The Missing Diamond Murder

by Diane Janes

  Only when they had finished their dinner and Jamieson had carried all the necessary constituents along the corridor so that they could enjoy their coffee in the drawing room did the object of Fran’s visit raise its head again.

  ‘I suppose you will begin your investigations in the morning,’ Eddie said. ‘I hope you will allow me to be your guide around the estate and your driver, if you need to check on anything further afield. I have nothing on at all and can put myself completely at your disposal.’

  ‘Eddie never has anything on,’ Henrietta said. ‘He is the laziest fellow in the county.’

  ‘Oh, I say! Don’t blacken my name immediately.’

  ‘No indeed, Hen. You really ought to have given Fran at least forty-eight hours in order to observe Eddie’s phenomenal lack of useful activity for herself.’ Roland was laughing, his words clearly not unkindly meant.

  Eddie took it in good part. ‘This is absolutely typical of my family. I offer to make myself useful and all I meet with is abuse and ridicule.’

  ‘Seriously, Fran.’ Roland adopted a much more sober tone. ‘We really do want to get to the bottom of this business if we can, so please feel free to go wherever you like in the house, or out in the grounds. Ask anything you want; speak with anyone you wish to speak with. Jamieson is going to have a word with the staff this evening, so they will be prepared to answer any questions which you may have for them and of course the rest of us are all similarly at your disposal.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Fran said. ‘I will, as you suggest, begin in the morning, and’ – she turned to Eddie – ‘I will naturally be very glad of the initial assistance of a guide. However, I have had rather a long day and I’m feeling awfully tired, so if you will excuse me, I’d very much like to make an early night of it.’

  SEVEN

  Fran awoke in a much better frame of mind. Her concerns of the night before seemed doubly foolish on this morning of bright spring sunshine, and when she got down to the dining room she again encountered an atmosphere of easy friendliness, with Roland Edgerton reading out snippets from his newspaper between eating bites of brown toast, while Mellie picked at some scrambled eggs and Henrietta teased their younger brother about an invitation to a twenty-first birthday party which had arrived in the post.

  ‘Mabel Trenchard has her eye on you, Eddie. You only have to say the word and her mother will be booking the church.’

  ‘Don’t talk tosh, Hen.’

  ‘I tell you, she’s a one-man woman. Ever since that game of musical chairs, when she ended up sitting in your lap …’

  ‘Mabel has a face like a horse and a laugh to match. I can assure you that if she was the last woman on earth—’

  ‘Do stop it, you two,’ Mellie chided. ‘You are both being total bores. I’m sure poor Fran neither knows nor cares who Mabel Trenchard is.’

  ‘Quite so,’ Eddie agreed. ‘Do shut up, Hen. Now, please don’t forget,’ he said, turning to Fran, ‘that I am entirely at your disposal.’

  ‘Fran may not require your assistance,’ his older brother said. Addressing Fran in his turn, he added: ‘Please don’t think that you have to put up with Eddie breathing down your neck the whole time. Do feel free to tell him to push off and leave you alone.’

  ‘Luncheon is at one,’ Mellie said. ‘And it is entirely up to you how you fill your time between then and now, of course.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Fran. ‘But I should be glad of a guide – initially, at least – because I thought that I should start by walking along the path to the place where your grandfather fell from the cliffs, and naturally I will need someone to show me the way.’

  Half an hour later, after she had finished her breakfast and been upstairs to change into her outdoor shoes and put on a cardigan (it was so much warmer down here in Devon than it had been back at home where she would most certainly have needed a coat), she met Eddie in the downstairs corridor and he showed her into the room known as the library, which had at one time become a bedsitting room for his grandfather.

  The wall safe in which the diamond had been kept, she decided, was not particularly obvious unless you knew where to look for it. ‘There’s no handle on the outside,’ she commented, and Eddie explained that the key activated a spring, so that when it was unlocked the door would automatically swing out from the wall.

  ‘I suppose there is only one key?’

  ‘So far as I know.’

  ‘And where was it kept?’

  ‘Oh, it’s just here.’ Eddie approached a small table, which stood against the wall and opened the little drawer which was set in it. ‘Here we are. Let me open it for you.’ Without waiting for her reaction one way or the other, he walked across, inserted the key into a discreet keyhole and gave it a full turn. The safe door swung ajar, just as he had said that it would.

  ‘Where was the key kept before?’

  ‘Oh, the same place. The table always stood here and the safe key has been kept there as long as I can remember.’

  ‘So … did everyone know where it was kept?’ Fran found it rather a struggle not to laugh.

  ‘I expect so.’ Eddie paused, perhaps considering the contradiction of locking something in a safe to which anyone who wished could gain access. ‘I suppose Grandfather always felt that burglars would never come down here. I mean, we are quite out of the way. And, of course, he would never have thought that anyone within the household would open it up and take something without permission.’

  ‘Very well,’ Fran said. ‘You had better lock up the safe again and then perhaps you can show me the route that your grandfather would have taken to reach the cliff edge.’

  Eddie locked the safe, replaced the key in the drawer of the table and then held the door open for her. ‘This way,’ he said. ‘Just along this corridor there’s a door which opens on to the loggia. In the summer,’ he continued as he led the way, ‘this door almost always stands open, which means that even propelling himself in the wheelchair, Grandfather would have had no difficulty in getting outside.’

  ‘And it was nice that day? The door would have been open?’

  ‘It was an absolute scorcher.’

  He held the door open and Fran stepped out on to the covered end of a long terrace, paved with the sort of large flat stone slabs which would have been easily negotiable for a wheelchair. For the first time since her arrival, she could hear the sound of the sea, faint though it was, breaking on the beach which lay out of sight at the foot of the valley. There was even a slight tang of salt in the air. She stood for a moment, breathing it in.

  ‘The garden is very lovely, isn’t it?’ Eddie said. ‘It will look even better in a few weeks, when the azaleas are out. All Mother’s handiwork, of course. She designed the whole thing. It was just a blank canvas when we first came, but Mother knows all about gardening, so Grandfather gave her a free hand and of course now that we’ve been here for almost a decade the trees and shrubs are growing up and really coming into their own.’

  ‘I noticed that your mother didn’t join us for breakfast.’

  ‘No, Mother has taken toast and lemon tea in her room for as long as I can remember.’

  ‘And your cousin, Imogen? She didn’t appear either?’

  ‘Imogen has all her meals with Miss Billington. Mother and Mellie don’t think she is civilized enough to join us in the dining room.’

  ‘Is it true …’ Fran hesitated. Everyone had assured her that she should ask whatever she liked, but the question seemed somewhat indelicate. ‘That Imogen is a little … backward?’

  To her relief, Eddie did not seem in the least offended.

  ‘Imogen is a good-hearted kid, but she has always been rather slow, I believe, when it comes to her lessons, and very childish in her ways.’

  ‘Your sister-in-law seemed to think that what she needed was … er … firmer handling.’

  ‘There’s probably a degree of truth in what Mellie says,’ Eddie conceded. ‘Imogen has always been rather indulged. You see, her fa
ther didn’t make it back from the war and then her mother, our aunt Sybil, went and died too. Sybil was Grandfather’s favourite, according to Father, so he naturally wanted to take Imogen in and give her a home. We three were all away at school by then, so Imogen was mostly being brought up as an only child and I suppose she became rather a pet with everyone. When we finally moved into Sunnyside House and the family started to get together here during the summer, Imogen was always the youngest of the cousins, and naturally everyone was specially kind to her, on account of losing her parents, and I suppose it became a bit of a habit to allow her more licence than everyone else. It perhaps took Mellie, a relative outsider, to see it. Of course,’ he added quickly, ‘it wasn’t just a question of letting Imogen have her own way about things. Grandfather used to make her feel special in other ways – letting her be the one to put out the mince pies for Santa Claus, always leaving a special thing for her to find when we had a treasure hunt, all that sort of thing.’

  ‘Treasure hunts? That sounds fun.’

  ‘Oh, we used to have excellent times – particularly when we were all a bit younger and Grandfather was still active. To tell you the truth, we all used to run a bit wild – not just Imogen. Father was forever across at the garage block, tinkering with his engines – he always fancied himself as a bit of an inventor – and Mother was perpetually focused on the garden. While they were neglecting us in the nicest possible way, Grandfather used to encourage us to play at pirates and treasure hunters and sometimes we divided into teams for games of cops and robbers, which involved chasing one another all over the grounds. We were allowed to get disgracefully dirty and fall out of trees and pretty much get up to anything short of drowning one another. Poor old Mellie doesn’t really understand that sort of childhood, because her mother is absolutely terrifying and utterly strait-laced.’

  By now they had left the terrace and were following a path wide enough for them to walk comfortably two abreast, which took a fairly level course between the trees and bushes. On their left a grassy bank rose, almost to head height, while to their right the garden fell away steeply. Glancing over her shoulder, Fran saw that they were already out of sight of the house. If old Mr Edgerton had come this way, no one would have been able to see him, unless they happened to look up at just the right moment from the right place in the garden, ever-changing glimpses of which were briefly visible between the trees – here a pond with gunnera, there a corner of the tennis court with last season’s lines still faintly visible, though it was far too early in the year to put up the net.

  ‘There is a very slight incline as we get further away from the house,’ Fran noted. ‘I suppose that would make it harder for an elderly person to get up here by themselves, propelling their own wheelchair.’

  ‘The thing is’ – Eddie took a breath and hesitated a moment before continuing – ‘I don’t see that Grandfather would have come all this way on his own. Not then. What I mean is that if it had happened a couple of years earlier I could easily have believed it, but by that final summer Grandfather hardly ever moved himself about in the chair – he always had someone pushing him.’

  ‘So you were a bit suspicious about what had happened from the very first?’

  ‘Well … yes … no … I don’t know. It was a huge shock, of course. The awful thing was that no one had checked on him that afternoon. It wasn’t until Monica, Grandfather’s nurse, came back from her afternoon out that he was properly missed. For some reason there had been a mix up between the servants over taking him a cup of tea that afternoon. It was all perfectly innocent, I’m sure, but it turned out that no one had seen him after Jamieson collected his luncheon tray at around two o’clock, at which point Grandfather had been napping in his chair.’

  ‘So Jamieson, the butler, was the last person to see him?’

  ‘Yes. Then Monica came back at around six and found that Grandfather wasn’t in his room. So she came out on to the terrace – there was a group of us sitting out there – and asked where he was and, of course, no one knew.’

  ‘Did you begin to look for him right away?’

  ‘Oh, yes. I think some of us were a bit worried right off, because it was so singular for him to just disappear, though one or two people said that someone must have taken him off into the grounds for a walk … that is to say, they would be pushing him in the chair, of course.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Well, as you can imagine it took a while to round everyone up and establish that no one had taken him off somewhere, then once we realized that he hadn’t been seen for hours, everyone began to hunt. It was rather horrid actually.’ Eddie paused for a moment, as if to gather himself. ‘People all over the house and grounds, calling out “Grandfather, Grandfather, where are you?” Eventually, after getting on for maybe half an hour of searching, Monica came up to Roly and told him that she had spotted something which looked like Grandfather’s chair in among the rocks below the point. His body wasn’t visible from the top, but we got a boatman from Avemouth to take us round and he was wedged between some rocks at the foot of the cliff. Luckily it wasn’t the spring tides, when the water would have risen high enough to wash him away completely, but those rocks don’t get completely covered at high tide in the summer.’

  ‘Can you walk to the place where he was found, from your beach?’

  ‘No. You can’t walk to it from anywhere. You would always need a boat to get there.’

  ‘So there’s no question of his getting there any other way than by falling from the top?’

  Eddie considered the question. ‘Well,’ he said. ‘Obviously you could take the chair and the body round in a boat but the damage that both the chair and the poor old boy himself had suffered were entirely consistent with a fall from the top, so the doctor said.’

  ‘And everyone but you assumed that he had got up there himself and fallen by accident?’

  ‘Not at all. I think it probably went through everyone’s mind that Grandfather might not have been strong enough, but the thing is that he had got up there, d’you see? And just as one couldn’t see any reason why he would have deliberately chucked himself over the edge, nor did anyone have any reason to shove him off there either. For the last few months of his life, it was Monica who had spent the most time with him, helping him in and out of the chair and so forth, and when the coroner asked her if she thought that he could have got out of the house and along the path by himself, she said that he had quite recently pushed himself out on to the terrace when she was busy with something else, so she did not believe it was beyond him to have got that far by himself, if he’d put his mind to it.’

  ‘But you didn’t agree?’

  ‘I don’t think any of us really disagreed. You see, it wasn’t impossible. He wouldn’t necessarily have had to go the whole way along the path all at once. As the coroner said, no one had seen him for at least four hours. He could easily have done it a few yards at a time, I suppose. Anyway, here we are, at the place where we think he went over.’

  EIGHT

  While listening to Eddie, Fran had hardly noticed how much louder the sound of the breakers was getting, but now as they stood at the point where the path turned abruptly eastwards, she realized that they had almost reached the edge of the cliff and the sea must be directly below them.

  ‘Be careful,’ Eddie cautioned. ‘It isn’t really safe to go right to the edge. Everyone knows to stay on the path.’

  ‘Tell me, how could Monica have known what had happened unless she left the path? You can’t see over the edge from here.’

  ‘The wheelchair had left marks in the grass. When Monica spotted them, she got down on all fours and crawled across until she could see the rocks. It’s only a matter of about six or eight feet to the edge. That’s why you have to be so jolly careful.’

  ‘I see. Did you see the marks yourself?’

  ‘Oh, yes. When Roly and I got here the place was obvious. It was the only spot along the whole length of the path where the gr
ass was flattened.’ Seeing Fran hesitating, he added, ‘I really wouldn’t attempt to look over the edge if I were you. It’s far too damp to get down and crawl, and it may be slippery. We could always hire a motor boat and show you the spot from the water, if you really need to see it.’

  ‘I probably don’t. I assume it’s a sheer drop.’

  ‘Oh, yes. One step down, as it were.’

  ‘You mentioned that some of you were sitting on the terrace,’ Fran said, as they turned by unspoken consent and began to retrace their steps. ‘And yet no one had seen your grandfather come by.’

  ‘It was late afternoon by the time the alarm was raised. As it happened, the terrace had not been occupied for most of the earlier part of the afternoon. Some people had been playing tennis; some were down on the beach. Mother, I seem to recall, had spent some of the latter part of the afternoon out on the terrace reading, but she had also spent some time lying down in her room.’

  ‘Would there normally have been anyone on the terrace during the afternoon?’

  ‘Not necessarily. It would just depend how everyone was spending the day. Tell me, what would you like to see next?’

  ‘Since we are already out of doors, I think it would be useful if you could show me around the gardens, specifically the places where you remember people being that afternoon.’