Fen Country

by Edmund Crispin

  “No, it isn’t. That doesn’t arise at all.”

  “I see. Well, when is something going to happen?”

  “In a moment, in a moment. Ben first. Ben is younger than his brother Asa, and much bigger and tougher. He’s also the dependent one of the pair—did at one time have a jeweler’s business of his own, but he was no good at it and it went bust. Since then he’s lived off Asa, and also lived with Asa, either in their flat in London, or else in this dismal little house in Dorset. Ben looks after the domestic side, in so far as it gets looked after at all. They’re neither of them married, and they do without servants, and they live together in a sort of devoted squalor.

  “Envisage, then,” said Humbleby dramatically, “this car—a puce Cortina, I ought perhaps to add—driving down from London to Stickwater in Dorset, Asa Braham at the wheel, myself beside him, the man Shirtcliff in the back, the diamond—”

  “Humbleby, haven’t you told me all this already?” Fen was more fretful than ever. “And come to that, is something portentous or significant going to happen on this drive, something relevant, I mean, to what you seem to be trying to start out to describe to me?”

  “Come to that,” said Humbleby a shade aggrievedly, “aren’t you being unduly particular? All I’m trying to do is give you the atmosphere, the ambient, the whole—”

  “Yes, granted, and very nice too, but my point is that the drive itself—”

  “It admittedly wasn’t important.” Forced to this concession, Humbleby busied himself with finding and lighting a cheroot. “Asa talked a good deal, but then, he always does, not just on drives, but on every occasion, everywhere. So at last, without incident, we arrived.”

  “At last.”

  “Not at any sort of gracious little country seat, but at a tiny, extraordinarily unprepossessing, example of Victorian farmhouse architecture, subsequently transformed, at no very evident expense, into a small dwelling-house. It was very isolated, with grounds which were, I suppose, fairly extensive, but horribly unkempt. As to the house itself, that really amounted to little more than two up, two down, with kitchen and bath: all dispiritingly gray and damp and obviously uncared-for. Ben Braham opened the front door for us, and seemed—I have to say ‘seemed’—in an evil temper. He took us into the front room right, a tattered sort of living-room, and offered us a drink. There was thereupon a row. The only drinks actually available, it turned out, were either home-brewed beer, made years before from some sort of chemist’s kit, or a rather small amount of a dreadful Italian apéritif called Casca Oli. Ben was supposed to have got drink in, but for some reason (perhaps to give cogency to his being on bad terms with his brother Asa) hadn’t in fact done so. He was supposed to have done a lot of things, including, in response to a radiogram from the Luis Pizarro, coming down earlier in the day to ‘open the house up.’ Well, he was there, all right, but that was about the most you could say. ‘I’ve packed my bag,’ he told us—and in fact there was a suitcase of some description hanging about in the hall outside—’and you know what I’m going to do? I’m going to go back to London and have myself a bloody great piss-up.’

  “This announcement apparently didn’t strike Asa favorably, giving rise, indeed, to a prolonged spell of angry fraternal shouting and counter-shouting. Even so, I stayed suspicious, as the words flew round and about my head. Meanwhile, the egregious Shirtcliff—who’d refused both Casca Oli and home-brewed beer, apparently more on principle than because they were equally odious—continued to nurse the Reine des Odalisques in its fat jewel-box in his briefcase on his lap.

  “So there we all four of us were, in this awful living-room, sipping ullage while a row went on. And now, to make a fifth, the potential customer for the Reine arrived You’ve heard of Clyde Savitt?”

  “The film star.”

  “Yes.”

  “He buys diamonds for his wife.”

  “Yes: like Richard Burton—though perhaps on not quite so massive a scale.”

  “And he’s an expert on diamonds, isn’t he?”

  “Yes—again like Burton, I suppose, up to a point. But with Savitt there’s an extra dimension. Savitt père was a jeweler, and Savitt fils, before he went into pictures, was intended to become one too. So before the lures of the old ciné trapped him, he learned a lot, about diamonds particularly. In short, he’d be pretty nearly impossible to deceive. He wanted the Reine for his wife; he knew it, from its many photographs; and when he eventually saw it…”

  Humbleby sucked at his cheroot, long and deep. “We went,” he said, “into the room on the other side of the little hallway. That is, all of us did except Ben, who was still—and again I have to say ‘apparently’—sulking. Savitt, I gathered, was resting between pictures at a modest country house conveniently close by. He had come to Asa, rather than the other way round, because he didn’t want his wife to know anything at all in advance about this possible jewel transaction. It was all perfectly plausible, and perfectly plain.

  “What was less plausible, and certainly less immediately plain, was why we’d made the move from the one room to the other at all. (I can see the reasons now, of course, but then, hindsight’s a wonderful thing.) Asa’s notion was that in the living-room where we’d all started off, Savitt included, the light wasn’t adequate, or at any rate, not adequate for examining a diamond. But this deficiency, though certainly real enough, didn’t seem to be much remedied when we got to Asa’s ‘study,’ which had in its ceiling a bulb of very low wattage indeed, so much so that although it was a small room, and we were crowded together, we could barely make out the expressions on each other’s faces… I must now,” said Humbleby with some dignity, “describe this room to you.”

  “Yes, yes, of course.”

  “Small, then. And not what you’d call overfurnished, either. There was a round table, at about the middle. There was a minute flat-topped desk with nothing on it. There was an almost equally exiguous old-fashioned safe—completely empty, it subsequently transpired. There were a crack-springed armchair, and a desk chair. And finally, in one corner, you could see a huddle of old Casca Oli cartons, with a couple of Anglepoise lamps and a few other odd bits and pieces. No pictures, and only one window, and that had steel shutters over it, closed and locked. By way of making light conversation, Asa explained that they’d been closed and locked for years, he having lost the only key. The shutters had been put in, he said, at I time when he’d been in the habit of bringing stones down to Stickwater, until finally the insurance companies had said, to his great grief, that he mustn’t do it any longer. Also from earlier, less stringent days dated the safe, and the admittedly pretty solid door—much more solid, as we found to our cost, than any of the others in the house which we’d come in by.

  “Light, Asa said: we must have, he said, like the dying Goethe, more light; and he started fussing with the two Anglepoises, neither of which, it soon became clear, was fitted with a plug in any way corresponding with the one socket in the room’s skirting-board. (By now, I need hardly tell you, my suspicions were very serious indeed. But even so, how was I to know what was planned, what was in fact just about to happen?) Anyway, there it was: Asa fatuously muttering about adaptors, Ben presumably still in the living-room (or possibly already off, with his prepared suitcase, for his projected piss-up in London); Clyde Savitt, the unlucky Shirtcliff and my almost equally unlucky self hovering around Asa in this dreadful little room, waiting for inchoate possibilities to congeal into some soft of event. This they almost immediately did, but not before Clyde Savitt, tiring like the rest of us of Asa’s busy fumblings with flexes, suggested that we might perfectly well have a preliminary look at the Reine straightaway. And Asa was all for this. Leaving the Anglepoises, he gave instructions to Shirtcliff. And with the air of a man acting insufferably against his better judgment, Shirtcliff took the jewel-box from his briefcase, placed it in the middle of the round table and retired angrily to stand with his back against the super-special door, which we’d closed after us. Shi
rtcliff had already inspected, and found sound, the steel window-shutters; now he was adopting what even a much more intelligent man would of course have thought the best general defensive position available.

  “He was wrong about that, but really, one can scarcely blame him.

  “Jewel-box on table, then; and Asa advances on it, opens it reverently and stands gazing at its contents, even under that impossibly dim illumination, with the pride of a Mrs. Worthington whose daughter has not only gone on the stage, but unaccountably made a spectacular success of the business. As to Clyde Savitt, whose behavior up to this point had been impeccable, excitement overcame him. He snatched the Reine out of the box (Shirtcliff stiffening visibly), snatched a loupe from his pocket and stood there making his examination in a breathless silence which affected all of us.

  “Then he said,’Yes: that’s it, all right.’

  “I mention this crucial remark not to criticize its civility, nor even to suggest that diamond-mad people go diamond-mad whenever they see a diamond, to the exclusion of absolutely everything else. I mention it because it was true. You said something earlier about the possibility of paste. But Savitt was sure then, and is sure now, that what he had in his hand was the Reine and nothing but the Reine—and this in spite of the awful light and the unfortunate circumstances generally.

  “Savitt said, ‘Yes: that’s it, all right. And I want to buy it.’ And he put it back in its box, rather quickly, as if it was burning his fingers.

  “And then suddenly we were in complete darkness.”

  Humbleby shook his head, not in negation but sadly. An efficient officer, he was consequently finding his own part in these proceedings disagreeable to recall.

  “Looking back on it,” he said, “I remember, or imagine I remember, the click of the mains switch. This, along with the meter and so forth, was in the hallway immediately outside the study. And it was this, certainly, that was used. So there we were, in chaos and old night, with the little gleam of the diamond in its open jewel-box on the round table our only illumination of any sort. By then it was blackness outside the house—no moon or stars; and even if it hadn’t been, the steel shutters over the window would have cut out any light absolutely.

  “Then the door burst open (no light at all from the hallway outside), and someone came tearing into the room, and the gleam of the diamond winked out, and the someone ran off again, and the door slammed, shutting us in; and the footsteps went away, out of the front door, and crunched quickly along the drive out of earshot; and somewhat distantly, a car engine started and revved up, and then that was gone too.

  “From the moment of the light going out to the moment of the intruder nipping off again, and slamming the door, was, I suppose, scarcely more than three seconds. Enough, though, for the Reine to be gone.

  “Shirtcliff had been bashed in the small of the back by the door opening, and had gone sprawling. Even so, he was the first to recover. But it was hopeless. Thanks to Asa’s precautions, the room door had a Yale on it; and the intruder had reversed the snib as he rushed in; so all he had to do when he left was click the door shut and reverse the snib on the outer side (there exist, unfortunately, Yales with this double arrangement).

  “And we were trapped.”

  Again shaking his head, “We were trapped,” said Humbleby, “for close on two hours. I know this must seem nearly incredible, but you must remember those shutters, and also the fact that there was no telephone, and also the fact that apart from my cigarette-lighter, which was by no means inexhaustible, we couldn’t see a bloody thing we were doing. Of course we shouted, and we banged. But Ben, it appeared, the only other person in the house, had long since left, plus suitcase, for his mafficking in London. That, anyway, was his story, when it came to the crunch: he’d gone off almost straightaway after we moved from the living-room to the study. And this never was, nor could be, disproved. Me, I never believed it for a moment. I was as sure as could be that it was Ben who’d turned off the mains switch, careered into the room, nabbed the diamond and whisked off out again, all with the happy collaboration of his brother Asa. But proving that was, and is, something else again. Shirtcliff could have had an accomplice, or even, come to that, Clyde Savitt. What, at that stage, did we know? What could we know?

  “I’m fairly good at locks, but there were no tools—apart from scraps of Anglepoises which Shirtcliff tore apart with his bare hands—so as I’ve said, it was nearly two hours before we got that door open at last. Hanging on to Shirtcliff’s sleeve, with the lighter guttering in my hand, I hauled him outside, turned the mains switch back on and then hauled him back inside again.

  “‘Strip!’ I said.

  “To do him justice, he saw the point, and he stripped at once. I went over his discarded clothes very carefully, and then, equally carefully, I went over him. (We’re supposed, at the Yard, to have read a lot of books about such things, and I can distinctly remember glancing through one or two of the least offensive of them.) Asa, who was putting on a great act of shock and horror, at this stage started bellowing about bodily orifices, but as I pointed out to him, not just the diamond had disappeared from the study, but a bloody greet jewel-case as well. Bodily orifices, I pointed out to Asa, were very unlikely receptacles for that. And in fact the jewel-case was eventually found, thrown away at the side of the drive, only a few yards from the front door. By that time, it was, I need hardly say, empty.

  “Shirtcliff—’clean’—ran off to a telephone with instructions from me. Meanwhile, I myself went over the study with what writers inexperienced in hyphenation call a fine tooth-comb, and which—”

  “Humbleby, listen a moment. It—”

  “—and which, I can assure you, brought nothing whatever, of any relevance, to light. I also searched Savitt and Asa, and they searched me. Still nothing. And there could be nothing. Someone had burst in, and grabbed the Reine in its box, and disappeared again, and that was all there was to it. Still, I had to take all the precautions, I had to do the searching—just in case. But nothing. I was very scrupulous about it all, and I can assure you—nothing, then or afterward.”

  Fen stared at his guest with more than usual attention: he had found the tale, if not exactly brilliant, at any rate an interesting one. “And finally?” he prompted.

  “Finally, Ben Braham was stopped in his car by the police at Deare, getting on for 80 miles from Stickwater, two-and-a-half hours’ drive. No diamond on him or in him, of course, and no diamond anywhere in the car. How could there have been? Eighty miles! At any point, at his leisure, knowing perfectly well how appallingly we were trapped back at that loathsome little house, he could have turned off the London road into a lane, stopped at a field-gate, gone into the field, poked a hole with his finger in the bank, injected the diamond, covered it up, made a careful note of the place (he had a torch in his car, but that doesn’t prove anyone guilty of anything) and then simply traipsed back and driven on again. He could, and can, simply return and pick the miserable little object up again whenever it suits him.”

  “Which won’t be yet.”

  “No, of course not yet: probably not for a long time. Not, anyway, until a long time after Krafft has paid out the insurance money. Ben and Asa will know, in any case, that we shall be keeping an eye on them for a bit. They won’t make any move until they’re completely certain it won’t backfire in the form of a Conspiracy to Defraud charge.”

  “And when they do at last make their move to pick up the diamond,” said Fen: “what then? Does Asa Braham get it anonymously through the post from a conscience-stricken thief?”

  “Lord, no.” And Humbleby smiled, with some affection, at his host, whom it was pleasing to find, for the moment, almost as dim-witted as he, Humbleby, had throughout the whole Braham business felt himself to be. “Because in that case, you see, the insurance money would have to be repaid, and Asa wouldn’t be able to afford that. But it’ll be reward enough, for Asa, just to have the Reine back and be able to gloat over it secretly. As
I’ve told you, he’s crazy about stones. And that, I suppose, has been the basis of the whole trouble.”

  Fen thought for a bit. Then he said mildly, “Superstitions about diamonds. You started by talking about those—but you don’t, if I may say so, seem to be altogether free from them yourself.”

  “I know practically everything about diamonds,” said Humbleby, with some indignation, “Diamonds, now—”

  “Yes, of course. But you say that when the lights went out—and there was no sort of reflected light—this particular diamond shone in the dark.”

  “Yes, certainly it did. Diamonds are self-luminescent. Look up any book on the subject and you’ll find—”

  “No, I shan’t. Sorry, Humbleby, but not for the circumstances you’ve described. Diamonds do shine in the dark, yes. But they don’t produce light, like glow-worms. They store it and reproduce it. For a diamond to shine in the dark, it must have been subjected to light first—fairly bright light, and fairly recently.

  “But what sort of light had your precious Reine des Odalisques been under? Well, if the tales are true, it’d been for three weeks in the darkness of a bank’s safe-deposit vault; then a man called Shirtcliff glanced at it for a moment, in ordinary daylight; finally, it was exposed to a low-wattage bulb—for what doesn’t sound like much more than two minutes, though I suppose—”

  “Less than two minutes.” Humbleby struck his brow with his clenched fist, in a transpontine manner which was nevertheless patently sincere. “God, what an imbecile I’ve been! You mean, Asa was so infatuated with the thing that he took it with him to South America.”

  “Yes, that seems likely.”

  “And then marched into Pratt’s Bank with it in his pocket, and then simply popped it into the jewel-box which he had left there, and brought it out again.”