by Roy Vickers
That, of course, was the night of the murder, though, guilty or not, Henry could not have been any more aware of this than the Duke himself.
In seeing his nephew out, the Duke stopped in the hall by the picture of the third Duke of Maensborough. It might almost have been a portrait of Henry in Stuart period dress.
‘He was an old scoundrel, y’know,’ chuckled the Duke. ‘Lent Charles II money and blackmailed Nell Gwynne into making him do something about the canals. Brought coal to London on a big scale – father of the industry – took his duty seriously in his own way. Charles got his own back by planting one of his ex-mistresses on him as a wife. Most unsuitable marriage, but it only lasted three weeks. The old villain got himself up as a highwayman and scuppered her.’ He patted the frame affectionately. ‘I’m writing his biography. I say, Henry, if this marriage comes off I shall have to cut off your income. Unsuitable marriage – definitely mentioned in the deed. But, of course, you can draw on me. I’ll fix something with your bank if the worst comes to the worst. But we’ll see whether I can do anything on Friday night.’
Chapter Four
On Friday night the Duke actually did nothing – which was Nelly’s fault rather than his. Normally, she had one bottle of stout after her ‘turn’. To-night this was supplemented with a couple of whiskies.
‘I was rotten to-night,’ she told Henry, who was waiting for her in the flat. ‘It’s these jools. Brought me bad luck, same as I said they would. As I got out of the taxi I saw a man slip into that sort of alleyway – you know, by the stage door – “Lone Jim” they call him because he always works by himself. And they say he was the one who did in that old girl at Highgate, strangled her with a bootlace, and then took her diamonds. And between you and I, Henry, he used to be Aggie’s fancy man. If Aggie’s been talking about those jools I’ll break her blasted neck.’
Henry disentangled it. Aggie was the dresser.
‘Did you tell Aggie they were the Brendon jewels?’
‘I may have mentioned it. And if you can’t mention a thing like that to your very own dresser, who can you mention it to? I want you to take ’em back, Henry. This minute.’ She put the collar into his hand, thrust the tiara into one of his pockets and the star and bracelet into another.
Henry went to his room, where a modern suitcase and an old fashioned portmanteau of a rich, mellow brown, stood packed in readiness for him to take to Maensborough. He unlocked the portmanteau, unstrapped it, put the jewels inside, then re-locked and re-strapped it. In the meantime Nelly was seeking to restore her nerve with a liberal gin and orange.
She had a second gin and orange when the Duke arrived, which, for a normally abstemious woman, was a great deal. It meant that she spent her last hour of life in a state of fuddled excitement. She received the Duke self-consciously, addressed him as ‘your Grace’ and asked him if he would ‘partake of supper’. Then she dropped that sort of thing, adopted him as an uncle and kept him in roars of laughter until she became maudlin.
‘Now listen to me, Uncle – I should say Duke, begging your pardon. Maybe you’ve been thinking about Henry and me. Well, I know what’s what – always have. Ask Henry if I haven’t. Why, look at that picture over there of him doing his act! Cost me forty quid and worth it. That’ll show you I wouldn’t disgrace him for the world.’
The Duke murmured assurances. It would have been useless to attempt a serious conversation with her.
‘It’s a lovely picture!’ enthused Nelly. ‘Shows you what’s what. Come and look at it, Uncle. It’ll make you feel better.’
She importuned him to an examination of the ridiculous picture at close quarters. She put her hand on a corner of the frame – no doubt with more weight than she intended, for the picture crashed.
Henry came to the rescue, shuffled the broken glass on to the skirting board, stood the picture flush with the wall. As the Duke moved away, he caught his foot in the wire and nearly tripped. Henry jerked the second staple from the back of the frame and was coiling the wire round his hand when the Duke said:
‘I think we’ll have to make a move, Henry. It’s past midnight and the drive takes nearly an hour. Can you get Marples up to take your luggage?’
‘I can ring him from the hall. I’ll bring my stuff out for him.’
‘And ask Service to come up and clear the supper things,’ put in Nelly.
On the house telephone in the hall, Henry told the porter to ask the Duke of Maensborough’s chauffeur to come up to the flat.
‘The chauffeur won’t want to leave his car, my lord. The police’ve been making a fuss about parking around here. I’ll be up meself in a couple o’ minutes.’
Henry thanked him and replaced the receiver. He did not ask Service to come up and clear the supper things. In the witness box he told Counsel that he forgot. Counsel preferred to believe that, as he intended to murder Nelly before he left the flat, he did not want Service to find the body too soon. But Counsel, of course, did not know what happened in the few minutes that followed Henry’s order to the porter.
Having replaced the receiver of the hall telephone he went to his room. But he found the door locked on the inside, so that he could not enter it from the hall.
He tried Nelly’s door, which was also locked. He went into the bathroom and through it into Nelly’s room, which he found in some disorder. Two drawers had been emptied onto the floor. A third drawer was open. Without touching anything, he went through the communicating door, which was open.
In his own room the portmanteau was gaping and he could see at once that the Brendon jewels had been taken. Nelly herself had not left the sitting-room. He remembered Nelly’s rambling about a jewel thief called Lone Jim.
His first thought was to telephone the police – his second was to close the portmanteau. Then he noticed that the straps had been cut instead of being unbuckled, and guessed that this was to avoid leaving finger-prints which would be difficult to rub out after the complicated process of unbuckling. From under the bed he dragged another portmanteau. This one had never mellowed like the other – it was still a harsh yellow. He intended to transfer the contents. But the yellow portmanteau was full of spare military kit.
Those cut straps had taught him something. He went into the bathroom, held his hands under a tap, then, while his hands were still dripping, transferred the straps. He put the lengths of cut strap through the slots of the yellow portmanteau containing his military kit, which he left in the middle of the room.
Then he strapped the mellow brown portmanteau containing his clothing and locked it, since the lock had not been damaged by whatever treatment it had received.
He left Nelly’s outer door locked. When he unlocked and opened the door of his own room, the porter was already in the flat. Nelly was standing by the outer door, one hand on the latch. The Duke, near her, was murmuring that he had had an extremely pleasant evening.
The porter took Henry’s luggage, preceded the party to the lift, a dozen feet along the landing.
‘Well, good-bye, Miss Hyde – or may I say good night, Nelly – and thanks again.’
‘Good night, Duke. Drop in any time you’re passing. S’long, Henry. I’ll try to be good till you come back next Friday.’ She lifted her face to be kissed. The Duke turned his back.
A few seconds later the Duke heard his nephew say: ‘All right, dear. I’ll shut the door.’
Then his nephew joined him and together they strolled to the lift, where the porter was waiting.
‘Between the Duke turning his back on you, Lord Brendon, and your joining him in the corridor, how much time elapsed?’
‘I don’t know.’ Henry seemed to be visualizing the scene. After a long pause he added: ‘At a guess, about ten to fifteen seconds.’
‘Ten to fifteen seconds!’ repeated Counsel. ‘In the late war, Lord Brendon, did you obtain your promotion by strangling a German sentry, thereby enabling your men to surprise a machine-gun post?’
‘No.’ With that frank
ness which at times seemed like sheer lunacy, Henry added: ‘But I see the drift of your question. During my period of training I was taught how to strangle a man quickly so that he would not be able to cry out.’
Counsel scowled. Brendon was throwing his own case away, giving Counsel no chance to shine.
‘By the method which you learnt as a soldier, Lord Brendon, how long would it take to strangle – let us say – a man, with – let us say – a length of picture wire?’
‘You could do it in a second or so, or not at all,’ answered Henry.
‘Thank you, Lord Brendon. I need trouble you no further.’ Counsel sat down. It was now five-thirty and the Judge adjourned to the following day. The reporters were already transmitting the copy which was to mislead the public into the belief that Brendon would not only lose his case but would inevitably be brought to trial for the murder and convicted. A shudder went round exalted circles, for the Duke of Maensborough was deeply committed. A dukedom is serious. No dukedom has ever been bought, nor even conferred for distinguished service since Wellesley was made Duke of Wellington for his share in the defeat of Napoleon.
In the corridor, Counsel told the cotton-broker that he thought it would be all right ‘bar accidents’ – in ignorance that the accident was at that moment in course of occurrence. Back in his chambers, Counsel meditated on the speech to the jury he would make on the following day. The speech, as a speech, would be fool-proof. Brendon could have strangled the girl in silence and laid her behind the door and would still have had five or six seconds in hand. The stale old trick of stealing his own jewels – the stale crudity of it – would be worked up. They were not even ordinary jewels, for they were entailed to the earldom of Brendon. No jewel thief would be such a fathead as to steal them. They would be itemized in the standard reference books. If some bungler had taken them, the fence would refuse to deal – which meant that the fence would at once tip off the police.
At six-fifteen that evening a junior Scotland Yard man, with whom he maintained friendly relations, burst into Counsel’s rooms.
‘You’re unlucky this time, Mr Manders! Lone Jim has been pinched at Southampton with the Brendon jewels in his possession – all, that is, but for two diamonds missing from the collar.’
Lone Jim pleaded guilty to the theft of the jewels, but not guilty to the murder. He had entered the flat by the fire escape, he asserted, at eleven-twenty, and had left it by eleven-thirty-five. After looking in Miss Hyde’s room and pulling out all the drawers, he had found the jewels in the adjoining room inside a locked portmanteau of which he had cut the straps and turned the lock with a skeleton key. He knew nothing of the two diamonds missing from the collar.
Lone Jim’s counsel emphasized that it was true that in Nelly Hyde’s room all the drawers had been pulled out, true that there was a portmanteau in the adjoining room, true that the straps had been cut. But in attempting to build up his client’s truthfulness he tripped, as it were, over those two missing diamonds.
Prosecuting Counsel has admitted in his memoirs that he was puzzled by those two missing diamonds. They had no relevance to the charge of theft. Feeling that they might have some round-about bearing on the murder he rattled them about in cross-examination.
‘You want the jury to believe that you are putting all your cards on the table, but you are parrying my question as to what you did with those two missing diamonds. I ask you –’
‘I’ve told you I didn’t do anything with ’em. They weren’t in the collar when I pinched it. I noticed they were missing as soon as I got home.’
‘You have heard the evidence of Lord Brendon and of Agnes Cope, the dresser. That collar had its full complement of diamonds as late as eleven o’clock. You assert that you stole the jewels some half an hour later. Do you ask the jury to believe that, in something less than half an hour, some other jewel thief entered that flat and contented himself with prising off two of the diamonds – when he might have taken the lot?’
Prisoner did not answer. Counsel had dazed him – and knew that he had made a tactical mistake in doing so. Something like a wave of sympathy for the prisoner swept over the court, carrying the impression that the prisoner was, after all, telling the truth – an impression strengthened by his outburst as he left the witness box. The descriptive reporters said that he looked more like a gutter sneak thief than a jewel robber, that he was cringing as if he had been physically pummelled.
‘You done what you’re paid to do and I know what’s coming to me,’ he shouted at Prosecuting Counsel. ‘All the same, since I been in that there witness box I haven’t uttered a word of a lie.’
Even some of the police representatives thought that this might get him off the murder charge. They were holding in reserve an indictment for the robbery and murder of an elderly lady at Highgate. But this was never used. Lone Jim was unable to produce any witness or any circumstantial evidence to rebut the contention of the Prosecution that he must have entered the flat later than midnight – that is, after Brendon and Maensborough had left it. The judge summed up against him and he was convicted of the murder of Nelly Hyde and in due course hanged.
Chapter Five
Aristocracy throughout the world sighed with relief. The Order was no longer in peril of public contempt. The pendulum swung heavily in Lord Brendon’s favour. His damaging admissions in the witness box were recognized as the uncalculating honesty of an innocent man. His generous waiver of damages against the cotton-broker proved him a sportsman. The impropriety of living with Nelly without benefit of clergy was slurred over. His reckless behaviour with the jewels was not mentioned. He retained his commission in the Guards and his hereditary footing in what is vaguely described as the highest circles.
For a year he lived very quietly. Actually he was mourning Nelly, though many maintain that this is incredible. A couple of years after the execution of Lone Jim for the murder of Nelly Hyde, Henry became engaged to Lady Aileen Jarroman, a delightful unspoilt girl of twenty-five whose father, Canon the Earl of Doucester, was a more or less impecunious country parson. They were married in June at St Margaret’s, Westminster, and went for a three months’ honeymoon in Europe.
In the meantime, contrary to poor Nelly’s prediction, the talkies had virtually assassinated the old music-halls – a fact which had a catastrophic effect upon the lives of the Earl and Countess of Brendon, though neither had ever witnessed a film.
In August, 1931, a West End pawnbroker rang up Scotland Yard. A rather seedy woman, giving the name of Agnes Cope, had asked for a loan of one hundred pounds on two diamonds of the first water. The pawnbroker had detained the diamonds on a pretext.
Scotland Yard found the name and address genuine. The woman was a respectable theatrical dresser, whose last employer of any note had been the late Nelly Hyde. As the two diamonds missing from the Brendon collar had never been found, the dossier had gone to Dead Ends. Inspector Rason lost no time in calling on Agnes Cope, who protested that she could not understand what all the fuss was about.
‘I can’t show a receipt for ’em, but that doesn’t mean I’ve stolen them. I’ve had them a long time and never meant to part with them and wouldn’t have done if it hadn’t been for these talking films upsetting things so.’
‘Yes. Bit rough on the old timers, I must say. But progress and all that, you know! The one thing I want you to tell me, Aggie, is when Lone Jim gave them to you.’
‘He didn’t give them to me! He never gave me anything in his life.’ Then as if she were too tired for further invention: ‘I lent him forty quid on them.’
‘When?’
‘A month to the day after poor Nelly was done in. He had tried to sell those two diamonds, but no one would buy. He was desperate and he came to me.’
‘So you received them knowing they were part of the Brendon jewels with a murder tied on to them? That looks bad for you, Aggie.’
‘Not if you look at it straight, it doesn’t. I thought Brendon had murdered poor Nelly and p
inched his own jewels – same as you clever detective gentlemen thought. All the same, I did ask Jim straight out if they were part of the Brendon jewels, as I had a special reason for thinking they might be. But he told me they were not.’
‘And you believed him, Aggie? A month after the robbery?’
‘Yes, I believed him – and I still do.’ She added: ‘He was such a liar that you could always tell when he was telling the truth.’
Rason discounted that and harked back. ‘What was your special reason for suspecting they might be the Brendon diamonds?’ he asked.
Her answer was rambling and full of personalities. In his report, Rason compressed it, but faithfully preserved the essentials.
‘Nelly had been sort of worked up and nervy for a long time, as she knew she wasn’t getting over so well as she used to. Well, the last night of her life, poor thing, just as she was coming to the theatre she saw Jim skulking about and it frightened her. She wore the jewels in her first turn and when she came back into the dressing-room for a quick change she says: “I nearly got the bird just now – it’s these jewels – they’re unlucky.” It was the first time I’d ever seen her really nervous. While I took her dress off, she undid the jewels and she dropped the collar – not on the rug but on the parquet flooring, which is hard. We left it there while I finished changing her. When she’d gone, I picked it up, and I saw that two of the settings had been damaged. I tried ’em with my fingers. The diamonds moved a little but wouldn’t come out. So I left them. When she’d finished I says “Nelly, my dear,” I says, “you give those diamonds back to Lord Brendon the very moment you set eyes on him,” I says, “and tell him to have his jeweller run over the settings, else you’ll get trouble and plenty of it,” I says. But she must’ve forgotten until he’d gone and then put ’em in his bag – which was the sort of silly thing she would do, poor darling!’