by Carola Dunn
“He must have smuggled them back into the museum,” said Goldman admiringly, “and put ’em back so nobody knew they’d been gone, then pinched them again later on.”
“Vun veek and some days he give me to make.”
Goldman found the next entry. “Brown, midday. Friday the thirteenth.”
Not generally regarded as an auspicious date. It had worked for “Brown.” Pettigrew had returned to the museum the following Monday and noticed nothing wrong.
“Brown” had gone on his lunch hour to pick up the fakes. He must have stayed at work late that evening, made the substitution … and done what with the real gems?
Abramowitz was getting restless, muttering something in Yiddish to his grandson.
“Sorry,” said Alec, “you wanted to be home by sunset.”
“The old people think it’s wrong to travel or work on the Sabbath,” Goldman said indulgently.
“I’ll get you there.” Thanks to Summer Time. Now for the all-important question: “What did Brown look like, sir?”
“Dark clo’es. Hat. Big man.”
Looking at the bespectacled gnome, Alec’s heart sank. “Big wide or big tall?”
Abramowitz gestured vaguely. “Big,” he repeated.
Goldman confirmed Alec’s fears. “Zeyde thinks I’m big. He does close work with a jeweller’s glass, of course, but he’s practically blind without it.”
Alec swallowed an oath. Without much hope, he asked, “What about his voice. Did he have any kind of accent?”
“No, he speak good English.”
At best it was another indication that the Grand Duke was not responsible for the theft. Neither Ruddlestone’s Lancashire nor Witt’s public-school pronunciation would make any impression on an immigrant from Central Europe.
“I hope we haven’t wasted your time, sir,” said Goldman rather anxiously, as if he expected imminent arrest for obstructing the police in the course of their duties.
“Not at all,” Alec reassured him. “The dates and times give us something to work on. It’s always possible the name may prove useful, though it doesn’t seem likely. Most of all, we now don’t need to waste any further effort looking for the maker of the imitations. No, as I said before, we very much appreciate your coming forward, gentlemen. And now let me drive you home.”
Rescuing his dinner just as Abramowitz was about to sit on it, Alec transferred it to the Austin’s back seat, beside Goldman. He delivered them to Whitechapel just before the sun touched the horizon.
“I’ll have a constable drop in on Sunday, sir,” he said to the old man, “just in case you remember anything else. And we may have to take a formal statement at a later date.”
Leaving Goldman explaining this to his grandfather, Alec hurried back towards Chelsea, eating on the way. Dobson and Bel had done him proud, with cold chicken and cheese cut to bite size, a raw carrot, an apple sliced and cored, a bread-and-butter sandwich, and two of Bel’s rock buns. These last were much less rocklike than her first effort, made months ago in Daisy’s honour.
In Mulberry Place, Daisy was watching at the sitting-room window. She dashed out to the car before Alec had time to do more than get out and go around to open the passenger-side door for her.
“No arrest,” she commiserated, “but the concert sounds simply spiffing, darling. What happened?”
He told her about the strass glass maker and his grandson, and she reciprocated with Grand Duke Rudolf Maximilian’s near attack on the cave bear. As she finished, they reached Langham Place. Though they had to leave the car some distance from Queen’s Hall, they were not quite the last stragglers to arrive.
“Sorry I’m not in evening togs,” Alec said as they hurried up the stairs to take their seats.
“Darling, it’s such a wonder to have you to myself for half an evening, you could wear bathers and I wouldn’t care.”
Between holding his hand and the waves of music surging into Fingal’s Cave, Daisy had no thoughts to spare for crime for a while. The unknown Prokofiev piano concerto, his third, proved so spectacularly brilliant as to be all-absorbing. Yet somewhere in the back of her mind she must have been mulling over the new information, for when the interval came, the questions on the tip of her tongue were all about theft and murder.
Alec got in first, as they went to stretch their legs in the lobby. “How is your article coming along?”
“Very well. I went to the Entomology department this morning. I’ve typed up those notes, and read through the whole lot, and actually started really planning the article. It’s more complicated than anything I’ve done before.”
“But you’re finished at the museum? Good.”
“Pretty much. There are bound to be a few odds and ends to clear up once I start writing. Do you think the jewels are still there, hidden somewhere frightfully clever?”
“It’s possible. Not inside a cave bear, perhaps. Your objections to that seem valid. But finding something so small in a place so large is as good as impossible.”
“And you can’t search everyone every day, of course. So what can you do?”
“It’s a waiting game. We’ve bolted and barred all but one staff exit and we have men watching that and the main entrance. All the chief suspects are discreetly followed from the moment they leave the museum until they return. If any of them goes near a jeweller, we’ve got him.”
“What a pity your fake-making jeweller is blind as a bat! Still, ffinch-Brown—even if he was idiotic enough to give half his real name—is small, and Ruddlestone is surely large enough to qualify as more than merely big.”
Alec laughed. “Yes, that’s a point. The dates may help, too, though it’s rather a long time ago for people to remember whether they noticed anything odd.”
“I guessed the jewels must have been stolen while Pettigrew was on holiday,” Daisy said smugly. “Oh, darling, that reminds me! I suppose you know that one of the constables who was on night duty then has retired since?”
“What!” He stared at her, shaking his head. “Great Scott, Daisy, how the deuce did you … ? No, never mind, in this case ignorance is bliss. Do you happen to know and recall his name?”
“Southey? North? Eastman? Westcott, that’s it.”
“And his address?”
“Darling, I haven’t the foggiest. The Chelsea police will know, won’t they?” Daisy grabbed Alec’s arm. “You are not going now. By the time you found out and got there, the poor old chap would be in bed and fast asleep. There’s the bell, let’s go back.”
At the end of the concert, Daisy and Alec, along with the greater part of the audience, hummed bits of the symphony as they emerged into the rain-gleaming night. Daisy’s head was too full of music to think of anything else. Alec had to open the windscreen and concentrate on peering into the darkness between lamp-posts all the way to Chelsea.
Sheltering under his umbrella, they stopped on the front step for a good-night kiss, then Daisy felt in her handbag for her key.
“That reminds me,” she said.
“Not again!”
“Oh well, I expect you already know,” Daisy said airily, sticking the key in the lock.
“I didn’t know about Westcott. Tell me.”
“Right-oh, darling. The museum locks match—not all of them, but, for instance, Dr. Smith Woodward’s key opens Dr. Pettigrew’s office.”
“Yes, typical of government institutions. What’s more, apart from the museum police, Pettigrew had the only key to the iron gate, which he may well have left in his office while he was away.”
“And Dr. Smith Woodward is constantly losing his keys.”
“He is? Now that I didn’t know,” Alec said thoughtfully. “So much the more likely that it’s a museum staff member who burgled the mineral gallery, and of course a constable who recognized him wouldn’t report it.”
“Not when no hue and cry was raised until after he left,” Daisy agreed. “Still, there’s not much chance Westcott did see him.”
“Not much chance, but some. I’ll run Westcott to earth first thing in the morning. Thank you, love. You have saved me from sitting around waiting for a purchasing jeweller to turn up, or for the thief to go looking for one.”
Alec was pretty good at holding the umbrella with one hand while hugging with the other. Quite some time passed before Daisy made use of her key.
Lucy was down in the kitchen, making cocoa. “Half an hour on the doorstep in the rain,” she observed dryly. “Why didn’t you invite him in, darling? I wouldn’t have interrupted the billing and cooing.”
“He didn’t mean to stay. He has to work tomorrow, and so do I.”
“Cocoa?”
In spite of cocoa, Daisy was too keyed up to fall asleep easily. One of the tunes from the New World kept going round in her head like a ghostly gramophone record, and above it sailed Alec’s words. Not, alas, the sweet nothings he had whispered in her ear, but the comment about the probability of the villain being a member of the museum staff.
Witt, Mummery, Steadman, Ruddlestone.
Harbottle said Ruddlestone could not possibly be a murderer. Though that jibed with Daisy’s opinion of the invertebrate curator, it was not evidence, of course, only a testimonial to his popularity as a boss.
But could any man keep up Ruddlestone’s obviously genuine joviality under the pressure of being hunted by the police? And, concerned for his own skin, would he have any thought to spare for recataloguing centuries-old collections of millennia-old fossils?
The last argument applied equally to Steadman, who was absolutely obsessed with Saltopus. Daisy had gone to look at progress on the little dinosaur after her appointment with the Creepy-Crawly man.
O’Brien had left for good, having learnt all he wanted, Atkins told her. The loss of the Hollywood incentive had not visibly dampened Steadman’s enthusiasm. Saltopus’s spine had grown by several inches. Sotto voce, Daisy observed to the commissionaire that the construction would go faster if the assistant was allowed to do more than merely stand ready to hand up the next vertebra.
“Not flippin’ likely, miss,” Atkins had whispered back. “Has to do it all himself, does our Mr. Steadman.”
Steadman was too obsessed with dinosaurs to care two hoots for a fortune in gems.
What about Witt? Daisy thought, turning over in bed and shaking her pillow, which felt as if it was stuffed with stones, precious or otherwise.
When she last saw him, Witt had been studying a primitive horse, but he had not been too absorbed to spend quite some time talking with her about the crimes. He had introduced the subject, as far as Daisy could remember. She rather suspected he had tried to pump her about the progress of the police investigation, and he might have tried to divert suspicion to ffinch-Brown.
Though she quite liked Witt, she was not at all sure she entirely trusted him. He was by far the least candid and straightforward of the four curators.
Where could he have hidden the jewels? Was the Grand Duke right, after all, about the cave bear and its fellow shaggy mammals? Did one or more of them have precious stones in their heads, like the toad in the old tale? Alec agreed that it was improbable, but there might be other places no one but Witt was likely to disturb.
He also had the most obvious motive for killing Pettigrew.
Motives, rather: his humiliating exit in the Keeper’s grasp; the business of the flints; and, if he was the thief, the discovery of the theft.
Too much Witt makes the world rotten, Daisy thought, beginning to grow drowsy. Tennyson? If she had learnt nothing else at school, she had had English poetry drummed into her. Lines often roamed through her head, accurately or inaccurately, when she was falling asleep.
But she must not fall asleep yet. She had not considered the case against Mummery.
There was an old fellow called Mummery,
Who fell into a basin of flummery.
He swam to the side
Where he hung on, and cried,
“I’m a victim of jiggery-pokery!”
It didn’t quite rhyme, and anyway, Pettigrew was the victim. Mummery would never have killed him within reach of his fragile fossilized fools. Reptiles. Except that Mummery had a whale of a … a Pareiasaurus of a temper, and when he lost it he was not apt to consider consequences.
Daisy drifted off with an image of the smashed Pareiasaurus in her mind. It metamorphosed into a Megalosaurus, strolling along on the end of a dog-lead, its ribs rattling. Bits of bone kept dropping off, all over the carpet.
“You mustn’t do that,” Belinda scolded. “Gran will be frightfully cross.”
“Who dusts the dinosaurs, I’d like to know?” Mrs. Fletcher demanded angrily. “Don’t you realize they have jewels in their heads, like the toad in the fable?”
In her sleep, Daisy smiled.
14
Pangs of hunger began to distract Daisy from her work. She glanced at the clock on the mantelpiece. Nearly lunchtime.
Practically all the planning for the article was done: the headings arranged in logical order, vital and particularly interesting bits of her notes underlined in red ink. Another hour or so and she could begin the actual writing. She needed a break.
Standing up, she stretched and went out into the hall.
Mrs. Potter was straightening her hat in the looking-glass, preparatory to leaving for the day. Artificial cherries bobbed, silk violets nodded, and sequins glittered as she turned to Daisy.
“I’asn’t done your study out proper in a month o’ Sundays, Miss Daisy,” she said severely. “You’ll be able to grow spuds on that desk soon if you don’t let me dust.”
“As soon as I finish this article,” Daisy promised, “you can have a whole morning at it. Toodle-oo, then, see you Monday.”
“You take termorrer off, miss. All work and no play, like they say.”
The char departed and Daisy went thoughtfully down to the kitchen. Dust—she had dreamt about dust, and she had a feeling it was important to remember the dream.
She took a tin of sardines from the cupboard. As usual when she was absentminded, she put the key on crooked, so the lid rolled back crooked and only half way, and she had to extract the fish with a fork. Fish? Dust and fish? What on earth was the connection?
Eyeing the fish on her plate, she decided she wasn’t really awfully keen on sardines. For a start, someone ought to be able to invent an easier way to open the tins than those idiotic keys. And then, there were the bones … .
Keys, bones, and fish. Dr. Smith Woodward, who kept losing his keys, was a recognized expert on fossil fish. The fossil fish were in the dinosaur gallery. Who dusts the dinosaurs?
The dream flooded back.
Who dusted the dinosaurs, those fragile fossils with their heads in the air, out of reach from the floor? Who but their curator? “Has to do it all himself, does our Mr. Steadman,” said Sergeant Wilfred Atkins.
Yet Steadman showed no apparent interest in the police investigation, being almost feverishly engrossed in his Saltopus. Too feverishly, perhaps, Daisy thought. He was a nervy type who, having stolen the jewels, might well lose his head and lash out if he understood Pettigrew to say all was discovered.
Still, why choose what must be a nerve-racking time to start on a new and complex project? There was the Lost World man, of course, with the lure of fame and fortune which always accompanied the word Hollywood.
It dawned on Daisy that the man from Hollywood might have arrived like manna from heaven. Steadman himself said he had not yet completed models of all the missing bones, but O’Brien’s interest was the perfect excuse to start assembling a skeleton not really quite ready for display. And for the assembly he needed ladders—
Ladders ready and waiting in the gallery, so that when the right moment came, he could seize his chance to retrieve the stolen gems from the dinosaurs’ heads.
Abandoning the sardines, Daisy ran upstairs to the telephone. On the way, doubts arose. She refused to tell Alec that her insight arose from a dream. Was her reas
oning good enough to ring him at Scotland Yard, or was there a fatal flaw she had not spotted? He would not be pleased if she disturbed him at work for nothing.
Perhaps he was at home. It was worth trying, though she’d be a bit pipped if he had gone home after seeing Constable Westcott and not ’phoned her to tell her what he had found out. After all, he might never have heard of Westcott but for her.
She dialled the St. John’s Wood number. After several rings, she heard Belinda’s breathless voice giving the number.
“It’s Aunt Daisy, darling.”
“Oh, hello, Aunt Daisy. Sorry I was so slow to answer. I was brushing Nana.”
“Good for you.” Daisy enquired after the puppy and her relations with Mrs. Fletcher, which had improved slightly. Then she asked, “Is Daddy there?”
“No, he had to go to Devon.”
“Devon!”
“It’s quite a long way, isn’t it? He said he won’t be back today. He went to see a man this morning, and the neighbors said he’d gone to stay with his sister in Devon, only they weren’t sure of her name or the village or anything, just the name of the farm, near Taviscott. I think.”
“Tavistock?”
“That’s it. Daddy decided he really needed to talk to the man, so he and Mr. Tring went right away, in the car.”
“Bother!” said Daisy. She gave Alec the benefit of the doubt and assumed he had rung her when Lucy was on the ’phone, as she had been for some time before going out.
“I’m sorry, Aunt Daisy,” Belinda said anxiously. “Are you awfully cross with Daddy?”
“No, darling, it’s no use being cross when he’s just doing his job.”
“It isn’t, is it? Aunt Daisy, please will you hold on for just a minute?” The ear-piece clicked on the table, then Daisy heard a muffled voice: “Granny, may I please invite Aunt Daisy to tea, please?”
The invitation was proffered and accepted, and Daisy returned to her lunch. The sardines looked less appetizing than ever, especially as she was going out for tea. Putting them away in the larder, she vowed never to eat them again once she was married to Alec.