by Diane Janes
‘But perhaps you have different ideas to the coroner,’ Fran probed gently.
‘Well no … no. Not immediately.’ Roland sounded uncertain. ‘You see, it could have been an accident. Grandfather had lost a lot of the strength in his arms, but he might easily have got it into his head to wheel himself out of the house and along the path, but then somehow lost control of the wheelchair and gone over the top. Even if he’d shouted for help, he wouldn’t necessarily have been heard. You know what it’s like when people are playing games and of course anyone down by the shore has to contend with the shingle and the noise of the sea. It was a lovely day and pretty much everyone was out of doors, enjoying themselves.’
‘What about his nurse?’
‘It was her half day.’
‘So you initially thought that it could have been an accident, but then something happened which made you change your minds?’
‘It wasn’t exactly that something happened. You see, it was only when we realized that the diamond was missing that we really began to suspect there was something wrong.’
FIVE
‘The diamond?’ Fran repeated. As she spoke, it seemed as if a sunbeam caught the top of a distant wave and a tiny sparkle of light gleamed momentarily in one pane of the drawing-room windows.
Though Roland had been appointed storyteller, it was Henrietta Edgerton who took up the tale. ‘From what we can understand, when Grandfather came home from Africa, he brought some of his newly acquired fortune in hard cash, some in gold and some of it in diamonds. As far as we know, he hadn’t actually discovered a diamond mine himself, but he set himself up as a provider of equipment to the actual prospectors and he had traded successfully and sometimes been paid in diamonds. He converted pretty much all those diamonds into other assets of one sort or another, but he kept a few, one of which was made into an engagement ring for our grandmother.’
‘How romantic,’ said Fran, feeling that some such remark was required.
‘Over the years he gradually disposed of all the other diamonds,’ Henrietta continued.
‘They weren’t particularly big stones,’ Eddie put in. ‘Most of them weren’t hugely valuable.’
‘But he kept this one back.’ Henrietta continued as if her brother hadn’t spoken. ‘He used to keep it in the safe in the room which he used as his bedsitting room. He kept one or two other bits and pieces in there too. Some rather nice rubies that had belonged to our grandmother – oh, yes – and a little diamond-and-pearl tiara that belonged to Mother. Anyway, after his funeral, when things had to be sorted out, we realized that although nothing else was missing, the diamond wasn’t there any more.’
‘So … let me get this straight.’ Fran’s pencil was poised above her notebook. ‘The diamond was just a single stone? It wasn’t part of a piece of jewellery?’
‘That’s right. It had been cut, but it had never been set in anything.’
‘How was it kept? Was it in some kind of case?’
‘No. It was actually in a little black bag.’
‘It was a black velvet bag,’ Mellie put in. ‘The bag was a little bit worn. I remember noticing that when he showed me the stone, because it made me wonder if the edges of the stone would cause the bag to eventually wear out.’
‘He showed it to you?’ Fran turned to Mellie with interest.
‘He showed it to pretty much everyone,’ Roly said. ‘At some point or another.’
‘So lots of people knew about the stone and knew where it was kept?’
‘Not exactly lots of people. When I said everyone, what I meant was all of the family. Grandfather wasn’t a complete fool. He wouldn’t have just got the thing out and flashed it under the nose of any old visitor, but we all knew about it, yes.’
‘How about the servants?’
‘That’s difficult to say. I suppose they may have known it was there. The location of the safe certainly wasn’t a secret. It’s the sort one often finds, built into the wall of a house, slightly masked by the panelling. I suppose some people might have hung a picture in front of it too, but Grandfather didn’t bother.’
‘And you say that the safe was in his bedroom?’
‘It was eventually.’ Henrietta took up the narrator’s role again. ‘But that almost came about by accident, because when Grandfather couldn’t manage the stairs any more, he had his bed down in the library, and that’s where the safe had been built in.’
At that moment they were interrupted by the doors bursting open. An oversized child, wearing a large hat with a feather waving from it, and a mustard-coloured cloak, which had clearly once seen service as a curtain, burst into the room brandishing a poker. ‘Ha ha!’ she yelled. ‘I’ve got you cornered now.’
‘Imogen! Do be careful or you will do yourself a damage with that thing,’ Henrietta protested.
‘Or damage the ornaments,’ said Mellie. ‘Where on earth is Miss Billington?’
The question was answered immediately as a small, nervous-looking woman hastened into the room in the wake of the child, gasping, ‘So sorry. Come on now, Imogen. The family has a guest. Let’s get back to the playroom, shall we?’
‘No, no,’ the girl protested. ‘They are all my prisoners.’
‘Do get a grip on the situation, Miss Billington.’ Mellie Edgerton spoke quite sharply, and Fran decided that she was perhaps not so frail or nervy as she had initially appeared.
‘Now then, Imogen.’ Eddie had risen to his feet and spoke in a much more kindly voice than his sister-in-law. ‘You know that it isn’t cricket to come bursting into the drawing room like this. Go along with Billie, old thing; otherwise, Cook may forget where she has put the chocolate biscuits again, and we none of us want that, now, do we?’ His hand was resting on the girl’s shoulder and as he spoke he began to guide her gently back in the direction of the drawing-room door. Miss Billington looked noticeably grateful.
‘Can we go and see Cook now?’ Fran heard the girl ask as Eddie and Miss Billington steered her out into the passage.
‘No doubt you are wondering about the intrusion.’ Henrietta turned back to Fran. ‘That was our cousin, Imogen. She has lived with us since her mother died in 1919, so we look on her as a sort of younger sister.’
‘How old is she?’ asked Fran, who was somewhat puzzled by the childish clothes and actions, which clearly did not fit the sheer size of the child.
‘Imogen will be fourteen this year. She’s a sweet girl really, but I’m afraid she is a little bit backward, which means that she tends to indulge in some rather silly antics. I’m sure she will grow out of it all eventually.’
‘Some of us,’ said Mellie, ‘believe that she would have grown out of it long ago, if there had been less emphasis on chocolate biscuits and more emphasis on a few good spankings.’
Fran took a moment to consult her notebook in order to avoid noticing the way the other two women had turned to glare at one another.
‘Don’t be unkind, Mellie.’ Roland had adopted a pleading tone. ‘Imogen can’t help the way she is.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous, Roly,’ snapped his wife. ‘The only thing wrong with that child is that she has been thoroughly spoiled. If my mother had had charge of her from the age of three, she would have been minding her Ps and Qs and almost ready to go off to finishing school by now, not racing about the house like a dervish with a poker in her hand.’
‘Perhaps,’ Fran ventured rather nervously, ‘we might return to the question of the diamond that has gone missing? Tell me, Mr Edgerton …’
‘Roly, please.’
Fran inclined her head. ‘Roly, did you report the disappearance of the diamond to the police?’
‘We did not.’
‘But it must be tremendously valuable … and surely, if you thought that it had been stolen …’
‘This is where you come in,’ Roland began, just as his brother re-entered the room. ‘We decided on discretion, you see.’
‘There were quite a lot of factors in play,’ Henrietta put in
.
‘To begin with, we simply didn’t know whether the diamond had been stolen. You see, Grandfather was in the habit of periodically getting it out, either to have a look at it himself, or else to show it to someone else, so no one was quite sure when it might have last been taken out of the safe. Grandfather had been growing rather absent-minded …’
‘What my husband means to say,’ Mellie said, ‘is that the old man had been going a bit dotty.’
‘So at first you thought that he might have just put it down somewhere and forgotten it,’ suggested Fran.
‘Exactly.’
‘But when you cleared out his room, it wasn’t there.’
‘Right again.’ Eddie resumed the role of spokesman. ‘The diamond isn’t insured and we hardly wanted to advertise to every Tom, Dick and Harry that it might be lying somewhere about the place, then having burglars turning up from far and wide to see what other swag might be available.’
‘Then there is the matter of Grandfather’s death, you see,’ Roly put in. ‘Right from the beginning, the whole business seemed a bit odd. No one could remember the last time that he’d wheeled himself all the way along that path, right as far as the point where he went over the edge. But since no one had admitted to taking him up there that afternoon, we assumed that he must have got there himself. As I’ve said before, old Vereker was jolly good at the inquest and he didn’t give any credence at all to suicide or foul play …’
‘It isn’t as if there was actually any evidence of either.’ This from Henrietta.
‘But that didn’t stop some impudent pup of a reporter, trying to sneak into the grounds and talk to some of the servants,’ said Mellie. ‘Obviously he got nothing out of any of them and Marshall – that’s the head gardener – soon chucked him out, but you can just imagine all the speculation there would have been if the sudden death of Frederick Edgerton had been coupled with news of a suspected jewellery theft.’
‘I may need to speak with all the staff myself,’ Fran ventured.
‘Of course,’ said Roly. ‘They will be instructed to offer you every cooperation.’
‘Your speaking to them is entirely different,’ Mellie said. ‘What we don’t want is some idiot like Constable Dunn coming up here and asking questions. I can see him now, standing there in his great big boots and licking his pencil, the way he always does before he writes anything down. And the next thing you know, the story would be all over the village and spreading like wildfire.’
‘But surely …’ Fran hesitated. ‘I understood that one of you is acquainted with the chief constable in another county. Wouldn’t it be possible to use those connections in order to have the matter investigated by a senior officer?’
‘Oh dear.’ Mellie sighed. ‘You don’t really understand, do you?’
Roland silenced her with a look. ‘We would much prefer not to involve the police, Fran. You see, what we would like you to do, if possible, is to track down the diamond, but along with that there is inevitably the question of whether its disappearance is in any way linked to our grandfather’s death. You see, if it turns out that our grandfather’s death was not the accident which we all believed in at the beginning … well, that could become a very delicate situation indeed.’
SIX
Fran sat at the dressing table which stood before the bedroom window, looking out into the gathering dusk. The sun had disappeared below the western headland and the garden was already swathed in shadows. Most of the room behind her was reflected in the dressing-table mirror; it was a comfortable room, immaculately decorated in shades of russet and pink, with the electric lamps already lit at either side of a large bed, which looked very inviting to someone who had spent most of the day travelling. Fran rather wished that she could undress and climb into that bed instead of having to go downstairs and eat dinner with the Edgertons.
Not only was she by now too tired to relish the prospect of keeping up polite conversation during dinner, but she was also experiencing a growing sense of unease. It was perfectly obvious that if old Frederick Edgerton’s death had not been accident or suicide then suspicion would fall on the surviving members of the family. No wonder they had no desire to involve the police. Yet if she did turn up some evidence of suspicious circumstances, the Edgertons would surely not expect her to collude with them in some kind of cover-up. Supposing she discovered that there had been foul play? The house suddenly felt a long way from any kind of civilization. Tom, Tom what have you got me into? A pheasant somewhere in the grounds chose that moment to emit a screech, startling her horribly.
Silly, silly … The Edgertons were perfectly nice, hospitable people who just wanted their grandfather’s missing diamond found with a minimum of fuss – and so far they had shown her nothing but kindness.
After tea Henrietta and Mellie had escorted her up to her room, indicating the bathroom which was just across the corridor from her bedroom and the discreet bell push alongside the bed, which she was exhorted to use if she needed anything at all.
‘Now if you have travelled light – which is always the most sensible way – there is nothing in the way of clothes or cosmetics that Mellie and I can’t lend you,’ Henrietta had said.
Fran privately thought that fragile-looking Mellie’s frocks would be much too small for her, while the tall, relatively slender Henrietta’s would probably be overlong, but she appreciated the gesture and realized that if they normally dressed for dinner then she would probably need to take up the offer.
The maid, Jane, had unpacked all her things. This operation had included laying out Fran’s hairbrushes and small collection of cosmetics on the dressing table, which gave her very little excuse to hang around upstairs. She took rather longer than was necessary to freshen up her Geranium Charm lipstick and brush her hair before heading back across the thick pile rug towards the bedroom door. The doors were well-made and a good fit, which made it impossible to hear if there was anyone approaching along the corridor, so it was only as Fran opened the door that she realized someone was passing by. Not wishing to encounter anyone on their way to or from the bathroom, she paused with the door barely an inch ajar, in order to allow the unseen person time to get out of the way.
In the same moment she heard the click of a door opening further along the passage and Mellie’s voice saying, ‘There you are, Roly. I was wondering where on earth you’d got to.’
Roly’s reply was unintelligible, but Mellie immediately came back at him, her higher voice clearly audible. ‘What do you think of her – your lady detective?’
Fran felt her cheeks burning crimson. She could not possibly walk out into the passage now, but nor did she dare to draw attention to her presence by shutting the door. She would just have to pray that neither of them was in a position to notice the way her door was open a tiny crack.
Roly’s brief assessment was again too low for her to hear, and Fran guessed that, unlike Mellie, he was probably facing away from her and into their room. Though she could not hear Roly, her mother’s voice sounded clearly in her head. ‘Eavesdroppers never hear well of themselves.’ And her mother was right, of course. One ought not to go around listening at doors.
‘And have you decided whether to tell her – about you know what?’
Fran immediately pricked up her ears. Eavesdropping might have its uses after all. It was probably what proper detectives did all the time. She suspected that Tom would have had no scruples about it whatsoever, if in pursuit of what might be an important clue.
However, Mellie’s question was greeted by another mumble from Roland, cut short by the distinct sound of a door closing.
Fran waited for a moment or two, but there was nothing else to be heard. Hmm, she thought, pursing her lips in an expression, which her friend Mo would have recognized at once. If there’s one thing I’m determined to find out about before I leave Sunnyside House, it’s what ‘you know what’ is all about.
She swung the door open and stepped out into the deserted upstairs cor
ridor. ‘Drinks in the drawing room before dinner,’ had been Henrietta’s parting words, and when Fran arrived downstairs, making her entrance through those rather theatrical double doors and descending the steps into the main part of the drawing room, she found that Henrietta was already perched on a sofa, glass in hand, next to a much older woman, her grey hair swept up into an almost Edwardian style, whose kind grey eyes made a swift assessment of Fran, even as she smiled in what appeared to be a genuine welcome.
Eddie Edgerton was also in the room, and he, of course, leapt to his feet and performed introductions. ‘Mrs Black, my mother, Lady Louisa Edgerton. Mother, this is Mrs Black, who has kindly agreed to let us call her Fran.’
Lady Louisa inclined her head, offered a hand and said, ‘Welcome to Sunnyside House, Mrs Black.’
‘Oh, Mother, don’t be so stuffy!’ exclaimed Eddie. ‘I’m afraid my mother simply cannot get on first-name terms with anyone until they’ve been acquainted for about thirty years. It’s her upbringing, I’m afraid.’
‘Oh, do leave Mother alone, Eddie.’ Henrietta was laughing as she spoke – in fact, all three family members were taking the exchange in good part. ‘Mother cannot help having been properly brung up, as Jane would say, instead of being allowed to run wild as we were.’
‘Stop fussing about form, Eddie, and offer our guest a drink,’ his mother said. ‘Tell me, Mrs Black, did you have a very trying journey?’
The conversation moved swiftly on to the subject of railway travel, the journey times between Devon and London, and from there it moved logically to a West End play which Henrietta was hoping to see. The quartet were soon joined by Roland and Mellie and at the stroke of eight o’clock a gong sounded somewhere in the distance and Eddie sprang to Fran’s side in order to escort her along to the dining room, where they were served dinner by the butler who had overseen her arrival.
Fran found the butler’s attentions slightly unnerving. He kept appearing at her shoulder with wine bottles and dishes of vegetables and she was unsure how she ought to address him. He was much more of a presence than a waiter in a restaurant, and yet in another way much less obviously demanding of her attention. She tried to watch what everyone else was doing, nervous of putting a foot wrong. The others all appeared to be perfectly at their ease, but of course they were used to eating in this rather lovely house with a butler in attendance. This room would have seen much grander occasions, she guessed, involving considerably greater numbers. For them, it was just a normal family dinner, encompassing the presence of a single guest with cheerful conversation ebbing to and fro. If any of them was worrying about the mystery which had brought their guest to Sunnyside House, they were certainly not showing it just then.
