The Attenbury Emeralds (31 page)

‘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.

‘I believe you are in possession of the Attenbury emerald,’ Peter said.

‘I don’t give a damn what you believe,’ she said.

‘I can get a search warrant,’ said Peter.

‘I don’t deny I have an emerald,’ she said.

‘You have the one that rightly belongs to Lord Attenbury.’

‘So what?’ she said. ‘Fair exchange is no robbery. Those things are easy to confuse.’

‘Unless you read Persian,’ he said, his voice smooth and quiet. He had not sat down. ‘And I see that you do,’ he added, reaching for a book on the shelf in the fireside alcove, and holding out a book in Arabic script.

‘It’s not a crime to read a foreign language,’ she said.

Harriet had posted herself in a corner of the room beside the window. She saw another, much younger woman come down the street carrying a violin case and a string bag of groceries, and stop at the front door to let herself in.

‘Fraud is a crime,’ said Peter, ‘and so is murder.’

The front door opened quietly.

‘Murder?’ said Mrs DuBerris. ‘Ha! You’ll have trouble pinning that on me, won’t you? No signature on those deaths – a different method of killing every time!’

‘But, Mrs DuBerris, how do you know about the murder methods? How do you even know what murders I refer to? Unless you know everything about them, that is?’

‘You’re a fool, Lord Peter,’ she said venomously. ‘I’m not going to call you “Your Grace”, it would choke me. “Your meddling interfering busybody” would suit you better. What do you hope to gain by trapping me? I’ll tell you what you will not gain, and that’s your friend’s emerald. Look, here it is.’ She reached for her bag which was hanging over the arm of her chair. ‘I’m going to throw it in the fire.’ And she held out her hand towards the burning grate. ‘Do you know what will happen to it in a fire?’ she asked. ‘It will be cracked open by the heat. That will fix Edward Attenbury, won’t it? But the stone in the vault will still be mine! I shall be hanged for murder, do you think? Then what do I have to lose? But it warms my heart to think what Attenbury has to lose!’

Peter said, ‘It is also a crime to be an accessory to murder. Do you care for what your daughter might have to lose? Give me the stone, and I will keep your daughter out of it if I can.’

Mrs DuBerris had already raised her arm for the gesture that would have cast the stone into the flames. Now she slowly let it fall to her side.

Ada DuBerris had been standing silently in the room doorway, behind Peter’s back, during the last few exchanges. Now she stepped into the room. ‘What is all this about, Mother?’ she asked. She went to her mother, stood behind her, and put an arm round her. Very gently she took her mother’s hand, bent the fingers back, and released the jewel from her grasp. Then, holding it, she said to Peter, ‘I have always understood this was ours. Inherited from my father. Isn’t that true?’

‘The one you have inherited is perfectly safe, Miss DuBerris,’ Peter said. ‘But that is not it.’

‘Take it then,’ she said, holding it out to him.

‘No, Ada, don’t!’ cried Mrs DuBerris. ‘Hold it over the fire till I can make an escape!’

‘Mother,’ said Ada DuBerris, ‘there’s a man at the back gate, and a police car in the street.’ And she handed the emerald to Peter.

Harriet looked out of the window. ‘There really is a police car in the street, Peter,’ she said.

‘I must speak to Bunter on the subject of ignoring instructions,’ said Peter. ‘Harriet, would you go outside and ask the Constable driving that car to come and make an arrest.’

The Constable conferred with Peter in the hallway. Then he entered the little room, in which they were now all crowded together.

‘Ethel DuBerris,’ he intoned, ‘I am arresting you for attempting to defraud one Edward Attenbury; and on suspicion of the murders of…’ – here he looked down at his rapidly scrawled notes – ‘Captain Alan Rannerson, Muriel Pevenor, and others. You do not have to say anything, but anything you do say…’

‘Say?’ exclaimed Mrs DuBerris. ‘Do you expect me to cave in and incriminate myself like a character in one of that woman’s stupid mystery stories? I’m not saying a damn thing.’

Suddenly there were policemen everywhere. A detective inspector stood in the doorway and said, ‘What is going on here?’

‘This Constable has just made an arrest,’ said Peter.

The scene blurred for Harriet. Across the press of people in the room she was looking at Ada DuBerris, standing in the corner behind her mother, white as a sheet, her hand over her mouth. Across the room she met Harriet’s eyes with an expression of pure horror. Then they were taking Mrs DuBerris away in handcuffs.

Ada said, ‘Mother, tell me you didn’t kill anyone!’

But she was given no answer.

The police Constable asked who Peter was, and then thanked him for allowing him to make the arrest. ‘It will go in my records, sir,’ he said. ‘Most people would have called for a more senior officer.’

‘You did it perfectly well,’ said Peter. And from the timbre of his voice Harriet knew at once that the Attenbury affair had entered that always-to-be-expected aftermath that meant sleepless nights, and sudden departures abroad and a time of edginess and unhappiness. One thing Peter could never do was enjoy his triumphs. To the Detective Inspector who had appeared, Peter said, ‘Keep a close eye on your prisoner, Inspector.’

‘Do you expect self-harm?’ said the Inspector.

‘She has lost what she has been living and planning for these thirty years,’ said Peter. ‘Just watch her.’

‘Point taken,’ the man said. The bevy of policemen were leaving.

Harriet said across the room to Ada, ‘Are you all right?’

It was a silly question. Ada was shaking like a person with a fever. Harriet went through to a little kitchen in a lean-to at the back of the house, to make tea. She found sugar and added it lavishly. Then she brought the cup through to the front room and offered it to Ada, who shook her head. ‘I think you should,’ said Harriet softly. ‘Do you have a friend who could come and keep you company for the next few hours?’

Ada looked at her dumbly. Then: ‘I’ll ask Ottalie,’ she said.

26

It was ten in the evening. Peter had been glum and restless ever since they left Mortlake; now he was fiddling with the arrangement of some books in the library.

‘Are we going abroad?’ Harriet asked him.

‘Would you like that?’ he said.

‘Only if you would.’

‘Where would you like to go?’

‘I have never been to Greece.’

‘Mmm,’ he said. ‘Might be rough comfort. It’s only a year or two since they were fighting a civil war.’

‘Wouldn’t some heroic travel be good for us?’

He smiled at her. ‘For me, you mean? To take my mind off other things?’

At that moment they heard the doorbell ringing in the hall below. They stood and listened – had Bunter gone across the garden to his own mews house? They heard the back door open and shut as Bunter returned to duty – the doorbell rang in his hall as soon as it rang in theirs. There was the murmur of voices, and then Bunter appeared.

‘Lady Ottalie Attenbury and Miss DuBerris, Your Grace. Will you see them? They appear, my lord, to be in a distressed state. So much so that I did not ask if it would wait until the morning…’

‘Yes, Bunter, we will see them,’ said Peter.

‘Will you bring tea, Bunter, please, and something simple to eat – biscuits, bread and butter and jam – whatever you can find at this hour,’ said Harriet.

‘Do you expect them to be hungry?’ asked Peter.