The Attenbury Emeralds (8 page)

‘It didn’t tell you where the king-stone was.’

‘Well, by now, Harriet, I was full of dire suspicion. I expect you are too, at this stage in the story.’

‘Such suspicions as I have, Peter – and remember all this is shadowy compared to having been there, and seen and known the participants – are subject to a profound sense of puzzlement about motive.’

‘Ah, motive. You know I don’t believe in that.’

‘You don’t think people have motives for their evil deeds?’

‘Or for their good ones. Of course they do. I just don’t think they have reasonable, thought-out motives that a rational person could deduce and base a line of detecting on. Or, no: you provoke me, Harriet, into overstating my case. I don’t think people always have rational motives. Of course, sometimes they do, I’ll grant that.’

‘Thank you, my lord,’ said Harriet drily.

‘But if you are asking about motive, then you have penetrated deeper into all this than I supposed you could from my fancy story-telling. I imagine you are going to ask me why someone should steal something that is about to be theirs anyway.’

‘Naturally one wonders that. It seems so stupid a thing to do that one wonders if one is mistaken in one’s suspicions.’

‘All will become clear. Unless, that is, you have had enough, and wish to go about your day as planned. I think it has stopped raining. It is positively sunning. Would you like to walk in the park with me? I am well able to narrate while perambulating.’

‘Good idea,’ said Harriet. ‘Just let me get a coat on.’

But Bunter was already bringing their coats over his arm, and holding scarves and hats at the ready.

6

The Serpentine made a pleasant sight for walkers. It was now a bright, rain-washed late spring afternoon, but still sharply cold. Harriet and Peter, strolling arm in arm, looked, it must be said, just like the sort of Londoners who figure in tourist posters. Harriet was wearing her fur coat, and a Liberty silk scarf, and a pair of two-tone brogues, and Peter still wore a hat out of doors, a practice that was becoming steadily less common. They looked both smart and old-fashioned in the world of the Festival of Britain, which they had resolved to visit as soon as it opened. When they reached the pleasant path along the bank of the lake, Harriet said, ‘Tell on, tell on.’

‘The next thing was Sugg’s great
coup de théâtre
. He stopped me on the stairs as I came down to dinner.

‘“I understand, Lord Wimsey, that you have been taking a particular interest in this case,” he said.

‘“Who told you that?” I asked. I hoped it wasn’t Charles – Sergeant Parker I should call him. “I can’t help keeping an eye on things, Inspector,” said I. “I was an intelligence officer. It comes with the rations.”

‘“War’s over now, in case you haven’t noticed, sir,” he said. “However, it does no harm to humour a young gentleman. I have solved the case. Lord Attenbury’s guests are free to leave. I’m just on my way to tell him so.”

‘“Have you recovered the jewel?”

‘“Not yet, sir. But we have a warrant for the arrest of the thief and the search of his premises. I have no doubt the recovery of the jewel will follow. The key to the whole thing” – he was preening himself, Harriet, positively preening – “was finding the link between the thief and his inside conspirator. I have arrested
her
. This was a clever plan, Lord Wimsey, laid well in advance.”

‘“You have arrested Jeannette?” I said, with a sinking heart.

‘“And even as we speak,” he said, “officers from the Yard are seeking to apprehend Mr Osmanthus, in whose possession the missing jewel will be found. You didn’t think of that, did you? I think you will find, with age and experience, Lord Wimsey, that the appropriate training for the job in hand has a lot to be said for it.”’

‘You are making this up, Peter!’ exclaimed Harriet.

‘By our first strange and fatal interview,’ he said, ‘By all desires which thereof did ensue, By our long starving hopes, etc., etc., I swear I am not.’

‘Can he really have been so patronising? How he must squirm at your later successes!’

‘I have wondered whether just this very thing is the source of his ill-disguised dislike of me.’

‘We can forgive those who injure us, but we never forgive those we have injured?’

‘He didn’t exactly injure me. Annoy would be a better translation.’

‘Well, so Inspector Sugg arrested poor Jeannette, and, I take it, Nandine Osmanthus?’ asked Harriet as they stopped to admire a patch of pale blue wood anemones, spreading across the grass like a skylit puddle. ‘Did he have a shadow of a reason?’

‘He had made a great discovery, which linked the two: the man known to desire the king-stone, and the person who had had the best opportunity to take it. Jeannette it was, and none other than she who had taken Osmanthus his lunch in the little sitting-room.’

‘So?’

‘So she had an opportunity to conspire with him. Perhaps she had taken the job with the Attenburys specially to await this chance, and indeed had been the one to summon Osmanthus to verify the authenticity of the stone. What do you think of that?’

‘I feel a certain shame. If Sugg found it easier to suspect a servant and a foreigner than any member of an upper-class house-party…’

‘There is no need for either of us to feel implicated in the
bêtise
of Inspector Sugg.’

‘But I do so feel, somewhat. I must have read dozen upon dozen detective stories in which the writer evinces such prejudices, and, worse, assumes them in the reader.’

‘Popular fiction is of its time. And don’t you think, Harriet, that that time is past, or rather passing? I think I can feel the social weather changing as we speak.’

Harriet mused. If Peter was right about that, she thought, the coming world might be hard on him.

‘It will be hard on my brother the Duke,’ said Peter, as though her thought had been spoken. ‘He is already falling into difficulties trying to look after that great house. I’m tired of these anemones; shall we walk on?’

‘When you are ready to complete the tale of the Attenbury emeralds…’

‘By all means. Your powers of endurance are astonishing. Of course Sugg’s case collapsed, but with a suddenness and completeness that took our breath away – Bunter’s and mine, I mean. Attenbury’s house-party dissolved at once, leaving, I must say, plenty of wrack behind. But everyone dispersed.

‘Arresting Osmanthus was a cardinal error. The jewel had not gone missing till after five o’clock at the earliest; Lady Attenbury’s maid had taken it from the banker’s box and given it to Jeannette at five, and she was unshakeably certain of it. And at the time she did that Osmanthus was on his way back to London, and, it turned out, in company with none other than Mr Whitehead, who had taken the same train, and got so pally with Osmanthus that he provided an indignant alibi. And no emerald of any kind, nor any other jewel than a diamond-studded fountain pen was found in Osmanthus’s quarters at the Oriental Club.’

‘What about Osmanthus’s own king-stone? The Maharaja’s, I mean?’

‘What indeed? My best guess was that Osmanthus got to hear of the uproar at Fennybrook Hall, and saw at once there was a danger of his own stone being impounded, and got it safely stowed somewhere.’

‘Did you take leave of Charles?’

‘I’m afraid I didn’t linger. Being forbidden to leave somewhere makes it a terrible ordeal to stay there, even if, left to oneself, one would choose to stay and one was having a jolly time. Bunter and I packed up and bolted back to Piccadilly as if the devil were after me.’

‘Poor Bunter,’ said Harriet with feeling.

‘I simply can’t imagine why everyone is so censorious about my driving,’ said Peter. ‘I have never had an accident…’

Harriet shuddered at various vivid recollections from the passenger seat, and said nothing. Peter patted the back of her hand where it rested on his forearm, as if he could sympathise. The two walked on in companionable silence for a while. They reached Hyde Park Corner. Peter said, ‘Would you like tea at the Ritz? Just because I married you shouldn’t put an end to flamboyant assignations.’

‘Will there be real Darjeeling tea?’ asked Harriet.

‘Certainly there will. The world has not yet gone to hell in a handcart. And delectably thin cucumber sandwiches. Do say yes, Harriet, I’m freezing in the open air. Be like Great Anna whom three realms obey.’

‘Gladly, my lord,’ said Harriet.

‘I always think I have been behaving somehow ridiculously when you call me that, my lady,’ said Peter.

They ordered tea with cucumber sandwiches, and maids of honour, and settled comfortably at a corner table with a glimpse across the terrace to the trees of the park.

‘It almost seems as though the war never happened, here,’ said Harriet. ‘It’s a good place to tell me fairy stories about the world before.’

‘Before the war?’

‘Before I met you.’

‘Where was I?’

‘You had unmannerly departed without taking leave of the then Sergeant Parker.’

‘I asked him to lunch with me the following week. To talk about Athanasius, you understand. But I learned from him that the person who had shopped me to Inspector Sugg was the wretched girl Jeannette. She had warned him when he tried a second time to bully her into confessing that every word he said was being overheard by his betters. He had the linen room locked immediately, though too late.’

‘So Charles kept quiet about you. I’m glad. What happened to Jeannette?’

‘Attenbury bailed her on his surety. And my mother found her a job with an elderly cousin, in need of companionship. One of Uncle Paul’s many ramificating relations. And in France. Out of the way of English spite.’

‘What about her young man?’

‘Joined her in France. Don’t know how they fared in the war. Must ask my mother. She’ll know.’

‘So have you been pals with Charles ever since?’

‘Pretty much. It was very occasional at first. Then as I got involved in more cases, and he got involved with my sister it took off to the heights at which you see it now.’

‘Before we get to more cases, I surmise that there must be more to the famous first one you are telling me about. Because your account so far makes it fall rather short of the sort of thing that makes a man renowned as an apprehender of jewel thieves.’

‘Sorry. Lack of refined narrative skills, I fear. Before I left Fennybrook, I told Claire Attenbury that the “paste” necklace in her jewel box was actually the real one. But, alas, the king-stone that had gone missing was also the real one. I have to say that those Attenburys were very offhand about the whole thing. None of them actually liked the king-stone much. The rivière could always be sent to Cartier’s and adapted to be worn without it. It was still a spectacular showy thing. And there was insurance money; made me quite cross with them.’

‘You wanted to know who had taken it? To be certain. To have cleared it up.’

‘Of course. And then a strange thing happened. One evening, about, I suppose, five weeks after the house-party, when everyone but me had stopped worrying about it, I imagine, except poor Sugg whose superiors had presumably given him a flea in his ear, Bunter came up to me in the library, and presented me with a card from Mr Nandine Osmanthus. Might he take up a few minutes of my valuable time? Of course I had him shown up.

‘Bunter fetched drinks, but Osmanthus demurred at speaking with Bunter present. He would be grateful for a word with me
privately
. Well, I don’t like Bunter left in the dark. It seems to me to be uncivil to imply that a fellow’s manservant might not be discreet. We had an arrangement, Bunter and I, in which on a nod from me he would withdraw, and then stand behind the section of the bookcase which was a disguised door through to the drawing-room. He could hear every word from there, and it was useful when I wanted his pin-sharp memory. He was as good as a secretary taking dictation without having to write it down.

‘So when the visitor had a drink in his hand and had settled in the best armchair, I gave Bunter the nod. And Osmanthus embarked on his errand. A lot of pleasantries first – wonderful flat, fine show of books, glad to see a good piano – that sort of thing. Take that as read.

‘I offered him sympathy over his having been arrested, and on having his premises searched, and hoped it had not been too unpleasant an experience.

‘“These things happen,” he said, shrugging his shoulders.

‘“And Inspector Sugg’s men did not find your own jewel and mistake it for the stolen one? I was afraid that might happen.”

‘“The Maharaja’s jewel is in a place of safety,” he said.

‘I said I was glad of that.

‘Then he said, “I had an unexpected visitor yesterday, Lord Peter. And what he told me has worried me very much. Oh, yes indeed. The short and the long is that I don’t know what is to be done. I would like your advice.”

‘“My advice is free and freely given, old chap,” I said, in what I hoped was an encouraging tone.

‘“You see, Lord Peter, although I am used to mixing with the highest class of people in my own country, I am not intimately acquainted with the way things are done in English aristocratic families. Not at all. So you see, I am at sea, afraid to put my foot in it as they say. But –” and here he raised his voice, and slapped the arm of his chair emphatically with the hand not holding his port – “it does not seem right to me! That poor young lady!”

‘“What poor young lady?” I asked him.

‘“The young Lady Charlotte, of course,” he said, sounding surprised.

‘“Start at the beginning, won’t you, Mr Osmanthus,” I said. “Who was the visitor who perturbed you so?”

‘“It was Mr Reginald Northerby,” he said.

‘“Aha,” said I. “And what did that gentleman want with you, Mr Osmanthus?”

‘“He wanted to sell me the king-stone from the Attenbury emeralds!” said Osmanthus.

‘“Did he though? And what did you reply to him?”

‘“I told him that my master, the Maharaja, wished to acquire not merely the stone itself, but good title to it. He would have nothing to do with trafficking in stolen goods. Not at all; not in any way at all. But, Lord Peter, Mr Northerby replied to me that the stone had not been stolen. It would be his to dispose of as soon as his marriage to Lady Charlotte took place, and he merely wanted to advance by a few weeks the transaction. The stone would be handed over in exchange for a cash-down deposit of a fraction of its value – should we say one-third of the money? The rest to be paid when the sale could be completed. There was a condition however. That was that the arrangement between us must be secret, and must remain so. Any leak of information would result in the sale being aborted, and the stone would then be put beyond our reach. In short, he would make sure that the Maharaja never acquired it.