,” he said, a little reluctantly, “our Board of Directors meets Monday week. It was planned to take the matter up at that time. I would then have been directed to advise Mrs. Royce of their intentions.”
Bull looked his question.
“And have the stones revalued for a reduction of the covering.”
Bull nodded. This was a complication.
“And, as a matter of fact,” Mr. Smedley continued, “I had asked her to have the stones reappraised herself, by a competent person, and to have him report to the directors at that meeting.”
“When was it that you told her?” Bull asked.
Mr. Smedley thought.
“Four days ago.”
“Is it customary to change the assessed value of property you insure?”
“This is a very unusual case, Inspector. Values have shifted since the war. We’ve had severe drains on our resources. We paid £ 150,000 to Lord Rosen after that terrible fête at Lewes Manor. Then there was the Manborough affair.”
Mr. Smedley winced painfully at the memory, and lowered his voice.
“In short . . . financial situation over the country . . . we have felt it best to make . . . what shall I say?—readjustments.”
“One of which,” Inspector Bull summed up
, “was Mrs. Royce’s diamonds.”
Mr. Smedley nodded.
“You see, they were insured with us before her husband’s death. That was in 1910. They are a fine collection of stones, but they have no extrinsic value, and their intrinsic value has decreased sharply. I mean, there’s no single great stone, or historic interest, or anything of that sort. I explained all that to Mrs. Royce. I may say that she was singularly amenable.”
“She didn’t object?” Inspector Bull’s surprise was evident.
“Oh, no! Oh, no! I don’t mean that at all. But in view of the . . . vigour of most of her opinions and objections, she took this proposal in extraordinary good part. Oh, she said we were outrageous robbers, and she would put her property with another concern. But she says that so often that we . . . we understand each other.”
“Well,” said Bull patiently, “and did she have the stones appraised?”
“That’s what Mr. Colton was bringing them to town for last night. We agreed on Albert Steiner in Hatton-garden.”
“I see. Did you know Colton was bringing them in last night?”
“Oh, yes. We knew it.”
Mr. Smedley’s answer came without hesitation. Bull wondered if he saw the point of the question. Then he wondered if, with so frequent an affirmative answer to it, the question had any point. So far he had found no one who didn’t know that the jewels were being brought that night from Windsor to London. But then the idea came back to him: All very well, but why the Colnbrook Road?
“I think, Mr. Smedley,” he said, “it’s obvious that this was an inside job, so to speak. It wasn’t an accidental robbery. Somebody knew the jewels were coming. Now who else besides yourself, in this office, knew about them?”
Mr. Smedley allowed himself a tiny smile as he rubbed his hands nervously together.
“My secretary,” he said. “You can depend on her honesty.”
“I’ll see her, please.”
Bull got his coat and hat as the manager pressed a button. A be-spectacled woman came in from an outer office. Bull looked at her and said, “Never mind.”
He felt that he could, as Mr. Smedley said, depend on her honesty; she was fifty and remarkably unattractive. She was not in league with Peskett, nor with Michael Royce.
“Thank you,” he said. “I understand that unless the jewels are recovered, you’ll pay Mrs. Royce £ 35,000.”
Mr. Smedley’s smile was wintry.
“I’m afraid we shall,” he said.
It occurred to Inspector Bull as he went out that the Thames River would be an excellent place to search for the Royce diamonds.
CHAPTER EIGHT
George Colton’s shop in St. Giles-street was of the type that has almost disappeared from London. Soon the South Kensington Museum will be the only place where they can be seen. There was the eighteenth century rounding front with its small panes of heavy clouded glass that had weathered, with infrequent breakage, two hundred years of London street life. The heavy steel bars behind were as discreetly unobtrusive as it was possible to make them. Outside, the insignia of successive generations of royal patrons were small and weatherbeaten—not large, shiny and vulgar, as they are sometimes displayed by new stores. The upper storey was low, the many windows narrow and leaded. Inspector Bull knew the place very well. He supposed Mrs. Colton would sell it to Woolworth’s. Still, Woolworth’s would probably have no use for such a location as St. Giles. Showmanship had not been important in the dealings of Colton’s. Bull wondered vaguely if he mightn’t buy the old front and set it up in Hampstead. He decided it would be impracticable as well as out of place, and further that Mrs. Bull would not allow it.
He looked around for the man who was keeping an eye on the place, and spotted him leaning with ostentatious ease against a pillar-box across the street. He nodded to him and the man came over.
“Anyone been here?”
“Yes, sir. This morning early the old fellow—said he was a clerk—came. I told him what had happened. He sort of went balmy, sir.”
“Where’d he go?”
“Don’t know, sir. I offered to get him a cab. Said he didn’t want one. Just shook his head and sort of staggered off. I was sort of worried, but I couldn’t leave. He turned left on Bond-street, sir.”
Bull unlocked the door with one of the keys he had got from the proprietor’s pocket, and stepped inside. He found a switch and turned on the lights. It might have been a hundred years since the shop had seen human activity. It had a curious air of having always existed completely apart from the slow-moving current of life on the little street outside. Bull thought how much more neatly shop-keepers died than other people. When you were called in after a shop-keeper’s death everything was already nicely put away and ready for you.
He went into the small back room. A grey cat came to meet him, and rubbed luxuriously against his leg.
“Hello!” he said, and was a little shocked at his own voice.
He looked around. There was not much furniture. Several efficient-looking modern safes stood against the wall. A dingy black alpaca jacket hung from a hook in a large cupboard. A narrow stairway led from the corner behind a small work-bench. Bull went up, thinking irrelevantly how many beaux of three centuries had climbed these steps, and how different his errand was from any of theirs.
He was in the small front room with the heavy leaded casement windows; it had a faded Turkey carpet and a little mahogany table with a black velvet cushion on it. There was a chair on one side and a stool on the other. Again Bull had a picture of the earlier days of Colton’s, when Colton was a master goldsmith, and his clients wore plum-coloured velvet breeches and embroidered coats. The present—or immediately past—owner was different, and so were his clients. Bull could not imagine George Colton balanced on the stool showing a tiara to His Excellency Mr. ___ of the Province of ___. But doubtless he did. Then Bull decided he didn’t, when he went into one of the back rooms and saw a comfortable modern office, furnished with shiny mahogany. A small safe was set into the wall in one corner. He looked around. He was trying to find something to open with a small gold key. He preferred to find it without assistance.
Bull spent half an hour in the shop and went out as wise as he had come in. Perhaps a little wiser; he knew Frank Smith’s address. He also knew where the “boy”—whose name was James B. Gates—lived, but that did not seem important at the time. Later it became so, Inspector Bull found.
In his room on the Embankment Bull frowningly drained the syrupy dregs of an enormous cup of tea, brushed the crumbs of sultana cake off his burnt sienna cravat, and prepared to tell Commissioner Debenham and Chief Inspector Dryden what he had found out about the Colnbrook Outrage—or more properly, what he had not found out.
The two were in the Commissioner’s room when he went
in.
“Well, Bull,” said the Commissioner, “what have you done?”
Commissioner Debenham liked Bull, chiefly, he supposed, because Bull was so inordinately serious. He was always amused by Bull’s reports, which read like bad mystery yarns, and by his inveterate faith in ultimate romance. The Commissioner himself had a sense of humour and knew how bad people really were. Bull, having very little, had no idea, the Commissioner insisted, of even the minor sins of mankind.
“Not much of anything, sir,” said Bull. “I saw Colton. He was shot twice, once, near the heart and once right through it. He died instantly. The fellow on the cycle got away clean as a whistle, of course.”
“Well, what have you got?”
A slight scowl appeared on Inspector Bull’s otherwise impassive large face.
“There’s something funny about it, sir.”
Debenham glanced across at Chief Inspector Dryden.
“I don’t understand Colton’s wife. She’s under thirty, I think. His daughter’s about the same age. Pretty and fierce, she is. Then there’s the chauffeur. He’s an American.”
Chief Inspector Dryden glanced at the Commissioner.
/> “Did he tell you so, Bull?”
“No, sir. I didn’t have to ask him. His looks and the way he speaks.”
“Go on, Bull.”
“Well, I didn’t question him much, but I’m looking him up to see if he’s got a record. He doesn’t look like a chauffeur much. Well, they both say just what they said last night, and it sounds pretty good. I mean about the actual hold-up and shooting. They sound as if they meant it. But the driver sounds as if he meant something more, too.
“I was out there in an hour after the murder, but it’d been raining. I couldn’t see anything—not even car tracks. There’s no record of motorcyclists between there and town. He got away clean. But there are two funny things. The first is, why didn’t Colton go on the by-pass?”
Commissioner Debenham nodded.
“It’s obviously a put-up job, sir. The man on the motorbike knew exactly what was happening. They didn’t say that he didn’t hesitate a moment about anything, but they implied it. He knew. It’s a nice lonely spot, that—where the Der-went-Foster place is for sale.”
The Commissioner nodded again.
“Then there’s point Number Two, sir. The Royces. It’s the old lady’s diamonds were stolen. They’re worth from ten to fifteen thousand pounds and they’re insured for thirty-five. Depreciation, sir. I’m going to see Albert Steiner about them at half past five this afternoon. Well, they stand to gain by that robbery. Now Mrs. Colton says she thought Colton was going to sell them. Smedley—he’s the manager of Continental Bonding and Assurance—says they were going to reappraise them to cut the insurance.”
The Commissioner turned to the Chief Inspector.
“Gives it a little different look, Dryden?” he said.
Dryden nodded noncommittally.
“It might just be a lucky break for the Royces, sir, as the Americans say.”
“Very lucky, indeed, I’d say, sir,” Bull observed. “Well, then here’s the list of those that knew Colton was Jjringing the jewels in to town. Mrs. Royce, Michael Royce, Colton, the clerk Smith, Smedley, Albert Steiner, and perhaps the clerk Gates at Colton’s. They knew a day or so before, all of them. Then Mrs. Colton knew it that night only—so she says.
