The Attenbury Emeralds

by Dorothy L. Sayers

  But this squib failed to flare, because Harriet simply looked at her husband and said, ‘Indeed you are.’

  The conversation was interrupted, as their conversations sometimes were these days, by a long, steady, slightly smiling mutual contemplation. Then Harriet said, ‘So what was this lifestyle that a normally repressive husband would have impaired?’

  ‘Oh, house-parties; moving around with a great cluster of satellite friends between Chamonix, the Riviera, New York and Madeira. Always in the Tatler for this or that grand do.’

  ‘I wonder how such a person got on in the war?’ asked Harriet.

  ‘So do I,’ said Peter. ‘Shall we call on her and see what we shall see?’

  Lady Diana opened her front door herself. She was wearing a caftan of Liberty silk spattered with sequins which might have been an evening dress, and might have been a dressing-gown. She was smoking a Balkan Sobranie in a long black cigarette-holder. She stared at Peter and then said, ‘Oh, it’s you. Come in. Place is a bit of a mess, I’m afraid. Can’t get servants these days. I suppose you’ve still got that creepy manservant of yours?’

  ‘No,’ said Peter firmly. ‘I can’t stand creepy servants. I’ve got rid of any I ever had.’

  ‘You must be Harriet,’ said Diana. ‘Don’t you do something rather odd? Writing or something?’

  ‘I write detective stories,’ said Harriet.

  ‘Quite a family quirk, then,’ said Diana, leading the way into her drawing-room.

  The lack of servants, creepy or otherwise, was immediately apparent. There were dozens of ashtrays full of cigarette butts lying around, and fashion magazines lying everywhere, on sofas and on the floor. A dead fire in the fireplace had probably not expired recently, since the ash pile was sprinkled with cigarette butts and sweet papers. Unwashed glasses and empty wine bottles stood around. The curtains had been roughly and unsymmetrically partly drawn. There was only one chair in the room uncluttered enough to sit in, and Diana sat down in it, and said, ‘Sit down,’ to her visitors.

  Without comment Harriet and Peter picked up piles of papers, moved them from a sofa to a side table, and sat side by side.

  Harriet reflected, looking at Diana, on the advantages of having been a striking rather than a beautiful woman in youth. Diana, now in her mid-fifties, still looked striking. Any grey in her dark, short-cropped hair had been dealt with. She was boldly and skilfully made-up, and had arranged herself gracefully in her chair. There was a curious, bright, hard glitter about her dark eyes. No fading for her, unlike her unfortunate niece Verity.

  ‘If you expected a drink you should have let me know you were coming,’ Diana now observed. ‘What do you want?’

  Harriet wondered how Peter would start. ‘I suppose you know about the strange claim that the family emerald has been swapped for another, and the one in the Attenbury strongbox is not the right one?’ Peter asked.

  ‘No, I don’t,’ Diana said. ‘Nobody tells me anything. That will have put the wind up Edward, I’ll bet. What fun!’

  ‘What I need to ask you might not be fun,’ said Peter. ‘I am trying to track the emerald on every occasion when it has been out of the bank. As, for example, it was when you took your niece Verity to a ball at the Café de Paris the night it was bombed.’

  ‘And you’ve brought her along so that she can make a bob or two out of putting it in one of her paperback shockers, I suppose?’ said Diana, waving her cigarette-holder at Harriet.

  Peter put a hand on Harriet’s arm.

  ‘If this were a social occasion, Lady Diana,’ he said, ‘we would leave at once and make sure that we never encountered you again. But I have a professional obligation to your nephew which I shall discharge as faithfully as I can.’

  Lady Diana turned her face away from them and answered in a very different tone from her previous brittle light voice: ‘It was absolutely bloody, if you want to know. Bloody, bloody bloody.’

  ‘It would be helpful if you could tell us as best you can remember what happened that night,’ said Peter.

  ‘I don’t want to,’ said Diana. ‘The whole thing gives me nightmares every time I think of it. And don’t tell me it would help Edward, because I don’t give a toss about Edward. He’s a pompous, disapproving young shit.’

  Harriet said, ‘There have been some deaths in the penumbra of that jewel. Not helping Peter might amount to helping a murderer. How would you feel about that?’

  ‘You know something?’ Diana said. ‘I could believe that. I really could believe it. I always hated that thing.’

  ‘What did you hate about it?’ asked Harriet.

  ‘It was dark. It didn’t look right with the other stones. It seemed somehow jinxed. It wanted to be picked up . . . Oh, I don’t know, I just didn’t like it. More fool me if we were just thinking of the price it could be flogged for.’

  ‘Murders have happened for less,’ said Harriet. ‘Please help. Tell us what happened at that party.’

  ‘I need a drink,’ said Diana.

  Peter looked around the room, spotted something that looked like a cocktail cabinet, and went over to open it. He found some tumblers and a bottle of malt whisky.

  ‘Don’t worry about water,’ Diana called over to him. ‘And there isn’t any ice. I’ll have it neat.’

  Peter brought the drink across to her, and sat down again.

  She downed the whisky with remarkable speed and then said, ‘Right. Well, I thought Verity was looking a bit peaky, so I asked her to join a mob of friends I was getting together to go out for the night. It was a fancy dress affair – we used to have such fun with those before the war – there were ten of us, enough for one table in the ballroom. A day or so before, I asked what costume she had dreamed up, because I thought with that boring mother of hers there might not be too much French lingerie or harlequin coats around in the wardrobes. I meant to help. When she said she was going in a sari I was a bit bothered, because the Honourable Helen Harrison had said she was going as an Indian girl, and I thought Verity would be shown up. Helen was so good at costumes . . . anyway, you don’t really want two the same in the same party. So I asked Helen to think of something else, and she came dolled up as Marie Antoinette. Funny, that, when you think what happened to her.’

  ‘What did happen to her?’ asked Peter.

  ‘She was decapitated by a sheet of flying glass,’ said Diana. ‘I need another drink.’

  Peter got up and refilled her glass.

  ‘I ought to offer you one,’ she said.

  ‘It’s a bit early in the day for us, thank you,’ said Harriet. She was beginning to look at Lady Diana with concern.

  ‘We all met in the foyer,’ Diana continued. ‘And pretty damn good we looked too. A bit of glamour and fun about every one of us. That basement ballroom was supposed to be safe!’ she added indignantly. ‘There was a big crowd milling about, and I saw there was another party in fancy dress, including, would you believe it, another girl in a sari. Someone said she must be a silly cow because she was wearing a turban fixed with a brooch in front, and it wasn’t right to have a turban with a sari. I can’t think why, but he seemed very sure of it. I looked across at this annoying woman. She had a red turban fixed with a big green brooch. Anyway, we all went in and sat at the corner table I had booked, and ordered some champagne. Well, it was supposed to cheer us up. And people got up from time to time and danced; it was Snakehips Johnson and his band. Jolly good.

  ‘Then there was a rumble, and a terrific bang, and all the lights went out, and stuff started falling on our heads. People were screaming . . . I reached out for Helen, and her arm was all wet and dusty, and she fell over as I touched her. My ears were hurting, and there was something trickling down my forehead. I called to everyone, “Get out! We must get out of here!” and we began to struggle out into the foyer. Someone had a torch, and was playing the beam around the floor, and there were terribly injured people all over the floor, half buried in rubble, some of them, and I didn’t want to se
e. I’d give anything not to have seen . . .

  ‘Anyway, we were holding hands and struggling to get out into the foyer, and walking all over dead people and stuff, and it was very cold. I looked up and the place was open to the sky. Stars. There were stars, and such awful screams and groans . . . and the foyer was still there. It even had lights on. People were milling about in it covered with dust, and scratched and bleeding. And the emergency services were there, helping people out into the street, and I looked around and saw at once that we weren’t all there. Helen was missing, and Verity and Jamie. So I started trying to get an ambulance man to go back and look for them, and he wouldn’t. They didn’t seem to realise that they were helping people who were still on their feet, and there was all that mayhem in the ballroom. So Donald wrestled a torch off one of the ambulance men, and we went back ourselves.

  I thought she was all right at first – Verity, I mean, because she was sitting with her back to the wall, and there was no blood on her, only dust on her hair, and her drink was on the table in front of her. I began to shout at her to come out. Then Donald’s torch picked up Helen’s head on the floor, and I threw up. And when I straightened up Donald had got across to Verity and he said she was dead. And then the rescue services arrived, and crowded in and told all the walking wounded to get out quick, and someone carried me out of there. They put me in an ambulance and drove me to Bart’s. It was full of frantic people, and terribly injured people being carried in. Someone gave me a cup of tea, and I realised that I only had a cut forehead, I wasn’t injured and I was getting in the way of people who were. So I staggered out of there and walked home.

  ‘I can’t have been thinking clearly because the way home was down Coventry Street, past the Café de Paris. There was still a line of ambulances, and there were all these bodies lying lined up on the pavement. All dressed up. Like beautiful broken dolls. I thought of looking for Verity but I couldn’t manage it. I only just managed to get home.’

  ‘How dreadful for you,’ said Harriet softly.

  ‘I’ll get over it,’ said Diana. ‘I don’t think of it so often now.’

  Peter said, ‘We don’t need to ask you much more, Lady Diana. But can you tell us how it is that the jewel Verity was wearing came back to the family?’

  ‘The rescue people found it. They sent for me because they were able to find that the table had been booked in my name.’

  ‘That was lucky, in a way,’ said Peter.

  ‘Lucky for the Attenburys,’ she said, recovering the sharpness in her tone. ‘Not for me. I had to identify the body. Roland was dead, Edward was in some awful military training camp in Yorkshire, Sylvia was in a state of collapse. I had to do it.’

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ said Peter. What else could be said?

  ‘And while I was in the mortuary they gave me this pathetic bundle of her things. One sandal with bloodstains. A few glass bangles. How could the bangles not be broken when the wearer was dead? And the emerald in its gold clip. Undamaged. But you know, now I come to think of it, they did ask me a queer question. They asked me if it was the right one. I picked it up and looked at it and said I should jolly well think so, and I brought it back to Sylvia. God, that was a difficult visit. If I had a five pound note for every time she said she didn’t blame me . . .’

  ‘Well, nobody in their right mind could blame you,’ Peter said.

  ‘If you really don’t blame someone you don’t keep on saying so,’ said Diana. And then, abruptly, ‘Tell me, Lady Peter, do you have to go somewhere by yourself to write?’

  ‘Yes. I have a pleasant study with my books and papers round me. And no telephone within earshot.’

  ‘I wouldn’t like that,’ said Diana. ‘I hate being alone. I’m afraid of being alone. And people don’t come as much as they did when I was younger. When I was more fun, I suppose. I have to rustle up friends to get company. Hell for me is an evening like this evening when I shall be alone in the house.’

  ‘Come to the cinema with me,’ said Harriet. ‘We could see Strangers on a Train.’

  ‘That’s meant well,’ said Diana. ‘But I’m not your sort of person, am I? And I’m not Peter’s sort either. Never was. And I saw Strangers on a Train the day before yesterday. Pour me another drink, and then push off.’

  Once out in the street again, Peter and Harriet instinctively walked briskly and silently away. There was a grey persistent drizzle outside, which had started while they were indoors. Since they had come out in fine weather they neither of them had an umbrella. Harriet was bare-headed, and Peter offered her his trilby. ‘You have a rakish charm in a man’s hat,’ he observed.

  Two corners down the street Harriet said, ‘It will be easier to rebuild and reopen the Café de Paris than to mend the damage there.’

  Peter said, ‘You were kind to her, Harriet.’

  ‘I was trying to be, but it didn’t work, did it? Did we get any further, do you think?’

  ‘There was that tantalising detail about her being asked if the emerald was the right one.’

  ‘Could the other person in Indian dress have been wearing the Maharaja’s jewel?’

  ‘I was wondering that.’

  ‘Baleful coincidence again,’ said Harriet.

  ‘Because if so, and if both wearers were dead it would have been very easy to muddle the stones.’

  ‘They had successfully connected Verity with a sandal and those borrowed bangles, as well as the jewel, or perhaps one of the jewels. And there were dozens of the dead and their accoutrements to deal with. I wonder how that was done?’

  ‘We don’t wonder, we ask,’ said Peter firmly.

  ‘But whoever do we ask?’

  ‘Charles, of course. What’s the point of having a policeman as a brother-in-law if one cannot pester him with trivial queries?’

  ‘If we really think those deaths are connected, it isn’t trivial,’ said Harriet.

  ‘Of course it’s not. Murder most foul, as in the best it is. And yet . . .’

  ‘And yet, Peter?’

  ‘I suppose at a time when all over the world people were being massacred in their hundreds of thousands one should keep a sense of proportion about a few gadflies in a ballroom.’

  They had reached their own front door.

  ‘You are wrong, my lord,’ said Harriet. ‘Let’s get indoors, and I shall rebuke you severely.’

  Peter helped Harriet out of her coat, and hung it over the banister post with his own. To Harriet’s raised eyebrows he said quietly, ‘I shall bare my head, and my breast if need be, to your rebuke, Harriet; but it is too much to ask of me to summon Bunter to witness it. The worst of Job’s tribulations was the complacency of his friends in his abasement.’

  They went tiptoe up the stairs to the library, where a bright fire had been lit, but for all their care Bunter heard them and appeared, asking if there was anything he could do.

  ‘Would you bring me a dry towel, Bunter, please?’ said Harriet. ‘His lordship is rather damp.’

  Bunter looked for a minute as if he was going to offer to dry Peter down himself, but then he thought better of it. He brought a towel, and retreated, closing the library door behind him.

  Harriet sat in a fireside chair, and said, ‘Come here, Peter.’

  Peter came and stood before her, and then knelt down at her feet to allow her to reach his head. She cast the towel over him, and rubbed his hair vigorously dry and tousled. Then she put the towel over the fireguard, and bent to kiss him, noticing with a constriction of the heart that his straw-blond hair was streaked now with grey. In sunshine it didn’t show; but when his hair was damp . . .

  ‘You may get up now,’ she said.

  ‘I am waiting for my rebuke,’ he said.

  ‘You seemed to be saying that one death would matter less at a time when millions were dying,’ she said. ‘But I think that idea is likely to make the millions of deaths more possible. It loses sight of those each and every immortal souls. Or, if you are unsure about souls, tho
se particular skeins of memory. If the murder of many could somehow diminish the importance of the murder of one, then one at a time we might diminish a massacre. A murder is an absolute crime.’

  ‘I accept rebuke, Harriet, because you are perfectly right. Although I’m not sure that that is what I meant to say.’

  ‘It’s a running flaw in your marble thoughts, Peter,’ she said. ‘I know you well enough to know that you could not have spoken lightly about the death of a group of navvies, or hospital porters. It momentarily distorts your judgement that the dead were gadflies, as you called them.’

  ‘You are right again, Magistra. And in any case, no murder was done in the Café de Paris, only an act of war. We should be keeping our minds on Mr Handley and Captain Rannerson. And on the jewel,’ he added, getting up. ‘Let’s have Charles to lunch, and ask favours.’

  Chapter 16

  ‘Sorry my dear sister can’t be with us today,’ said Peter.

  ‘She’s at a meeting of the Prisoners’ Aid Association,’ said Charles.

  ‘How are all the children, Charles?’ asked Harriet.

  ‘All well, thank heavens,’ said Charles. ‘Charlie will finish his degree this summer, as you know, and is thinking of joining the RAF. His mother can’t dissuade him, so far.’

  ‘Why should Mary want to dissuade him?’ asked Peter.

  ‘She thinks it too dangerous, even in peacetime,’ said Charles. ‘It’s all right by me. The boy is besotted by planes, and he might as well follow his heart.’

  ‘I expect Mary is thinking about Lord St George,’ said Peter.

  ‘But it was the Battle of Britain that did for him, poor lad,’ said Charles. ‘Not flying routine sorties over the North Sea. I expect he’ll get his way,’ he added, referring to his son. ‘He usually does.’

  ‘And Polly?’ asked Harriet.

  ‘Polly has decided to follow me into the police,’ said Charles.

  ‘What does Mary think of that?’ asked Harriet.

  ‘She’s envious. Keeps remarking that a proper career doing something useful is a real opportunity. And before you ask about Harriet, I haven’t the faintest idea what she will opt for, and neither has she. At the moment the height of her ambition is the school hockey team.’