The Emperor's Snuff-Box

by John Dickson Carr

  All the scarlet of embarrassment, and mortification at being caught here, had faded out of Toby’s face. He no longer resembled such a seething picture of guilt, dazed-eyed like a boxer at the end of the fifteenth round, that you wanted to slap him on the back and say, “it’s all right, old man.”

  He still carried himself stiffly. But wrath was asserting itself, and self-righteousness too. Human nature remains human nature, whether we like it or not. He had got himself into an embarrassing position. Therefore he was going to take it out on somebody—perhaps on anybody—for being put in that position.

  “Get out,” he said to Prue.

  “Monsieur?”

  “I said, get out!”

  “Aren’t you forgetting,” interposed Eve, with such cold and rapid effect that Toby blinked, “aren’t you forgetting this is Mademoiselle Latour’s house?”

  “I don’t care whose house it is. I mean …”

  With a violent effort Toby got control of himself, after pushing his hands through his hair and seeming to hold hard to his skull. He straightened up, breathing hard.

  “Get out of here,” he requested. “Please. Scoot. Va-t’en. I wish to speak to madame.”

  The cloud of anxiety had lifted from Prue, who herself drew a deep breath and was very sympathetic.

  “Without doubt,” she said brightly, “madame will wish to discuss the nature of the compensation?”

  “Something like that,” agreed Eve.

  “Me, I am of sensibility,” said Prue. “Believe me, I am glad madame has shown such gentility in accepting all this. I must confess that for a while there I was worried. I go now; but I shall be upstairs. When you wish to see me, knock on the ceiling with that broomstick, and I descend. A’voir, madame. A’voir, Tobee.”

  Gathering up the suspender-belt, the needle, and the thread from the table, Prue made her way towards a door at the back of the sitting room. She gave them a sprightly little sympathetic nod, heightening the prettiness of eyes and lips and teeth, and floated out in a backwash of fleur-de-something, closing the door carefully behind her.

  Eve went over and sat down in the easy-chair by the table. She did not say anything.

  Toby fidgeted. He walked away from her, putting his elbow on the mantelpiece. The atmosphere of an electrical thunderstorm, gathering in this placid retreat behind the flower shop, could have been felt by a person even more insensitive than Toby Lawes.

  To few women has ever been given such an opportunity as was presented to Eve then. After all the aches and bedevilments which had been forced on her, she might have cried aloud that some recompense was only her due. Any fair-minded outsider, seeing those two in the snug room, must have urged her to wade in, with joyous shouts, and smite the enemy hip and thigh. But it is easy for an outsider to say these things.

  The silence lengthened. And there was Toby, his elbow on the mantelpiece, twisting at his mustache, hunching his collar up round his ears, and occasionally giving a quick sideways glance at her to see how she was taking it.

  Eve said only one word.

  “Well?”

  XIV

  “LOOK HERE,” TOBY BLURTED out, in his sincere way, “I’m damned sorry about this.”

  “Are you?”

  “I mean, about your learning about it.”

  “Oh. Aren’t you terrified for fear the bank will hear about it too?”

  Toby considered this.

  “No, that’s all right,” he assured her. As he stared back at her, a powerful shade of relief went over his face. “Look here, was that what you were worrying about?”

  “Perhaps.”

  “No: I assure you it’s perfectly all right,” said Toby earnestly. “I’d thought of it, of course. But it’s all right so long as you don’t involve them in an open scandal. That’s the thing: to avoid an open scandal. Otherwise your private life is your own. Just between ourselves,”— he glanced left and right, —“old Dufour, that’s the manager, goes to see a poule at Boulogne. Fact! It’s well known at the office. I’m telling you that in confidence, naturally.”

  “Naturally.”

  Toby’s face grew redder yet.

  “What I like about you, Eve,” he blurted out. “is that you’re so damned understanding.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yes,” said Toby, avoiding her eye. “It isn’t a thing we ought to talk about, mind. It isn’t a thing I like to talk about to any nice girl, least of all to you. But since the barriers are down … well, there you are.”

  “Yes. The barriers are down, aren’t they?”

  “Most women would have had conniption fits. I tell you that, straight. You don’t know what it’s been like these past weeks, even before father died. You may have noticed I haven’t been exactly my bright merry self. That little bitch upstairs,”— Eve stiffened, —“I tell you, she’s the worst headache I ever had in my life. You can’t imagine what I’ve been through.”

  “And is that,” Eve asked slowly, “is that all you’ve got to say to me?”

  Toby blinked.

  “All I’ve got to say to you?”

  Now Eve Neill had been to what are known as the right schools. But at the same time she was still the daughter of old Joe Neill, of Neill’s Mills, at Loomhalt in Lancashire. Like old Joe himself, there were certain things she could put up with to an unlimited extent, and other things she could not put up with at all.

  As she sat back in Mademoiselle Prue’s chair, it seemed to her that she saw the room through a faint mist. She saw the back of Toby’s head reflected in the mirror over the mantelpiece, and a tiny bald-spot no bigger than a sixpence amid the woolly hair. The back of that head, somehow, added the last touch to her infuriation.

  Eve sat upright.

  “It didn’t occur to you,” she said, “that you’ve got a hell of a bloody cheek?”

  In the face of this blast, Toby looked for a second as though he could not believe his ears.

  “It didn’t occur to you,” said Eve, “that there was anything funny in your p-preaching morals at me all day, and acting the high and mighty Sir Galahad, and talking about your ideals and your principles, when all the time you’ve been keeping this girl on the string ever since you’ve known me?”

  Toby was horrified.

  “Really, Eve!” he said. “Really!” And he began to glance quickly and nervously round the room, as though he half expected to find himself face to face with M. Dufour the bank-manager.

  “Yes, really!” said Eve. “Blaah!”

  “I never expected to hear such language from you.”

  “Language! What about actions?”

  “Well, what about them?” demanded Toby.

  “So you can ‘forgive and forget’ what I do, can you? I should jolly well think you could, you—you canting Uriah Heep! And what about your ideals? And you being the simple young man with a pure and holy code?”

  Toby was more than perturbed; he was deeply moved with astonishment. He blinked back at her in the same near-sighted way as his mother.

  “But that’s an altogether different thing,” he protested, in a shocked tone like someone explaining something obvious to a child.

  “Oh, is it?”

  “Yes, it is!”

  “How?”

  Toby struggled. It was as though he had been asked to expound the interplanetary system, or the construction of the universe, in half a dozen words of one syllable.

  “My dear Eve! A man sometimes has… well, impulses.”

  “And do you think a woman doesn’t have ‘em either?”

  “Oh?” snapped Toby. “So you admit it, then?”

  “Admit what?”

  “That you’ve started an affair with this swine Atwood after all.”

  “I never said anything of the kind! I said that a woman —”

  “Oh, no,” said Toby, shaking his head like one who has ineffable knowledge above the gods. “Not a nice woman. That’s where we differ. If she has, she’s not a lady; and she’s not worthy
of being idealized. That’s why I’m so surprised at you, Eve.

  “And d’you mind a little more plain speaking, Eve? I wouldn’t hurt you for the world. You know that. But I can’t, in honesty, help saying what’s in my mind. And it seems to me that tonight I’m seeing you in a new light. It seems to me —”

  Eve did not interrupt him.

  In a detached way she observed that he was standing too close to the fire; that the gray cloth of his suit, behind the calves of the legs, was beginning to scorch and smoke; that in a second more, when he shifted his position, it would sting him like fury. But this prospect failed to upset her.

  The interruption was supplied by Mademoiselle Prue, who came flying in after a brief knock, and hurried to the table with an air of nervous apology.

  “My—my cotton,” she explained. “I seek another spool of cotton.” Mademoiselle Prue began to ransack the sewing-basket, while Toby jumped in pain as the cloth scorched his calves, and Eve’s soul danced the saraband to watch him.

  “Dear Tobee,” continued Mademoiselle Prue. “And madame. May I please beg of you not to shout so much? We are respectable here, and it will derange the neighbors.”

  “Were we shouting?”

  “You were shouting very much. I could not understand, because I have no knowledge of English. But it did not seem good.” She fished out a spool of red cotton and held it up against the light. “I hope there is no disagreement about this matter of—compensation?”

  “Yes,” said Eve, “there is.”

  “Madame?”

  “I won’t buy your lover back from you,” said Eve, thereby sending Toby clear up in the air. To do him justice, Toby was as angry over this aspect of the matter as Eve herself.

  “But I can make you an offer,” continued the daughter of old Joe Neill. “I will give you double compensation if you persuade your sister Yvette to admit to the police that she locked me out of my house on the night Sir Maurice Lawes was killed.”

  Prue lost a little of her color, so that the pink-painted lips and dark-lashed eyes stood out with vivid effect.

  “I do not know what my sister does!”

  “You don’t know, for instance, that she is trying to get me arrested? Presumably in the hope that M. Lawes here will then marry you?”

  “Madame!” cried Prue.

  (And clearly, Eve thought, she didn’t know).

  “Don’t let that arresting business worry you,” growled Toby. “They’re bluffing. They don’t really mean it?”

  “Oh, don’t they? They came to my house to take me to jail, half a dozen of them. And I only got away from them by running out and coming here.”

  Toby tugged at his collar. Though Eve had spoken in English, a very frightened Prue undoubtedly caught the drift of it. She examined another spool of cotton, and threw it on the table.

  “The police are coming here?”

  “It would not surprise me,” retorted Eve.

  Prue, with shaking fingers, was grubbing in the sewing-basket and fishing out all manner of articles, which she inspected in a dense way before dropping them on the table. More spools of cotton. A paper of pins. A pair of scissors. Then, in some mysterious fashion, a shoe horn, a rolled tape measure, and a hair-net entangled with a ring.

  “Your sister,” said Eve, “has a bee in her bonnet. I couldn’t have guessed it was you.”

  “Merci, madame!”

  “But it’s no good. That cat won’t jump. M. Lawes is not inclined to marry you, as he must have told you himself. On the other hand, I am quite seriously in danger of my life and your sister is in a position to clear me.”

  “I don’t understand what you are talking about. Yvette thinks I am silly. She tells me nothing!”

  “Please!” Eve urged desperately. “Your sister must know perfectly well what happened that night. She could tell them that M. Atwood was in my room the whole time. Even if they won’t believe him, they may believe her. If the only reason why she wants to get me arrested is this obsession about you, then surely…”

  Eve checked herself, so startled that she got up from the chair.

  Prue had almost gutted the sewing-basket of its contents. Her latest discovery, which she dropped with petulant disdain among the pins and cotton-spools, might have been a piece of cheap costume jewelry. Or it might not. Smallish, square, crystal-like stones, alternating with smallish blue-gleaming stones, were strung together in a thin metal filigree of antique design to form a necklace. As it curled up snakelike where Prue dropped it, the lamplight ran across it with spiteful fires, making the stones wink and sparkle.

  “Where,” said Eve, “did you get that?”

  Prue raised her eyebrows.

  “That? It is of no value, madame.”

  “No value?”

  “No, madame.”

  “Diamonds and turquoises.” Eve picked it up by one end, so that it curled and swung beside the lamp. “It’s Madame de Lamballe’s necklace! Unless I’ve gone completely mad, I last saw this in Papa Lawes’s collection. In the curio cabinet immediately to the left of the door as you enter the study.”

  “Diamonds and turquoises? Madame is mistaken,” said Prue, not without bitterness. “Do you doubt that? Well! Let madame go herself to the shop of M. Veille, only a few doors from here, and ask him at what he values it!”

  “Yes,” interposed Toby in a curious tone. “But where did you get it, little one?”

  Prue looked from one to the other of them.

  “Perhaps I am silly, as my sister says.” The self-assured countenance wrinkled up. “Perhaps my idea was not good. Oh, God, if I have made a mistake my sister will kill me! You try to trick me. I do not trust you. I will answer no more questions from either of you. In fact, I—I go to telephone my sister!”

  After flinging this out after the fashion of a terrible threat, Prue was out of the room so quickly that they could not have stopped her if they had wished. They heard her sharp, high heels clattering on a staircase behind the door at the back of the shop. Eve dropped the necklace on the table.

  “Did you give it to her, Toby?”

  “Great Scott, no!”

  “Sure?”

  “Of course I’m sure. Besides,” argued Toby, turning his back abruptly so that he now faced her out of the mirror, “that particular necklace isn’t gone!”

  “Isn’t…?”

  “It’s still in the curio cabinet to the left of the door. At least, it was certainly there when I left our house an hour ago. I remember, Janice called my attention to it.”

  “Toby,” said Eve, “who wore the brown gloves?”

  The mirror, a little stained with rust spots, reflected Toby’s face oddly.

  “When the police were questioning me this afternoon,” said Eve, with every nerve in her body strained and fighting, “I didn’t tell the whole truth. Ned Atwood saw the person who killed your father. I almost saw him.

  “Somebody, wearing a pair of brown gloves, went into the study and smashed the snuff-box and killed Papa Lawes. Maybe Ned won’t die, you know. And if he doesn’t die,”— in the mirror, Toby’s eyes shifted slightly, —“he’ll tell what he saw. I can’t tell you much, Toby. But I can tell you this much. Whoever did that, it was a member of your own dear, sweet family.”

  “That’s a filthy lie,” said Toby, not loudly.

  “Is it? You can think so if you like.”

  “What did your… your boy-friend see?”

  Eve told him.

  “You didn’t say anything about this to Goron,” Toby pointed out. He seemed to be having difficulty with a dry throat.

  “No! And do you know why I didn’t?”

  “I can’t say, I’m sure. Unless it was to cover up your own swooning embraces with —”

  “Toby Lawes, do you want me to come over there and slap your face?”

  “I see. Growing vulgar, are we?”

  “You talk about vulgarity?” said Eve.

  “I’m sorry.” Toby shut his eyes. He clenched his h
ands on the mantelshelf. “But you don’t understand. Eve, this is just about the last straw. I tell you, I won’t have my mother or my sister mentioned in connection with this!”

  “Who said anything about your mother or your sister? I was only telling you what Ned can testify to, and probably Yvette Latour as well. And I, like a fool, I kept quiet about it because I couldn’t bear to hurt you. You were such a noble young man, such a straightforward fellow…”

  Toby pointed at the ceiling.

  “Are you holding her against me?” he demanded.

  “I’m not holding anything against you.”

  “Jealous, eh?” asked Toby eagerly.

  Eve reflected. “The funny part is that I don’t think I am.” She started to laugh. “If you could have seen your own face when I walked in here—it might be a good joke if the police weren’t a-actually following me, without your doing anything to stop them. And now we find this Mademoiselle Prue with a necklace which looks like…”

  The portière which closed off the sitting room from the shop in front was made of heavy brown chenille. A hand drew the portière aside. Eve saw the twisted smile—an odd smile, as though the mouth were not quite right—on the face of the tall man in the old sports suit, who removed his hat as he came into the sitting room.

  “Excuse me for butting in,” observed Dermot Kinross, “but I wonder whether I could have a look at that necklace?”

  Toby whirled round.

  Dermot went to the table, where he put down his hat. He picked up the string of white and blue stones, and held them under the lamp. He ran them through his fingers. Taking a jeweller’s lens from his pocket, he twisted it rather awkwardly into his right eye, and scrutinized the necklace again.

  “Yes,” he said, with a breath of relief. “That’s all right. They’re not real.”

  He dropped the necklace, and returned the lens to his pocket.

  Eve found her voice.

  “You’re with the police! Are they … ?”

  “Following you? No,” smiled Dermot. “As a matter of fact, I came to the rue de la Harpe to see M. Veille the art dealer. I wanted an expert opinion on this.”

  From his inside pocket he took out an object wrapped in tissue paper. Unwrapping it, and holding it by the end, he displayed a second necklace of shimmering blue and white stones. It was—at first glance—so exactly like the necklace on the table that Eve stared from one to the other of them.