Silence. ‘I did,’ Rose said firmly, and the others reluctantly agreed.
‘But while Matt was barging around looking for her I reckon he saw poor Shelley in that hidey-hole waiting for someone, and lost his cool,’ Rob said.
‘But which one of you would she have been waiting for? According to the draw, it was Matt, but she wouldn’t be having a rendezvous with him,’ I pointed out.
‘Not me,’ Tony said. ‘Anyway, the draw was more or less off because of all the rows. Rose was with me all the time back at the car park, weren’t you, love?’ She nodded.
‘Nor me,’ Rob put in hastily. ‘Sue and I were in the car park too.’
Tony looked puzzled. ‘No, as we left, I saw Sue follow Stavros back into the taverna.’
Sue flushed. ‘I had a quick word with him about dancing lessons.’
‘Of course,’ Rose said sweetly, ‘you do love Greek dancing, don’t you?’ What Sue really liked was quite clear.
‘Matt said you checked the toilets, Sue, to see if Shelley was there,’ I said.
Sue grew even redder. ‘Well, she wasn’t, was she? What does it matter where I was? I wasn’t killing Shelley.’
But Rob might have been, I thought - until he dashed my hopes. ‘And before you jump to any conclusions, Mr Colby,’ he said, ‘I should explain that as Tony and Rose will confirm I walked back with them to the car park, and Sue joined shortly afterwards.’
The front was still united.
When I have a duff car engine before me, I can pick out which bit is at fault. Nine times out of ten, it’s in the ignition system. I get drawn to it by a kind of instinct, which I can then back up with fact. Faced with the Sextet, however, I didn’t seem to be igniting. The only one of the four who could theoretically have killed Shelley was Sue, but I wasn’t happy with this deduction. I had no doubt that there were a lot of hidden emotions in this group that I wasn’t going to get to hear about, but had they led to murder? A crime of passion, Dimitri had called it, but that didn’t tell me whose passion it was.
My engine seemed to be misfiring in a big way.
~ * ~
That night I dreamed not of hidden passions but of kebabs racing around in a Dinky post office van. Luckily when I awoke my inner engine began to rev up again and I realized I hadn’t focused sufficiently on whom Shelley was waiting for. She was hiding from Matt, that was for sure, but that meant she must have plans for later, which did not include him. So that led me - where?
I went on pondering the problem while out on police work over a vanished Triumph Stag, and I took the opportunity to make a few enquiries at police HQ. The DI on Matt’s case was surprisingly cooperative - in his own way.
‘It was Matt Redwell, you can bank on it. His DNA and prints were on that kebab stick and no one else’s. It’s a wrap.’
It sounded bad, but then so can a rough idle in a high performance engine. For me the kebab stick proved the push start I needed.
‘Where did he get it from?’ I asked.
‘Eh?’ The DI looked at me as though the car crime unit was wasting taxpayers’ money in employing me. ‘They all had kebabs for dinner. He kept his back.’
Ignoring the fact that a twelve-inch kebab stick would be an uncomfortable accessory tucked into one’s socks while Greek dancing, I pointed out, ‘Stavros’s prints would be on them too, or the chef’s when he transferred them from grill to plate.’
He looked thrown. ‘So Redwell picked up a clean skewer from the kitchen. Easy enough, probably.’
‘When?’
‘After the dancing ended.’
‘Unnoticed by Dimitri, Stavros and the lady who was intent on a quick snog with him?’
The DI said he’d think about it, and I went on thinking myself. A crime of passion - and yet there hadn’t been much obvious passion in the Sextet’s game. Shelley was a lady who spread her favours far and wide and who had declared she wanted a real man not one drawn out of a hat. Not Matt, not Rob, not Tony.
~ * ~
Matt rang at eight thirty the next morning. He’d left four messages on my answering service for me to ring him, but I’d ignored them all yesterday evening. ‘How’s it going?’ he asked eagerly.
‘Not bad,’ I said. ‘I think I’ve got it.’
~ * ~
It was another couple of weeks before, having passed on my pearls of wisdom to the DI, I got the tip that I was right, and it looked as if charges could be dropped against Matt Redwell. Out of curiosity I treated myself to a trip to the taverna. It wasn’t a Tuesday, but there was a notice on the taverna door announcing that it was closed due to illness. The kind of illness that would keep Dimitri safely behind bars for some considerable time.
It turned out that he and Shelley had been an item for some while, but she had just called the whole thing off. That night she made it all too clear she favoured young Stavros and had dashed after him to suggest a rendezvous later. She would hide from Matt in the arbour, and wait for Stavros. But Dimitri’s hopes had risen when he heard her make it clear that she was after better game than Matt, but then his pride took a hammering when he heard the assignation being planned with Stavros. So after the final dance he packed Stavros off to the kitchens and went to the arbour himself having earlier provided himself with a kebab skewer and an oven glove to handle it with. The only person who had time and opportunity to do so. Thus equipped, Dimitri had avenged the blow to his manly pride.
~ * ~
To give Matt his due, he came round to thank me before leaving town.
‘Knew I could count on you, Jack. Thanks, I owe you.’
‘Let’s call it quits for the Dinky post office van,’ I said with relief, as the last vestiges of guilt rolled off my shoulders.
‘Rightio.’ He slid into his newly restored Morris Minor, wound down the window and grinned. ‘By the way, Jack, did I ever tell you I pinched your Dinky Ford GT40?’
<
~ * ~
THE UNKNOWN CRIME
Sarah Rayne
Sarah Rayne was educated in Staffordshire, where she still lives, and worked in the property business before establishing herself as a leading writer of psychological thrillers including House of the Lost.
~ * ~
I
‘ve never been a high-profile thief. I’d better make that clear at the start. But I’m moderately prosperous and over I the years I’ve developed my own line in small, rare antiques. An elegant chased silver chalice from some obscure museum, perhaps, or a Georgian sugar sifter.
But I’ve always had a yen to commit a crime that would create international headlines. The removal of the Koh-i-noor or St Edward’s Crown or a Chaucer first folio. You’re probably smiling smugly, but there are people who will pay huge sums of money for such objects. (I’d be lying if I said the money didn’t interest me.)
And then my grandfather died, leaving me all his belongings and the dream of a theft that would echo round the world and down the years suddenly came within my grasp.
He lived in Hampstead, my grandfather, and the solicitors sent me the keys to the house. I didn’t go out there immediately; I was absorbed in a delicate operation involving the removal of a Venetian glass tazza from a private collection - very nice, too. A saucer-shaped dish on a stem, beautifully engraved. So between tazzas and fences (yes, they do still exist as a breed and I have several charming friends among the fraternity), it was a good ten days before I went out to Hampstead. And the minute I stepped through the door I had the feeling of something waiting for me. Something that could give me that elusive, longed-for crime.
I was right. I found it - at least the start of it - in a box of old letters and cards in the attic. I know that sounds hackneyed, but attics really are places where secrets are stored and Rembrandts found. And, as my grandfather used to say, if you can’t find a Rembrandt to flog, paint one yourself. My father specialized in stealing jewellery, but my grandfather was a very good forger. He was just as good at replacing the real thing with his fakes. If yo
u’ve ever been in the National Gallery and stood in front of a certain portrait . . . Let’s just say he fooled a great many people.
At first look the attic wasn’t very promising. But there was a box of papers which appeared to have been my great-grandfather’s. He was a bit of a mystery, my great-grandfather, but there’s a family legend that he was involved in the theft of the Irish Crown Jewels in 1907. My father used to say he had never been nearer the Irish Crown Jewels than the pub down the road, but I always hoped the legend was true. And it has to be said the Irish Crown Jewels never were recovered.
It wasn’t the Irish Crown Jewels I found in that house, though. It was something far more intriguing.
Most of the box’s contents were of no interest. Accounts for tailoring (the old boy sounded as if he had been quite a natty dresser), and faded postcards and receipts. But at the very bottom of the box was a sheaf of yellowing notes in writing so faded it was nearly indecipherable.
How my grandfather missed those papers I can’t imagine. Perhaps he never went up to the attics, or perhaps he couldn’t be bothered to decipher the writing. If your work is forging fine art and Elizabethan manuscripts, it’d be a bit of a busman’s holiday to pore over faded spider-scrawls that will most likely turn out to be somebody’s mislaid laundry list or a recipe for Scotch broth.
But the papers were neither of those things.
They were an account of great-grandfather’s extraordinary activities during the autumn of 1918.
~ * ~
October, 1918
I’ve been living in an underground shelter with German shells raining down at regular intervals for what feels like years, although I believe it’s actually only three weeks. But whether it’s three weeks or three days, it’s absolute hell and I’d trade my virtue (ha!) to be back in England.
You’d expect a battlefield to be cut off from the rest of the world, but we get some news here: how the Germans have withdrawn on the Western Front, how the Kaiser’s going to abdicate, even how a peace treaty is being hammered out. It’s difficult to know what’s true and what’s propaganda, though. And then last night I was detailed to deliver a message a couple of miles along the line.
I’m not a coward, but I’m not a hero either and it doesn’t take a genius to know that a lone soldier, scurrying along in the dark, is a lot more vulnerable than if he’s in a properly-dug trench, near a gun-post. But orders are orders and I delivered the message, then returned by a different route. That’s supposed to fool the enemy, although I should think the enemy’s up to most of the tricks we play, just as we‘re up to most of theirs.
I was halfway back when I saw the chateau. The chimes of midnight were striking in the south and there was the occasional burst of gunfire somewhere to the north. It was bitterly cold and I dare say I was temporarily mad or even suffering from what’s called shell shock. But I stood there for almost an hour, staring at that chateau. It called out to me - it beckoned like Avalon or Valhalla or the Elysian Fields.
I was no longer conscious of the stench of death and cordite and the chloride of lime that’s used to sluice out the trenches. I could smell wealth: paintings, silver, tapestries . . .
But I can’t drag a Bayeux tapestry or a brace of French Impressionists across acres of freezing mud. Whatever I take will have to be small. And sellable. There’s no point in taking stuff that hasn’t got a market. I remember the disastrous affair of the Irish Crown Jewels . . .
~ * ~
That’s as far as I read that first day. The light was going and the electricity was off, and it’s not easy to decipher a hundred-year-old scrawl in an attic in semi-darkness. Also, I had to complete the sale of the tazza. That went smoothly, of course. I never visualized otherwise. I’m very good at what I do. That night I celebrated with a couple of friends. I have no intention of including in these pages what somebody once called the interesting revelations of the bedchamber; I’ll just say when I woke up I was in a strange bed and I wasn’t alone. And since one can’t just get up and go home after breakfast in that situation, (very ungentlemanly), it was a couple of days before I returned to great-grandfather’s papers.
~ * ~
November, 1918
For two weeks I thought I wouldn’t be able to return to the chateau. You can’t just climb out of the trenches and stroll across the landscape at will.
Then last night I was chosen to act as driver for several of the high-ranking officers travelling to Compiegne, and I thought - that’s it! For once the British army, God bless it, has played right into my hands. I’ll deposit my officers in Compiegne, then I’ll sneak a couple of hours on my own.
We set off early this morning - it’s 10 November, if anyone reading this likes details.
Later
I have no idea where we are, except that it’s in Picardie. I’ve been driving for almost an hour and it’s slow progress. We’ve stopped at an inn for a meal; the officers are muttering to one another and glancing round as if to make sure no one’s listening.
I’m in the garden, supposedly taking a breath of air, but actually I’m staring across at the chateau and writing this. I can see the place clearly, and it’s a beautiful sight.
~ * ~
I was interrupted by the phone ringing. A furtive voice asked if it had the right number and, on being assured it had, enquired if I would be interested in discussing a jewelled egg recently brought out of Russia. Yes, it was believed to be Faberge. No, it was not exactly for sale, simply considered surplus to requirements. A kindness, really, to remove it.
‘Considered surplus by whom?’
‘A gentleman prepared to pay very handsomely. He could see you in an hour.’
I hesitated. On the one hand I had great-grandfather’s exploits. On the other was the lure of a Faberge egg.
Fabergé won. Thieves have to eat and pay bills like anyone and I had recently bought a very snazzy dockside apartment.
I rather enjoyed that job. There were electronic sensors in the floor, so I used a simple block and tackle arrangement, which I slid along by means of a suspended pulley-wheel. I scooped the egg from its velvet bed, stashed it in the zipped pocket of my anorak, then wound the pulley back and hopped out through the window.
The client was a charming and cultured gentleman of complicated nationality and apparently limitless funds, and we celebrated the transaction liberally with vodka and caviar. After that we discussed Chekhov and explored the causes of the Russian Revolution until he fell off the chair while making a toast to the House of Romanov and had to be taken to the local A&E with a fractured wrist.
A&E were busy and we were there all night. But my client was polite and civilized during the whole time.
~ * ~
10 November, 1918
We’re all being very polite and civilized during this journey, whatever its purpose might be. We’re even being civilized to the enemy - half an hour ago we were overtaken by a car carrying three Germans of unmistakable high rank. I didn’t panic until we came upon them a few hundred yards further along, parked on the roadside.
‘They’ve got a puncture,’ said the colonel in the back of my car, and told me to stop in case we could help.
‘Are you mad, sir?’ said the major next to him. ‘It’ll be a trick. They’ll shoot us like sitting ducks.’
‘We‘re all bound for the same place, you fool. There won’t be any shooting.’
I don’t pretend to have much mechanical knowledge, but I can change a wheel with the best - although it felt strange to do so alongside a man with whose country we had been at war with for four years. I expected a bullet to slam into my ribs at any minute, and I promise you I kept a heavy wrench near to hand. But we got the job done in half an hour, with our respective officers circling one another like cats squaring up for a fight.
I stowed the punctured wheel in the boot.
‘Not too close to that case,’ said the German driver, pointing to a small attaché case.
‘Why? It hasn’t got
a bomb in it, has it?’
‘Oh no,’ he said, earnestly. He had better English than I had German.
‘It contains a— I have not the word—’ He gestured to his own left hand where he wore a signet ring.
‘A ring? Signet ring?’
‘Signet ring, ach, that is right.’
‘From a lady?’
He glanced over his shoulder, and then, in a very low voice he said, ‘From the Kaiser. I am not supposed to know, but I overhear . . . It’s for the signing of the peace treaty.’
I didn’t believe him. Would you? I didn’t believe a peace treaty was about to be signed and, even if it was, I didn’t believe Kaiser Bill would send his signet ring to seal the document. Nobody used sealing wax and signet rings any longer.
Guilty Consciences - [A CWA Anthology] Page 16