Wimsey 014 - The Attenbury Emeralds

by Jill Paton Walsh

  ‘What have you been up to, darling?’ she had asked him three nights ago. ‘Hope you haven’t been bored?’

  ‘Bored?’ he had said. ‘I should jolly well say not! But it’s secret, Mummy. Can’t tell.’

  With so much going on Harriet had not had time to worry about the secret.

  ‘I expect it had occurred to them that if we noticed they were around we might want to send them back to school,’ said Peter.

  You could trust boys to be fascinated by fire, and ineluctably drawn towards soot, that most dramatic form of dirt. The morning after their arrival at Bredon Hall the disappearing sons had set out in a posse to explore. Even the elder two were impressed.

  ‘What a mess!’ said Paul joyfully.

  ‘A relief for the old man, I should think,’ said Bredon insouciantly.

  ‘Why?’ asked Paul.

  ‘I shouldn’t think anyone will want him to break the bank putting a roof on that,’ said Bredon airily, waving his hands towards the pile of black rubble that was most of his ancestral home.

  PB said, ‘I wonder how much they got out?’

  ‘What do you mean?’ asked Roger.

  ‘Oh, you know, books and pictures and things.’

  ‘Oh, that stuff,’ said Bredon. ‘I wouldn’t take it as a gift myself.’

  ‘It’s all your ancestors, you posh lot,’ said PB.

  Bredon put up his fists at PB, and they all laughed.

  A lanky young man with a wheelbarrow was working near them shovelling up ashes and debris. ‘The stuff is in the barn,’ he said. ‘I’ll show you if you like.’

  The barn had been part of the buildings of the home farm. It stood empty these days, the land having been attached to the next farm, and being worked by the tenant farmer there.

  They all trooped inside. It was full of objects: pictures leaning against the walls, small pieces of furniture, books in great tottering piles, tapestry wall-hangings just tossed to hang bundled up over the sides of the stalls, various porcelain jars, silver candlesticks and bric-à-brac simply piled at random on a pile of hay-bales; but it was even more full of a choking and repulsive stink of scorch.

  ‘Ugh!’ said Paul.

  ‘Let’s open it up,’ said Bredon.

  They unlatched the great cart doors, and trundled them open.

  ‘Now the trap in the hay-loft,’ said Bredon. Roger scrambled up to do it. Cold, clean air swept through the building. A few cinders spun away on the up-draught.

  Bredon said, ‘Could we do anything about all this?’

  Paul said, ‘Where the heck would we start?’

  ‘We could bring everything into this big central space and empty all the stalls,’ said PB. ‘And then use the stalls like filing boxes and put things back in some sort of order. We could do with some trestle tables to put small things on, and for a writing desk to make lists.’

  ‘I can make lists, PB,’ said Roger. ‘I’ve got good clear handwriting.’

  ‘We’ll take you up on that,’ said Bredon, ruffling his younger brother’s hair.

  ‘Would you know where we could find trestle tables, by any chance?’ PB asked the gardener, who was standing by, watching them.

  ‘There’s some in the tack-room,’ the boy said. ‘They get set up to put the wage packets out on come pay day. I’d help you fetch them…’ he added uncertainly.

  ‘What’s your name?’ asked Bredon.

  ‘Jim, sir. I’m Jim Jackson.’

  Bredon looked levelly at him for a moment. ‘Do you think we can borrow you, Jim?’ he asked.

  ‘You couldn’t normally, sir,’ said Jim, ‘without you asked the Head Gardener. But he’s in the hospital with the back of his hands burned quite bad, and almost to his elbow one arm, we’re told. And it’s all at sixes and sevens, sir, so I don’t think anyone would notice what I’m after doing.’

  ‘Well, Jim, do as you like, then,’ said Bredon. PB was looking at Bredon with a flicker of a smile.

  ‘I’m game to help out if I can, sir,’ said Jim. ‘I can do what you tell me, but I haven’t a clue what all these indoor things are, mind.’

  ‘Would you be kind enough to get out a couple of those trestle tables, Jim, please,’ said Bredon sweetly. ‘Paul will help you carry them.’

  They all set to work willingly enough. Even Roger could carry small pictures and objects. But they quickly discovered that it was hard work.

  ‘It uses different muscles from rugger,’ said Bredon ruefully, after an hour’s work. He leaned against a post, stretching his legs and arms.

  ‘I never knew that soot was greasy,’ said Paul. But so it was proving: everything blackened that they had touched had fingerprints in the grime; everything relatively clean that they had touched had grimy fingerprints, and they themselves were beginning to look like sweeps.

  ‘Bredon, I think this is too much for us,’ said Paul.

  ‘Oh, never say die,’ replied Bredon. ‘This is the hardest bit. Tomorrow we will be moving things back into the stalls, and that will be one by one. Cheer up, Paul.’

  Jim, who had been quietly helping with the biggest pictures, slipped away at this point.

  Bredon thought he had given up on them, but he was back quite soon with two rather larger gardeners, one of whom was a grown man. ‘This here’s Bob,’ said Jim.

  Bob walked around a bit. Then he said, ‘Do you boys have permission from the house to be doing this?’

  ‘No, Bob,’ said Bredon. ‘We are showing initiative. We are always being told at school to do that.’

  ‘Oh, ah,’ said Bob. ‘Well, the garden men will help you, but only if you give me a formal order that they are to do it. Understood? Anything gets broken, and you takes the blame, not one of us.’

  ‘Of course, Bob,’ said Bredon, unruffled.

  ‘Only, young master,’ Bob said, ‘we don’t know how things stand no more. The old Duke ran a tight ship and he had a short temper. He was very fair, mind, but we watched our steps. We don’t know what the new Duke will be like at all. By rights I ought to get all three of us out of here fast, only I can see you could do with a bit of a hand.’

  ‘I think you’ll find my father is pretty fair,’ said Bredon.

  With two more hands to the job they moved everything into the central space by mid-afternoon.

  Bredon offered thanks, and said the work would be easier from then on, and he thought could be managed without more help.

  ‘Those lists we are going to make will be the filthiest lists known to man,’ said Paul, holding out to Bredon his spectacularly blackened hands.

  ‘We’ll keep Roger clean,’ said Bredon. ‘He can sit at the table and do the actual writing while the rest of us do the scene-shifting.’

  As he spoke they realised that Bunter had come into the barn and was standing listening and looking.

  PB took the lead. ‘We are hoping to sort things and make lists, Dad,’ he said.

  It seemed a long time before Bunter answered. They all knew that if he disapproved the work would stop at once.

  ‘Good idea,’ he said at last.

  ‘I thought, Dad, we would need kinds and grades,’ said PB.

  Bredon raised an eyebrow.

  ‘Kind of things listed separately – as in pictures, prints, tables, jars,’ said PB. ‘And grades as in how damaged, like a little, a lot, totally destroyed.’

  ‘What are you going to make these lists in?’ asked Bunter.

  ‘Haven’t thought yet, Mervyn,’ said Bredon, flashing the Wimsey smile at Bunter.

  Bunter left, and they stood around surveying the next day’s work. But he was soon back, carrying an armful of leather-bound folio ledgers, which he put down on the trestle table. ‘Some distant duke bought in enough of these to last the house till doomsday,’ he said.

  ‘Thank you,’ they said in ragged unison.

  ‘And now to clean you up,’ said Bunter. ‘You will need hot baths, and you may need help scrubbing down to get that soot off. You cannot possibly t
ramp through the Dower House looking like that. I shall organise baths for you in the servants’ quarter. No arguments.’

  Feeling as sheepish as naughty children, they obeyed.

  The day after the funeral, at breakfast, Bredon offered to show his parents what their sons had been up to. He led the way across to the barn. Within the barn Peter Bunter was waiting. It was clear at a glance what had been happening. A little makeshift table carried a row of ledgers, in which the boys had been listing the items. Harriet picked up the first ledger. Pictures, undamaged, she read.

  ‘Anything in that list is over here,’ Paul told her eagerly. ‘The number in the book corresponds to the label on the frame.’

  The next ledger was labelled Pictures, damaged. The damage was carefully described. Harriet read: ‘Frame scorched in lower right-hand corner, three small holes in canvas,’ and ‘picture blackened over whole surface, frame broken on opposite corners.’ She put down this ledger and picked up the next: Books, damaged. She handed it to Peter. The three boys were standing around, eagerly waiting for parental reaction.

  ‘We thought this might be useful, for insurance or something,’ said Paul.

  ‘There’s hours of hard work here,’ said Peter, ‘and of course it’s useful. Thank you.’

  ‘We couldn’t have done it without Peter Bunter,’ said Bredon. ‘He dreamed up the system.’

  ‘And we got help moving these big pictures around,’ said Paul. ‘The gardeners helped us.’

  Harriet realised that Peter was struggling with emotion. She knew full well what it was, but Bredon misread it.

  ‘Most of this isn’t as bad as it looks, Father,’ he said. ‘A lot of it is smoked rather than scorched. We thought we’d better leave cleaning anything to the experts, but I bet a lot of these pictures will clean up as good as new.’

  ‘I’m very proud of you,’ said Peter. ‘Of all of you.’

  ‘We think these lists will take us another three or four days, Father,’ said Bredon. ‘May we finish the job?’

  ‘What? Oh, more time off school, is that it? Yes; another week.’

  ‘Bunter says PB must go back tomorrow,’ said Paul. ‘He said: “My son has got to make his way in the world.”’

  ‘We all have to make our way in the world,’ said Harriet. ‘One world or another.’

  ‘I’ll have a word with Bunter,’ said Peter. ‘But when it comes to what PB does, what Bunter says, goes.’

  ‘I’ll think he’ll ask my mother,’ said PB. ‘And she will ask him if he knows what you think.’

  Going back to London, when at last they were free to do so, felt like putting on again clothes that one has not worn for a while. Deep familiarity overlaid with recent unfamiliarity; welcome and strange at once. Harriet had not written a single word during their absence; too much to do, too many interruptions. And Peter, she thought, had not given a thought to detecting anything. In that she was wrong, it turned out. Having seen his mother safely on to the Southampton train, complete with Franklin and many suitcases, he came home, and, unusually for him, tapped lightly on the door of Harriet’s study, entered, and sat in the armchair facing her.

  ‘I am returning to you, Miss Vane,’ he said, ‘in the persona of Lord Peter, the notorious sleuth, and, moreover, a sleuth with an unsatisfied client, and an undetermined investigation on his hands.’

  ‘I am glad to see you back, Peter,’ she said. ‘What will you do next?’

  ‘Bunter says there is something I ought to read,’ he said. ‘I shall go and read it. And I believe young Attenbury has twice left his card here, and is likely to call at around three.’

  ‘Would you like moral support?’

  ‘If it doesn’t bore you overmuch. I’ll leave you to get on with your own work now.’

  But he was soon back, holding in his hand a magazine with an austere, academic-looking cover. ‘Look at this,’ he said.

  Harriet took it from him. ‘The Proceedings of the Society of Antiquarian Jewellers,’ she read.

  ‘Page thirteen,’ he said.

  Page thirteen carried a report of an address given to the society by one Miss Pevenor. She had been offering an account of her researches, including a description of the Attenbury emerald, and the translation of the inscription.

  ‘Quite interesting, Peter,’ said Harriet, puzzled at his agitation.

  ‘Don’t you see?’ he said. ‘That woman has just put herself in mortal danger.’

  ‘The reason being?’

  ‘The heart of the matter is those inscriptions,’ he said. ‘If you can read those, and you know anything about Persian poetry, you know there are three stones. And that’s a very dangerous thing to know. Look, I’m going to see if Charles can give her some protection.’

  Peter left the room. Curious, Harriet continued to inspect Miss Pevenor’s article. She skimmed it rapidly. ‘The inscription upon the back of the jewel, or my spirit leaves my own body, is clearly incomplete. Possibly the stone was once part of a collection…’

  She did not look up as Peter entered the room. ‘Peter, surely this is all right,’ she said. ‘Miss Pevenor doesn’t know anything about the Maharaja’s stone. It’s all speculation. She doesn’t even know that what she thinks of as the Attenbury emerald isn’t the right one.’

  When Peter didn’t answer, she looked up. He was standing in front of her, quite still.

  ‘It’s too late,’ he said. ‘Charles tells me she was murdered last week.’

  ‘Horrible,’ said Harriet. ‘That poor woman! What had she done to deserve to die terrified and helpless?’

  Peter had just finished describing to her what he had learned when he and Charles had visited the Middlesex Constabulary to discover what they could about the death of Miss Pevenor. It had in fact been reported in the copy of The Times that carried the stories about the death of Gerald; not even Bunter had spotted it, in small type way down the page. On a normal day it would have rated headlines, but it had been more fun to harass a great family with a scandal or two. The local police had been a bit bemused to find themselves visited by a senior officer in the Met and a famous amateur, over what James Vaud, the detective in charge, described as ‘a squalid case. Run of the mill’.

  Someone had talked their way in to the house. No sign of forced entry. And the victim had felt secure enough to sit down at her desk, spread out some papers in front of her. ‘Must have intended to show the visitor something,’

  Inspector Vaud had said. ‘And then she was attacked from behind. Bit of picture wire round the neck. Tightened with a paper knife being turned in it.’

  ‘Obviously the local force knew she was working on valuable things. There was a bit of disturbance in the house – books flung on the floor, broken china, dressing-table drawers all emptied. Motive, robbery, they thought. And they couldn’t find anything worth taking, so they reckoned it had all been taken. As to what might have been taken, they could read her ledger. She should have had the Marshal pearls, and three diamond tiaras. They had circulated descriptions.

  ‘They were gratifyingly amazed, Harriet, when we asked if they had found the safe. Remember she told us the book in front of the buttons to reveal it was Urn Burial? Well, I had a quick look roughly where I remembered Urn Burial to have been when we visited her, and it was a complete give-away. There was The Garden of Cyrus on the shelf, completely out of order – not another Thomas Browne anywhere near it. Wonderful moment! I took the book down, and in seconds I had the panel opened and the safe revealed. I haven’t felt so prestidigitous since I learned how to get a rabbit out of a hat when I was a boy.’

  ‘So what was in the safe, Peter?’ Harriet asked.

  ‘They couldn’t open it. So I called up Bill Rumm, and he trundled up on the Northern Line, and cracked it for us. It contained the Marshal pearls, and three diamond tiaras,’ he said.

  ‘So nothing had been stolen?’

  ‘Not a peppercorn. But Inspector Vaud stuck firmly to his guns. The mere fact that a robbery had not oc
curred did not mean that robbery was not the motive.’

  ‘You can’t blame him for that, Peter. Logically he is quite right.’

  ‘Oh, logic…I think he might have noticed how desultory the ransacking was. Not a very serious search. But why should I trouble to enlighten him? It would have taken till the middle of next week to explain to him what we thought the real motive might have been.’

  ‘Peter, you should face the fact that it really might have been a botched burglary. Quite a few people probably knew she wrote about jewels, and might have thought she might have some around.’

  ‘It doesn’t really look like that to me, Harriet. Thieves do sometimes assault a householder in the course of a crime. They have been known, even, to kill them. But it’s very unusual. After all, burglary carries a prison sentence; but murder leads to hanging. You need a professional for a jewel heist, because you have to know how to convert the loot safely into cash. And professionals, in my experience, take very good care not to go armed, in case the situation gets out of hand and they incur the death penalty.’

  ‘So what do you think would happen, Peter, if the Royal Commission on Capital Punishment which is under way at the moment abolished hanging? Would burglars go armed?’

  ‘They might,’ he said. ‘An unlooked-for result of such a decision might be more murdered householders. Whether anyone would identify a length of picture wire as a homicidal weapon unless they found it actually round the neck of a garrotted victim is another thing.’

  ‘What do you think about the death penalty? Would you like to see it abolished?’

  ‘Charles told me once,’ he answered, ‘that he had a friend who was a prison governor. And that man told him that he thought capital punishment was more merciful than a life sentence. And yet…there are too many mistaken verdicts. Think what a near thing it was that you…’

  ‘I think, Peter, that the man who really killed Philip Boyes deserved to die. And therefore, you see, that if I had really done it I would likewise have deserved death.’