When the family small talk had run its course, Charles leaned back in his chair and said, ‘Come clean then, you two. How is the famous sleuth doing on the trail of the mysterious emerald?’
‘If we find it, Charles, you will be on the track of the murderer of Captain Rannerson, I think,’ said Peter.
‘Hmm. Maybe. I’m not sure at all that any crime is involved here. It isn’t a crime to muddle up two nearly identical stones.’
‘But, Charles, someone has appeared claiming ownership of the Attenbury one. That looks like a ruse in pursuance of theft, to me. And such a ruse must have been long in the devising, and it required cunning and knowledge to accomplish it. And probably murder along the way.’
‘Your theory is that the victims, or victim perhaps, because I’m unconvinced that a motor accident involving a pawnbroker was a murder at all – your theory is that Captain Rannerson was murdered because he knew or had seen something that might have impeded this long-lasting fiendish plot? Well, Peter, you have been right before when I have been wrong, or at least slow on the uptake.’
‘Come, Charles, you are not Inspector Sugg.’
‘Well, it does occur to me that if you are right we have only to wait and see who turns up with the documentation and actually tries to walk off with the jewel now in the bank.’
‘We have thought of that,’ said Peter. ‘Objection number one is that we don’t know how much time it will take the mysterious Mr Tipotenios to collect his documentation and reappear. And the new Lord Attenbury is desperate for funds. But there are other potential snags. Let’s make a scenario as if we were Harriet planning a novel. Mr T turns up at the bank with his documentation. I think we can take it that it will have compelling force. I think we could not rely on its being obviously forged. Can we arrest him, Charles? Can we compel him to come up with an explanation of how it is that his jewel is in the Attenbury strongbox and theirs is not?’
‘Hmm,’ said Charles. ‘If he has a good lawyer, I don’t know what we could do. It would be up to him to explain how he knows that his jewel is in Attenbury’s box. But I don’t see what we would do if he simply denies all knowledge about what has happened to the other jewel.’
‘The devil of it is, Charles, that those stones are identical only up to a point. There is an inscription on the back of them, in Persian, and I don’t think it would be the same inscription on both. So for anyone who reads Persian they are immediately distinguishable.’
‘Well, not every second thief around here reads Persian,’ said Charles. ‘I’m surprised you don’t, Wimsey, you usually have an annoying habit of knowing everything.’
‘Ah, love, could you and I with fate conspire . . .’ said Peter, ‘we would certainly arrange for a human lifespan long enough to allow for learning Persian and Mandarin Chinese come to that, as well as Arabic, and every European language with a respectable literature to offer as an enticement. I am sixty, Charles, not three hundred and sixty.’
‘We could find someone to read a Persian inscription for us,’ said Charles.
‘But we don’t know what each stone ought to say,’ said Harriet.
‘Ah.’
‘Can I bring this discussion down to earth?’ said Peter. ‘The only person likely to know that the stones had been swapped would be the person who swapped them. And that person must have had the Maharaja’s stone available. So the immediate question is on what occasions was the swap possible? One such was the ten days or so during which Captain Rannerson held the stone, and was flashing it around London showing his friends. A captain in the Indian Army might have had friends who knew a maharaja or two, or he might have known them himself.
‘Another such was in the débris of the Café de Paris, when there were two ladies dressed up as Indian girls. And what we were planning to ask you, Charles, is do you know any way of finding out who was sorting out the items of property belonging to the dead? Such a person might have muddled two jewels together by sheer confusion and the difficulty of the task. As we were regulated within an inch of our lives during the war, I wondered . . .’
Charles pondered. ‘I can spare a WPC to see what she can find out,’ he said.
Harriet felt herself blushing. ‘We must invite you very soon, Charles, with no ulterior motive at all, otherwise you will begin to look very warily at any invitation from us.’
‘Dear Harriet,’ said Charles, ‘invite me all you like. There is always interesting talk here, and good food. That salmon we have been eating was wonderful.’
‘Freddy and Rachel are in Scotland,’ said Harriet. ‘He caught it himself in the Spey, and had it sent down to us.’
‘That’s the kind of friend to have,’ said Charles.
‘So are you, Charles,’ said Peter brazenly, ‘so are you.’
Charles’s WPC must have been good at her job; a day or two later Harriet and Peter set out to interview a pair of sisters, now retired, who had been working in the mortuary nearest to Coventry Street on the night of 8th March, 1941. They were living in a patch of prefabs on the South Bank, just below a viaduct carrying trains in and out of Waterloo. In this unpromising setting their prefab stood out from its neighbours, having window boxes, and a rainwater butt and a dazzling garden full of marigolds and geraniums, and a tiny lawn the size of a tablecloth that looked like a yard of green velvet from Liberty’s.
They had been pre-warned, and there was a packet of biscuits and a plate of cakes all ready to be brought out along with a large brown teapot. The little sitting-room was full of small ornaments, lacy antimacassars, brass fire-irons and toasting fork, fancy plates hanging all over the walls nearly obliterating the sunflower-patterned wallpaper.
The owners introduced themselves as Joyce and Susie, and immediately asked how to address a lord, never having had the need to know that yet.
‘Just call us Peter and Harriet,’ said Harriet hastily, fearing that the attention of the two ladies would be wholly taken up with unfamiliar protocol.
The missing titles appeared as pauses in conversation: ‘Please sit down – Harriet, – Peter. Make yourselves comfy,’ said Joyce. And seeing Harriet looking round the room, she added, ‘You can’t be doing with plain and tidy in a little house – Harriet. It looks much better with bits and pieces, we find.’
‘I always wondered what these places were like inside,’ said Harriet. ‘It looks very bright and jolly the way you have it.’
‘Would you like to look round?’ asked Susie, jumping up. ‘It won’t take no longer than it takes the tea to brew.’
It didn’t take as long to show Harriet a second room, with two beds and a wardrobe in it, a tiny kitchen and a tiny bathroom. It was all quite light and sunny. Of course it was cramped, but once you got used to the small size it was perfectly cosy. ‘And a bloody sight better than the damp basement what we had before Hitler did a demolition job on it, pardon my language,’ said Susie. ‘After you,’ and she ushered Harriet back into the front room just as the tea was being poured.
Peter was being presented with a plate of cakes. ‘Camouflage cakes, those are,’ Joyce was telling him.
Peter contemplated the three colours just visible through the light brown crust of the cakes. ‘They look the part,’ he observed.
‘Home-made. Three colours in the mix, and three flavours,’ Joyce told him. ‘The kiddies love them.’
‘Kiddies?’ Peter asked, startled. There really wasn’t much room for children.
‘Oh, not ours. The neighbours has kiddies,’ said Joyce.
‘Come now, Joyce,’ said Susie, pouring tea as brown as the pot itself into the teacups. ‘Let people get a word in endways. They haven’t come to chinwag with us.’
‘We were wondering if you could remember the Café de Paris incident,’ said Harriet. ‘And a green jewel. Or perhaps two green jewels.’
‘I can remember that all right,’ said Susie. ‘We won’t never forget that, will we, Joyce? We was working in the East End most nights,’ she went on. ‘Me and Joyce h
ere, and our friend Rita Patel. But that night they came and fetched us on account of having more bodies than they could be doing with.’
‘Doing what, exactly?’ Peter asked.
‘Laying them out, my darling, laying them out,’ said Joyce. ‘Cleaning them up a bit, and putting shrouds on them to cover the wounds as much as you could. Making it as easy as possible for the poor families who came looking for them. They all had to be looked at even if they was wearing their identity discs, and not many of that lot were. Spoils the look of nice dresses, I suppose. No more than they was carrying gas-masks or identity cards in their purses. Not but what you could necessarily put the purse and the body together rightly. We was doing our best.’
‘You must have seen terrible things,’ said Peter. His words brought back to him in a painful flash the recollection of Mrs DuBerris sitting on a bench in the gardens of Fennybrook Hall. He had no time to work out the connection, because Joyce was saying, ‘It wasn’t a very nice job, no. But someone had to do it. And you know what, er, Peter, the men wasn’t as good at that as the women. Not by a long way.’
‘The man in charge that night said we should have had a medal,’ said Susie. ‘And I said to him I’d rather have a good leg of lamb!’
‘But you haven’t come to talk to us about bodies, have you?’ said Joyce. ‘It’s those green glass things you want to know about. Costume jewellery.’
‘It would be immensely helpful if you could tell us what you remember about those,’ said Peter.
‘You tell ’im,’ said Susie.
‘Well, first we was laying out a young woman in a green sari. Pretend Indian. She was wearing one of them green things in a wire, on a ribbon at her neck. I didn’t think nothing of it. I just put it in the box with her other bits and pieces, and got on with my work.’
‘You put it in a box?’
‘We had shoe-boxes to put stuff in. We would put everything we found on a body in one of them boxes, and chalk a number on the box, and put it on a shelf. Then we would put a luggage label on the corpus’s toes, and put the same number on that before it got covered over and put on a shelf. Should have been foolproof as long as we looked what we was doing.’
‘It went on all night with them bringing in bodies. Then in the morning shift some time someone brought in a couple of bags full of personal property what they had dug out while they was looking for people in the rubble. So we rummaged through that, and guess what – there was a red scarf in it and one of them green stones pinned to it on a clip to make a brooch. First we thought the green sari girl must have been wearing a stole sort of thing, but it wouldn’t have looked right. So in the end we put the red scarf in the “unidentified” box.
‘Then when we had a tea-break we was bitching about it,’ said Joyce, ‘saying what a con it was.’
‘Why was it a con?’ asked Harriet.
‘They must of hired their costumes, see. All wearing that fancy foreign stuff. You would hire it in Covent Garden, at one of them theatrical shops. And they shouldn’t of hired out the same bit of glass to two ladies for the same night. Ladies don’t like to see someone else wearing the same as what they’ve got. Course they don’t.’
‘If the two jewels were the same,’ said Peter, ‘why did one of you ask Lady Diana, when she took her niece’s things, if she had got the right one?’
‘Only that one was done up as a necklace and the other as a brooch,’ said Susie. ‘We wasn’t that fussed about them – but the costume hire want back exactly what they lend you, or you lose your deposit.’
‘Course, since the lady policeman told us you wanted to talk to us about them, we have been wondering,’ said Joyce, ‘if they could of been real after all. Only they couldn’t of been, could they, not that big?’
‘At least one of them was real,’ said Peter. ‘Possibly both of them were.’
‘Well, all I can say is coo-er!’ said Susie.
‘So the question is, could they have been muddled so that the one Lady Diana took home was not the one her niece was wearing that night?’ asked Peter.
‘I really don’t think so, no,’ said Joyce. ‘Do you think so, Susie?’
‘No, can’t see how that could of happened,’ Susie replied. ‘We had the girl all tidied up and labelled and her things in the box before the warden brought us the bag with the other one in it. They was kept separate, all through.’
‘Do you know what happened to the brooch that was with the red scarf?’ asked Peter.
‘Yes, I do know that as a matter of fact. I was working there about a week later, along with Rita, when a woman come in and claimed it. Said her daughter had been wearing a red turban, and had it been found?’
‘Rita asked her if her daughter was all hurt bad, and she said she was shook up with a leg in plaster but she’d be all right.’
‘What was this woman like?’ asked Peter.
‘Oh, just an ordinary sort of woman. She spoke nice. Rita said something to her about the words on the back of the stone, friendly like, but she didn’t want to know. She wasn’t there no more than a minute or two, and then she took her stuff and signed for it, and left.’
‘If she signed for it, it might be possible to find her name,’ said Harriet.
‘Mrs Smith. That’s what she signed. Rita said at the time, well, there’s lots of those around. Wish I’d had time to have a proper look at them jewels, though. I like nice things.’
‘Think where we’d be if we had nicked them!’ said Joyce.
‘Lying awake at night expecting to be nicked ourselves,’ said Susie. ‘That’s where we’d be. Don’t take any notice of her, she’s never nicked a thing in her life,’ she added, addressing the Wimseys. ‘We’re all right as we are. Better’n poor Rita. She copped it the very next night.’
‘How did she cop it?’ asked Peter.
‘Fell through a manhole on her way home in the dark, and broke her neck,’ said Susie. ‘Broken manhole cover. Have another camouflage cake?’
‘Yes, please,’ said Peter. ‘They are very good.’
‘It needs an egg to make them,’ said Susie proudly. ‘But only one.’
‘For all that, they plainly could have been muddled in the morgue,’ said Peter. He and Harriet, having returned home, were putting Bunter in the picture.
‘But who was the other person wearing a look-alike?’ asked Harriet.
‘A Miss Smith, perhaps?’
‘And how did she come by a duplicate emerald?’ asked Harriet.
‘There was a paste copy once,’ said Peter. ‘I wonder what became of that? We’d better see if anyone knows.’
‘How do we find out? Do we have to ask Charles again?’
‘He wouldn’t mind if we did,’ said Peter. ‘He can see as well as we can that this is now looking like a murder enquiry. Serial murder, no less. But Bunter tells me young Attenbury is calling on us this evening after dinner, so perhaps he will do.’
‘I don’t like to be discouraging, Peter,’ said Harriet, ‘but are we getting anywhere at all with this enquiry? The emerald could have been swapped while Captain Rannerson had it; it could have been swapped accidentally at the Café de Paris . . .’
‘But an accidental swap won’t do, Harriet, will it?’ said Peter. ‘If it were accidental, the holder wouldn’t know he or she had the wrong stone, and so could not turn up to claim the one in the strongbox; whatever we are looking for, we are not looking for an accident, but for an opportunity for deliberate villainy.’
‘And not very plausible villainy, Peter. Our perpetrator has to have a legitimate claim on one of the stones, that will stand severe scrutiny. And then has to carry out the swap and wait; wait for perhaps many years to spring. What kind of person is that?’
‘It is an advantage of crimes in your fiction,’ said Peter, ‘that the puzzles are designed to be soluble. In that respect, if in no other, they do not resemble real life. But of course it seems likely that we are looking for an agent of the Maharaja of Sinorabad.’
> ‘Haven’t the maharajas all been abolished?’
‘They have been dispossessed of all but their personal fortunes,’ said Peter. ‘I don’t think democratic India has got round to confiscating family jewels. It seems rather moderate at the moment.’
‘And for the moment we must be ready to comfort the victim of this implausible crime,’ said Harriet. ‘Peter, what can we say to him?’
‘We shall give him a job to do,’ said Peter. ‘And he will hasten to do it for us.’
Chapter 17
Edward Abcock, Lord Attenbury, appeared promptly at nine o’clock, and was made welcome with a bottle of port, carefully decanted by Bunter, and accompanied by Stilton cheese and some oatcakes. His agitation on his previous visit had subsided into an air of misery which pervaded his manner so thoroughly that it must have become the prevailing weather in his soul.
‘How’s it all going?’ Peter asked him when he was comfortably settled with his glass in his hand.
‘It’s ghastly,’ his lordship replied. ‘Absolute hell. Do you know much about death duties, Lord Peter?’
‘Not as much as you do, I’m afraid,’ said Peter.
‘Well, it isn’t going to hit you as it has me, is it?’ said Edward. ‘Just die before your brother and you’ll never have to know. I suppose I must have known that I would be in this pickle some day, but I wasn’t ready for it. I simply can’t raise the money for the tax unless I put Fennybrook Hall up for sale. I could sell the land, but it isn’t getting a good price, so it would mean leaving the hall without its farms, and no income to support it. And it’s in a rotten state of repair . . . In the old man’s day an earldom counted for something, but now it just makes you into a class enemy or a figure of fun. And I feel a real idiot wearing those robes for the House of Lords. Like something out of Gilbert and Sullivan without the tunes. I don’t suppose you’ve got anywhere about that emerald, have you? The family lawyer chappie tells me it was insured for a hundred thousand pounds. And that really would make a difference.’
The Attenbury Emeralds Page 16
