The Diamond Thief

by Sharon Gosling

  “How did you know?” Thaddeus asked, once the Professor had changed out of his disguise. The transformation was remarkable – no one would have known that the man who had burst into the police station was the same man that bustled about the place now. The bald head was gone, replaced by a flash of fine white hair, and the bushy eyebrows and hooked nose had vanished, too. It was impossible to pinpoint the Professor’s age – the eyes said late thirties, but the hair suggested he was much older. Thaddeus had never had the courage to ask.

  “How did I know what?”

  “About what was happening at the station. I mean, you just turned up, out of nowhere.”

  The Professor was busy taking apart the weapon he had used on Collins, cleaning it down and refilling the chamber of purple liquid from a heated glass vial that had been steaming gently over a Bunsen burner.

  “I had been listening in, dear boy,” he said. “To begin with I thought that man – Glove – was being merely unpleasant. Then I realized he was actually a complete fool. And a dangerous one at that, I’ll warrant.”

  Thaddeus frowned. “Listening in? Whatever do you mean?”

  The Professor carefully replaced the glass vial on its stand before going to Thaddeus’ coat, which he had folded across the empty chair beside him. The Professor shook it out, his hand reaching for the bottom seam, where the lining met the outer wool. He probed about for a bit, and then took a sharp knife from the workbench and quickly slit it open.

  “Professor!” Thaddeus said in dismay, “that’s my only coat!”

  “Please don’t fuss, Rec,” said the older man. “It’s easily repaired. Have you never heard of a needle and thread? Ah-ha, there!”

  The Professor pulled a small metal object – or rather, a collection of small metal objects – from Thaddeus’ coat. Among the tangle of parts, Thaddeus could see several tiny cogs, a miniature gauge and some metal piping, as well as what looked like a small cylinder at the centre, covered in a very thin layer of foil. Attached to the gauge was a small, red jewel that looked to Thaddeus like garnet. The object was fascinating and beautiful.

  “What is it?” he asked, taking the device from the Professor’s hands and turning it over, careful not to break any of the fragile parts.

  “Well, in part it is a very small friction engine,” said the Professor. “The smallest I’ve ever built – in fact, I’ll wager it is the smallest anyone has ever built. It’s started by external movement. That’s why I put it at the bottom of your coat. When you put the garment on and begin to walk, the engine starts up.”

  “I don’t understand,” Thaddeus said. “You said you were listening? To what happened at the station?”

  “Ah, yes,” said the Professor. “Well you see, that’s the truly genius bit of this device. Once the thing’s warmed up and ticking over nicely, it can send a signal.”

  “A signal?”

  “Yes. It’s a recording, really. It works like Mr Edison’s phonograph – the one that caused all the fuss last year. But unlike him, I got it working properly. The key is the tin foil, you know! He was using wax, which was simply foolish. You see here–” he pointed to the cylinder at the centre of the device. “When the engine starts, the stylus begins to make little indentations in the foil that, when played back at a faster rate, will recreate the sounds it is picking up. It can only store two or three minutes at a time, so once it is full it uses its friction energy to transmit to a larger unit – the one in question is on the roof of Scotland Yard, incidentally. I put it there a few months back – and that relays to this...” In full flow now, the Professor pointed expansively to a large phonograph that stood on another workbench. It had been augmented with an extra speaker horn and a tower of thin metal filaments that disappeared into the ceiling.

  “The same patterns that were recorded at your end are etched onto another, larger cylinder at this end, you see,” the Professor continued to an astonished Thaddeus. “I have it set to play back immediately and continuously, as soon as the friction engine is activated. Of course, there’s a little delay. That’s why I was almost too late. It’s lucky you’re a ditherer by nature, my boy!”

  Thaddeus was speechless for a few moments, looking between the tiny device that had been hidden in his coat and the gramophone.

  “It’s amazing,” he said eventually. “Simply... amazing.”

  “Yes, it is rather, isn’t it?”

  “You’re a genius.”

  The Professor sniffed happily. “Oh well, Thaddeus… genius is as genius does, you know.”

  Then something else occurred to Thaddeus. He frowned. “Were you spying on me?”

  The older man looked genuinely shocked. “What? Of course not!”

  “But you put this in my coat,” Thaddeus pointed out. “How long has it been there? What were you hoping to hear? Or were you using me to get inside the police station? Is that what this is all about?”

  The Professor placed a hand on his arm. “Thaddeus, Thaddeus,” he soothed. “It wasn’t anything of the kind. I merely wanted to be able to test the machine, that’s all. It’s far from perfect yet.”

  “Well, why didn’t you just ask me to test it for you? You know I always try to help with your experiments if I can.”

  The Professor sighed. “What time did you get home last night?”

  “Well, I haven’t actually been home yet.”

  “And the night before?”

  “Err...”

  “And the night before that?” The Professor held up a hand before he could reply. “My dear boy, you are never anywhere but at work. You are always at Scotland Yard, or about police business. And I knew you would never agree to allow me to listen into the police station. But who else could I ask? So… there we are.”

  Thaddeus sighed. “You shouldn’t have done it, you know.”

  “Ah, but think of the benefits!” the Professor exclaimed, gleefully. “Think of the criminal organizations we could take down! No one could hide from the law!”

  Thaddeus had to smile at the Professor’s enthusiasm, though his humour soon turned cold. “I don’t think I’ll ever be catching criminals again,” he said, quietly. “I’m a wanted man myself now.”

  The Professor patted his shoulder again. “Don’t you worry about that. Now, I don’t think I caught everything clearly with my friction machine. Tell me all about it – start from the beginning.”

  And so Thaddeus did. He left nothing out, from the night at the circus just three days ago when he had seen, and tried to save, the girl they called ‘Little Bird’, right up until when the Professor had burst through the doors of Scotland Yard just an hour or so ago. In the re-telling of it all, the events of the past three days seemed surreal and unbelievable even to Thaddeus, but the Professor listened patiently, nodding here and there.

  “Well,” he said, when the story was done. “This is a curious matter and no mistake. First things first – you’d better give me those night-glasses. I’ll see if I can get them working.” Thaddeus dug them out of his coat pocket and handed them over as the Professor went on, “What do you plan to do next?”

  Thaddeus shrugged. “What can I do, except try to find the real thief? She’s out there somewhere. I just have to find her.”

  The Professor nodded, a thoughtful frown on his face. “And you are sure? That she is the thief?”

  “Who else could it have been?”

  His friend raised his shoulders slightly in an elegant shrug. “Things are not always as they seem, Thaddeus. You would do well to remember that.”

  Thaddeus pulled out his pocket watch and looked at the time. It was just touching 5 o’clock in the morning. He stood up, taking hold of his now even more tattered coat. “Well,” he said. “In this case, professor, I know exactly how things are. And I intend to put them right before I end up paying for a crime I did n
ot commit.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “To interrupt Lord Abernathy’s breakfast. I’ve got to start somewhere, haven’t I?”

  Eight

  An Unexpected Meeting

  “Well, look on the bright side,” J whispered hoarsely, reaching up to pull a branch out of Rémy’s way. “It ain’t raining. Right?”

  Rémy pushed forward through the undergrowth. J was right, the interminable rain had paused for a little while, but the bushes and grass around them were still soaking wet and the air was damp and clinging.

  “It will be getting light soon,” she said quietly, glancing at the sky.

  “Tsk, don’t you worry about that,” J told her dismissively. “There’s still plenty o’ dark in the sky. Anyway, this is just a look-see, right? You ain’t breaking in or nuffin’. Yet. Are yer?”

  Rémy ignored him, pushing forward through yet another dripping bush. The night was always darkest before the dawn, they said, but it wasn’t the dark that bothered her – it was the cold. She pulled Claudette’s cloak more tightly about her shoulders and tried to ignore how icy her toes had become.

  They were standing just inside the high brick wall of Lord Abernathy’s house at Beauvoir Square, about a third of a mile west of Whitechapel. It was large and square, built of pale yellow London brick that glowed faintly in the dim light, and set in about an acre of grounds. At the other end of the estate, against the far reach of the wall, was a set of outbuildings, probably for the gardener’s use.

  “It is still not as big as I would have expected,” she muttered, to herself as much as anyone else. “Not for a lord.”

  “Ah, well, this ain’t ‘is main place, is it? ‘E’s got a big place up north, so people say. An h’estate,” J said significantly. “Scotland, I fink. Stands to reason, don’ it? ‘Is name sounds like a Scot, don’ yer think?”

  Rémy didn’t answer – she was too busy counting the windows that she could see. There were sixteen, and they were all closed fast and darkened. It didn’t seem as if the lord was awake yet. She guessed that his servants would be, though – it was fast approaching the crowing hour now and they’d be scuttling around in the windowless basement, stoking the fires to warm the house ready for when his Lordship rose.

  “I want to get closer,” she said.

  “Alrigh’, if you must, but just watch yerself. I ain’t coming to rescue yer if you get caught. Oi!” he added anxiously, as she kicked her boots off. “What’cha doin’? You ain’t planning to shimmy your way up no more drainpipes, are ya?”

  Rémy danced from one bare foot to the other, trying to get some feeling back into them. She nodded to the gravel path that ran around the edge of the house and cut through the neatly-manicured lawn. “Less noise this way,” she said.

  “Oh,” said J, with a nod. “Well, when you put it like that…”

  Rémy glanced at him. J’s legs were barely covered by the tattered rags that stood for his trousers, and he was shivering in the cold morning air. She pulled off her cloak and pushed it towards him.

  “Put it on,” she ordered, shortly. “Stay here. I will not be long.”

  “Cor!” J said, his eyes as big as the large round pennies he rarely saw. “Fanks!”

  Rémy left him cocooning himself in the warm material and pushed her way out of the undergrowth, stepping onto the close-cut grass. She moved quickly, avoiding the gravel paths to muffle her progress. She had to work out where the Darya-ye Noor was likely being hidden. Abernathy would keep it close, she guessed, but nowhere obvious – probably his study. He might have a strongbox, or perhaps, if she was fortunate, just a locked drawer. Although her legendary luck had been out of sorts ever since she reached England, she reminded herself, as her bare feet slid into a puddle left from the last downpour.

  Rémy reached the wall of the house and looked up. There were four floors, each with four windows. A bit grand for one person, even if he was a lord. Rémy thought back to Gustave’s pronouncement that Abernathy was nothing of the kind. She wondered why he had said that – J had seemed convinced that he was. Rémy sighed to herself. It was funny, she’d spent her life at the circus trying to avoid spending time with Gustave, but now there were many things she’d like to ask him. She wondered if she’d ever get the chance.

  Shaking her head, Rémy forced herself to concentrate. She had to see inside. If she could understand the layout of the house, it might give her a clue as to where Abernathy was hiding the stone. Rémy glanced back towards the bush where J was hiding. The boy would be horrified if he knew what she was contemplating, but she had no choice.

  Placing her hands against the rough stone, Rémy looked up. There were plenty of handholds if you were brave enough. She took a deep breath. Then she began to climb.

  She made it as far as the second floor and was balancing on a narrow brick window ledge when she heard a sound that chilled her blood. It was a dog barking – no, not one, not even two – it was the baleful sound of a whole pack. It was hard to pinpoint where they were, but the noise was getting louder by the second. Rémy looked over to the bush where she’d left J and saw that he’d scrambled out of his hiding place and was now standing on the lawn, frantically trying to attract her attention. On finally catching her eye, he shouted something she couldn’t hear and then pointed to the other end of the grounds, around the corner of Abernathy’s house, back towards the outbuildings she’d noticed earlier. He looked terrified.

  A second later, the dogs appeared. There were five of them – huge and black, with slavering jaws opened wide to display their massive teeth. J turned to run, but there was no way he’d make it back to the wall in time. Rémy looked up – she could climb higher and get to the roof – there was no reason to think that the servants knew there was more than one intruder. She could sit up there all day if she had to and slip out once they’d locked the dogs away again.

  But that would mean leaving J to his fate. She looked down again, seeing the scrawny little figure slipping and sliding over the wet grass as the dogs grew closer. Of course she couldn’t leave him. He was just a child, and she was the only reason he was here at all.

  Rémy took a deep breath and then issued a high-pitched shriek that immediately made the dogs look around. Then she leapt from her perch.

  The gravel below gave a harsher landing than the soft sawdust of the circus ring, but Rémy was used to falling hard. She dropped, let herself roll as soon as her feet hit the ground, and was upright again almost immediately. The dogs, having forgotten J, were coming at her fast. She glanced at J who had frozen in fear.

  “Run!” she screamed at him, over the sound of the dogs. “Don’t stand there – run!”

  She didn’t wait to see if he did as he was told, plunging instead along the gravel path that led towards the park’s main entrance, the rough stones cutting into her soles. Rémy ignored the pain – it was no worse than the times she’d missed Dominique’s back during training. She rounded the south corner of the house and saw the city crowding against the big iron gates. The street lights were beginning to fade into the growing dawn.

  Rémy could feel the dogs on her heels as she sprinted the open distance towards her only hope of escape. Behind her, lights had been lit in the big house. All she could do was hope that the staff or their master didn’t have a weapon to hand, or there would be something besides the dogs trying to tear holes in her.

  By the time she was in reach of the gate, one of the animals was close enough to snap at her heels. Its teeth grazed her leg, leaving a trail of saliva. Rémy used all her remaining strength to jump at the gate, clanging against the wrought iron curlicues and holding on for dear life.

  Below her, the dogs had not given up. They howled as their quarry scrambled further out of reach. They crashed against the metal, their powerful shoulders shaking the gates on their hinges as Rémy struggled
to hold on.

  She heard shouts behind her, and looked up to see someone leaning out of a high window of the big house. Desperate not to be caught, Rémy dragged herself up the gate, hands and feet gripping the black-painted iron. Twice she almost fell – once dropping far enough to feel the teeth of one of the animals biting into her bare heel before she managed to haul herself away again. But for all her exhaustion, Rémy was still as quick as a fox and twice as agile. Before the men of the house had even got out of the door she was over the top of the gate and leaping down towards the dirty wet cobbles of the street outside…

  …and straight into the arms of the boy with the mismatched eyes.

  * * *

  Thaddeus – at the Professor’s insistence and out of his generosity, too – had hailed another cab to take him to Lord Abernathy’s house. He would have been happy to walk – after all, it was still too early to knock on the door of a peer of the realm, and walking would have both served to clear Thaddeus’ head and get him there at a respectable hour. But the Professor had pointed out that strolling around the streets as a wanted man was ill advised, and also that it was raining hard. He insisted that arriving dripping wet to converse with a lord would appear odd, and, given Thaddeus’ situation, the last thing he needed was to be immediately put at a disadvantage. So the younger man had bowed to the Professor’s wisdom and done as he was told.

  It meant, however, that he had a lot of time to kill before he could request an audience with Lord Abernathy. He’d bought the early edition of the penny paper, but decided to walk a circuit of the outer wall of Abernathy’s home before finding a dry patch of wall to lean against as he read it. And so it was that, when the commotion inside started, Thaddeus was on the other side of the wall.

  At first he thought a fox had wandered across the dogs’ path, sending them into a frenzied bloodlust. But then he heard a weird sound, almost like a scream but at a much higher pitch, and then, in between the baying of the dogs, the sound of feet running on gravel.