The Attenbury Emeralds (7 page)

‘And nothing was found?’ asked Harriet.

‘No missing emerald appeared. Plenty of nice jewellery, but not the dark, mysterious Mughal stone.’

‘What then?’

‘I had a stroke of luck. I was tired of being cooped up with the linens, and sickened, rather, at the stuff I was hearing. I had a sudden fit of nausea. I left Bunter doing the dirty work, and went for a walk. Well, only a prowl, really. Nobody was allowed into the open air. I made for the conservatory, where at least there was sunshine showing through, and some greenery. Right at the far end of the thing – it was massive on account of Lady Attenbury’s passion for plants – there was a wrought-iron bench among the tendrils of a vine, and I sat down and stretched my legs. Hadn’t been there a minute when little Ottalie came up to me, and stood in front of me.

‘“Are you a lord?” she asked.

‘“Fraid so,” said I.

‘“So what do I call you?” she asked.

‘“I’m also a family friend,” I told her. “You call me Peter.”

‘“Uncle Peter?”

‘“Just Peter.”

‘“I want to ask you something, Peter.”

‘“Fire away.”

‘“If that emerald came back, would all the horribleness go away?”

‘I considered my position. The easy thing would have been to say yes – but I have never been any good with children. I just deal with them as though they were adults. Sheer ignorance. So what I actually said was, “It depends, Ottalie, on how it ‘came back’, as you put it. If you know anything about it, you ought to tell, even if it makes the horribleness worse for a bit.”

‘“Do you think Charlotte would stop crying?” she asked.

‘“She might,” I said cautiously. “But it isn’t Charlotte who is in the worst trouble, is it? It’s probably Jeannette.”

‘“Jeannette didn’t take it,” said Ottalie decisively.

‘“How do you know that?”

‘“Because she made me put it back,” she said.

‘“
Put it back
? When and why, Ottalie?”

‘“Well, my friend Ada and I were in the nursery playing being at court,” said Ottalie, sitting down beside me. “We were all dressed up, and it was still ages before we could go down and watch the grown-ups. So I went to see if Charlotte was back in her room yet, and then I just borrowed the emeralds. I wanted to show Ada how you could turn them into a tiara. And I put them on, and posed in the mirror. So then Ada wanted a turn.”

‘“I can see that she would have done,” said I.

‘“So I went and borrowed the other ones, so that Ada could wear some too.”

‘“The other ones?”

‘“The paste ones. Mummy keeps them in her boudoir. She wears them sometimes. We borrowed those. It was only going to be for a minute…I suppose we lost track of the time. We were pretending to pose for the court photographer. I was using Mummy’s ivory fan, and Ada had her ostrich feathers.”

‘“So then what?”

‘“Jeannette found us. She was very angry. People were already coming up to dress for dinner. We put the king-stones back the right way up, and I ran and put the necklace back in Charlotte’s room. And it was all right because Charlotte still hadn’t come up. But if Jeannette was a thief why would she have made me put it back?”

‘“So where is the other necklace now?” I asked, privately noting that Jeannette had protected the children when giving her evidence to Sugg.

‘“Jeannette put it back in Mummy’s room.”

‘“Let’s go and look at it. I’ll come with you,” I said.’

Harriet was looking at him quizzically. ‘Peter, do you mean to say that in this famous first case you didn’t have to do any detecting at all, just listen to a pretty little girl?’

‘Aha!’ said Peter. ‘Not so fast, Harriet. I went and found Lady Attenbury’s maid, and we fetched out the other necklace, the paste one, from her jewel box. This was what Charlotte had worn. Sarah opened her mistress’s jewel drawer for us, with a sort of grim triumph about her – that policeman was going to be wrong-footed – and there indeed was a gorgeous emerald rivière, with a big dark stone in the middle. No mistaking it for paste, close up. But my rapture was very rapidly moderated, because with it wasn’t the real king-stone – no inscription on the back.’

‘Gosh, Peter, what then?’

‘Well, it shifted the game completely. Those naughty children and the panicked maid had mixed up the things; they must have put the real king-stone on the paste necklace, and put that in Charlotte’s room. But since during the hour before the dinner gong the jewels had all been in the nursery, which was along a bit and up one floor, everybody had answered the wrong questions about their whereabouts.’

‘Is that what made Sugg so angry with you? That you told him his whole enquiry was off beam?’

‘No; because that’s not what I did. I made very sure that when they scampered to return the jewels there had been two king-stones. They were certain of that. They were also mistakenly sure they had put everything back exactly as they found things. I swore young Ottalie and Jeannette to secrecy. I told them I was a secret agent and they could leave the whole thing to me, but everything depended on nobody getting to know what we three now knew.

‘Having got that far I went to look for Charles. Sergeant Parker, as I then knew him. I gathered he was off-duty.

‘I found Charles in a tiny room assigned to a lowly sergeant in the hierarchy of a grand household, up in the attics. He was sitting in an armchair, reading Origen. I admit, Harriet, I was surprised. The Church Fathers didn’t strike me as the expected reading material for young policemen. I was even more surprised when he looked up as I entered his room – he had called “Come in!” to my knock – and put the book down on the bed. It didn’t have the Attenbury library binding. It was his own copy. He moved to sit on the bed, and gestured me to sit in the chair.

‘“What can I do for you, Lord Peter?” he said.

‘“Purification by fire,” said I, nodding at his book. “Makes the difference between heaven and hell almost notional, seems to me.”

‘Charles said cautiously, “I would not have expected an English lord to be interested in theology.”

‘“The English lord in question would not have expected a policeman to be reading the Fathers. But it’s jolly encouraging, Sergeant Parker, because what I’ve come to talk to you about is a moral dilemma. Can I put it to you?”

‘“I’m off duty for a couple of hours while Inspector Sugg chews the cud,” said Charles. “So you may put something to me, if you like. But even an off-duty policeman is a policeman, remember, my lord.”

‘“The thing is, I can guess where that emerald is. I think it could be returned to its rightful place, on the quiet. And that would be my duty to my old friend Lord Attenbury. We could just ‘find’ the thing, and send Sugg and co packing, and have a quiet word with somebody, and that would be that.”

‘But, Peter!’ said Harriet indignantly, ‘the real king-stone was gone and you
didn’t
know where it was!’

‘I was guessing, I admit. Put it down to irresponsible youth. But also remember that nobody in the family actually liked the king-stone…no, that’s a red herring. Anyway, Charles thought about it.

‘“In your position, that is probably what I would do, Lord Peter,” he said. “But if you were easy in your mind about it, and certain that that is what you want to do, you would not be talking to me about it. And since you are talking to me, I must tell you that I think such a course of action would be deeply immoral.”

‘“Deeply immoral? That’s going it a bit, isn’t it?”

‘“Let me put this to you. If you recover the jewels without incriminating the thief, do you think the person in question might do it again? If they could continue to be the trusted guest or servant of wealthy people, whose trinkets are worth several years’ wages for ordinary people? Another thing: if you recover the loot by stealth in this way where does that leave the current suspect? Could the girl ever clear her name?”

‘“Lady Attenbury trusts her,” I said.

‘“And what of her standing among the below-stairs people of whom she is one? Will everyone here trust her, once she has been accused?”

‘That left me thinking. I said, “If I went to Lord Attenbury and asked him if he wanted his property back with no scandal and no fuss, or if he wanted the thief caught and exposed, I know what he would say.”

‘“I imagine you do,” said Charles icily.

‘“Oh, come, Sergeant, give a fellow a break,” I said. “You must see I’m in a quandary.”

‘“But, my lord, you put me in a quandary too,” Parker said. “Now that I know that you know something relevant to our enquiries, I ought to interview you, to subpoena you if necessary, to make sure that you divulge what you know to Inspector Sugg.”

‘“The devil you ought!” I said. “But you see I have acquired a strong dislike of Inspector Sugg.”

‘Charles said, “I do not see how you could have reasonable grounds for that opinion, my lord.”

‘“He bullies his witnesses,” I said.

‘Charles said quietly, “How could you know that?”

‘Now I’d put a cat among the pigeons. Charles and I just sat staring at each other. I contemplated simply lying to him, simply telling him that the servants had been talking afterwards about their ordeal in the Suggery, and that my trusted manservant had conveyed to me…I don’t know what Charles was thinking.’

‘Well, you had put him in a difficulty, Peter. His duty was to Sugg. And he didn’t know you from Adam. Why should he risk his career by trusting you?’

‘Why indeed? But after we had been eye-balling each other for some time, that is what he decided to do, all the same.

‘“Eavesdropping, Lord Peter?” he said at last.

‘I was quiet – just thinking about what to say.

‘“I can easily find your spy-hole, my lord,” he said.

‘I said, “It’s dashed uncomfortable balanced on a pile of sheets. I wouldn’t need to do it if I could see the witness statements.”

‘“That would be against every possible police procedural rule,” he said.

‘“But might have advantages,” said I.

‘“What would those be, my lord?” he asked.

‘“Well, I’m an insider in the world you are investigating. I know how these chaps and their ladies live; I know how they think. I might be able to help.”

‘“So you might. But who would you be helping? You might dish the police enquiry to protect your friends. You have just told me you are tempted to do that.”

‘“And you just convinced me that that would be an immoral thing to do.”

‘Stalemate. I knew just how two dogs feel when they are walking round each other in the park.

‘“I don’t think I’ll feel very pally about whoever pinched the thing,” I said. “Let’s flush him out together, or her, of course, and I’ll gladly expose the wretch to the law and the press.”’

‘I imagine Charles was just as worried that if he helped you detect, you might shop him,’ said Harriet.

‘I’ll bet he was,’ said Peter. ‘But I said, “Look here, Sergeant Parker, I’m really bothered that your superior officer may be going to pin the thing on the wrong person.”

‘He didn’t actually say, “So am I,” but his face said it as clearly as a subtitle in a French film.

‘So then I gave a dog a bone. I said, “Look, I happen to know that those jewels weren’t where everyone thinks they were at the time Inspector Sugg is asking about. Sugg put one of your colleagues watching Lady Charlotte’s room, but someone – I’d rather not say who at the moment – fetched them out of there for a crucial forty minutes in the hour before dinner. Sugg is staking out the wrong territory.”

‘“Are you telling me that Constable Johnson fell asleep? How could the emerald be taken somewhere else without his seeing and reporting it?”

‘No, no, I’ve got nothing against Constable Johnson. He has an excuse. But the crucial thing is that during most of the hour before dinner the place we should be thinking about isn’t the main corridor, but the one above; the western end. So all the witnesses have been asked about their proximity to the wrong place. Or if you like, the wrong time. There were only a few minutes between the return of the emeralds to Lady Charlotte’s room, and the sounding of the dinner gong. By which time nearly all the guests were already milling about downstairs in their glad rags.”

‘But I take it,’ said Charles, ‘That this private information does not enable you to lay your hands on the missing jewel?”

“Fraid not. It really has been taken.”

‘“And where was it in the hour between five and six?”

‘“In Miss Ottalie’s nursery.”

‘Charles chewed that over a bit, and then he said, “But if that is the case, Lord Peter, of what possible interest to you can the witness statements be that we have already taken? As you say, they contain answers to the wrong questions.”

‘“It was any that are still to be taken that I was hoping to see,” I said.

‘Charles said, “The most I can do for you, Lord Peter, is to continue to talk to you as we are doing now, privately and in my time off. And in doing even that I am taking a risk, as I am sure you realise.”

‘“Thank you,” I said. The man had put himself in my hands. I appreciated that. “But the first thing you will have to do is convince Sugg that the damn thing had wandered, and that he must not interview—”

‘“The little girl?”

‘“She must on no account be bullied.”

‘“Indeed not,” said Charles. “We shall have to have the maidservant bullied instead.”

‘That was his first indiscretion, Harriet. It let me see that he agreed with me about Sugg.

‘Well, I took myself off, and a few minutes later I had a visit from Constable Johnson, knocking discreetly on my door. Sent along by Charles, of course. And I asked him if he remembered seeing Ottalie running about. He did. She was with the tiny girl, Ada. Of course he hadn’t taken any notice of them, being doggedly fixed on seeing potential thieves. He turned out to be a sharp enough young man. The moment he realised that Ottalie came into the picture he was remorseful for not having noted her down in his book, and was racking his brains to help me. He had seen Ottalie running along the corridor, and entering her sister’s room. She had left again almost at once, and he had not written it down. Then a crowd of people had come up the stairs – Captain Ansel, Mrs Ansel, Honourable Freddy, Mrs Sylvester-Quicke – and passed along to their rooms in a burst of conversation. Then Mr Northerby had come up the stairs with Lady Charlotte, and seen her to the door of her room. For a brief moment they had stepped inside, and partly closed the door – the constable assumed they had been kissing. Then Charlotte had opened her door, and walked briskly along the corridor to the foot of the stairs, where she called, “Ottalie, are you there? Do you want to see me dress, or not?” Mr Northerby said, “See you in a minute,” and entered his own room. Charlotte returned to her room without seeing Ottalie, and the hue and cry among the servants was raised almost as soon as she had closed her door. He could give me an exact time when Charlotte came up: five forty-five. That was all he could tell me. But it was enough.’