‘I just can’t. My father must never find out about this.’
‘I find that unlikely, but we may be able to resolve matters for you. If we are not fortunate enough to be able to do that, though, then you will have to call in the police.’
‘Then, heaven help me.’
Chapter Four
The next morning, the one before the dinner/dance, there was a light sprinkling of snow; not enough to hamper road traffic, but sufficient to give the old shop-fronts of the town a delightfully Dickensian air. Its district council was old-fashioned when it came to traditional celebrations and, instead of Slade and Shakin’ Stevens blaring out at Christmas shoppers, the sound of old-fashioned carols floated across the cold morning air.
Holmes breezed in with his face glowing from the low temperature, as he had not been able to park nearby, early customers to the retail establishments having bagged all the convenient spaces. ‘Come along, Garden,’ he exhorted his partner, sitting listlessly at his desk. ‘We’ve got a house and shop to search for clues. This won’t get the baby bathed.’
Garden brightened, as he had momentarily forgotten about this prospect, and was thinking, instead, about a parcel he was expecting imminently. He shot upstairs for his coat, but stopped on the way out to have a word with his mother. ‘Doesn’t the big tree look beautiful,’ he declared, as he and Holmes exited, walking to Messrs Adolphus Fredericks and Son, jewellers, gold and silver bought.
The bell pinged as they entered the premises, and young Roderick looked across the counter at them. ‘Do you want to look at the case I took the pieces home in?’ he asked eagerly.
‘You have it here? Did you wear gloves when you brought it back?’ asked Holmes, completely oblivious to the fact that the locum jeweller hadn’t even bothered with the niceties of exchanging greetings.
‘I didn’t think about it,’ replied the young man, his shoulders sinking at this further display of his incompetence.
‘Let the dog see the rabbit,’ said Holmes with a sigh of frustration, and then had to explain the remark before he and Garden followed, as the young man put the lock on the door and led them into a back room.
Holmes got out his fingerprint powder from what Garden thought of as his partner’s Fisher-Price detectives’ kit, and blew some on to the surface of the metal attaché case. Taking a magnifying glass from his beloved bag, he examined the powder-encrusted areas and declared, ‘It looks like just one set of prints, which I presume will prove to be yours.’
‘Sorry.’
‘Would you mind putting your fingers on to this?’ asked the scary man with the moustache, as he handed the younger man a sheet of glass which he had just withdrawn from an unmarked envelope.
Roderick did as requested and handed back the now smudged sheet of glass to Holmes, who took his magnifying glass to it. He sighed. ‘Yes they look identical to me. Young man, you have been more than careless and foolish.’
‘I know.’
‘May we have the keys to your home, if it’s not too much trouble?’ Garden had been listening silently, and knew his partner was feeling defeated, because of his sarcasm.
‘Twenty-three Acacia Crescent,’ intoned Roderick, hopelessly, as he handed over a bunch of keys.
‘And when will your father be back from his holiday?’ asked Holmes, anxious to know how much time they might have to find the jewels.
‘Evening of the twenty-seventh,’ replied the son in a sad monotone, envisaging his eventual fall from grace.
Holmes harrumphed, pulled himself up to his full height – five feet eight inches – and marched out of the premises with a determined air about him, Garden in his wake, not sure how his partner would pull off success in this case.
Chapter Five
Roderick Fredericks’ family home turned out to be a large detached Edwardian villa eminently suitable to a family of jewellers three generations in the business.
There were no broken window panes; in fact, the whole place, as expected, was double-, if not triple-glazed. There were no signs of the front door having been forced or any marks around the lock, to indicate that a screw-driver had been used to gain entry.
It was a similar case at the kitchen door and those leading in from the patio. ‘If whoever it was wasn’t admitted by that young man, then it must be someone with their own set of keys,’ stated Garden emphatically.
‘You don’t suppose that young jackanapes is working an insurance scam, do you?’ Holmes was a very suspicious person, and would suspect anyone if they crossed his mind.
‘He seemed too genuinely upset and distressed for that to be the case,’ opined Garden, thinking back to when the young man had entered their offices.
‘It would be a bold move, but typical of the youth of today,’ quoth the old fogey.
‘I see there’s no CCTV on the house,’ commented Garden.
‘More of a reason to suspect this young man, then.’
‘I think you’re barking up the wrong tree there, Holmes.’
‘Well, let’s go in, and you can give me your feelings about the circumstances so far,’ he replied.
As they let themselves in at the front door, Garden said, ‘I think we need the names and addresses of the friends Fredericks went out with on the evening of the disappearance of the jewellery, and the names and addresses of anyone else who has keys to the property.’
‘If you think that necessary.’ Holmes simply wasn’t going along with this idea now he had his mind set.
‘At least appear to play the game, there’s a good chap. If you can expose young Roderick as a jewel thief, all well and good; but if it’s all down to someone else, then you need to solve this satisfactorily for the reputation of the business.’
Holmes gave another deep sigh. ‘If you say so, Garden.’
After a vague wander round, the two self-styled detectives realised that they had no idea what they were looking for, and settled for checking the front door for fingerprints, of which there was a great profusion. ‘We really don’t know what we’re doing, do we?’ asked Garden in a defeated voice.
‘Nonsense. We’ll get to the bottom of this case, you’ll see, my boy. We’ve got until the evening of the twenty-seventh; that’s ages away.’
‘And all the time the jewels get further and further down a fencing chain,’ stated Garden in a doleful voice. ‘We’ll be ridiculed.’
‘Nonsense. Give that young man a ring and ask him who has keys to this property, and for contact numbers for all the friends who accompanied him on his clubbing trip.’ Holmes certainly didn’t feel downbeat.
‘And we’ll have to visit all the local pawnbrokers after we’ve got descriptions of the missing pieces,’ added Garden, now feeling that with the application of diligence and a thorough examination of all the facts, they could be successful after all.
Provided with a string of phone numbers and an address for the cleaning woman, they set off in Holmes’ new(ish) car to talk to the cleaning lady. It was a car that actually talked to the driver, and of which Holmes was rather proud. Part of its charm was the SatNav, which he could use to get to unfamiliar addresses on cases, instead of getting hopelessly lost, as he was totally incapable of drawing up internet maps, and he now provided it with the address for Mrs Addison.
‘Thirteen Mons Avenue,’ he pronounced.
‘Please repeat instruction,’ was thrown back at him.
‘Thir-teen Mons Av-en-ue,’ he repeated carefully.
‘Phoning office,’ the car replied.
His mouth dropping open, Holmes uttered a word that barely passed his lips, even in private. ‘Bollocks!’ he exclaimed.
‘Door locks,’ replied the car.
‘I think it would help if you actually selected SatNav,’ suggested Garden and, as the phone rang on The High in Hamsley Black Cross and Shirley answered, he repeated all the contact numbers for his mother to check, whilst they went in search of the Fredericks’ cleaner. That would certainly kill two birds with one stone.
As he drove smugly up Mons Avenue, they recognised the just post-First World War architecture and the covering-up of the cracks in the terraced housing with pebbledash. As Holmes braked in front of number thirteen, both of them registered various facts about its exterior. On exiting the car, it was obvious that the lawn had not received its last cut of the season, but that the hedge that peeped over its short front wall was tidily clipped and, although its front door could do with a good coat of fresh paint, the net curtains were white and had been ironed, rather than just washed and hung up again.
‘It would seem that our Mrs Addison may not be able to wield a paintbrush or lawnmower, but she is perfectly able to use shears and an iron,’ commented Garden, feeling rather in Conan Doyle mode.
‘She may have a daughter, and she is not “our” Mrs Addison,’ retorted Holmes, his mood instantly soured by Garden’s deductive powers. ‘She may be an absolute slattern.’
‘She’s a cleaner, Holmes. How unlikely is that to be?’
‘We shall see,’ his employer replied darkly, and rapped sharply on the door knocker, for there was no bell.
After a further two knocks, Garden approached the front window and tried to see through the nets, but the only thing he could discern was the fact that no tree lights twinkled inside the room on the other side of them. ‘Looks like there’s no one at home.’
‘Probably hiding upstairs,’ grunted Holmes.
‘Or gone away for Christmas,’ was Garden’s opinion. ‘Did you ask young Master Fredericks whether she was coming in to clean over the festive season?’
‘Stop going all Edwardian on me, and, no, I didn’t think of it. Do you want to phone him?’
Garden replied in the affirmative and punched out the shop’s number on his mobile, but Roderick could not help him in the slightest. ‘I don’t know what arrangements Dad made. Mrs Addison just comes and goes. If it’s one of my days off, I’m usually still in bed, and don’t even hear her. Otherwise, I’m at work when she comes in. Any arrangements she made for while Dad was away were between her and Dad. He didn’t say anything to me about her.’
‘Honestly,’ huffed Holmes when this news had been relayed to him. ‘It’s like boxing in the dark, isn’t it?’
‘So, what do you think?’
‘I think she has a criminal son who “borrowed” his mother’s keys and went in and half-inched all that jewellery and, is at this very moment, fencing it into the criminal fraternity of the area, or even further afield.’
‘God, what an imagination you have. You should be a writer,’ Garden told him in amazement. As they drove away, a squat grey-haired figure crawled out from behind the sofa and switched on the Christmas tree lights, which had been glowing away merrily until she had heard a car drive up. What had her Clive been up to now?
The car had to be parked well away from the offices again, and as they walked down The High towards their lair, Holmes commented on the fact that there had been the addition of a number of tiny presents to the town tree, which made it even more beautiful and eye-catching, and that it was a credit to the Retailers Association, which he had now paid a double annual fee for them to join.
When they arrived back at the office, Shirley informed her son that a parcel of some size had arrived for him in his absence, and that she had popped it up outside the flat door. With a whoop of excitement, he went rushing through to the back office and straight up the staircase. He could hardly contain himself.
Yes! It had come! Lovingly, he extracted from its packaging a jacket he had bought on eBay as a sort of Christmas present for Joanne. It had cost him a small fortune second-hand, but it had been worth every penny, he thought as he held it up to admire its beauty.
In his hands was a snow-white faux fur jacket liberally scattered with crystals, which sparkled where the winter sunlight caught them in the light from the window. Oh, how he wanted to wear it! How he wanted to parade in public in such a magnificent garment. Well, fat chance of that. He had nothing planned, so he’d just have to be content with wearing it around his flat, for now.
Chapter Six
The next day, Shirley Garden arrived quivering with nerves at the thought of her outing the next evening with the boss. He was a perfectly nice man, of course, and paid her wages, but she couldn’t perceive of him as a date. She just didn’t think of him like that, and had, in the past, managed to avoid any occasion on which they could be said to be ‘out together’.
Fortunately, the object of her anxiety didn’t spend a lot of time in the office, merely grabbing Garden, then making off for all the pawnbrokers in the area, the number of which had grown considerably over the past few years – there was even one in Hamsley Black Cross, and several in the winding streets of Farlington Market.
They began with Z. Scrivett, Pawnbroker, situated conveniently in The High, and immediately ran into a problem.
‘Good morning,’ Holmes greeted the elderly man behind the counter. ‘Do I have the pleasure of addressing Mr Scrivett?’ He was unfailingly polite, although he did not approve of such shops. ‘Pop Goes the Weasel’ had never been one of his favourite nursery songs.
‘Zachariah,’ the old man declared, holding out a hand. ‘And you are?’
‘Holmes and Garden, private investigators, sir. We are attempting to trace some jewellery that might have come into your hands within the last few days. May I ask if, er, um, patrons have brought anything of that ilk into this establishment?’
‘Why, yes, we’ve had quite a lot of sparkly stuff brought in recently. What exactly are you looking for?’ And therein lay the problem.
‘Well, we don’t exactly know. Garden, did that client give you a description of the jewellery we’re after?’
‘Sorry, no.’ Garden wanted a hole to open up beneath him, that it might swallow him whole, at this omission on their part.
‘Can you phone our, um, client, and ask if there is photographic evidence of what is missing for, perhaps, insurance purposes?’
Garden slipped outside and made a phone call to an establishment in the same street as they were now enquiring.
When he returned, it was with the information that all the items had been photographed, and that the photographs were in the possession of the legal owner of the pieces. ‘Do you think you could be so kind as to ring back our esteemed client and ask if we might be allowed copies of these photographs?’
Garden ducked outside again, once more punching in a number that was becoming increasingly familiar. On his second return he informed Holmes that if they would care to pay a call on their client, they would indeed be provided with photographs of the pieces that were missing.
‘Do excuse us, Mr, Zachariaher Scrivett. We’ll be back shortly.’ Holmes was definitely rattled at their omission.
Outside, Garden commented, ‘We’re not very good, are we?’
‘Just a matter of experience, old boy. We’ll get there,’ Holmes mumbled, heading for the jewellery shop and hoping that the eyes of Mr Zachariah Scrivett weren’t upon them.
The photographic evidence of the stolen jewellery had been retrieved from the interstices of the computer, and was waiting for them when they entered the shop. Garden’s breath was taken away by some of the items removed from a small provincial jeweller’s home and dreamed of the day when he might get even some good reproductions for Joanne.
‘My word, Mr Fredericks, you do carry some pricey stuff,’ commented Holmes, on being apprised of the value of the missing stock.
‘We have clients in the poshest bits of London, you know,’ smirked the irritating young man.
‘Well, thank you very much for these,’ said Garden, waving the copies of the photographs at the owner’s son, and they set out again for Mr Scrivett’s establishment, not eve
n considering that he might guess that their client wasn’t too far away at their hasty return.
Mr Scrivett smiled an oily smile at their return and, after inspecting the copies of the photographs, admitted that he had not received anything of the class of that sort of thing. ‘Unless these are paste,’ he added.
‘Not to our knowledge.’ Suddenly Holmes was indignant at such a suggestion.
‘Only asking. It’s getting increasingly hard to tell these days, especially from photos,’ was his equally indignant reply. ‘Look, I’ll just put the catch on the door, and you can see for yourselves what I’ve had through my doors in the last few days.’
In the cramped back office, three trays of jewellery were thrust under their noses, but nothing so fine as was shown in the photographs for insurance purposes.
‘Off we go to Farlington Market, then,’ puffed Holmes in disappointment. ‘Mr Scrivett, thank you so much for your time.’
None of the pawnshops in that town could be of assistance either, and it began to dawn on them that the missing jewels would not be easy to locate.
‘We’ll have to go to Streeter,’ declared Garden in despair.
‘I’d rather eat Colin than hand this over on a plate to that bounder,’ stated his partner.
‘But we can’t deal with this on our own.’
Holmes was adamant. ‘Yes, by gad, we can, and we will.’
Chapter Seven
The next day, Mr Fredericks was back, in a similar state of distress as he had been on his first visit to their offices.
‘This time the shop’s been broken into,’ he informed them, his voice a squeak. ‘Dad will definitely kill me.’
‘Sit down,’ ordered Garden.
‘Calm down,’ ordered Holmes almost simultaneously. ‘Shirley, cup of tea required in here,’ this last, loudly enough to be heard in the outer office. ‘Now tell us, coherently, exactly what has happened.’
The Bookcase of Sherman Holmes: A Holmes and Garden Anthology Page 20