The Best British Mysteries 3 - [Anthology]

by Edited by Maxim Jakubowski

  “Allow her to explain in her own time,” said Faro with a smile.

  In reply, Nadia touched her father’s sleeve, whispered, and then turning to Faro, Mr. Jacob said, “She thinks you are not the same man.”

  “Ah,” said Faro. “Now we are getting somewhere. Your exact words, Mr. Jacob, if I recall them correctly, were that you did not recognise me again. Your daughter’s information confirms that I have never set foot in your shop before this afternoon—”

  “But—but, sir,” Mr. Jacob interrupted, “it was the day you arrested the holy man, the one who was trying to steal from my shop—”

  “A moment, if you please. A holy man stealing from you—and I was arresting him. Sir, you must be dreaming.”

  “If it was a dream,” said the jeweller ruefully, “then it was a costly one. I lost much money.”

  “I presume you have reported this theft to the police.”

  Father and daughter exchanged anxious looks and shook their heads.

  “No? Then I think you had better tell me exactly what happened.”

  “You—the er, other inspector—was in a policeman’s uniform that first time.” Mr. Jacob shrugged. “It makes a man look different.”

  “Describe this uniform, if you please.”

  What Mr. Jacob described was worn by police constables. Detective inspectors, however, were allowed the privilege of plain clothes, if they wished. The experience of twenty years had led Faro to appreciate the advantages of anonymity in his line of enquiries, where an approach by an officer of the law was a hindrance rather than a help. Innocent as well as guilty were apt to become somewhat reticent when faced with an intimidating uniform.

  * * * *

  “May we go right back to the beginning, if you please?” asked Faro.

  At his stern expression, Mr. Jacob sighed. “Very well ... Nadia will look after the shop while we talk inside.”

  In the screened-off living quarters, domesticity was provided by a curtained bed in the wall for the father and a tiny room no larger than a cupboard for his daughter. From every corner, stuffed animals glared at them yellow-eyed and fierce. A tray of dismembered clocks and watches ticked furiously as if in a constant state of anxiety at the close proximity of soldering iron and Bunsen burner.

  Inviting Faro to a seat by the fire, the jeweller began his strange story.

  “A few days ago, a customer, a holy man—of your faith—wished to buy a diamond ring for his wife—”

  “Ah, you must mean a minister,” interrupted Faro, and when Mr. Jacob looked even more confused, he added, “We call them ‘reverends.’”

  Mr. Jacob nodded. “I understand. This reverend selected a ring priced at forty pounds and offered to pay with a hundred-pound banknote.”

  Fraud. Such was Faro’s immediate reaction considering the few hundred-pound banknotes printed and in circulation. Only a foreigner would be taken in by such audacity.

  “I see that you too are doubtful, sir, as I was. And so was this reverend. He said, ‘As I am a complete stranger you must be wondering if this note is real. I noticed a bank just across the road there. Would you care to ask the cashier to verify that this is a genuine banknote?’”

  “Ah,” said Faro. “How very convenient. You go across the road and leave him in the shop. And when you return—” He shrugged, said sadly: “My dear fellow, this is a very old trick.”

  “I am not stupid, Inspector. When I suggested that my daughter go to the bank instead, the reverend was not in the least dismayed. I was watching him intently and he was most complimentary about her. He talked—much as you have done, sir, curious about my reasons for coming to Scotland.

  “Nadia came back and told us that both the bank cashier and the manager himself had assured her that the banknote was indeed genuine. I put the diamond ring into a box and from the safe, in the wall over there—” he pointed—”I gave the reverend his sixty pounds change.”

  Mr. Jacob sighed and shook his head. “He seemed such a kindly man, but just as he was leaving the shop, you—I mean, the policeman—entered, seized him, and said to me: ‘I am a police inspector and I have to tell you that this man is a thief, well known to us. He has already been in prison three times.’”

  Faro was puzzled. A trickster like the minister, who had been jailed three times, yet he had never heard of him.

  Mr. Jacob continued: “I am an honest man, sir, and I had to protest that this time no fraud was involved, for the bank had examined the hundred-pound note and declared it genuine. You—er, this inspector—then asked me to show it to him. ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘as I suspected; like many other shopkeepers and bank cashiers, you have been tricked by a brilliant forgery. This is a master craftsman and I am arresting him. I shall have to take the fake bank-note, which will be required as evidence later.’

  “When he brought out the handcuffs, the reverend said to him: ‘They will not be necessary, Inspector. You have my word as a gentleman that I will come with you quietly.’

  “But the inspector just laughed at him and I felt sorry for the reverend. He did seem like a real gentleman who had fallen on hard times. Who knows what sorrows and misfortunes had driven him to a life of crime.”

  Faro was curious about the man’s identity. “Can you describe him for me?”

  “Garbed all in black, he was. Tall, pale-skinned, light-eyed...”

  Mr. Jacob ended with an embarrassed shrug, for the description also fitted the man who was now questioning him.

  Faro suppressed a smile. Did all gentiles look alike to the jeweller?

  “The reverend then began to plead. ‘There are hiring carriages outside. I will pay for one, Inspector. Please allow me this last indulgence.’ It was a wild day,” Mr. Jacob continued, “a blizzard blowing, so the inspector gave in.”

  “And you were sent for a carriage and you watched the inspector hand his prisoner in and drive away,” said Faro. “Is that so?”

  Mr. Jacob looked puzzled and then he sighed. “You smile, sir? I expect you know what happened next,” he added glumly.

  “When you came back into the shop you realised that your sixty pounds change had not been returned to you and that your fake minister had also carried off the diamond ring.”

  The jeweller nodded sadly. “I realised there had been a mistake. When I closed the shop I went at once to the police station. But do you know, Inspector, no one would believe a word of my story. They pretended that no inspector of theirs had brought in a holy man. When I protested that I was telling the truth, they became very suspicious and asked a lot of questions while another policeman wrote it all down. Where are your papers? they kept shouting. What about this shop of yours? How did you pay for it?”

  He spread his hands wide. “I was so ashamed and upset, Inspector, and very afraid. This was the kind of life I had escaped from when I fled to Scotland. Was I to go through it all over again? Fortunately, for me, that is, there was a disturbance. A bad woman—from the streets—was brought in drunk and fighting. So I took my chance and ran away as quickly as I could.”

  Faro shook his head, aware that would make the Central Office even more suspicious. He knew his men. Edinburgh was full of people who came in with wild stories and tried to obtain compensation for imagined frauds. They would jump to the obvious conclusion that they were dealing with another criminal—or a madman. And they got plenty of both kinds in a day’s work.

  “After that I was afraid to go back again,” Mr. Jacob continued. “I know I should not have rushed out like that, but you see, no one, not even a policeman, wishes to believe that a foreigner is telling the truth. I could see it in their eyes as they listened to me. An expression I have reason to know very well. Suspicion and something worse—hatred.”

  Again the jeweller spread his hands in that despairing gesture. “Like eager hungry dogs waiting for the chance to leap on their quarry,” he added in a horrified whisper.

  * * * *

  Faro protested with some soothing platitudes regarding
the law and justice, which he knew were untrue. His words rang hollow, for Mr. Jacob was correct in his assumptions and Faro was well aware that many of his men had strong anti-Semitic feelings.

  Even those with skins the same colour and speaking the same language, Irish and English, and their own countrymen from the Highlands were abused. To the struggling teeming mass of Edinburgh poor, signs of affluence in any “foreigner,” however hard won, were a subject of the most bitter hostility.

  And now Faro was faced with the hardest part of all, to tell the jeweller what was patently obvious.

  “The police inspector who made the arrest, Mr. Jacob—well, I am afraid he was not a real policeman.”

  “Not real? But how could one doubt it? He was wearing a uniform.”

  “Alas, that is no criterion of honesty. He had probably stolen it.”

  Mr. Jacob looked at him wide-eyed. “What are you trying to tell me, sir?”

  “That your police inspector and the minister were both criminals, in league together, planning to steal a diamond ring and sixty pounds from you.”

  “But the hundred-pound note—”

  “Oh yes, that banknote was genuine enough. And a very necessary part of their trick to defraud shopkeepers who would be—as you were—immediately suspicious of such a large denomination, rarely exhibited in public and even more rarely handed across shop counters.”

  As he spoke, Faro realised that the jeweller must have seemed the perfect foil for the crooks. The success of this trick depended on the ignorance of new shopkeepers. Particularly foreigners who might have their own reasons, nothing to do with fraud, but a lot to do with past unhappy experiences of political persecution, which made them wary about any involvement with the law.

  Mr. Jacob continued to look astonished and Faro repeated, “Please believe me, there was no inspector, no minister. You must understand that both men were thieves who had set out to rob you.”

  “Ah, Inspector, in that you are mistaken,” said Mr. Jacob stubbornly. “There was no crime, since the very day after I went to the police station the inspector came back—to return the diamond ring with many apologies. It had been found on the reverend’s person when he was searched. He also returned my sixty pounds,” he added triumphantly. “Now that is not the action of a thief.”

  And leaning towards Faro, he said, “What I still fail to understand is why he gave your name.”

  But Faro had already worked out that ingenious part of the fraud. The first episode with the minister and the diamond ring, his dramatic arrest by the bogus inspector, and the subsequent return of both ring and sixty pounds were elaborate overtures to secure the jeweller’s confidence.

  As for the bogus inspector, Faro guessed that he was a seasoned criminal and that perhaps their paths had already crossed. There was a certain grim humour in claiming to be Inspector Faro in the very neighbourhood where he lived and was a familiar sight.

  Faro saw something else, too. That this was merely the beginning, carefully planned with intended results far beyond the remodelling of an emerald brooch into a ring.

  Of one thing he was absolutely certain. The emerald brooch had been stolen. No doubt when he returned to the Central Office it would be listed as one of the missing jewels from the recent robbery at Jenners.

  Mr. Jacob had to be unwittingly drawn into the thieves’ kitchen. The most invaluable and hardest accessory to find was a skilled craftsman who would be adept at totally altering the appearance of stolen gems, and melting down gold.

  Once the jeweller was committed to them, then there was no escape for him. The gang would make sure of that, and their threats would be most effective, especially since the police would be ready to suspect an alien. Mr. Jacob’s visit to the Central Office, with his disastrous and wild-seeming accusations written down and filed as possible evidence, had landed him further into the net.

  Faro knew that if the jeweller was to be saved and danger averted, there was only one way. The bogus inspector must be seized when he came to reclaim the brooch. But when might that be?

  He stared out of the window. At three o’clock on a December afternoon, there was little light outside, the street already almost deserted.

  He could hardly stand guard for an indefinite period, although most of his success in a long career owed much to that element of patient waiting. However, he had given up hope by the time the street lamps were lit and the smoking chimneys of Edinburgh that Robert Burns called “Auld Reekie” added their acrid stench to the freezing fog.

  A thin stream of customers had long since gone. Not one resembled the bogus inspector and Mr. Jacob exchanged a despairing glance with Faro.

  The plan had failed. Faro shook his head. Criminals, he knew, also have their intuitive moments. Perhaps the thief had already approached the vicinity of the shop in the dim light and, suspicions aroused, had decided that in his business, discretion was always the better part of valour.

  Mr. Jacob went around the counter and was rolling down the door blind when a rap on the outside announced a last customer.

  Concealed by the kitchen curtain, Faro observed a young woman. He groaned. His last hope had expired—

  But wait—what was she asking?

  “I have come from Inspector Faro—to collect my emerald ring. I am the inspector’s sister and here is the note he asked me to give you.”

  As Mr. Jacob put on his spectacles and read the note slowly and carefully, Faro pushed aside the kitchen curtain. “Hello, my dear. I thought you were never coming. I’ve been expecting you for some time. What kept you?”

  The young woman was clearly taken aback and would have bolted had he not stood firmly between her and the door.

  Looking round desperately she stammered: “But—but—”

  Taking the woman’s arm firmly, Faro said: “I have already collected the ring for you and outside I think you’ll see a carriage awaits. Thank you, Mr. Jacob, you have been most kind”

  And Faro marched her out of the shop to the police carriage he had summoned earlier, which had been lurking discreetly out of sight round the corner. It approached rapidly and at the same time, another carriage bowled down the road.

  A man stared out and seeing that the woman had been taken and that several constables were erupting from all directions, he leaped down, took to his heels, and bolted down one of the closes.

  “Bastard!” shrieked the woman after him. “Bastard!” Her screams and bad language as two uniformed constables restrained her caused a few passersby to blanch. One elderly woman was so overcome by this display of unseemly emotions that she swooned on the spot.

  As for Faro, he was already in hot pursuit of the bogus inspector, who had discovered too late that his headlong flight carried him down a cul-de-sac.

  The struggle was short and swift, since Faro’s early training had included lessons in self-defence from a retired pugilist. The constables who had followed, truncheons at the ready, were not needed.

  Handcuffing the man, who was tall and fair like himself but considerably younger, Faro said: “You had better start talking, or it’ll be the worse for you. I dare say your doxy is already telling them all she knows.”

  And one look at the woman’s scared face, the way she cursed and spat as her confederate was hustled into the police carriage, obviously convinced him that he need expect neither discretion nor mercy from that quarter.

  “All right, Inspector Bloody Faro, you’ve won this time....”

  As Faro suspected, the bogus inspector and the minister were mere links in an organised gang of jewel thieves.

  Most of the missing gems from the haul at Jenners were recovered.

  But that is another story.

  <>

  * * * *

  Robert Barnard

  The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter

  ‘Ah!’ said Mr Septimus Coram, surveying the large plate of eggs, bacon, pork sausages, tomatoes, mushrooms, and - his particular favourite - blood pudding. ‘Gives you an a
ppetite, my job, that nobody can deny.’

  It was something he said on all such occasions, accompanying it with a deep swig from the pewter beer mug that he always used at such late breakfasts.

  ‘Brute!’ mouthed his daughter Esther. It was something she said on all such occasions, but only silently.

  ‘He went quiet, did he?’ asked his wife. It wasn’t that she wanted to know, merely that the neighbours would ask.

  ‘Didn’t have no option. One brawny warder on one side of him, and another brawny warder on the other side. Not that I couldn’t have coped on my own if need be.’

  Mr Coram had all his life been wiry rather than heavy in frame, though a lifetime’s addiction to massive fried meals and beer had given him an unattractive potbelly. His droopy moustache, pince-nez spectacles, and protruding ears produced a facial effect that was far from alluring.