Trickery

by Roald Dahl

  Robert and Betty Sandy stood on the edge of it all, speechless with horror. At last Robert said, ‘I imagine our lovely diamond is somewhere underneath all that.’

  ‘I don’t give a damn about our diamond,’ Betty said. ‘I’d like to kill the people who did this.’

  ‘So would I,’ Robert said. ‘I’ve got to call the police.’ He went back into the sitting-room and picked up the telephone. By some miracle it still worked.

  The first squad car arrived in a few minutes. It was followed over the next half-hour by a police inspector, a couple of plain-clothes men, a finger-print expert and a photographer.

  The Inspector had a black moustache and a short muscular body. ‘These are not professional thieves,’ he told Robert Sandy after he had taken a look round. ‘They weren’t even amateur thieves. They were simply hooligans off the street. Riff-raff. Yobbos. Probably three of them. People like this scout around looking for an empty house and when they find it they break in and the first thing they do is to hunt out the booze. Did you have much alcohol on the premises?’

  ‘The usual stuff,’ Robert said. ‘Whisky, gin, vodka, sherry and a few cans of beer.’

  ‘They’ll have drunk the lot,’ the Inspector said. ‘Lads like these have only two things in mind, drink and destruction. They collect all the booze on to a table and sit down and drink themselves raving mad. Then they go on the rampage.’

  ‘You mean they didn’t come in here to steal?’ Robert asked.

  ‘I doubt they’ve stolen anything at all,’ the Inspector said. ‘If they’d been thieves they would at least have taken your TV set. Instead, they smashed it up.’

  ‘But why do they do this?’

  ‘You’d better ask their parents,’ the Inspector said. ‘They’re rubbish, that’s all they are, just rubbish. People aren’t brought up right any more these days.’

  Then Robert told the Inspector about the diamond. He gave him all the details from the beginning to end because he realized that from the police point of view it was likely to be the most important part of the whole business.

  ‘Half a million quid!’ cried the Inspector. ‘Jesus Christ!’

  ‘Probably double that,’ Robert said.

  ‘Then that’s the first thing we look for,’ the Inspector said.

  ‘I personally do not propose to go down on my hands and knees grubbing around in that pile of slush,’ Robert said. ‘I don’t feel like it at this moment.’

  ‘Leave it to us,’ the Inspector said. ‘We’ll find it. That was a clever place to hide it.’

  ‘My wife thought of it. But tell me, Inspector, if by some remote chance they had found it …’

  ‘Impossible,’ the Inspector said. ‘How could they?’

  ‘They might have seen it lying on the floor after the ice had melted,’ Robert said. ‘I agree it’s unlikely. But if they had spotted it, would they have taken it?’

  ‘I think they would,’ the Inspector said. ‘No one can resist a diamond. It has a sort of magnetism about it. Yes, if one of them had seen it on the floor, I think he would have slipped it into his pocket. But don’t worry about it, doctor. It’ll turn up.’

  ‘I’m not worrying about it,’ Robert said. ‘Right now, I’m worrying about my wife and about our house. My wife spent years trying to make this place into a good home.’

  ‘Now look, sir,’ the Inspector said, ‘the thing for you to do tonight is to take your wife off to a hotel and get some rest. Come back tomorrow, both of you, and we’ll start sorting things out. There’ll be someone here all the time looking after the house.’

  ‘I have to operate at the hospital first thing in the morning,’ Robert said. ‘But I expect my wife will try to come along.’

  ‘Good,’ the Inspector said. ‘It’s a nasty upsetting business having your house ripped apart like this. It’s a big shock. I’ve seen it many times. It hits you very hard.’

  Robert and Betty Sandy stayed the night at Oxford’s Randolph Hotel, and by eight o’clock the following morning Robert was in the Operating Theatre at the hospital, beginning to work his way through his morning list.

  Shortly after noon, Robert had finished his last operation, a straightforward non-malignant prostate on an elderly male. He removed his rubber gloves and mask and went next door to the surgeons’ small rest-room for a cup of coffee. But before he got his coffee, he picked up the telephone and called his wife.

  ‘How are you, darling?’ he said.

  ‘Oh Robert, it’s so awful,’ she said. ‘I just don’t know where to begin.’

  ‘Have you called the insurance company?’

  ‘Yes, they’re coming any moment to help me make a list.’

  ‘Good,’ he said. ‘And have the police found our diamond?’

  ‘I’m afraid not,’ she said. ‘They’ve been through every bit of that slush in the kitchen and they swear it’s not there.’

  ‘Then where can it have gone? Do you think the vandals found it?’

  ‘I suppose they must have,’ she said. ‘When they broke those ice-trays all the ice-cubes would have fallen out. They fall out when you just bend the tray. They’re meant to.’

  ‘They still wouldn’t have spotted it in the ice,’ Robert said.

  ‘They would when the ice melted,’ she said. ‘Those men must have been in the house for hours. Plenty of time for it to melt.’

  ‘I suppose you’re right.’

  ‘It would stick out a mile lying there on the floor,’ she said, ‘the way it shines.’

  ‘Oh dear,’ Robert said.

  ‘If we never get it back we won’t miss it much anyway, darling,’ she said. ‘We only had it a few hours.’

  ‘I agree,’ he said. ‘Do the police have any leads on who the vandals were?’

  ‘Not a clue,’ she said. ‘They found lots of finger-prints, but they don’t seem to belong to any known criminals.’

  ‘They wouldn’t,’ he said, ‘not if they were hooligans off the street.’

  ‘That’s what the Inspector said.’

  ‘Look, darling,’ he said, ‘I’ve just about finished here for the morning. I’m going to grab some coffee, then I’ll come home to give you a hand.’

  ‘Good,’ she said. ‘I need you, Robert. I need you badly.’

  ‘Just give me five minutes to rest my feet,’ he said, ‘I feel exhausted.’

  In Number Two Operating Theatre not ten yards away, another senior surgeon called Brian Goff was also nearly finished for the morning. He was on his last patient, a young man who had a piece of bone lodged somewhere in his small intestine. Goff was being assisted by a rather jolly young registrar named William Haddock, and between them they had opened the patient’s abdomen and Goff was lifting out a section of the small intestine and feeling along it with his fingers. It was routine stuff and there was a good deal of conversation going on in the room.

  ‘Did I ever tell you about the man who had lots of little live fish in his bladder?’ William Haddock was saying.

  ‘I don’t think you did,’ Goff said.

  ‘When we were students at Barts,’ William Haddock said, ‘we were being taught by a particularly unpleasant Professor of Urology. One day, this twit was going to demonstrate how to examine the bladder using a cystoscope. The patient was an old man suspected of having stones. Well now, in one of the hospital waiting-rooms, there was an aquarium that was full of those tiny little fish, neons they’re called, brilliant colours, and one of the students sucked up about twenty of them into a syringe and managed to inject them into the patient’s bladder when he was under his pre-med, before he was taken up to Theatre for his cystoscopy.’

  ‘That’s disgusting!’ the theatre sister cried. ‘You can stop right there, Mr Haddock!’

  Brian Goff smiled behind his mask and said, ‘What happened next?’ As he spoke, he had about three feet of the patient’s small intestine lying on the green sterile sheet, and he was still feeling along it with his fingers.

  ‘When the Prof
essor got the cystoscope into the bladder and put his eye to it,’ William Haddock said, ‘he started jumping up and down and shouting with excitement.

  ‘ “What is it, sir?” the guilty student asked him. “What do you see?”

  ‘ “It’s fish!” cried the Professor. “There’s hundreds of little fish! They’re swimming about!” ’

  ‘You made it up,’ the theatre sister said. ‘It’s not true.’

  ‘It most certainly is true,’ the Registrar said. ‘I looked down the cystoscope myself and saw the fish. And they were actually swimming about.’

  ‘We might have expected a fishy story from a man with a name like Haddock,’ Goff said. ‘Here we are,’ he added. ‘Here’s this poor chap’s trouble. You want to feel it?’

  William Haddock took the pale grey piece of intestine between his fingers and pressed. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Got it.’

  ‘And if you look just there,’ Goff said, instructing him, ‘you can see where the bit of bone has punctured the mucosa. It’s already inflamed.’

  Brian Goff held the section of intestine in the palm of his left hand. The sister handed him a scalpel and he made a small incision. The sister gave him a pair of forceps and Goff probed down among all the slushy matter of the intestine until he found the offending object. He brought it out, held firmly in the forceps, and dropped it into the small stainless-steel bowl the sister was holding. The thing was covered in pale brown gunge.

  ‘That’s it,’ Goff said. ‘You can finish this one for me now, can’t you, William. I was meant to be at a meeting downstairs fifteen minutes ago.’

  ‘You go ahead,’ William Haddock said. ‘I’ll close him up.’

  The senior surgeon hurried out of the Theatre and the Registrar proceeded to sew up, first the incision in the intestine, then the abdomen itself. The whole thing took no more than a few minutes.

  ‘I’m finished,’ he said to the anaesthetist.

  The man nodded and removed the mask from the patient’s face.

  ‘Thank you, sister,’ William Haddock said. ‘See you tomorrow.’ As he moved away, he picked up from the sister’s tray the stainless-steel bowl that contained the gunge-covered brown object. ‘Ten to one it’s a chicken bone,’ he said and he carried it to the sink and began rinsing it under the tap.

  ‘Good God, what’s this?’ he cried. ‘Come and look, sister!’

  The sister came over to look. ‘It’s a piece of costume jewellery,’ she said. ‘Probably part of a necklace. Now how on earth did he come to swallow that?’

  ‘He’d have passed it if it hadn’t had such a sharp point,’ William Haddock said. ‘I think I’ll give it to my girlfriend.’

  ‘You can’t do that, Mr Haddock,’ the sister said. ‘It belongs to the patient. Hang on a sec. Let me look at it again.’ She took the stone from William Haddock’s gloved hand and carried it into the powerful light that hung over the operating table. The patient had now been lifted off the table and was being wheeled out into Recovery next door, accompanied by the anaesthetist.

  ‘Come here, Mr Haddock,’ the sister said, and there was an edge of excitement in her voice. William Haddock joined her under the light. ‘This is amazing,’ she went on. ‘Just look at the way it sparkles and shines. A bit of glass wouldn’t do that.’

  ‘Maybe it’s rock-crystal,’ William Haddock said, ‘or topaz, one of those semi-precious stones.’

  ‘You know what I think,’ the sister said. ‘I think it’s a diamond.’

  ‘Don’t be damn silly,’ William Haddock said.

  A junior nurse was wheeling away the instrument trolley and a male theatre assistant was helping to clear up. Neither of them took any notice of the young surgeon and the sister. The sister was about twenty-eight years old, and now that she had removed her mask she appeared as an extremely attractive young lady.

  ‘It’s easy enough to test it,’ William Haddock said. ‘See if it cuts glass.’

  Together they crossed over to the frosted-glass window of the operating-room. The sister held the stone between finger and thumb and pressed the sharp pointed end against the glass and drew it downward. There was a fierce scraping crunch as the point bit into the glass and left a deep line two inches long.

  ‘Jesus Christ!’ William Haddock said. ‘It is a diamond!’

  ‘If it is, it belongs to the patient,’ the sister said firmly.

  ‘Maybe it does,’ William Haddock said, ‘but he was mighty glad to get rid of it. Hold on a moment. Where are his notes?’ He hurried over to the side table and picked up a folder which said on it john diggs. He opened the folder. In it there was an X-ray of the patient’s intestine accompanied by the radiologist’s report. John Diggs, the report said. Age 17. Address 123 Mayfield Road, Oxford. There is clearly a large obstruction of some sort in the upper small intestine. The patient has no recollection of swallowing anything unusual, but says that he ate some fried chicken on Sunday evening. The object clearly has a sharp point that has pierced the mucosa of the intestine, and it could be a piece of bone …

  ‘How could he swallow a thing like that without knowing it?’ William Haddock said.

  ‘It doesn’t make sense,’ the sister said.

  ‘There’s no question it’s a diamond after the way it cut the glass,’ William Haddock said. ‘Do you agree?’

  ‘Absolutely,’ the sister said.

  ‘And a bloody big one at that,’ Haddock said. ‘The question is, how good a diamond is it? How much is it worth?’

  ‘We’d better send it to the lab right away,’ the sister said.

  ‘To hell with the lab,’ Haddock said. ‘Let’s have a bit of fun and do it ourselves.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘We’ll take it to Gold’s, the jeweller’s in The High. They’ll know. The damn thing must be worth a fortune. We’re not going to steal it, but we’re damn well going to find out about it. Are you game?’

  ‘Do you know anyone at Gold’s?’ the sister said.

  ‘No, but that doesn’t matter. Do you have a car?’

  ‘My Mini’s in the car park.’

  ‘Right. Get changed. I’ll meet you out there. It’s about your lunch time anyway. I’ll take the stone.’

  Twenty minutes later, at a quarter to one, the little Mini pulled up outside the jewellery shop of H. F. Gold and parked on the double-yellow lines. ‘Who cares,’ William Haddock said. ‘We won’t be long.’ He and the sister went into the shop.

  There were two customers inside, a young man and a girl. They were examining a tray of rings and were being served by the woman assistant. As soon as they came in, the assistant pressed a bell under the counter and Harry Gold emerged through the door at the back. ‘Yes,’ he said to William Haddock and the sister. ‘Can I help you?’

  ‘Would you mind telling us what this is worth?’ William Haddock said, placing the stone on a piece of green cloth that lay on the counter.

  Harry Gold stopped dead. He stared at the stone. Then he looked up at the young man and woman who stood before him. He was thinking very fast. Steady now, he told himself. Don’t do anything silly. Act natural.

  ‘Well well,’ he said as casually as he could. ‘That looks to me like a very fine diamond, a very fine diamond indeed. Would you mind waiting a moment while I weigh it and examine it carefully in my office? Then perhaps I’ll be able to give you an accurate valuation. Do sit down, both of you.’

  Harry Gold scuttled back into his office with the diamond in his hand. Immediately, he took it to the electronic scale and weighed it. Fifteen point two seven carats. That was exactly the weight of Mr Robert Sandy’s stone! He had been certain it was the same one the moment he saw it. Who could mistake a diamond like that? And now the weight had proved it. His instinct was to call the police right away, but he was a cautious man who did not like making mistakes. Perhaps the doctor had already sold his diamond. Perhaps he had given it to his children. Who knows?

  Quickly he picked up the Oxford telephone book. The Radcliffe Infi
rmary was Oxford 249891. He dialled it. He asked for Mr Robert Sandy. He got Robert’s secretary. He told her it was most urgent that he speak to Mr Sandy this instant. The secretary said, ‘Hold on, please.’ She called the Operating Theatre. Mr Sandy had gone home half an hour ago, they told her. She took up the outside phone and relayed this information to Mr Gold.

  ‘What’s his home number?’ Mr Gold asked her.

  ‘Is this to do with a patient?’

  ‘No!’ cried Harry Gold. ‘It’s to do with a robbery! For heaven’s sake, woman, give me that number quickly!’

  ‘Who is speaking, please?’

  ‘Harry Gold! I’m the jeweller in The High! Don’t waste time, I beg you!’

  She gave him the number.

  Harry Gold dialled again.

  ‘Mr Sandy?’

  ‘Speaking.’

  ‘This is Harry Gold, Mr Sandy, the jeweller. Have you by any chance lost your diamond?’