The Attenbury Emeralds

by Jill Paton Walsh

  Lady Ottalie Attenbury lived in Eaton Square. Her side of the square stood in beautiful run-down grandeur, facing the sun. At the top of the steps to the front door a row of doorbells indicated that the house was divided into flats. One of the bells was labelled ‘OA top floor’. Peter rang this bell. When nothing happened they tried the front door, found it open and began to climb the stairs. These were wide, carpeted in worn and shabby Axminster, and lit by a roof-light far above. As Harriet and Peter ascended they heard music above them. Someone was playing and singing, in a fine soprano voice.

  ‘Mozart,’ said Peter.

  They stood on the landing for several bars, listening. Then Peter tapped lightly on the door, the singer fell silent, and the door opened. Harriet would instantly have realised that this was Charlotte’s sister; the facial likeness was marked. But this woman was shorter and slightly frail-looking. If the fashion of the day had allowed a woman of thirty-plus to be pretty, she was still pretty, and she was wearing the New Look – a full skirt and tight sweater. Her music had made her radiant, and she took a while to react to her unexpected visitors.

  ‘Yes?’ she said, looking at them blankly.

  ‘You might remember me,’ Peter said. ‘Peter Wimsey.’

  ‘Oh, lord, Peter!’ said Ottalie. ‘Step in here off the gloomy landing where I can’t see who you are.’

  Peter did so. He introduced Harriet. The flat was very light, and the large room they stepped into was nearly empty of furniture, containing mostly a Steinway Grand. Nevertheless it was a spectacularly untidy room, with piles of books and music all over the floor.

  ‘We are sorry to have interrupted your music,’ Harriet offered.

  ‘Oh, God, did you hear that?’ was the reply. ‘I’m sorry. It needs a lot of work yet.’

  Harriet didn’t know what to say. If she said, no really, it was beautiful, she risked sounding like an ignoramus; and she hardly knew how to explain to a person considerably more musical than herself the effect it had on her to hear a piece played imperfectly. It made audible the difficulty in the music; it made audible the demands made on the performer. It was moving in a fashion that a perfect performance never quite seemed to be.

  Peter said, ‘A little more practice on that low note, perhaps.’

  ‘This one?’ she said, touching a note on the piano keyboard.

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘a few bars later. I’ll play it for you.’

  ‘Can you really?’ she asked. ‘The accompanist is very late this morning.’

  ‘I can after a fashion,’ Peter replied, taking off his coat, casting it on to the floor over a stack of books, and sitting himself at the piano.

  Harriet watched and listened. Peter’s playing sounded a bit hesitant at first. After all, it wasn’t Bach. Ottalie opened her mouth and sang full voice.

  ‘Dove sono i bei momenti Di dolcezza e di piacer?’

  When they finished the piece they were both silent for a few seconds.

  ‘You could do that if you practised,’ said Ottalie. ‘But it can’t be what you came for.’

  ‘Of course not,’ said Peter, ‘I didn’t even know you were a singer.’

  ‘Well, I trained at the Royal College,’ she said, ‘but I didn’t make it professionally. I just sing in the London Bach Choir, and I do a few weddings and funerals when I’m asked. The perfect dilettante, that’s me.’

  ‘Diletto, after all, is the Italian for pleasure,’ said Peter. ‘Look, is there anywhere we can sit?’

  ‘Through here,’ Ottalie said, and led them into a much smaller room with a settee and armchairs and side tables, all deep in clutter. She made room for them to sit by simply throwing stuff on to the floor. ‘I’m no good at this,’ she said to Harriet. ‘Are you any good at this? It’s growing up with servants that does the damage.’

  Harriet said, ‘I’m very lucky.’

  ‘Of course I had help before the war,’ Ottalie said. She was standing in the middle of the room with a volume of Grove in her hand, looking around for somewhere to put it. Harriet was glad she wasn’t going to throw it down in the corner – it was a thick book that might break its binding if treated roughly.

  ‘Mind you, I adored the war,’ Ottalie said. ‘It was very easy to be useful. Fire-watching and first aid and then, when someone found out I could do Italian, transcribing Mussolini’s broadcasts for our people. When I started out all the Italian I knew was from Da Ponte libretti; with a touch of Verdi for good luck.’ She giggled.

  ‘May we sit down?’ said Peter, doing so. Harriet sat also, and Ottalie slipped down on to the floor in front of a still encumbered chair, and leaned against it, looking up at Peter from somewhere near the height at which she had looked up at him all those years ago.

  ‘You know your nephew is in trouble?’ Peter asked her.

  ‘Yes; and how!’ she said. ‘And you are sleuthing for him. Jolly kind of you. He hasn’t a spare bean to pay you with.’

  ‘I’ve known your family since I was a boy,’ said Peter.

  ‘So you have. Peter, I can’t imagine how I can be the least help to you. Your jolly wife here would be far better at detecting than I can be.’

  ‘She is a great help,’ he said gravely. ‘It was Harriet’s idea that we ought to come and talk to you. It is what you may be able to remember that we need.’

  ‘I have a lousy memory,’ said Ottalie.

  ‘Except for songs, perhaps?’

  ‘Oh, songs…’ she said. ‘That’s different. They have music to go by.’

  ‘Cast your mind back, Ottalie, to that evening when Charlotte’s engagement party was in progress, and you were playing with the emeralds. You and a friend.’

  ‘Ada DuBerris,’ said Ottalie. ‘Still a friend as it happens.’

  ‘And the maid Jeannette found you…’

  ‘God, was she angry!’ Ottalie said. ‘I’d never heard a grown-up talk to another like that.’

  ‘But that is just what we have come to ask you,’ said Peter. ‘If you and Ada were playing alone, or if there was somebody else there.’

  ‘Just Ada’s mother, popping in and out,’ said Ottalie. ‘She was showing us how to wear the stuff, and how to preen in the mirror. And then Jeannette arrived in a high dudgeon, and started attacking us all, especially Mrs DuBerris. A lot of ought to know better at her age, and how the gems were Jeannette’s responsibility, and how it was unfair for a guest who couldn’t be held to account for anything to risk the livelihood of a servant…well, you can imagine. We were all very abashed, and crept around doing just as Jeannette said. Didn’t I tell you all this at the time? I seem to remember confiding in you.’

  ‘You didn’t confide in me about Mrs DuBerris,’ said Peter quietly.

  ‘She asked me not to tell anyone. I thought she didn’t want the grown-ups to know she had been ticked off. I used to try to keep it from Mummy when I had been in trouble, so I knew how she felt.’

  ‘How did she take being stripped off by Jeannette?’

  ‘She was as timid as a mouse. Said sorry a couple of times. Thoughtless of her…that sort of thing. But look here, Peter, I really don’t see how this has any bearing on what happened next. On that awful Northerby man’s box of tricks. That can’t have had anything to do with who was in the nursery. I don’t get it.’

  ‘You are being more helpful than you know, Ottalie,’ said Peter. An undertone had entered his voice, audible to Harriet, though perhaps not to Ottalie.

  ‘Did you say that you still know Mrs DuBerris?’ he asked.

  ‘Well, not exactly her. But Ada is a friend, yes. She’s a bit musical; couldn’t afford to train, but she plays the fiddle a little, and we often go to concerts together. I sometimes take her along when I need a companion on a trip. We’ve known each other since childhood, after all. And I sometimes give her things. So does Charlotte.’

  ‘What kind of things?’

  ‘Oh, you know, when we clear our wardrobes some of the clothes fit her. Nothing valuable. Charlotte says she is
a hanger-on and a scrounge, but then she was too old to play with Ada as I did. And I don’t think Ada is into horses as she is into music, although she always tries to please. She doesn’t have much in common with Charlotte.’

  ‘And even less, I imagine, with Diana?’

  ‘Poor Diana,’ said Ottalie. ‘No, no love lost there at all. I don’t see where all this is getting us.’

  ‘Tell us more about Ada. She never married?’

  ‘No. Various boyfriends in the war that didn’t last. You know what that was like. She’s quite good-looking, but she doesn’t have a penny piece to her name, and to be honest, I think it’s her mother that’s the trouble. When I was very little I thought it was wonderful for Ada to have a mother who was always close, and put her above everything else. I thought my own mother was distant and cool. The servants did a lot for us that Ada’s mother did for her in person. But later Ada’s mother was a bit much. Is a bit much, actually. Always knows exactly where Ada is, and who she is with. Imagine that for a woman who is my age! Like having a cobra round your neck. I’m sure that’s what frightens the men away, and I don’t blame them.’

  ‘You don’t like Mrs DuBerris, I see.’

  ‘No,’ said Ottalie, ‘I don’t like stranglers.’

  ‘What did you say?’ asked Peter.

  ‘Oh, I only mean that she is choking the life out of Ada. Ada ought to cut free, but she doesn’t seem able to.’

  Peter said, ‘Ottalie, would Ada have known, do you think, when the family emerald was taken out of the bank? Could she have got to hear of it?’

  A shadow passed across Ottalie’s face. ‘So that’s what you’re getting at,’ she said.

  ‘I’m afraid it is.’

  ‘Well, Ada certainly knew when it was all about a horse. She and I were with Charlotte over the weekend when the bet was made. She was one of the party.’ Ottalie paused, frowning. ‘I really don’t see how she could have known when my sister-in-law borrowed it for Verity. I didn’t know about that till long afterwards. Charlotte wasn’t in London, and Ada has never been on talking terms with Diana. I think you’re barking up the wrong tree, Peter. Because she couldn’t have known about letting Miss Pevenor have it, either…Oh, God, hang on a mo, I think she could. Father was getting a bit doddery by then, and he wanted to ask Edward what he thought about it, and Edward was round here having supper, and Father rang to ask if I knew where Edward was…and of course we talked about it. Edward couldn’t see why we shouldn’t lend it to the Pevenor woman; Father had said it would be a good thing when Edward came to sell it. And Ada was here that evening. We had been to a matinée at the cinema.’

  There was another pause while all this sank in.

  Then Ottalie said, ‘Peter, this has got to be wrong. Whoever is playing tricks with us has got one of those emeralds of their own. And in all the years I’ve known them Ada and her mother have been really, really hard up. It doesn’t make sense. They don’t even like jewellery, so if they had an emerald they would have sold it, and done themselves a favour with the money.’

  ‘Why do you say they don’t like jewellery?’ asked Harriet, chipping in.

  ‘Well, they speak very contemptuously about wearing what they call baubles,’ Ottalie said. ‘And we’ve learned not to offer them jewellery. I gave Ada a diamond pin once; I thought if she didn’t like it she could sell it and buy a frock. But it came back the next day with a note from her mother.’

  ‘Perhaps what is known to them is told to another,’ said Peter. ‘Perhaps we are looking for a friend of theirs. Now, Ottalie, I must ask you not to let a word of this conversation get to Ada. Can I trust you for that?’

  ‘I suppose so,’ Ottalie said. ‘I usually tell her everything.’

  ‘I will keep Ada out of this if I can,’ said Peter. ‘But if she has been warned of this conversation I may not be able to. It’s in her own best interests not to know what we have been saying.’

  ‘Okay,’ said Ottalie.

  As they were leaving, Peter said to her, ‘Your mother was one of the best women I have known.’

  ‘I understand that now,’ she said. ‘I try to be like her.’

  ‘Good for you,’ said Peter, kissing her lightly on the cheek.

  ‘So that’s how it was done,’ said Harriet, when they were walking away down the street.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘All clear now. And when you know how, as I said, Harriet, you know who.’

  ‘Well, it’s not all clear to me,’ said Harriet. ‘Anybody who had seen two stones at once was in danger…presumably because they might deduce the existence of the third stone. The Maharaja had seen two at once – he had arrived to do just that, but there was no point in attacking him, because he was the source of the reward. But you had seen two stones at once also – why have you been immune from attack all this time?’

  ‘I have wondered that,’ he said. ‘And I have dredged out of memory the fact that there was someone once whom I told that I could not read Persian. And you see, Harriet, that train of thought leads to the same place. It was Mrs DuBerris that I told.’

  25

  ‘Discovering that someone could have done something falls a long way short of proving that they did,’ said Peter. Harriet was sitting down beside the fire in the drawing-room, and Peter was pacing up and down like the unfortunate tiger in the London Zoo.

  ‘So what do we do now?’ Harriet asked him. ‘Do we consult Charles?’

  ‘It’s out of our hands if we do that,’ said Peter, coming to stand in front of her.

  ‘What is making you so uneasy, Peter? You have achieved a triumph of deduction. Or are you worried that it might not be right?’

  ‘I think it’s right, provable or not,’ he said.

  Harriet looked at him with concern. ‘Are you afraid of what you will go through if someone hangs whom you have incriminated?’ she asked softly.

  ‘Yes, I am,’ he said. ‘I always am. And afraid of what it imposes on you when I impersonate a jelly. But it has never so far stopped me doing what I should.’

  ‘Then it mustn’t now.’

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘no,’ and he resumed pacing.

  Harriet got up and began to walk beside him. The room was not large enough for two people to pace up and down in; he grimaced at her, and sat down, whereupon she did too.

  ‘So the problem is?’ she asked him again.

  ‘It’s taking me back painfully to the very beginning of all this,’ he said, ‘when I didn’t know whether I was helping a friend or apprehending a thief. Forgive my deplorable vanity, Harriet, but I don’t want to take to Charles after all these years another divided loyalty. He and I have been batting for the same side all this time…’

  She waited for more.

  ‘What am I doing, Harriet?’ he asked her. ‘Am I helping a friend get his property back, or am I an angel of justice?’

  ‘Do I have to tell you that, Peter?’ she asked.

  ‘What will you think of me if my intervention decisively and permanently robs Attenbury of his emerald?’

  ‘What will I think of you, or what will young Attenbury think of you?’

  ‘I can live without his good opinion if I have to; the loss of yours would destroy me.’

  ‘You seem to me to be a good friend, to your friends and to mine, and that’s a pleasant virtue. It’s nice to live with. But when it comes to the crunch, Peter, blessed are they who hunger and thirst after justice.’

  ‘Justice will seem very like vengeance,’ he said.

  ‘All those lost years,’ she said. ‘Years of the life of the strange but harmless Miss Pevenor, of the doubtless deplorable Captain Rannerson, possibly of the admirable Rita Patel, of the pawnbroker: how do you weigh those in the balance against wealth?’

  ‘All right, Harriet,’ he said. ‘Your firmness makes my purpose just. It’s the dish best eaten cold then. I shall confront her without telling Charles, and entrap her if I can.’

  ‘I’m coming with you,’ said Harriet.


  ‘No,’ he said. ‘It will be dangerous.’

  ‘I’ll wear that stout dog-collar you gave me once, if you like,’ she said.

  ‘My God, have you still got that?’ he said.

  ‘I thought it might come in handy if we ever got a dog,’ she said, and their conversation dissolved into laughter.

  Mrs DuBerris lived in Mortlake, in a shabby terrace of houses with their doors straight on to the street. The trains racketed past, very close; but beyond the track there was a patch of allotments giving a view to another such terrace row. An iron footbridge gave access to anyone this side of the line who had an allotment the other side. The allotments were neat and growing food in rows, but all the houses had that post-war look of near dereliction. Bunter was with them. Peter drove past the house first, and then parked the Daimler a quarter of a mile away, well out of sight. Bunter went off on a recce, and came back to report.

  ‘There is a narrow path along the ends of the gardens behind the houses, my lord,’ he reported. ‘The garden ends have rickety fences, and the gardens are small. I can position myself at the gate from the garden of number fifty and prevent an escape by that route. I notice also, my lord, a window open at the back of the house. I think I would be able to hear a loud cry of alarm and respond accordingly.’

  ‘Will you be unseen there? Is there cover?’ asked Peter.

  ‘Sufficient, my lord. Give me a start of five minutes.’

  The woman who opened the door to them startled Peter. Surely Mrs DuBerris was of about his own age, but she had a deeply lined face. She had dyed her hair a bright chestnut colour, which covered every grey hair and looked odd framing the ageing face. A pair of brightly glittering eyes looked out at him.

  ‘You!’ she said. ‘What do you want?’

  ‘To talk to you,’ Peter said.

  ‘Well, I don’t want to talk to you,’ she said. ‘Push off!’

  ‘I thought I should talk to you before I talk to the police,’ said Peter mildly to the closing door.

  Mrs DuBerris opened the door again and stepped back in her narrow hallway to let them in. She marched into a small front room, and sat down abruptly in a fireside chair. ‘Say what you have to say and get out,’ she said.