"That's what Rupert and I said in effect," said Jessica. "The trouble is, there are six of us who know about this. He's going to have to rely on us all keeping the secret. Who's to say that any one of us won't let the cat out of the bag in some unguarded moment? Then he'd be in far worse trouble."
Polly said, "I don't really agree that we should stay silent. I think Milo ought to go to the police directly."
"So do I," chimed in Miss Chilmark. "Let the truth come out, whatever it is. What do the rest of you think? What about you?" she said to Shirley-Ann.
"I think the decision is up to Milo. I don't mind staying quiet if he doesn't want to get involved."
"And you?" demanded Miss Chilmark, swinging around to face Sid.
Sid's shoulders were hunched as usual. He said, without looking up from the floor, "I can stay quiet."
"No one will argue with that," said Rupert. "Milo, my old cobber, the house is divided. Four of us are willing to turn a blind eye, and two want to hand you over to the rozzers."
"That isn't right," Polly protested. "Milo tells us he knows nothing about this, and I'm willing to believe him. He has nothing to fear from the police. The sooner he reports this and gives them the chance to catch the real thief, the better."
"My sentiments exactly," said Miss Chilmark.
Milo gave a nod. "You're right, of course. I'd better hand this in as soon as possible."
"Do you want anyone to go with you?" Polly asked. "We can all back up your story. We're solidly behind you, Milo."
Milo thanked her and said he thought he would rather go alone. He placed the precious envelope tightly between the pages prior to closing the book. "The amazing thing is that it was here, like a bookmark, at the very chapter I was going to read out."
"The one about the locked room lecture?" said Jessica.
"Yes."
"Did you have a bookmark here?"
"No need. I knew it was chapter seventeen."
"But you'd opened the book to look at it?"
"Sometime during the week, yes. I suppose when the thief opened it, the pages fell open at the chapter I'd been studying. But why me? Why do a thing like this to me, of all people?"
There was no response from anyone. If any of the Bloodhounds knew the answer, or had a private theory, this wasn't the moment to air it. Polly suggested closing the meeting early—it was still only 8:45—and there was no dissent. Milo put on his overcoat and fur hat and was the first to leave.
Chapter Thirteen
Shirley-Ann could hardly wait to tell Bert, her partner, about the dramatic moment when the Penny Black was found. She gave him the update as soon as she got back to their flat in Russell Street. Bert was a difficult man to impress, a modern embodiment of the stony indifference displayed by the English archers at the Battle of Agincourt. Admirable, but frustrating when you were the French army at the charge, so to speak, with lances raised and banners unfurled. He listened in silence, hardly raising an eyebrow until Shirley-Ann had finished. Then came the comment: "I suppose we'll have the police around here asking questions next."
Bert had this unerring ability to raise alarming images in Shirley-Ann's brain. She pictured two burly officers in uniform sitting in the living room. She, straight from the kitchen, caught wearing that vulgar PVC apron with its lifesize image of an overdeveloped female torso in basque and suspenders. No good saying her regular apron was in the wash and this one belonged to Bert, a silly prize won in the rugby club raffle. She visualized the policemen eyeing suspiciously her shelves of books stacked with crime fiction and perhaps even finding on the bottom shelf among the atlases and art books the Stanley Gibbons Junior Stamp Album she had kept since childhood. "Interested in philately, are we?"
Shirley-Ann's brain was in such turmoil that she wouldn't be ready to sleep until much later. She didn't expect to hear much more from Bert until he'd finished his supper. He always ate a big meal with a glass of red wine at the end of the day, and tonight it was a full-size Marks and Spencer steak and kidney pie, heated in the microwave. He survived all day at the Sports and Leisure Center on dried fruit, pulses, and apple juice. It seemed to suit his metabolism. He had the physique of an athlete, so hunky, Shirley-Ann sometimes told him, that he could have doubled for Arnie Schwarzenegger, which was a slight exaggeration. He jogged in the mornings, and of course his work kept him in shape and burned up plenty of calories.
She wanted Bert's advice. He had a very clear-sighted view of things. She waited until he had cleared his plate and was finishing with a banana.
"Bert."
"Mm?"
"Do you really think the police will want to talk to me?"
"It's obvious. You're a witness. You could be a suspect as well."
"Oh, be serious. I didn't have anything to do with it."
"They don't know that. If—what's his name, the gay bloke?"
"Milo."
"If Milo can't explain how he got hold of the stamp, questions are going to be asked, aren't they?"
She nervously fingered a strand of her hair. "I suppose you're right."
"Don't know why you got mixed up with this lot."
"That's down to you."
He frowned. "Me?"
"Because you're always at the Sports Center in the evenings. You can't expect me to stay here on my own. It was in that 'What's On in Bath' pamphlet you brought home. I found it under Clubs and Societies, remember?"
"So how are you going to handle it?" Bert asked, positive and forward-looking. Attractive qualities in a man, but not always easy to match.
"You mean if they come asking questions?"
"There's no 'if about it."
"I'll tell the truth, I suppose. Mind you, I don't want to get Milo into more trouble than he's in already."
"You can't turn your back. You might as well go to the police and tell them what happened—before they come to you." Bert's urge to get things done was why a career in sport was so ideal for him. He called it "sports management," but Shirley-Ann suspected it had more to do with demonstrating step-ups than sitting behind a desk.
"I don't want to do that," said Shirley-Ann. "I don't want to shop Milo. I don't even know for sure if he went to the police after the meeting ended. He said he was going, but you never know."
"Shop him?" Bert repeated. "You're talking like a criminal yourself."
"Give over, Bert. I'm not going to the police, and that's final."
Bert softened a little. He relented to the extent of offering her a segment of orange. He put on his worldly-wise look, the sort of expression he wore when showing some novice how to hold a table tennis bat. "You've got to admit that they sound an odd bunch. This Rupert—he's the character with the dog, right?"
She nodded. "Character is the word for Rupert. He dresses like a stage Frenchman. Well, a rather gone-to-seed stage Frenchman. Black beret, striped jersey, and jeans. And he has this terribly, terribly well-bred English accent. Have I told you this already?"
"Some of it," Bert said.
"Listening to him, you'd think you were safe as houses, but he seems to cause havoc wherever he goes. He got the Bloodhounds banned from the Francis Hotel."
"Why?"
"I don't know the details. He can be pretty outspoken, and it's a very carrying voice. I'm not sure if he knows the effect it has."
"Better keep your distance, then. What about the women in the group? Are they more reliable?"
"There's Polly Wycherley. She's our chairman. A little white-haired lady with a fixed smile like you get across the jam and marmalade stall at the Women's Institute sale. She set up the group, and she holds it together. I think it's very important to her self-esteem to keep it going."
"Reliable?"
"I'd say yes like a shot except that Jessica—she's the one who runs the art gallery—seems not to trust her entirely."
"Any idea why?"
"There's some friction between those two. Polly was quite miffed because I stayed for a drink with Jessica in the Moon and
Sixpence last week. And Jessica wasn't too pleased when I mentioned having coffee at Le Parisien with Polly. So there's a slight question mark. But I like them both in their different ways. Jessica is bright and liberated. Fun to be with."
"There's another woman in the group, isn't there?"
Shirley-Ann smiled. "Miss Chilmark wouldn't care to be described as a woman. A lady, if you please. 'There have been Chilmarks in the West Country for over seven hundred years.' She can't abide Rupert. Or Polly. Or any of us, except possibly Milo. She'd like to be chairman."
"So what's your opinion?" Bert asked. "Do you think Milo pinched the stamp?"
"I'd be amazed if he did. He's an intelligent man, or so I thought."
"But this wasn't a stupid crime," Bert pointed out. "The whole thing was set up as a kind of challenge, remember. There was that rhyme about Victoria that was on the radio and in the papers."
She nodded. "It was a jolly clever bluff. Everyone was fooled by it, including the police."
"So you reckon there's a good brain behind this?"
She nodded. "The way it was set up was really artful. Brilliant, in fact. That rhyme fooled everyone. The stupid bit was tonight—if Milo is the thief—revealing it to everybody."
"Unless he's still several moves ahead of the rest of you."
Her eyes widened. Bert was second to none at spotting devious goingson. There was a lot of jockeying for position in sports management.
"So what's he up to, do you suppose?" She leaned across the table with the point of her chin resting on her upturned thumb. Her lips were slightly open. She half hoped Bert would say "Who cares about Milo?" and lean closer.
Instead he asked, "Does he know anything about stamps?"
Her chin came to rest less seductively in her cupped hand. "I've no idea. No one has mentioned it. He seems more hooked on Sherlock Holmes than anything else."
Bert rotated his finger thoughtfully around the rim of the empty wine glass. "Do you think he fancies himself as Holmes?"
Shirley-Ann giggled a little. "I suppose he might. He does wear a deerstalker. But I don't see why it should make him want to steal the Penny Black. Holmes didn't commit crimes; he solved them."
He expanded on his theory. "If he wanted to show off a bit, demonstrate his skill at solving a crime, he could pretend to find the stamp by Holmes's methods."
"But he didn't, did he? It turned up in the pages of a book."
"A stupid mistake. It proves he isn't in the same league as Holmes," said Bert. "He must have tucked it in there for safety and forgotten that he was using the same book to read from."
She pondered for a moment. "That sounds quite possible. What was he aiming to do with the stamp?"
"He'd have pretended to find it somewhere nobody else would think of, and he'd have got his fifteen minutes of fame as the modern Sherlock who outwitted the police. The whole episode wouldn't have done anybody any harm provided that the stamp turned up again in perfect condition."
"That's rather neat. I do hope you're right," she said. "I don't like to think of Milo as a thief."
"I didn't say he wasn't one," said Bert in a change of tone. "They don't all wear flat caps and carry bags with SWAG written on them."
"Haha."
"He could have demanded a ransom for it. Fifty grand, or he burns it."
"He's a retired civil servant, for heaven's sake."
"Maybe he's been waiting all his life to do something really exciting."
"Silly!"
Bert said huffily, "If you don't think much of my opinions, why ask me?"
Now she'd offended him. He was so touchy about anything remotely suggesting he was stupid, which he patently was not. She supposed he had to endure a lot of thoughtless remarks at work from users of the Leisure Center who thought he was just a musclebound bloke in a tracksuit.
They cleared the table and watched television for an hour, but Shirley-Ann couldn't have told you what the program was.
Chapter Fourteen
Peter Diamond was still up after midnight watching television, picking holes in the plot of an old film, To Catch a Thief. Stephanie had quit after the first commercial break. "Far be it from me to drag you away from Grace Kelly," she told him. "See it to the end. I'm tired."
She was amused to see that the new kitten stayed on the arm of his chair, ready to pounce on his hand if he moved. It still had no name. Peter had this weird theory that the kitten would let them know what it wanted to be called. She was content to let the little tabby do its own job of winning approval. On the first evening, after the predictable flare-up when he'd spotted the cat-tray, her bruiser of a husband, the tyrant of Manvers Street, had stayed up most of the night with the kitten in case it cried. Big softie.
Then the phone rang.
She was still sitting up in bed reading when he came into the bedroom to hand over the kitten. "I'm going to have to go out, love. That was Wigfull."
Her eyes widened. "He isn't your boss, is he? What does he want at this time of night?"
"He's found a body."
"Personally?"
"So he says. Murder is my pigeon, not his."
"Where is it?"
"On a canal boat."
"In Bath?"
"Limpley Stoke. That boatyard near the Aqueduct. I've got to go."
"It's wickedly cold tonight. There's a frost."
"I'll take it carefully down Brassknocker," he promised.
"I wasn't thinking of your driving. I meant I'm going to freeze in this bed without you."
He smiled. "You'll have warmed up nicely by the time I get in."
"Thanks—I'll really look forward to that. You'll be as cold as Finnegan's feet on the day they buried him."
By daylight Brassknocker Hill offers a series of glorious, gasp-inducing views of the Limpley Stoke Valley. By night the descent from Claverton Down is even more dramatic, for you plunge into a vast, black void with just a scattering of lights. He would have driven cautiously anyway, without the frost warning. At the bottom he turned right at the Viaduct pub, joined the A36 and immediately left it by the traffic lights.
The entrance to the Dundas boatyard is an unprepossessing pull-in over uneven ground a few yards along the Bradford Road. The gate was open, and a few frost-coated cars were parked inside. He bumped over a couple of potholes and stopped beside an empty police car. Nobody was about. There was some kind of notice at the far end of the parking area. He groped in his glove compartment for a torch. The notice informed him: YOUR CAR is AT RISK FROM THIEVES.
There was only one way to go: up a slope toward some temporary-looking buildings that turned out to be the boat-yard offices. They stood beside a stretch of the old Somerset Coal Canal that was used for mooring. His torch picked out a small iron bridge and beyond it a row of narrowboats and other small craft.
Along the towpath he discovered that the moorings extended much farther than he had first appreciated, using both sides of the canal. Fifty or sixty boats must have been tied up there. He flicked the torch over some names painted in the florid lettering that is the canal boat style: Henrietta, Occam's 's Razor, Charleen. They were moored for the winter, he guessed, locked up, curtains drawn, with everything portable removed from the decks. If cars were at risk from thieves, then so were boats.
Presently voices carried to him. A torchbeam speared the darkness and dazzled him. He stepped out toward John Wigfull, two uniformed officers, and a bearded man in a deerstalker hat. They were beside a red narrowboat called the Mrs. Hudson. As if to proclaim that it was also a houseboat, some twenty conifers in pots stood along the roof, and there was a television aerial. The interior was lit, but nothing could be seen; the Venetian blinds were closed at all the windows.
"This is Mr. Motion," Wigfull said, with a nod at the bearded man. "He owns the boat."
"Nice boat," said Diamond to Motion. "And you say there's a corpse inside?"
Wigfull said, "We found it together."
"You found it?" Diamond coul
d have added that Wigfull was supposed to be fully stretched investigating a stamp theft, but there was no need. The point was made in the way he stressed the word You.
"Peter, can we take this from the beginning? We've got to wait for the SOCOs, so you might as well hear what happened. Mr. Motion walked into Manvers Street this evening and informed us that the missing Penny Black had come into his possession."
"So you've found it." Diamond took a longer look at Motion in his deerstalker, but without shining a torch into his face it was difficult to assess the man in these conditions. "A body and the stamp?"
Wigfull continued, "It turned up in a book. He doesn't know how it got there. He happened to be reading from this book at a meeting. There's a club called the Bloodhounds that meets on Mondays—"
"Hold on a minute. The what?"
"Bloodhounds."
"We're a group of local people with a mutual interest in crime fiction," Motion explained in a tone that expressed some irritation with Wigfull. Clearly they'd been over this a number of times already.
Wigfull said, "They bring their books to the meeting and read bits. When Mr. Motion opened his, the cover was inside— and when I say cover, I'm using the stamp collectors' term. I mean the envelope with the Penny Black. It was between the pages at precisely the section Mr. Motion had chosen to read from. Have I summarized the facts correctly, Mr. Motion?"
"Yes," said Motion wearily.
"He opened the book and made the discovery in the presence of six other witnesses. When he realized what it was, he came directly to the station and reported it. That was at five to nine this evening. I was called in and interviewed him from nine thirty onward."
"For almost three hours," said Motion.
"This wasn't a missing budgerigar you brought— in, sir," said Wigfull, displaying some impatience of his own. "It's the world's most valuable stamp." He switched back to Diamond. "Mr. Motion insists that the book never left his hands from the time he started out for his meeting."
"Literally?" said Diamond.
Motion gave a nod.
"I see that you're wearing an overcoat, sir. Did you wear it for the meeting?"
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