Any Old Diamonds

by KJ Charles

  “I’m sure,” Jerry said. “Well, you have us over a barrel. You needn’t expect us to like it—”

  “I don’t care if you like it.”

  “As I was about to observe.” Jerry’s brows were at a dangerous angle. “We’ll open this safe, once, and that will be the end of it. We will not be your personal skeleton keys again. And on that note, let me observe that your ‘guvnor’ and his journalist friend aren’t untouchable either. You leave us alone and we’ll return the favour.”

  “Don’t,” Susan said, very softly. “Don’t even voice a threat. I will ruin you.”

  “Oh, you don’t like the idea of being struck at through one’s affections? Yes, what utter shit would do that. And by the way, you forget about Stan Kamarzyn too, not just me and Templeton. Now and for the future.”

  “No,” Susan said. “I’m not here to give you carte blanche for crime. We won’t go after any of the three of you for what’s done, but next time we get hired to one of your jobs, you can all take the consequences. That’s the best offer you’ll get and a damned sight better than what you’d have been facing if we didn’t need you.”

  “And yet you do need us. Evidently quite badly, given the lengths you’ve gone to, because I’m quite sure forgiving Temp is sticking in your throat.”

  “Did I say I’m forgiving him?”

  They were looking at one another like dogs, ready to snarl and snap. Alec felt he was going to snap in quite a different way. He wanted to demand they stop talking, and kept his mouth shut with an effort.

  “Very well,” Jerry said at last. “Amnesty for all three of us, up to and including this job. Agreed?”

  “Agreed.”

  “But this will happen only if you make it possible for us to do our end. We’ll need a solid hour to get into the safe, at least. My preference would be to go in at two in the morning and do the work before the Duchess’s tweeny maid comes in at five, but that has its own problems, especially if we bring two people in. The Duchess is a light sleeper, and chloroform isn’t nearly as convenient as the ill—the illustrated papers would have you believe.” He didn’t look at Alec in that brief stutter. “It can leave burns, and there’s a good chance she’d remember being put out.”

  “We can’t have that. It has to be discreet.”

  “Then give me a daytime option. You’re here for security. You can demand a list of the Duchess’s movements.”

  “Unfortunately, when she isn’t in her room, the servants frequently are,” Susan said. “She doesn’t want to see them, but she does want her room cleaned twice a day.”

  Jerry hissed. “How important is it that nobody knows the safe was opened?”

  “Critical.”

  “Must you be present? It doubles the risk and noise. What are you looking for?”

  “None of your business,” Susan said. “Why does it take an hour to open the safe? I thought you two were good at this.”

  “Are you familiar with the operation of a variable key for Bramah sliders?”

  “No.”

  “Assume I explained how it works and you grasped that it takes an hour. Look, I need to get the lie of the land. I suggest we both seek a way for us all to be done with this ugly little situation. Meanwhile Alec is going to take me round the house.”

  “You’re not going to spend the next week torturing Alec to improve your wounded self-esteem,” Susan said. “If you have a bone to pick, you can pick it with me.”

  “On the contrary. We’re not going to waste all the hard work we put in. Alec and I are as close and friendly as we ever were. Aren’t we, Alec?”

  Susan’s eyes narrowed ominously. Alec said, “It’s all right.”

  “It had better be,” Susan said. “I don’t like you, Crozier.”

  “The feeling is entirely mutual.” Jerry gave her a small bow, then crooked his arm. “Come, Lord Alexander. You’ve done so well getting me to your childhood home, you may as well give me the tour.”

  Susan hissed like a cat. Alec shook his head and took Jerry’s arm with deep reluctance, and they walked back to the castle together.

  “Well,” Jerry said after a moment. “You’d better find something to say. About the castle, that is, or perhaps your noble family’s history of heroic deeds or something, because I’m not doing all the work here.”

  Alec took a deep breath. “Is it any use to say I’m sorry?”

  “I don’t give a shit if you’re sorry. I want to do the job you trapped me into and get out before the Lazarus bitch changes her mind. So walk me round this temple to the Great God Mammon with a smile on your face, and don’t forget the Duchess’s bedroom.”

  Breathe. Breathe. You’ve done worse.

  It didn’t feel like that. It felt as humiliating as the interview with his father, and he had no persona to hide behind, no excuse. Jerry had warned him that he wouldn’t be able to live with himself if he became a traitor, and, as in so many other things, he’d known Alec to the bone.

  But it had to be done, so Alec summoned up the few reserves he had. He smiled. He dredged up whatever he could recall of family history and indicated notable pictures, pieces of furniture, or carvings that he recognised. The Duchess had done a thorough job in sweeping through Castle Speight and making it her own. He tried not to point that out. There was no reason for Jerry to care.

  The tour took an agonisingly long time, since there were some thirty rooms on the ground floor. They greeted fellow guests, kept up a light stream of conversation whenever they were observed. It was surprisingly easy, since Jerry was very good at light conversation, except that they were next to one another, shoulder to shoulder, the faint smell of his cologne in Alec’s nose.

  “And this is the library,” Alec said, pushing open yet another heavy oak door. “Oh.”

  “Oh?” Jerry repeated, stepping in after him.

  “Just— It hasn’t changed.” It was not a particularly noteworthy library compared to some of the great houses, nothing compared to the Cirencester collection, and mostly made up of leatherbound almanacs and collections of dusty sporting periodicals rather than anything one might want to read. If the Duchess had filled it with modern novels he wouldn’t have objected. All the same, it was the library, where he’d sat and read or drawn, and he shut his eyes and inhaled the dry, dusty scent of books.

  “This doesn’t look much used,” Jerry remarked.

  “Father prefers his own study. We used to play or read in here. I wonder—” He went to the great, heavy wooden desk and pulled open a drawer, the feel of the carved knob familiar to his palm yet oddly too small. It held only a few oddments, a pen wiper and knife, a piece of string. He pulled open the next drawer, empty, then all of them, faster. There was nothing.

  “Well,” he said.

  “What were you expecting?”

  Alec shut the last drawer carefully. “Cara put things in here. It was hers, really, Father gave her permission to fill the drawers. Special oddments like lucky stones, and all my best pictures, and a doll George carved her and cut his thumb making, and dried flowers when Mother had picked us each a posy. I suppose it would have looked like rubbish. I suppose one would naturally throw that sort of thing away, if one wanted to use the desk. It’s just empty now.”

  He looked up then. Jerry was two feet away, looking at him, expressionless, and Alec felt suddenly dizzy, as if he’d snapped from one reality to another, because he’d forgotten. Jerry didn’t care if his father had thrown away his childhood drawings. He would have cared before, but now he didn’t, and Alec had earned that.

  “Anyway,” he said. “I think that’s all. Shall we go upstairs?”

  Jerry didn’t reply. He just looked at Alec, watching him with that intent gaze, unblinking, and it was all Alec could do not to shift awkwardly where he stood.

  “What I struggle with,” Jerry said at last, “is why you gave me so much truth while also lying to me so extensively. Because you did, didn’t you? That wasn’t all an act. If you had the capac
ity to run a game so convincingly for so long, you wouldn’t be living in an attic.”

  “I wasn’t lying about anything, apart from—that one thing.”

  “The small matter of entrapping and grassing me up. Indeed.”

  “I wasn’t, though.” Alec wanted to beg Jerry to believe him, as if it would do any good. “I lied about the job, and Susan, and I’m sorry, but everything else I told you—everything we did—it was true, Jerry. It was all true.”

  Jerry’s lips tightened. “That seems to me quite extraordinarily ill-judged.”

  Alec couldn’t find an answer. “I don’t think so,” he said at last. “I don’t regret it.”

  “Really?” Jerry said. “You should.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  Jerry disappeared after they’d walked the upstairs, having particularly noted the main corridor past the state bedrooms. He didn’t emerge till luncheon, another endless, dreadful meal with the ill-assorted company. Jerry was charming, inevitably. Susan sat, uninteresting and invisible, not speaking until spoken to. Alec made courteous conversation with his fellow guests, asked polite questions and pretended to listen to the answers, smiling, smiling.

  He was going back to his attic after this, he decided. He would settle back into illustration, make up the ground he’d lost with the picture papers in the last couple of months of inaction, build his reputation with the book publishers. He’d forget his title and position; their price was far too high. He never wanted to come to this house again.

  After lunch he settled in the gardens—not the walled garden—with a sketch pad, in the hope that it would discourage people from approaching him. He had about half an hour of peace, and then footsteps crunched on the gravel, and Miss Hackett came up with Susan.

  “Lord Alexander.” Miss Hackett looked down at the pad on his knee. “In my day, drawing was the pursuit of young ladies. I was under the impression your father preferred you not to indulge this hobby.”

  Susan shut her eyes. Alec said, as calmly as possible, “I like to draw and I don’t think it’s harming anybody if I do so.”

  Miss Hackett sniffed. “My sister the Duchess might differ, considering the unfortunate past to which I should not care to refer. Come, Roy.”

  “I think I’ll stay outside,” Susan said. “You go in.”

  “Miss Roy—”

  “We had this conversation,” Susan told her, very softly. Miss Hackett drew herself up and marched off. Alec let himself sag.

  “Good God, she’s awful,” Susan said, sitting by him.

  “I don’t understand it. Why can’t people let everyone else get on with their lives? What possible reason is there for seeing someone not doing any harm, taking a bit of pleasure, and deciding to ruin it, for nothing?”

  “It’s not for nothing. She can tell herself she’s better than whoever she’s condemning, and get a thrill of power while she does it. It’s not about principles, or people, or anything except a demonstration that she’s higher on the ladder than whoever she’s picking on. If I were actually her companion I’d have put a pillow over—” Susan clamped her mouth shut, too late.

  “It’s all right,” Alec said.

  “No, it isn’t. Sorry. That was awful.”

  “Then it fits right in with everything else. I don’t know if I can do this much longer.”

  Susan scowled. “What’s Crozier done?”

  “Nothing. I almost wish he would. I feel so guilty.”

  “I really do think he’ll survive,” Susan said drily.

  “Oh, I’m sure he will. Only, he trusted me. I think he...cared, even, and I don’t think he does that often, and I shouldn’t have spoiled that. Not for me, but for him. He was kind to me, and this is what I did in return, and I’m afraid he won’t be inclined to kindness again.”

  Susan was uncharacteristically silent for a few moments. At last, and carefully, she said, “You do know that bad people aren’t generally redeemed by the love of a good woman, or man, don’t you? Most people don’t change, and if they do, it’s not because of someone else. Crozier’s acts aren’t your responsibility.”

  “I don’t agree. What we do affects other people. If we teach other people that they won’t be loved, or they can’t trust anyone, then that’s how they’ll be.”

  “Your father did his damnedest to teach his children that, and I don’t recognise you or Cara in that description,” Susan said. “We’re not helpless. Do you know about my guvnor?”

  “Only that he’s a private detective.”

  “He is now, but he was a flim-flam man before that, in the Spiritualist racket. Bloody good, too. People called him the Seer of London and believed he had magic powers. Made a fortune.”

  “Good heavens. Really?”

  Susan nodded. “I grew up in the Golden Lane rookery. My mother died when I was, I don’t know, six or so, and then I was on my own until Justin took me out of the gutter and made me his accomplice. I was eight or nine by then, probably. He taught me how to pick pockets and fool marks, how to do the tricks that made the fraud work. We took hundreds of pounds off people who thought he could talk to the dead.”

  Alec’s mouth was hanging open. He closed it.

  “And he also taught me to read and write and talk proper,” Susan said. “He fed me and housed me and looked after me—and took in my friend too, because I asked, even though she wasn’t any real use to him. I wanted to work with him forever, to become a medium myself. I can still do it, you know. I could hold a seance now and you’d swear the dead were speaking.”

  Alec had a sudden picture of Susan presiding at the seance table, summoning up his mother’s spirit, or that of the Duchess’s first husband, intoning ghostly accusations. He almost wished she would. “So how on earth did you become private detectives?”

  “Long story. We got mixed up in a murder case, and everything went arsewards in the most spectacular way. But as part of that, the guvnor met a good—well, a good man, actually.” Alec swung round at that. She gave him a quick smile. “Nathaniel, the other guvnor. He’s got principles, and lives up to them, and once they’d found each other, it changed everything. The guvnor walked away from Spiritualism, from all of it, went straight, and the next thing I knew he was sending me to school. He paid for me to have the best possible education so I could have a respectable occupation or a nice middle-class marriage. And then he took me on in the agency anyway because that was what I wanted.”

  “But he and, uh, your other guvnor. Are they still together?” Please, Alec found himself thinking. He wanted to know it was true, that it was possible. Please.

  Susan grinned. “More than twenty years, and they haven’t stopped arguing yet. But listen, Alec. Anyone would look at all that and say, well, the good man reformed the bad one. Yes?”

  “I suppose so.”

  “But everything Justin did for me, he was doing it long before he met Nathaniel. He looked after me in his own way from the moment he saw me, even if it wasn’t the right way by most standards. Nathaniel didn’t find one single thing in Justin that wasn’t already there, and nobody on earth could have redeemed my guvnor if he hadn’t felt like redeeming himself. I say redemption,” she added, “but he’s still the devious bastard he always was. He just turns it against different people now.”

  “I see,” Alec said, nonplussed.

  “The guvnor never changed: he just did things differently. And if I’d told him to stick his school up his arse and gone to work for another spiritualist—and I could have, I was really good at my trade—or even if Nathaniel had walked out on him, I don’t think he’d have gone back to the table-rapping. He made a decision and he stuck with it, and that was all him. And the reason I’m telling you this is, when someone was going to become a better person, but you didn’t do what they wanted, so now the rotten things they do are your fault?” She tapped Alec’s knee lightly. “Pile of shit. If Crozier wants to dig up some human decency from under whatever rock he’s buried it, he’ll do it with or without you.
And if he doesn’t, nothing you could say or do would change him. Don’t flatter yourself.”

  Alec blinked. “You don’t mince your words, do you?”

  “You should meet the other guvnor.”

  He could see why Cara had liked her so much. Susan’s sharp intelligence and fearsomely uncompromising nature must have felt like a lifeline to a woman raging against a wrong the world refused to acknowledge. “I’m still not sure I agree, though. It’s asking a lot to say people shouldn’t be affected by others.”

  “I didn’t say not to be affected. You might feel and think a lot of things you can’t help. But the only thing that counts is what you do, and we’re all capable of controlling that. Crozier, and my guvnor, and the Duchess, and you.”

  Alec rubbed his face. “Yes. Maybe. I don’t know if I’ve done terribly well. Certainly not by Jerry.”

  “Crozier’s first instinct when he realised what was going on was to hit you where he could hurt you worst. I dare say he knew I wasn’t going to make a fuss about who you share a bed with, but that was still the act of a stone-cold bastard, and I’d bear that in mind if I were you. He’s lost nothing but a bit of pride and a lot of diamonds that weren’t his to take. Don’t waste any tears on him. He’s not worth it.”

  Alec sighed. “I’ll try.”

  “Good. May I see your drawings?”

  Alec handed over the sketchbook. Susan flipped through it, and Alec winced to see quite how often he’d drawn Jerry’s face, but she made no comment until she came across a pencil sketch of Cara. “Oh. When did you do this?”

  “Last month. It’s from memory.”

  “It’s very good.” Susan looked at the pencil image, the corners of her mouth pulling down for a second. “Very like her. At least, in some moods.”

  “Like Mother too,” Alec said. He hadn’t intended it, but he’d thought of Cara on that evening when he’d haltingly confessed kissing another boy and the growing, terrifying certainty it had brought. She’d held him then, whispering comfort and reassurance, just as Mother had when he’d fallen and knocked out a tooth. They’d both said, I love you, and Everything will be all right, and even though he’d known the words could do nothing, they’d meant everything. “They were very alike.”