Wimsey 014 - The Attenbury Emeralds

by Jill Paton Walsh

  ‘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 see. 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.’

&nbs
p; ‘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, those 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.’

  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.’

  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.