by Diane Janes
‘I still say you’d be taking a terrible risk.’
‘Oh, undoubtedly. Of course, the risk of the plan going wrong would have been significantly reduced, if you had taken the precaution of removing yourself – and the diamond – from the building in advance. Monica claimed that she’d gone out on the terrace for a breath of fresh air, but I think what she had really been doing was concealing the diamond. Her plan had probably been to hide the diamond somewhere outside, then let herself back into the house and raise the alarm, pretending that she’d gone downstairs to get a drink or something, and seen the smoke coming under the door, but as it was Mr Edgerton started yelling, so she had to come up with a rather weak explanation for what she was doing outside.
‘The trouble was that I tended to overlook Monica, because it seemed to be impossible for her to have been the killer, as she had an alibi. It appeared that Monica couldn’t possibly have committed the murder, because she was collected by car and driven to Torquay. Jamieson had seen the victim alive after she had left the house and by the time she came back, the old man was already gone, so we all knew that the murder must have been accomplished while she was away. The hotel staff vouched for the fact that she and her friend had taken tea there and although that didn’t account for the entire afternoon, her companion, Mr Moncrieff, appeared to be a thoroughly trustworthy and reliable witness, who had worked at Baddeley Court for years and years and had no motive to lie for her.
‘Lots of clues pointed to Monica Roche. First of all, her name is originally French, though it’s quite common in England too. In France they pronounce it “rosh”, I believe, but over here we say “roach” like the fish.’
‘Or the cockroach. Thanks,’ said Mo, as Fran handed her a glass of lemonade and then poured one for herself.
‘So I’d noticed the possibility presented by her having a French name, but then I dismissed that because she seemed to be so completely English, and besides which we thought we were looking for a completely different French name.’
‘Well, that was the fault of the old woman in Sidmouth,’ said Mo.
‘Not really. At least it was as much our fault as it was hers. Mrs Headingham couldn’t remember the name of the Frenchman, but she told us that the word which came into her head reminded her of poison. That led to Poussin, and we all latched on to that, but we were heading down completely the wrong track. She originally said that the name sounded like poison, which is very similar to Poussin, but it’s even closer to poisson, which is French for fish. Roche – roach – fish – poisson – poison.’
‘Good heavens, that’s all a bit cryptic. How strangely some people’s minds seem to work.’
‘And it also happened to be the case that Dolly’s family name turned out to be shared with another French artist, which coincidentally suggested Poussin as well.’
‘But in that case the only fish was a red herring.’
Fran ignored the lame jest. ‘Even Eddie’s funny idea about a burglar gagging his grandfather and tying him to the chair was a clue in its way.’
‘Go on.’ Mo laughed. ‘Don’t keep me in suspense.’
‘Well, you see, Eddie was quite right. Suppose you’d laid your plans, checked that the coast was clear, gone into the library and offered to wheel old Mr Edgerton as far as the cliffs and he’d simply said thank you but he didn’t want to go?’
‘I suppose you’d try to persuade him.’
‘And what if he didn’t want to be persuaded? If you attempted to force him into coming with you, he might kick up a regular shindig and alert one of the servants.’
‘Quite so. But you said he wasn’t tied up or gagged.’
‘He wasn’t. But he was probably drugged. It would have been easy for Monica Roche to have given him some sleeping pills with his lunch. When Jamieson collected his lunch tray, he was fast asleep in the wheelchair.’
‘So he couldn’t call out because he wouldn’t have realized what was happening. I suppose that was probably a blessing. So again and again, things pointed to the nurse.’
‘Exactly,’ said Fran. ‘When it came to hiding the diamond in the grotto, I’d thought out the reason why Dolly might have hidden it there, but what I hadn’t initially realized was that the same thing applied to Monica in spades. You see, Monica couldn’t be sure that the diamond wouldn’t be missed right away. For all she knew, a member of the family might have looked in the safe on the very first day after Frederick Edgerton died and spotted that it was missing, but in order to alleviate any suspicion she had to stay and work out her notice. It’s a well-known fact that if valuables go missing, the servants’ things will be thoroughly searched, so Monica needed to hide that diamond somewhere no one was likely to look for it. It was no use putting it in the house. It needed to be somewhere she could return to unseen and retrieve it after she’d officially left. By putting it in the grotto, she knew that even if her belongings were checked on the very day she left, no one would find the diamond on her.’
‘But instead the noisy child, what’s-her-name, went and found it.’
‘Imogen found it within less than half an hour of its being hidden.’ Fran gave a chuckle. ‘I bet Monica Roche was furious when she went back and discovered that the stone had gone.’
‘How soon do you suppose she checked that it was still there?’
‘I doubt if she would have returned to the grotto until she came back to actually collect the diamond. She wouldn’t have wanted to risk being seen there in the immediate aftermath of old Mr Edgerton’s death, just in case anyone got interested in what she was doing there and started snooping around. On the face of it, the grotto represented a really safe hiding place because the family was hardly going to start organizing a treasure hunt with the chief instigator of treasure hunts barely cold in his grave. It must have seemed safer than handing it to her accomplice, because he was in service too, and might have come under suspicion by simply having been on the premises when he picked her up and dropped her off that day, so he too risked the possibility of being searched if the theft had been discovered immediately.’
‘Her accomplice? This is the first I’ve heard of an accomplice.’ Mo sounded rather as if she thought she had been short-changed.
‘Mr Moncrieff, the Baddeleys’ chauffeur. Though he’s pleading not guilty to accessory to murder, he’s admitted everything else to the police, which has helped fill in some of the gaps in the story. He claims that he was only ever party to the theft and has always believed that Mr Edgerton’s death was an accident.’
‘So Moncrieff was in on it! The nurse inveigled her way into his affections and persuaded him to help her. There was a love affair after all.’
‘Not a love affair. A completely different relationship, in fact. Moncrieff is Monica Roche’s half-brother.’
‘But hold on – surely Moncrieff is a Scottish name?’
‘It is, but the thing is that you can be born in England but still have a French father … and a Scottish mother. If Monica Roche had been born today, there would have been an even bigger clue, because since 1911 the index to English births provides the mother’s maiden name, but of course Monica Roche’s birth was registered long before that.’
‘I’m not sure that I follow what you’re getting at there,’ said Mo.
‘Not to worry, I’ll come back to that in a minute. You see, Eddie and I had assumed that the address Georges Roche gave to Frederick Edgerton was in France, but it’s now emerged that Monica Roche’s father had lived in London for quite a while before he went to South Africa. That’s probably why he and Frederick Edgerton hit it off so well. Georges Roche would have spoken fluent English and been used to British ways because he’d married a British girl called Mary Moncrieff. That was what I meant about being able to see the mother’s maiden names in the birth registrations index. I had to get copies of the actual birth certificates to be sure of the connection. Mary already had an illegitimate son before she married Georges Roche. His name was George Moncrieff.
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‘Soon after she married Georges Roche, he went off to seek his fortune, and not long after he left, Mary found out that she was expecting his child. She named the girl Monica and waited for her husband. In the fullness of time, he wrote to say that he was coming back, but unfortunately he didn’t make it. For some reason he came back via Morocco. He’d lost or been fleeced of his money and he died of typhoid in a doss house in Tangiers, but in his last letter to his wife he’d told her not to worry because a friend and business associate called Freddie Edgerton had been keeping a valuable jewel safe for him and would bring it to her when he returned to England.’
‘But somehow or other, the diamond was never handed over,’ Mo finished for her. ‘Do you think it was an accident? Could Frederick Edgerton not have found them, if he’d tried a bit harder?’
‘I don’t know. I suppose it wasn’t easy to track people down in the London slums, back in the 1880s. Mary Roche may have been moving from place to place, especially if she owed the rent, and in those circumstances, she’s unlikely to have left a forwarding address. Perhaps Frederick Edgerton didn’t try as hard as he might have done. Perhaps he thought his friend had taken his wife back to France. Who knows? The important point is that the Roche family didn’t get their diamond back, so the widowed Mrs Roche had a struggle to bring up her children and those children had to work hard for their living.
‘According to what Moncrieff told the police, they never seriously tried to track down this man who was supposed to be bringing them a diamond. I’m not sure that Mary Roche, or her son, were entirely convinced of the diamond’s existence and even if they believed in the story of the diamond and the man who was supposed to be bringing it for them, they had no idea where he might be, or even whether he had made it back to Britain. In time Moncrieff left school and went into service. He got his post at Baddeley Court when Colonel Baddeley first bought a motor car, back in 1907, so of course he was already there when Frederick Edgerton bought the land to build Sunnyside House, but according to Moncrieff, he had long since forgotten the name of the man who was supposed to have been bringing back a diamond for them. However, his stepsister, Monica, had not forgotten and when her half-brother happened to mention the new family who had moved into the district, she put two and two together and realized that it might be the same man. She became obsessed – in Moncrieff’s words – with finding out the truth and when the vacancy for a trained nurse came up, she applied for the post.’
‘But surely, when she was taken on as his nurse, the old man must have realized that she was his old friend’s daughter?’ protested Mo.
‘Apparently not. If he noticed the name at all, then he must have assumed that it was a coincidence. There’s more than one family called Roche and he probably wasn’t aware that there had ever been a daughter. According to Moncrieff, the fact that her surname didn’t create so much as a flicker of interest with the old man just made Monica all the more bitter and she decided to take back the diamond. “The way Monica put it, it didn’t seem like stealing,” Moncrieff said, “because it had been our property all along.”’
Mo shifted in her deck chair and wedged a cushion more firmly behind the small of her back. ‘Hmm,’ she said. ‘I’m not so sure about that.’
‘The irony is that if Monica had actually told him who she was, Frederick Edgerton might have given her the stone. I know he didn’t appear to have made much effort to find his friend’s wife, but at the same time, he’d never sold the diamond, or given it to anyone else either.’
‘Goodness, why didn’t the stupid woman just confront him with the truth about who she was?’
‘She wasn’t going to risk it,’ Fran said. ‘Think about it. Suppose she had revealed her connection with the diamond and Frederick Edgerton had refused to hand it over and told the family who she was. If she’d tried to take the diamond after that, suspicion would have fallen on her at once. Besides which, she had developed a real hatred of Frederick Edgerton, imagining that it was entirely due to him that she and her half-brother had endured such hardships throughout their lives. You can imagine how life at Sunnyside House would have fuelled that resentment. Here was this big, happy family, living in the lap of luxury, while she and her brother had worked so hard all their lives and ended up with next to nothing.’
‘So at some point,’ said Mo, ‘she decided that getting the diamond back wasn’t enough. She wanted revenge.’
‘It may have been more complicated than that. Don’t forget that she couldn’t just make off with the diamond because sooner or later it would have been missed and she would naturally have come under suspicion as a person who enjoyed almost constant access to the room where the safe was. She had to hatch a scheme which would deflect suspicion away from herself, and she must have realized that Mr Edgerton’s death would remove the one person who might have been able to say with any certainty when the diamond had definitely last been in the safe. Everyone knew that Mr Edgerton liked to get the diamond out and look at it from time to time. The family all knew that Mr Edgerton was becoming a little bit confused, so Monica played up to that, encouraging them to believe that he was getting worse. It worked too, because after his death it was suggested that he might have hidden the diamond somewhere, which was extremely useful from the point of view of a thief, because it threw up an element of doubt as to whether there had actually been a theft at all.
‘Remember that he claimed his food had been tampered with? Well, I don’t believe that was an attempt on his life. If he’d died suddenly and poison was found, that would have immediately aroused suspicion and Monica Roche was far too clever for that. I think it was just another means of drawing attention to his supposed eccentricities. It would have been very simple for Monica to have added something bitter to his food then thrown it away, claiming to have tasted it and found nothing wrong with it herself.’
‘What an evil woman,’ said Mo. ‘She must have planned and schemed for months.’
‘From the moment she first took up the post, she was probably working out the lie of the land. It wouldn’t have taken her long to discover where the diamond was kept. She would have kept her relationship with Moncrieff a secret, just in case anyone became overly interested in their background and started to ask questions, besides which, I don’t think she had originally planned to involve him at all. If I’m right, then her first plan had been to arrange for her employer to die accidentally in the fire. I expect that’s when she first hit on the idea of hiding the diamond safely in the grotto, but of course the fire came to nothing, because Mr Edgerton woke up and gave the alarm. That experience probably taught her that when the time came to attempt something else, she would need to ensure that her charge didn’t wake up. The other problem on that occasion was that when the old man gave the alarm, she must have had to smuggle the diamond back into the safe at the first opportunity, before it was missed.
‘After that she revised her plans, setting up a supposedly accidental meeting with her half-brother so it could appear that they developed a friendship which would make it natural for her to go out for trips with him in the Baddeley’s car. Trips which would eventually provide her with an alibi. The idea was that on the day of the murder, Moncrieff would collect her from the house, then take the lane which ran along the perimeter of the Sunnyside grounds and park the car in a secluded spot. He was to wait in the car while she went through the woods to steal the diamond, and after that they would drive into Torquay and create an alibi by being seen in the Palace Hotel. With Frederick Edgerton dead, it would be natural for her to give in her notice, then a few days after she had officially left, Moncrieff would borrow the car again, meet her off the train somewhere well up the line, drive her back to that same place and she would slip through the woods and collect the diamond from the grotto.’
‘But when she got there, it had already been removed. She must have been furious,’ said Mo, as if she found the prospect distinctly pleasing.
‘She had been biding her time for m
onths, waiting for the moment to send Mr Edgerton over the cliffs, because all the conditions had to be just right for it to work.’
‘What conditions do you mean?’
‘Well, she could hardly just push him out of the house and up the path in full view of everyone, could she? It had to happen on a day when Moncrieff had use of the car, so she would appear to have a solid alibi. The day had to be warm enough for it to be credible that her victim had been tempted to take himself out into the garden. Most important of all – and this was potentially the most difficult thing of all – it had to be done during a period when there was no one within sight of the terrace.
‘Joe, the young apprentice gardener, mentioned that the car, which he’d assumed belonged to a courting couple, had been seen parked in that same spot before. It had probably been there on quite a few other occasions, but there hadn’t always been anyone in the right place to see it. There must have been several false starts, when Moncrieff collected her from the house, parked in the lane and waited while she doubled back through the woods to see whether the coast was clear. She would be able to get in among the trees which overlook the terrace and if she saw anyone sitting there, or hanging about nearby, she simply slipped back to the car without being seen.’
‘But eventually there was an afternoon when there was no one to see her.’
They were both silent for a few seconds until Mo spoke again. ‘The other thing you still haven’t told me – and it is of course, the most important question of all – is whether or not you have decided to accept Eddie Edgerton?’
‘I’ve told him that I’m not going to marry him. Oh yes, I know, he’s awfully nice and I’ve grown to be quite fond of him, even in the short time that I have known him, but … but I’m not in love with him, you see.’ Fran had turned away and was looking far beyond the garden wall, towards some distant treetops, as if she had discovered something of immense interest there. ‘And that wouldn’t be fair.’
