The Attenbury Emeralds

by Jill Paton Walsh

  ‘Charm,’ she said, ‘but not bite. The public is gruesome and vengeful. Life imprisonment may be a worse fate, but from a fictional point of view, it won’t be anything like such a good ending.’

  ‘Ghoul!’ said Peter.

  ‘Peter, did you find out what was on the table in front of Miss Pevenor? Exactly what did she seem to have got out of her files to show her visitor?’

  ‘Oh, the description of the Attenbury emerald, I’m afraid,’ he said. ‘Dammit, Harriet, if I hadn’t been railroaded by a dukedom that woman would still be alive!’

  22

  Lord Attenbury was agitated. Peter offered him a rueful apology for having so little to report, mentioning that family affairs had been taking up his attention recently. Whereupon the young man exploded.

  ‘You’ll be all right!’ he cried. ‘But what about me? What am I to do? Do I preside over the ruin of my family with nobody to help me?’

  ‘Believe me, I am trying to help you,’ said Peter. ‘But with the best will in the world we may not be able to get this sorted out in time for the Inland Revenue. You’d better find a bit of stoicism to meet the situation.’

  ‘Stoicism? That’s damned easy to say when you don’t need it yourself!’

  ‘I would have thought our situations are uncannily parallel,’ said Peter.

  ‘Do you, Wimsey? Do you indeed? As I understand matters, at the moment your brother died the house was on fire? What do you suppose is the value of a burning house? Might even be negative! So you will escape duty on that, collect the insurance and make a neat escape. Where will it be? A handy tax-free haven like Bermuda? Or Switzerland perhaps? But my family will be ruined, I tell you, ruined! We shall live out our lives in poverty!’

  Harriet said quietly, ‘Lord Attenbury, many people, most people, live without hunger or misery on a fraction of what you will have left even if you must indeed sell the house to pay the duty. I have lived with barely twopence to rub together myself, and although it was hard at times, it was not demeaning. You won’t really be reduced to indigence.’

  He sat down abruptly, facing Harriet. ‘That’s the devil of it,’ he said. ‘I suppose it depends what you’re used to. Or perhaps, what your womenfolk are used to. They are making such a fuss, Lady Peter! Such howls at any economy I suggest. They expect a way of life that I cannot see how to maintain for them, for any of us. And it’s not like selling a semi-detached villa in Finchley; selling Fennybrook Hall would humiliate us. Whatever you say.’

  ‘Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that,’ she said. ‘But, Edward – may I call you Edward? – I think that most women manage whatever life throws at them. They may make an awful fuss when difficulties are in prospect; but when it comes to the point, they manage.’

  ‘They haven’t ever had to,’ he said, speaking quietly now. ‘I wish any of them were as sensible as you are. My girlfriend has given me up, and my mother says she doesn’t blame her. “What have you to offer her?” That line of talk.’

  ‘If the love of a good husband was not enough for her, then she was prime among the extravagances you cannot afford,’ said Harriet. ‘Forget her as quickly as you can.’

  ‘Bloody Denver has all the luck,’ he said, rising to go. ‘You’ll let me know, I suppose, if you come up with anything?’

  ‘We’ll run along immediately with anything of the sort,’ said Peter.

  ‘What did he mean by that last remark?’ said Harriet, when the door had closed behind the departing guest.

  ‘Let me decode it for you,’ said Peter. ‘By bloody Denver he meant me; and in that last comment on my luck he was complimenting you. Only for the most basic of your virtues, I’m afraid: your Johnsonian bottom of common sense. You made a good job of that, Harriet. You calmed him down admirably. I was seriously tempted to have him thrown out.’

  ‘I take it that we are not actually planning on pocketing the insurance money and making off with it where the remote Bermudas ride?’

  ‘Would you like that?’ he asked.

  ‘I would positively hate it.’

  ‘I thought so,’ he said. ‘Then we’ll stay here. And let’s see if we can get these pestilential emeralds laid to rest.’

  ‘Where, Peter, if all were solved and sorted, do you think they should be laid to rest?’

  ‘They should all three be in the Maharaja’s museum. Attenbury should have the value of his; and the wicked owner of the mysterious third stone should hang for murder. Now let’s see if we can bring all to come about according to the words of the prophets. A council of war this evening, I think. We shall be ourselves again, as if the glories of our blood and state really were shadows.’

  ‘Oh, let’s!’ said Harriet.

  They dined early, and Peter invited the Bunters to join them. A bottle of Cockburn’s had been decanted, and Mrs Trapp, the cook, had managed to find a small triangle of Stilton. Not, of course, the way Stilton should be bought or served, but many times better than no Stilton at all. Harriet hoped that Hope Bunter wouldn’t find the talk too boring. She was vaguely aware that the pleasant, easy-going way of life that the four of them had adopted during the war, and which had survived six years of peace, was threatened now. It was much easier to imagine, and indeed to achieve, this party sharing a modest treat together in the London house or at Talboys than at Duke’s Denver.

  ‘Right,’ said Peter. ‘I thought we might try to eliminate any that we can of the three occasions since 1921 when the jewel has been out of the bank. If we can. We’ll start with the matter of the expensive horse in 1929. You first, Harriet.’

  ‘Well,’ said Harriet, ‘we know Captain Rannerson was holding the jewel for quite a while. Showing it to all and sundry. Supposing one of his Indian friends said, “I’ve got one just like that!” and supposing they compared the jewels and advertently or inadvertently muddled them up, and the wrong one came back to Attenbury when he found the money.’

  ‘Hideously plausible, Harriet. But the mistake would have to be deliberate to account for the unknown person turning up now and making the claim on the bank.’

  ‘Okay, so it’s deliberate.’

  ‘And this little twist to the tale just didn’t happen to happen where anyone who has talked to Freddy got to hear of it.’

  ‘But such a small thing might not get reported to all and sundry. Two people just showing each other the jewels, each one holding the other’s for a minute or two. Put them down on the table, shall we say to pick up a drink, and bob’s your uncle,’ Harriet said.

  ‘And this happened in 1929,’ said Hope, ‘and the perpetrator hasn’t made any move to get the advantage of it all this time? The wrong emerald has just lain in the bank?’

  ‘It’s pretty unlikely, Peter,’ said Harriet in agreement.

  ‘Well, something that he or she does seem to have done is to send a few people to their maker,’ said Peter, ‘starting with Captain Rannerson.’

  Bunter, sitting at the end of the table, was holding a pencil, and had a notebook in front of him.

  ‘I am recording a possibility that the exchange was made during the time that Captain Rannerson had the jewel,’ said Bunter. ‘Do you consider, Your Grace, that the motive for that murder was to recover an emerald that had been swapped for the Attenbury one?’

  ‘That would be odd, wouldn’t it?’ said Peter. ‘Why kill someone when one has just achieved the cuckoo in the nest trick that will let one at any time recover the jewel?’

  ‘There was a huge reward on offer to anyone who could present the Maharaja with both,’ said Harriet.

  ‘But if the swap had been effected then both might be obtainable without going to the trouble of killing anyone,’ Peter said. ‘On reflection I can’t see that we can rule out anything as a result of this story. Can any of us?’

  There was a general shaking of heads.

  ‘No progress on that one. Let’s move on to consider the Blitz.’

  ‘Well, that’s a terrible story of confusion and death, isn’t it?’
said Harriet.

  ‘Death but not murder,’ said Bunter quietly. ‘Not a targeted death.’

  ‘And much confusion,’ said Harriet. ‘However certain our ladies are that they could not have mixed up the stones, and all that system of shoe-boxes, it plainly could have happened.’

  ‘The interesting question there is: who was wearing the rogue emerald? If we knew that we would be hot on the scent,’ said Peter. ‘All we know is that they were both there together, Attenbury’s and the third stone.’

  ‘And if the cuckoo trick had already been carried out, they were the wrong way round,’ Harriet pointed out. ‘Verity would have been wearing the third stone, and the unknown Miss Smith Attenbury’s. Very odd.’

  ‘Yes, but we are running ahead of ourselves. We don’t know that the trick had already happened.’

  ‘I shall record the possibility that it happened in the morgue, Your Grace,’ said Bunter.

  ‘Now what about Miss Pevenor?’ said Harriet. ‘Killed in the course of an unsuccessful burglary?’

  ‘The other way about,’ Peter said. ‘A fake burglary used to cover up a murder. We need to think what, if anything, these occasions have in common.’

  ‘This sounds like an eleven-plus question,’ said Hope. ‘I saw a sample paper while I was doing some school photographs last week. Underline the odd one out – peat, wood, coal, gas, bricks.’

  ‘Gas,’ said Peter. ‘All the others are solids.’

  ‘Bricks,’ said Harriet in the same breath, ‘all the others are fuels.’

  Hope laughed. ‘Who knows which of you passed and which failed that question?’ she said.

  ‘Well, we are all failing this task,’ said Peter. ‘The Blitz is the odd one out, in that two jewels were involved; only one put in an appearance on the other two occasions. The Blitz is also the odd one out in that nobody was murdered, unless Rita was pushed down that manhole…The horse trading is the odd one out in that Rannerson had an Indian connection absent on the other two occasions.’

  ‘Unless the Indian costumes being worn by the ladies make that connection,’ said Harriet.

  ‘I suppose they might,’ said Peter, ‘but it’s a bit thin compared to a rank in the Indian Army. Miss Pevenor is the odd one out in that she was interested in the back of the stone instead of only the front…’

  ‘Didn’t Susie say that Rita had made some friendly remark to Miss Smith about the writing on the stone?’ said Harriet.

  ‘Yes, she did,’ said Peter. ‘I think we had better find out a bit more about Rita. Would you like to see what you can dig up for us about her, Bunter?’

  Bunter did not quite manage to conceal his delight at being asked.

  ‘I have taken the liberty of looking up what I could find about the lady already,’ he said. ‘I was a little uneasy when you mentioned to me that the lady who had actually returned the second emerald had met with death a short while afterwards. She was not difficult to find. I visited the British Museum newspaper library on a remote chance that the lady had merited an obituary. And there she was.’ He opened his notebook and read his notes: ‘Rita Patel, Anglo-Indian origin. Lecturer at the LSE in developing economies. Accidental death on 9th March, 1941. Great loss to oriental studies…fine linguist…devoted herself to war work…’

  ‘Bunter, you are a marvel!’ said Peter.

  Harriet contemplated Bunter with astonishment. ‘What put you on to the idea she might have an obituary?’ she asked.

  ‘I thought I remembered her name, my lady, in an article about the London School of Economics.’

  Is Bunter thinking of taking a degree? Harriet wondered. Then, No, of course, it is Peter Bunter that he is thinking about. That’s how he sees his son making a way in the world.

  ‘How very clever of you, Bunter,’ she said.

  He acknowledged her with the very slightest inclination of the head.

  ‘It provides an Indian connection with the Blitz occasion,’ he said.

  ‘So now Miss Pevenor is the odd one out. No Indian connection arises in her case, as far as we know,’ said Harriet.

  ‘But it’s staring us in the face now, isn’t it?’ said Peter. ‘It’s about the inscriptions. The inscriptions not only allow one to distinguish one stone from another, they allow the deduction that there are three. Miss Pevenor had obtained a transcription of the lines from us, and told the world that she had done so. The owner of the third stone will kill to keep its existence secret.’

  ‘Then it should have been too late to kill her – the news was out,’ said Harriet.

  ‘Not exactly, my lady,’ said Bunter. He picked up the copy of the account of Miss Pevenor’s speech, and pointed out to her a paragraph.

  ‘The inscriptions will merit further investigation,’ Harriet read. ‘I will attempt to find someone who can identify the source…’

  ‘That wouldn’t have been too difficult,’ Bunter offered. ‘And with the identification the third stone would have been hypothesised. And the owner was determined to keep its existence secret.’

  Peter said, ‘But now it is being used as a decoy to swindle Attenbury out of his, its existence must come to light.’

  ‘But long after the event,’ Harriet said. ‘When it is very difficult to follow trails; when reconstructing what happened has become impossible with the blurring of memory. Let’s try another tack. Let’s make a mental picture of the villain in all the detail we can command. It’s what I do when I begin to write a detective story – anatomise the murderer in my own mind. One must have a clear view of the villain, otherwise the clues are impossibly muddled.’

  ‘Well, to start with, our murderer is holding the third stone, and is intending to use it as a decoy. He or she is able to form a long-term plan, and pursue it over many years,’ said Peter.

  ‘What is the motive? If it’s just greed, why defer the coup de grâce? Why not claim the emerald in the bank any time sooner?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Peter, ‘unless…unless the timing is not coincidence; it has been delayed in order to cause the maximum difficulty to Lord Attenbury.’

  ‘So this person is consumed with hatred of the Attenbury family. Why?’ said Harriet.

  Peter shrugged. ‘You know how I hate why questions,’ he said. ‘When you know how you know who. Sometimes the who in question will tell you why, but that’s a tale you won’t hear till you have your hands on the villain and it’s all over.’

  ‘There’s a further point: exactly what makes the killer strike?’ asked Harriet. ‘He is afraid that the person who has the stone out of the bank will cotton on to the fact that it isn’t the right one?’

  ‘I suppose that might lead to a search for the Attenbury stone, and the foiling of the plot,’ said Peter. ‘But how was it known when the stone was taken from the bank? That wasn’t announced in the newspapers.’

  ‘Perhaps there was an accomplice in the bank,’ said Harriet.

  ‘Wickedness in a temple of rectitude?’ said Peter, smiling wryly.

  ‘Perhaps it wouldn’t seem very wicked for somebody simply to tell a friend when the emerald had been borrowed.’

  ‘They must at the very least have supposed themselves to be assisting theft,’ said Peter, ‘which is a fairly grave matter in a bank.’

  ‘Or perhaps the villain is friendly enough with the Attenbury family to know of at least one occasion when they reclaimed their emerald.’

  ‘We’ve moved on from that, though, Harriet. We are no longer looking for one occasion on which the jewel could have been swapped; we are looking for someone who intervened on every occasion on which it was out of the bank.’

  ‘I don’t know enough about this sort of thing, Peter. Would the insurers be told when the jewel was out of the bank?’

  ‘Yes, they would,’ said Peter. ‘Of course they would. Let’s get the firm’s name from Attenbury, and go and sniff around the insurers. Brilliant, Harriet.’

  23

  Messrs Abraham, Farley, Van der Helm and Bird had o
ffices off Fetter Lane. Peter and Harriet paused to pay their respects to the statue of John Wilkes, and entered the little side street of Georgian frontages. There was a small gate at the far end into a cemetery, now containing as many park benches as headstones, and profusely overgrown, mostly with what a gardener would have called weeds. Having looked over the railings at this pleasing sight, Peter and Harriet retraced their steps a little, and climbed the few steps to the front door with the long-winded brass plate beside it. The conversion of a Georgian house into offices, although there are many hundred such in London, seems never to have been mastered, and always produces a haphazard, rather random effect. So it was here. The first door on the right was labelled ‘Reception’. Peter knocked and they went in.

  The room, under a fine plastered ceiling, and within tall windows through which the light poured in, was darkened by a thicket of tall filing cabinets. In clearings in this thicket there were two desks with harassed-looking young women working at typewriters. One of these desks was near enough the door to serve as reception. Peter asked for Mr Abraham.

  ‘Dead,’ said the girl at the front desk. ‘Long ago.’

  ‘Mr Farley?’ Peter asked.

  ‘Same,’ said the girl.

  ‘Then we must ask to see Mr Van der Helm.’

  ‘Retired. Lives in Holland since the war.’

  ‘Mr Bird, then?’ asked Peter.

  ‘He’s retired too,’ the girl replied. ‘Mr Buxton is in charge here now.’

  ‘How long has Mr Buxton been in charge?’ asked Peter.

  ‘Nearly a year,’ the girl replied. ‘You’ll find him very competent, Mr…Mr?’

  Peter handed her his card.

  ‘Coo!’ she exclaimed.

  ‘What is it, Beryl?’ asked her colleague, weaving her way through the filing cabinets to lean over Beryl’s desk. ‘You’re famous!’ she said to Peter.

  ‘I do try not to be,’ said Peter, favouring her with his most ingratiating smile. ‘I was hoping to talk with somebody in the firm who has been here a long while.’