Fen Country (17 page)

“I’m fairly good at locks, but there were no tools—apart from scraps of Anglepoises which Shirtcliff tore apart with his bare hands—so as I’ve said, it was nearly two hours before we got that door open at last. Hanging on to Shirtcliff’s sleeve, with the lighter guttering in my hand, I hauled him outside, turned the mains switch back on and then hauled him back inside again.

“‘Strip!’ I said.

“To do him justice, he saw the point, and he stripped at once. I went over his discarded clothes very carefully, and then, equally carefully, I went over
him
. (We’re supposed, at the Yard, to have read a lot of books about such things, and I can distinctly remember glancing through one or two of the least offensive of them.) Asa, who was putting on a great act of shock and horror, at this stage started bellowing about bodily orifices, but as I pointed out to him, not just the diamond had disappeared from the study, but a bloody greet jewel-case as well. Bodily orifices, I pointed out to Asa, were very unlikely receptacles for that. And in fact the jewel-case was eventually found, thrown away at the side of the drive, only a few yards from the front door. By that time, it was, I need hardly say, empty.

“Shirtcliff—’clean’—ran off to a telephone with instructions from me. Meanwhile, I myself went over the study with what writers inexperienced in hyphenation call a fine tooth-comb, and which—”

“Humbleby, listen a moment. It—”

“—and which, I can assure you, brought nothing whatever, of any relevance, to light. I also searched Savitt and Asa, and they searched me. Still nothing. And there could be nothing. Someone had burst in, and grabbed the
Reine
in its box, and disappeared again, and that was all there was to it. Still, I
had
to take all the precautions, I
had
to do the searching—just in case. But nothing. I was very scrupulous about it all, and I can assure you—nothing, then or afterward.”

Fen stared at his guest with more than usual attention: he had found the tale, if not exactly brilliant, at any rate an interesting one. “And finally?” he prompted.

“Finally, Ben Braham was stopped in his car by the police at Deare, getting on for 80 miles from Stickwater, two-and-a-half hours’ drive. No diamond on him or in him, of course, and no diamond anywhere in the car. How could there have been? Eighty miles! At any point, at his leisure, knowing perfectly well how appallingly we were trapped back at that loathsome little house, he could have turned off the London road into a lane, stopped at a field-gate, gone into the field, poked a hole with his finger in the bank, injected the diamond, covered it up, made a careful note of the place (he had a torch in his car, but that doesn’t prove anyone guilty of anything) and then simply traipsed back and driven on again. He could, and can, simply return and pick the miserable little object up again whenever it suits him.”

“Which won’t be yet.”

“No, of course not yet: probably not for a long time. Not, anyway, until a long time after Krafft has paid out the insurance money. Ben and Asa will know, in any case, that we shall be keeping an eye on them for a bit. They won’t make any move until they’re completely certain it won’t backfire in the form of a Conspiracy to Defraud charge.”

“And when they do at last make their move to pick up the diamond,” said Fen: “what then? Does Asa Braham get it anonymously through the post from a conscience-stricken thief?”

“Lord, no.” And Humbleby smiled, with some affection, at his host, whom it was pleasing to find, for the moment, almost as dim-witted as he, Humbleby, had throughout the whole Braham business felt himself to be. “Because in that case, you see, the insurance money would have to be repaid, and Asa wouldn’t be able to afford that. But it’ll be reward enough, for Asa, just to have the
Reine
back and be able to gloat over it secretly. As I’ve told you, he’s crazy about stones. And that, I suppose, has been the basis of the whole trouble.”

Fen thought for a bit. Then he said mildly, “Superstitions about diamonds. You started by talking about those—but you don’t, if I may say so, seem to be altogether free from them yourself.”

“I know practically everything about diamonds,” said Humbleby, with some indignation, “Diamonds, now—”

“Yes, of course. But you say that when the lights went out—and there was no sort of reflected light—this particular diamond shone in the dark.”

“Yes, certainly it did. Diamonds are self-luminescent. Look up any book on the subject and you’ll find—”

“No, I shan’t. Sorry, Humbleby, but not for the circumstances
you’ve
described. Diamonds do shine in the dark, yes. But they don’t produce light, like glow-worms. They store it and reproduce it. For a diamond to shine in the dark, it must have been subjected to light first—fairly bright light, and fairly recently.

“But what sort of light had your precious
Reine des Odalisques
been under? Well, if the tales are true, it’d been for three weeks in the darkness of a bank’s safe-deposit vault; then a man called Shirtcliff glanced at it for a moment, in ordinary daylight; finally, it was exposed to a low-wattage bulb—for what doesn’t sound like much more than two minutes, though I suppose—”

“Less
than two minutes.” Humbleby struck his brow with his clenched fist, in a transpontine manner which was nevertheless patently sincere. “God, what an imbecile I’ve been! You mean, Asa was so infatuated with the thing that he took it with him to South America.”

“Yes, that seems likely.”

“And then marched into Pratt’s Bank with it in his pocket, and then simply popped it into the jewel-box which he
had
left there, and brought it out again.”

“Almost certain, I’d say. The diamond had stored all that light because he was staring at it virtually up to the last possible moment. Either he’d forgotten that when Ben put their plan into operation the diamond would shine, or else—which seems more likely—he just thought that the interval, between the light going out and the
Reine
being grabbed, would be too short for anyone to notice.”

“Well,
I
noticed,” said Humbleby. “The question is, did Savitt? Did Shirtcliff? If they both did”—and here an unhealthy revengeful gleam appeared in Humbleby’s eye—“Asa’s claim on Krafft Insurance isn’t going to look too good.”

“If he disgracefully neglected a specified precaution, then the whole thing is void.”

“Void.”

“And did only Asa have access to that Pratt’s Bank safe-deposit? I mean, if he could just give the key to someone else, then he could say—”

“No, it had to be him. Couldn’t be anyone else.”

And here Fen considered Humbleby with a faint air of displeasure which, except between such old friends, might have seemed slightly ungracious. “I don’t altogether dislike the sound of your Asa,” he said. “Of course, it’s bad to try to defraud insurance companies, and if for all of you that diamond did in fact shine in the dark, then… Even so, there are some moods”—and here, Fen brought the sherry out again—“in which it’s possible to feel that the thing was worth a try.”

“Asa withdrew his claim,” said Humbleby when six months later he and Fen met coincidentally at the Travelers’, “because Savitt and Shirtcliff had both, like me, glimpsed the
Reine
self-luminescing. So the claim wouldn’t wash—and now, I understand, Asa’s quite a poor man. He makes out, though, as poor men so often mysteriously do. Is your conscience at rest?”

“Shirtcliff?”

“Sacked from Safeguard for incompetence, and at once taken on by the Metropolitan Police.”

“Savitt?”

“Richer and more famous and more courteous than ever.”

“The diamond?”

“Well… Somewhere. I suppose we’ll never know.”

They never did know, but at the last, one man, without knowing it, knew.

Police Constable Bowker’s “manor” was centered on the hamlet of Amble Harrowby, a focus for much rich agricultural activity. Left-wing himself, Bowker was unable to suppress at least a theoretical distaste for the local Socialist peer, Lord Levin, whose notional egalitarianism had somehow never prevented him from enjoying such benefits as an inherited title, with additional tremendous inherited wealth, could bestow. At the same time, Bowker realized that in this respect he was perhaps being a little naïve, the more so as Lord Levin went to such particular trouble to be pleasant to everyone, Bowker himself by no means excluded. There could scarcely—Bowker reflected, as he buzzed through the lanes in his white crash-helmet, on his little machine—be a more agreeably conscienceless man in the entire land.

In particular, this scheme of a trout-lake was good. Lord Levin had many farm tenancies on his property; one of these—always notable for the combined age, idleness and incapacity of its tenant—had recently been caused to be vacated by death; and Lord Levin was taking the opportunity of converting some fifteen acres of notoriously unproductive land into a fairly large-scale water for fishing.

Now, Police Constable Bowker, whatever his general feelings about Lord Levin, didn’t at all disapprove of this. On the contrary, since the lake was to be a natural-seeming sort, confluent with the surrounding mild bulges of the countryside, he felt, and felt quite strongly, that here was an instance where private riches might quite well redound to the public good.

He stopped his machine, therefore, at a specially good point of vantage—Copeman’s Rise—from which the lake-making proceedings, which had by now been going on for a good two weeks, could be unusually well viewed.

Immense scars, bulldozer-induced, lay across the land. Hedgerows had been ripped up and tossed aside. Tons of unsifted earth were being lorry-laden and whipped off to unknown dumping grounds. The whole spectacle—admittedly for the moment hideous, but still, Bowker felt, marginally better than the grubby little contraceptive-infested copses it was replacing—was one of massive alteration and change. Bowker’s heart warmed. Soon, all this unavoidable scooping-out would give way to a placid expanse of brownish waters (Bowker’s romanticism would have preferred bluish, but his practicality forbade this), lightly ruffled by the prevailing winds.

So far, so good. But as Bowker came to a halt, it became evident to him that his emotions regarding this presently tormented landscape, so soon to be converted to beauty, were not entirely shared. Two men, who had parked their shabby car close by, were having to support each other, arms round shoulders, in order to contemplate the scene with equanimity.

Bowker thought that he perhaps recognized them.

They were a jeweler and his brother with a country cottage at Stickwater, fifteen miles away. Bowker also thought that they were possibly supporting one another because they were drunk.

But then he shifted a little nearer—and decided he had been wrong about that.

Bowker went back to his machine, re-started the engine, gunned it up and headed for the London road. There are some things even a country copper thinks it best not to interfere with: and one is when he sees two male adults watching a trout-lake being made with great scalding tears pouring down their cheeks.

“No,” said Detective Inspector Humbleby. “No, it doesn’t really do to play jokes on the police. You’re liable to get yourself into serious trouble, for one thing. And for another, it’s essentially unfair…

“However, there has been just one instance, quite recently, of the thing’s being brought off with impunity and, on the whole, justification.” He chuckled suddenly. “I don’t think anything’s given us so much simple pleasure at the Yard since Chief Inspector Noddy tripped over his sword and fell headlong at the Investiture last year… Tell me, did you ever come across a DI called Snodgrass?”

Gervase Fen said that he was sorry, he had not.

“I thought you might have done, for the reason that Snodgrass is our expert on literary forgeries… However. The thing about him is that although he’s undoubtedly a very good man at his job, he’s far from being an amiable character.

“Not to put too fine a point on it, Snodgrass is dour and suspicious to a quite offensive degree. And with decidedly left-wing political views, too. So that when he came to deal with Brixham—”

“Brixham the newspaper baron?”

“Yes. Though it was Brixham the book-collector whom Snodgrass offended. Brixham specializes in the Augustan period, you know—Pope and Addison and all that lot. That’s relevant to what follows, in the sense that Brixham would obviously know a great deal about the pitfalls of literary forgery and would be in a position, with this money and printing-presses and laboratories and so forth, to turn out a very creditable forgery himself.

“He must have had accomplices, of courses-technicians of various softs. But Snodgrass never succeeded in getting a line on them, and it’s evident that Brixham secured their secrecy by the simple process of letting them into the joke.

“Well now, the origin of it all was five years ago, when trouble arose over a first edition which Brixham had sold to a fellow-collector, and which was suspected to be a forgery.

“Snodgrass investigated. And in the course of his investigations he was quite needlessly uncivil to Brixham (who turned out in the end to be completely innocent)—uncivil enough to have justified a strong complaint to the AC, if Brixham had chosen to make it. He didn’t choose, however. He had other ideas.

“And just six months ago, after a long interval of patient preparation, those ideas came to fruition.

“What happened was that an old boy called Withers (who I think must have been a party to the plot) came to the Yard asserting that a letter recently sold him by Brixham was faked. The sum involved was only a pound or two. But if the letter was a fake, and Brixham knew it, then unquestionably a fraud had been committed. And accordingly Snodgrass started to inquire into the matter with a fervor worthy, as they say, of a better cause.

“The letter was dated 9 August 1716, and purported to be written by one Thomas Groate. You’ve heard, of course, of the publisher Edmund Curll?”

Fen nodded. “The man of whom Arbuthnot said that his biographies had added a new terror to death.”