They had been pre-warned, and there was a packet of biscuits and a plate of cakes all ready to be brought out along with a large brown teapot. The little sitting-room was full of small ornaments, lacy antimacassars, brass fire-irons and toasting fork, fancy plates hanging all over the walls nearly obliterating the sunflower-patterned wallpaper.
The owners introduced themselves as Joyce and Susie, and immediately asked how to address a lord, never having had the need to know that yet.
‘Just call us Peter and Harriet,’ said Harriet hastily, fearing that the attention of the two ladies would be wholly taken up with unfamiliar protocol.
The missing titles appeared as pauses in conversation: ‘Please sit down – Harriet, – Peter. Make yourselves comfy,’ said Joyce. And seeing Harriet looking round the room, she added, ‘You can’t be doing with plain and tidy in a little house – Harriet. It looks much better with bits and pieces, we find.’
‘I always wondered what these places were like inside,’ said Harriet. ‘It looks very bright and jolly the way you have it.’
‘Would you like to look round?’ asked Susie, jumping up. ‘It won’t take no longer than it takes the tea to brew.’
It didn’t take as long to show Harriet a second room, with two beds and a wardrobe in it, a tiny kitchen and a tiny bathroom. It was all quite light and sunny. Of course it was cramped, but once you got used to the small size it was perfectly cosy. ‘And a bloody sight better than the damp basement what we had before Hitler did a demolition job on it, pardon my language,’ said Susie. ‘After you,’ and she ushered Harriet back into the front room just as the tea was being poured.
Peter was being presented with a plate of cakes. ‘Camouflage cakes, those are,’ Joyce was telling him.
Peter contemplated the three colours just visible through the light brown crust of the cakes. ‘They look the part,’ he observed.
‘Home-made. Three colours in the mix, and three flavours,’ Joyce told him. ‘The kiddies love them.’
‘Kiddies?’ Peter asked, startled. There really wasn’t much room for children.
‘Oh, not ours. The neighbours has kiddies,’ said Joyce.
‘Come now, Joyce,’ said Susie, pouring tea as brown as the pot itself into the teacups. ‘Let people get a word in endways. They haven’t come to chinwag with us.’
‘We were wondering if you could remember the Café de Paris incident,’ said Harriet. ‘And a green jewel. Or perhaps two green jewels.’
‘I can remember that all right,’ said Susie. ‘We won’t never forget that, will we, Joyce? We was working in the East End most nights,’ she went on. ‘Me and Joyce here, and our friend Rita Patel. But that night they came and fetched us on account of having more bodies than they could be doing with.’
‘Doing what, exactly?’ Peter asked.
‘Laying them out, my darling, laying them out,’ said Joyce. ‘Cleaning them up a bit, and putting shrouds on them to cover the wounds as much as you could. Making it as easy as possible for the poor families who came looking for them. They all had to be looked at even if they was wearing their identity discs, and not many of that lot were. Spoils the look of nice dresses, I suppose. No more than they was carrying gas-masks or identity cards in their purses. Not but what you could necessarily put the purse and the body together rightly. We was doing our best.’
‘You must have seen terrible things,’ said Peter. His words brought back to him in a painful flash the recollection of Mrs DuBerris sitting on a bench in the gardens of Fennybrook Hall. He had no time to work out the connection, because Joyce was saying, ‘It wasn’t a very nice job, no. But someone had to do it. And you know what, er, Peter, the men wasn’t as good at that as the women. Not by a long way.’
‘The man in charge that night said we should have had a medal,’ said Susie. ‘And I said to him I’d rather have a good leg of lamb!’
‘But you haven’t come to talk to us about bodies, have you?’ said Joyce. ‘It’s those green glass things you want to know about. Costume jewellery.’
‘It would be immensely helpful if you could tell us what you remember about those,’ said Peter.
‘You tell ’im,’ said Susie.
‘Well, first we was laying out a young woman in a green sari. Pretend Indian. She was wearing one of them green things in a wire, on a ribbon at her neck. I didn’t think nothing of it. I just put it in the box with her other bits and pieces, and got on with my work.’
‘You put it in a box?’
‘We had shoe-boxes to put stuff in. We would put everything we found on a body in one of them boxes, and chalk a number on the box, and put it on a shelf. Then we would put a luggage label on the corpus’s toes, and put the same number on that before it got covered over and put on a shelf. Should have been foolproof as long as we looked what we was doing.’
‘It went on all night with them bringing in bodies. Then in the morning shift some time someone brought in a couple of bags full of personal property what they had dug out while they was looking for people in the rubble. So we rummaged through that, and guess what – there was a red scarf in it and one of them green stones pinned to it on a clip to make a brooch. First we thought the green sari girl must have been wearing a stole sort of thing, but it wouldn’t have looked right. So in the end we put the red scarf in the “unidentified” box.
‘Then when we had a tea-break we was bitching about it,’ said Joyce, ‘saying what a con it was.’
‘Why was it a con?’ asked Harriet.
‘They must of hired their costumes, see. All wearing that fancy foreign stuff. You would hire it in Covent Garden, at one of them theatrical shops. And they shouldn’t of hired out the same bit of glass to two ladies for the same night. Ladies don’t like to see someone else wearing the same as what they’ve got. Course they don’t.’
‘If the two jewels were the same,’ said Peter, ‘why did one of you ask Lady Diana, when she took her niece’s things, if she had got the right one?’
‘Only that one was done up as a necklace and the other as a brooch,’ said Susie. ‘We wasn’t that fussed about them – but the costume hire want back exactly what they lend you, or you lose your deposit.’
‘Course, since the lady policeman told us you wanted to talk to us about them, we have been wondering,’ said Joyce, ‘if they could of been real after all. Only they couldn’t of been, could they, not that big?’
‘At least one of them was real,’ said Peter. ‘Possibly both of them were.’
‘Well, all I can say is coo-er!’ said Susie.
‘So the question is, could they have been muddled so that the one Lady Diana took home was not the one her niece was wearing that night?’ asked Peter.
‘I really don’t think so, no,’ said Joyce. ‘Do you think so, Susie?’
‘No, can’t see how that could of happened,’ Susie replied. ‘We had the girl all tidied up and labelled and her things in the box before the warden brought us the bag with the other one in it. They was kept separate, all through.’
‘Do you know what happened to the brooch that was with the red scarf?’ asked Peter.
‘Yes, I do know that as a matter of fact. I was working there about a week later, along with Rita, when a woman come in and claimed it. Said her daughter had been wearing a red turban, and had it been found?’
‘Rita asked her if her daughter was all hurt bad, and she said she was shook up with a leg in plaster but she’d be all right.’
‘What was this woman like?’ asked Peter.
‘Oh, just an ordinary sort of woman. She spoke nice. Rita said something to her about the words on the back of the stone, friendly like, but she didn’t want to know. She wasn’t there no more than a minute or two, and then she took her stuff and signed for it, and left.’
‘If she signed for it, it might be possible to find her name,’ said Harriet.
‘Mrs Smith. That’s what she signed. Rita said at the time, well, there’s lots of those around. Wish I’d ha
d time to have a proper look at them jewels, though. I like nice things.’
‘Think where we’d be if we had nicked them!’ said Joyce.
‘Lying awake at night expecting to be nicked ourselves,’ said Susie. ‘That’s where we’d be. Don’t take any notice of her, she’s never nicked a thing in her life,’ she added, addressing the Wimseys. ‘We’re all right as we are. Better’n poor Rita. She copped it the very next night.’
‘How did she cop it?’ asked Peter.
‘Fell through a manhole on her way home in the dark, and broke her neck,’ said Susie. ‘Broken manhole cover. Have another camouflage cake?’
‘Yes, please,’ said Peter. ‘They are very good.’
‘It needs an egg to make them,’ said Susie proudly. ‘But only one.’
‘For all that, they plainly could have been muddled in the morgue,’ said Peter. He and Harriet, having returned home, were putting Bunter in the picture.
‘But who was the other person wearing a look-alike?’ asked Harriet.
‘A Miss Smith, perhaps?’
‘And how did she come by a duplicate emerald?’ asked Harriet.
‘There was a paste copy once,’ said Peter. ‘I wonder what became of that? We’d better see if anyone knows.’
‘How do we find out? Do we have to ask Charles again?’
‘He wouldn’t mind if we did,’ said Peter. ‘He can see as well as we can that this is now looking like a murder enquiry. Serial murder, no less. But Bunter tells me young Attenbury is calling on us this evening after dinner, so perhaps he will do.’
‘I don’t like to be discouraging, Peter,’ said Harriet, ‘but are we getting anywhere at all with this enquiry? The emerald could have been swapped while Captain Rannerson had it; it could have been swapped accidentally at the Café de Paris…’
‘But an accidental swap won’t do, Harriet, will it?’ said Peter. ‘If it were accidental, the holder wouldn’t know he or she had the wrong stone, and so could not turn up to claim the one in the strongbox; whatever we are looking for, we are not looking for an accident, but for an opportunity for deliberate villainy.’
‘And not very plausible villainy, Peter. Our perpetrator has to have a legitimate claim on one of the stones, that will stand severe scrutiny. And then has to carry out the swap and wait; wait for perhaps many years to spring. What kind of person is that?’
‘It is an advantage of crimes in your fiction,’ said Peter, ‘that the puzzles are designed to be soluble. In that respect, if in no other, they do not resemble real life. But of course it seems likely that we are looking for an agent of the Maharaja of Sinorabad.’
‘Haven’t the maharajas all been abolished?’
‘They have been dispossessed of all but their personal fortunes,’ said Peter. ‘I don’t think democratic India has got round to confiscating family jewels. It seems rather moderate at the moment.’
‘And for the moment we must be ready to comfort the victim of this implausible crime,’ said Harriet. ‘Peter, what can we say to him?’
‘We shall give him a job to do,’ said Peter. ‘And he will hasten to do it for us.’
17
Edward Abcock, Lord Attenbury, appeared promptly at nine o’clock, and was made welcome with a bottle of port, carefully decanted by Bunter, and accompanied by Stilton cheese and some oatcakes. His agitation on his previous visit had subsided into an air of misery which pervaded his manner so thoroughly that it must have become the prevailing weather in his soul.
‘How’s it all going?’ Peter asked him when he was comfortably settled with his glass in his hand.
‘It’s ghastly,’ his lordship replied. ‘Absolute hell. Do you know much about death duties, Lord Peter?’
‘Not as much as you do, I’m afraid,’ said Peter.
‘Well, it isn’t going to hit you as it has me, is it?’ said Edward. ‘Just die before your brother and you’ll never have to know. I suppose I must have known that I would be in this pickle some day, but I wasn’t ready for it. I simply can’t raise the money for the tax unless I put Fennybrook Hall up for sale. I could sell the land, but it isn’t getting a good price, so it would mean leaving the hall without its farms, and no income to support it. And it’s in a rotten state of repair…In the old man’s day an earldom counted for something, but now it just makes you into a class enemy or a figure of fun. And I feel a real idiot wearing those robes for the House of Lords. Like something out of Gilbert and Sullivan without the tunes. I don’t suppose you’ve got anywhere about that emerald, have you? The family lawyer chappie tells me it was insured for a hundred thousand pounds. And that really would make a difference.’
‘Well, can’t you get the insurance company to pay up?’ asked Peter.
‘They won’t pay up for a year,’ said Abcock, ‘if it’s a question of theft. To leave time for the police to try to recover the goods. It’s some sort of restriction on the policy in exchange for a reduction in the premium, which my mother signed up to a couple of years back. She was having an economy drive, and she thought the thing was as safe as it could be in a respectable bank. She says she asked me and I agreed, but I can’t remember. The truth is I never gave this a moment’s thought while my father was alive. And after his death I just left it all to Grandfather. What a fool I am!’
‘Just rather young to grasp the ins and outs of things,’ said Peter. ‘Don’t be hard on yourself. I can tell you how far we have got.’ And he proceeded to outline the quest so far. At the thought that a murder or even maybe two had been committed and were lying on police files unsolved, Edward went very pale. Peter spared him the gruesome details about 8th March at the Café de Paris, but he was looking even sicker by the time the narrative got that far.
‘So the thing is,’ Peter said, ‘there were apparently two emeralds at that unfortunate gathering. And I know of three that would look very similar: one belonging to an Indian potentate, which we have no reason to believe is not in India; one belonging to you; and a paste copy that your grandmother used to keep in her everyday jewel box to save getting the real one out of the bank except exceptionally. And so naturally we wonder what happened to the paste copy. Could it possibly be the one that was being worn, not by your sister, but by the other woman, whoever she was? Miss Smith, apparently. Do you think you could find out if anyone in your family has any knowledge about the whereabouts of that paste copy?’
‘I can give it my best shot!’ said Edward.
‘If you can find it,’ Peter added, ‘it might be useful if we could borrow it.’
‘What for?’ Edward enquired. He was now actually sipping his port, instead of endlessly swirling it around in his glass.
‘It might jog somebody’s memory,’ said Peter.
‘That was a neat piece of occupational therapy,’ said Harriet when he had gone.
‘People like to think they can help,’ said Peter complacently.
‘What would help now?’ asked Harriet.
‘Read me a poem, and I’ll play you some Bach before bed,’ said Peter.
Harriet took a moment or two to reach down the Nonesuch Donne, and find the place, since she was not starting at a first line to be found easily in the index, but midway.
On a huge hill,
Cragged and steep, Truth stands, and he that will
Reach her, about must and about must go,
And what the hill’s suddenness resists, win so.
‘Go on,’ said Peter quietly when she paused.
Yet strive so that before age, death’s twilight,
Thy soul rest, for none can work in that night.
To will implies delay, therefore now do;
Hard deeds, the body’s pains; hard knowledge too
The mind’s endeavours reach, and mysteries
Are like the sun, dazzling, yet plain to all eyes.’
Peter was already sitting at his piano, and had lifted the lid. But when she stopped reading he went on, quoting softly by heart:
Keep th
e truth which thou hast found; men do not stand
In so ill case, that God hath with his hand
Sign’d kings’ blank charters to kill whom they hate;
Nor are we vicars, but hangmen to fate.
Harriet, with the book open on her knees, noticed a tiny misquotation on Peter’s lips.
‘It doesn’t say “nor are we vicars”,’ she pointed out. ‘It says “nor are they vicars”, It’s only kings who are being called hangmen to fate, not all of us.’
‘A hangman to fate is what I have often been,’ said Peter, ‘and if all goes well I am like to be such again.’ And with that he bent his head slightly, and began to play to her.
Well, thought Harriet without resentment, he is supposed to be playing to me, but actually he isn’t, he is playing to the soul of Bach.
‘Keeping the truth you have found?’ she said, when he finished the piece.
‘Any truth I have found includes you, Harriet,’ he said.
‘I do wonder,’ said Harriet to Peter over breakfast the following day, ‘what that necklace was like.’
‘I thought it had been described to you in tedious and elaborate detail,’ Peter said.
‘Not the eponymous Attenbury emeralds,’ said Harriet. ‘The original one. What sort of fit-up would look good with two large stones in it?’
‘One hanging below the other?’
‘Mmm,’ said Harriet. ‘Possible.’
Wimsey 014 - The Attenbury Emeralds Page 16