The Pearl Thief

by Elizabeth E. Wein

  ‘Ellen, have you a knife?’ Jamie asked.

  ‘Aye,’ she choked.

  ‘Can you cross over to the willow bank and cut four or five withy wands? Stout and tall as you can get, and we can drive them into the riverbed here around it so they’ll stand above the water when the tide comes in and the police will know where to look for it.’

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘Julie, let me do that,’ Jamie said, but I wasn’t going to be babied by him.

  We reburied the corpse together, trying to treat the hellish thing as if it were as fragile and exquisite as Sandy’s boat.

  Not one of us had the stomach to go and gape at the exhumation that followed.

  Not so the rest of humanity. There had been no interest in an English antiquities scholar supposedly suffering an accidental drowning, and a little public interest in the discovery that part of our glorious Scottish past was under threat and might or might not be salvageable; but the press announcement that someone working on the Glenfearn School renovation had been garrotted and shoved in the Tay to decompose brought out the whole of Eastern Scotland.

  My brothers and I took refuge in the library from the ghoulish onlookers, and so did Ellen.

  It was Sandy who threw together the opposing forces of Ellen and Mary. He wanted Ellen to make clean copies of the boat sketches she’d done earlier in the week, and poor Mary – so resentful, but of stalwart conscience – was too enamoured of my big brother to do anything other than allow his gentle requests to be accommodated.

  I met Ellen and Pinkie in front of the library on the first morning of this assignment; Pinkie, realising Ellen was without the rest of her family, now stuck to her like glue. Ellen looked most unlike herself, dressed in a respectable tweed skirt and an almost-new navy wool cardigan. She’d put her hair up in exact imitation of Mary.

  ‘You look like a proper countrywoman!’ I said.

  ‘Not a librarian?’ Ellen prompted gently.

  It took me a moment to realise she meant the question in earnest.

  ‘Or a librarian,’ I agreed.

  ‘Miss Kinnaird won’t be able to fault my manners,’ Ellen said, with the faintest hint of defiance. ‘But I’ll maybe have to leave the dog with you while I go in to see her the first time.’

  ‘Don’t you want me to come along?’

  She cocked her head, gazing at me fondly.

  ‘I do,’ she said. ‘But I think I should go alone. Just this once, to set myself right with Miss Kinnaird, without the Lady of the Manor about the place arranging things for us.’

  Ellen smiled at me, waiting for me to back down.

  ‘All right, Lady Julia?’

  ‘Oh, all right.’

  I let her go alone.

  I felt very proud of her, and of Mary, and a little ashamed of myself for considering their uneasy truce to be any of my business.

  Now the Procurator Fiscal was forced to demand an inquiry after all, since as a murder the case would have to go to the High Court in Edinburgh rather than the local Sheriff Court. Everyone had to be interviewed all over again – including Ellen, who was with us when we found Housman’s head and shoulders (which had been whisked away to the mortuary to join his legs).

  The same dreadful trio of driver, Water Bailiff and Inspector Duncan Milne turned up at the library to question Mary and Ellen. After grilling Mary in her own study for half an hour, they sent her back upstairs and the inspector dragged Ellen down.

  As had happened over at the Big House, Inspector Milne posted bulldogs at the door and window to stop us listening in. Thank God Mary had established that alibi for Euan, but now I found myself panicking lest they try to pin something on Ellen instead.

  Sandy and Jamie and Mary and I waited in the Upper Reading Room, where we couldn’t hear a thing. Jamie, just as fearful as I was, slumped miserably in one of the library chairs, drumming his fingers against his thigh.

  After a minute or so I said, ‘Mary, can I borrow your horn?’

  She’d been flustered enough by her own interrogation that she handed the trumpet over without arguing.

  I lay on the smooth floor over her study with the bell of the horn pressed flat on the old dark wood.

  ‘Anything?’ Jamie asked.

  ‘Not a whisper,’ I said in annoyance. ‘It’s seventeenth-century solid.’

  ‘You need a conduit for the sound,’ Jamie began. Then he continued excitedly, ‘Oh, I say, try listening at the fire. The chimney downstairs probably has a flue that joins up with this one.’

  Mary cried, ‘Darling, be careful with my trumpet!’

  All four of us (Sandy too) knelt with our heads practically in the grate, eavesdropping on Ellen’s precognition.

  Inspector Milne pestered her about where she was living. Of course she was staying by herself at Inchfort Field, where her family always camped when they were there, with one small bow tent just big enough to sit up in. Everything she had with her came on the bicycle. Milne asked her question after question about who might visit her there, and for how long, until she began to get angry.

  She finally exclaimed heatedly, so loudly that Jamie and Sandy heard it too, even without the aid of Mary’s horn, ‘Naebody is in about wi’ me! Nae man is in about with me! And if there were a man wi’ me, what would be the wrong in it – or the business of yours?’

  ‘I must be aware of anyone who might have had river access at the time of Dr Housman’s disappearance. Or who might have reason to return there. We need to be aware of anything that might have motivated this act of violence – a secret shared? A debt left unpaid? A fight over a woman?’

  ‘Well, nae man I’d have about me is a hangman!’ Ellen snarled.

  She didn’t have anything to tell them. She didn’t know a thing about Hugh Housman – she’d never even seen him. And for all their bullying, even I could tell they didn’t have anything to pin on her.

  That didn’t stop Sergeant Angus Henderson from giving her bicycle a good seeing-to on their way out, prodding its tyres with his cromach and testing the brakes. The bicycle, which was leaning against the stone bridge as if it were embarrassed, suffered these indignities in silence.

  Ellen joined us at the upstairs casement window to watch the policemen leave. They were supposed to come back to the Big House the next day to have a go at me again, and Jamie too.

  ‘I swear that gadgie thinks I’m here after the salmon,’ Ellen said as Inspector Milne’s car bumped over the stone bridge. ‘He’s treating me like a poacher.’

  ‘Maybe he thinks you’re after pearls,’ I said.

  ‘There’s no law against me taking pearls –’ She stopped abruptly.

  We had the same thought. We, and we alone, knew what Hugh Housman might have been murdered for: a Keiller jam pot full of treasure.

  ‘A secret shared,’ Jamie quoted softly, under his breath as though he were swearing.

  We knew now we had to turn in the pearls we’d found.

  But there in front of the library, on our own, Ellen and Jamie and I made a vow to get them out of the dovecote first. We weren’t going to share the chimneys of Aberfearn Castle with the Perthshire and Kinross-shire Constabulary.

  I did not at all like the thought of someone coming back for them.

  Nor of Ellen being up at Inchfort by herself.

  15

  EATING PEOPLE UP

  Another interview with Inspector Milne. He didn’t ask about the pearls so I put off mentioning them. I felt I was getting good at this.

  And I accepted the tickets offered to me by Frank Dunbar, and I took – not Jamie – I took Ellen to the variety show.

  I wanted to do something for her. I wanted to distract her from the horror that infected us all now – and to distract me too. Frank had given me two tickets and I couldn’t go with him, of course; but if I went with Jamie, Ellen would be spending Saturday night alone up at Inchfort Field with the Salmon Stane and Hugh Housman’s most unnatural ghost, and nobody but the cowardly Pinkie for company.


  There wasn’t even a moon; it was new, and would set early. So we left Pinkie-dog at the Big House for the evening, and Mummy let me have the car after I swore we wouldn’t drink anything at the interval, and we sailed off to Perth for a night on the town.

  The show was wonderful. I’d never have seen anything like that if it hadn’t been for Frank. Mémère had only ever taken me to the opera, and that not often. At home it was amateur Gilbert and Sullivan or the pantomime. Once, in a moment of blazing and astonishing good fortune, Sandy met me in London on my way home from school at Christmas and we saw a new play by J.M. Barrie, The Boy David, with original orchestral music in the background like in a moving picture. But good old-fashioned vulgar music-hall entertainment? Not a chance.

  The featured star of the variety was a person who went by the stage name Le Sphinx. Ellen was fooled, or possibly just distracted, by the fact that in addition to peppering the audience with French clichés in an American drawl, and as well as singing jazz in a sonorous deep contralto that made you want to take off your clothes and bathe in it, Le Sphinx had skin that was easily as dark as the peat we had been digging in two days ago. The singer stood in long satin gloves and a simple evening gown of bridal white that was constantly shifting to blue and lavender under the lights, with bare thin muscular shoulders and sleek waved hair glittering with diamanté clips. That incredible voice seemed to be whispering to you in particular (you, you, you) as if you were alone together in an empty Parisian nightclub – just you at a table alone with that voice and no one else.

  But I was not fooled.

  I glanced at Ellen, just once, and she was watching with her mouth open.

  At the interval she turned to me and said simply, ‘Thank you. It’s the barriest show I’ve ever seen. Better than a month at the pictures. She’s pure magic.’

  ‘She’s a man,’ I said.

  Ellen burst out laughing.

  I said, ‘I swear it.’

  ‘She’s never a man! You can see down her dress! And in front – you’d see if she was a man, in that tight dress! She never is!’

  ‘She is. You can hide anything if you want to badly enough.’

  Ellen tilted her head, looking at me quizzically. ‘But not from you – why’s that?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said, thinking about it. ‘I love looking for things that other people haven’t noticed and then trying to fit them together, like jigsaw pieces. You know what a sphinx is – a creature with a lion’s body and a woman’s head? You’d call it “she” in English. But “Le Sphinx” is masculine, so you have to say “he” in French.’

  ‘Och, away wi’ you, Davie Balfour,’ Ellen teased. ‘You dinnae ken your ain he from she.’

  ‘Also, it’s the answer to the Sphinx’s riddle.’

  ‘What is?’

  ‘A man. The Sphinx goes around eating people up because they don’t know the answer to her riddle, and the answer is “a man”.’

  Le Sphinx wasn’t in the second act, but during the interval stood with an elbow propped against the bar, sipping a cocktail that glowed green as a starboard light, and autographing programmes.

  I linked my arm through Ellen’s to give me courage and stood in the queue to get my ticket stub signed.

  ‘Vionnet,’ Le Sphinx observed approvingly in that voice like melted chocolate, casting a connoisseur’s eye over my frock. ‘Been shopping in Paris, chérie?’

  ‘It’s last year’s and you know it,’ I said.

  She gave a low and delighted chuckle. Her eyes were black as a moonless December night and reflected the electric lights like stars. ‘A sophisticate,’ she said. ‘Here’s me thinking I was playing a hick town.’

  ‘Je suis française,’ I said. ‘Et vous? Un citoyen de Paris?’

  I could feel Ellen smouldering beneath my own arm, ill at ease as if she were at sea in this place. We must have looked a very odd pair, me in the shimmering rose and silver Vionnet dress with a little gold velvet evening jacket I’d borrowed from Mummy dangling over my shoulders, and Ellen in her tweed skirt and navy cardigan. She looked perfectly nice, but she wasn’t dressed for the theatre. Her glorious loose hair kept buying her slanted and disapproving looks from the other theatregoers. If I hadn’t been hanging on to her with such schoolgirl-chum determination she could have easily passed as my secretary.

  Or my maid. I didn’t want people to think she was my maid. I didn’t want her to feel like people thought she was my maid, so I hung on to her arm as if I were propping her up.

  Le Sphinx eyed our partnership with curiosity, then chuckled again and boldly answered my very cheeky question. ‘Oui, chérie, aujourd’hui je suis français.’

  I’d used the masculine form when I called her a ‘citizen’ and she’d done the same when she called herself ‘French’.

  She said in English, for Ellen’s benefit, ‘You’ve guessed my riddle. Some people can tell; it’s not a secret. I’m a more exciting performer as a woman, so why not?’

  ‘You’re the most exciting performer I’ve ever seen,’ I said honestly.

  She grinned at me. ‘You’re glowing, ma petite. You think you know men? Did you win the argument about me?’

  ‘Yes, I won the argument, but not because I know men,’ I said. ‘It’s because – I love to fool people. So I see through them too. You do it for a living and you get it right. And it must take so much courage, to be so different and not be afraid of how people might react. And I …’ I laughed also, at myself. ‘I don’t think I could do what you do. But I am a sphinx too.’

  ‘Chameleon, maybe. There’s only one sphinx.’ Le Sphinx sipped at the green cocktail, then turned, catlike, on Ellen.

  ‘And what do you think of me?’

  ‘I think,’ Ellen said, ‘you must be always lonely.’

  ‘One of a kind is how I see it.’ She reached for Ellen’s ticket stub and scrawled her stage name across it theatrically, not getting a single drop of green ink on the white silk gloves. ‘Are you afraid of me?’ she asked.

  ‘A wee bit, aye,’ Ellen admitted with ill-concealed resentment and fascination. She took back the ticket stub as though she expected it to bite her, avoiding touching the gloved hands.

  ‘What about you, Vionnet? Afraid of me?’

  ‘I wouldn’t tell you if I was,’ I said.

  ‘Give me a kiss, ma petite,’ said Le Sphinx, leaning down and offering her cheek. She smelled of powder and hair oil and stage paint and Chanel No 5.

  I tilted her smooth chin towards mine with the tip of a finger and lightly touched our lips together. They were just like all the other lips I’d lightly touched this summer: warm and soft and full of human hope and fear and cruelty and kindness.

  Ellen laughed. A handful of people at the bar applauded, and a woman in a hat flounced away.

  ‘I like a daring girl,’ said Le Sphinx.

  ‘I do try to be daring.’

  She laughed. Then she warned quietly, ‘Do try to be careful too. You can be both.’

  After the show I drove Ellen back to Inchfort Field and we didn’t say much on the way; the slender moon had set by the time we were heading out of Perth.

  As I pulled up at the field gate she said, ‘Thank you, Julie. It was braw. All of it, even the silly bits. The performing budgies!’

  I snickered. ‘They were hilarious.’

  ‘But that Sphinx …’

  She paused, then climbed up on the back of the car and lit her pipe (a new one, I supposed).

  ‘That singer frighted me half to death. How you cheeked her! But she was wonderful – it was all wonderful.’

  Ellen passed me the pipe. I climbed up next to her and we sat on the back of the Magnette with our feet on the seats, looking up at the stars and smoking in silence.

  ‘I’d better go,’ I said at last. ‘It’s past midnight.’

  ‘Aye,’ Ellen said. She swung her legs around, slid off the car and hopped over the field gate, sure-footed and at home in the dark.

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nbsp; ‘Thank you!’ she called again.

  Brig O’Fearn village was pitch-black. I drove cautiously. I’d never driven at night before, except coming home from Perth half an hour earlier. But Ellen had been with me then, full of smouldering warmth and wonder, and though I’d been driving carefully I hadn’t been nervous. Now the road felt cool and lonely, and something new was eating at me.

  As I rounded the corner to take the humpbacked bridge in Brig O’Fearn, the headlamps of the Magnette splashed light over a dark, looming figure in the process of wheeling a bicycle by the handlebars down on to the river path below the bridge. The bicycle’s own headlamp was only a dim pinpoint of baleful yellow without speed to generate enough power to keep it alight.

  Probably the Water Bailiff going to check on the Glenfearn School, I thought; and yet the cold nagging in my stomach wouldn’t go away. I kept thinking about the legend of the standing stones walking about to swim with the salmon on Lammas Night. It was only two nights off.

  Only when I’d pulled the Magnette up to the Strathfearn House garages and a squealing bundle of doggy fluff half my size came bounding into my arms and knocked the wind out of me did I realise what was really bothering me.

  Pinkie was here and Ellen was by herself in Inchfort Field, alone with the standing stones and the stars and the murdered ghost of Hugh Housman.

  My prudent mother keeps a torch in her car. I took it with me to find my way along the river path so I could deliver Pinkie to her proper mistress; it would be faster to walk that way than to drive the long way round again.

  The birch wood by the river, so alive with birdsong and the constant activity of the Glenfearn School by day, mostly has only one voice at night: the sound of running water. It is beautiful, but it is so old. It is the sound the long-dead pearl fishermen heard, the sound the Bronze Age people heard when they launched the log boat into the prehistoric River Fearn, the sound they heard when they raised the Drookit Stane – the river has a voice that doesn’t die. It is as inhuman and ancient as starlight.

  The Inverfearnie Library was slumbering calmly with Mary tucked safe inside as I passed.

  Even so I managed to work myself into a funk of nerves well before I got to Inchfort.