‘Sit down, sir,’ he said, poking the professor in the chest with sufficient firmness to park him in the flirtation settee. ‘I shan’t join you. Nothing personal intended, but I like to see a man’s eyes when I ask him questions. In case you wondered, we ain’t here to look at the ladies on the wall, and I don’t propose to compete with ’em.’ He pulled the draw-string at the side of one of Dr Probert’s naked goddesses, who was partially in view, then smartly turned about, pointed a finger at Quayle and asked ‘What have you done with the Etty?’
‘The what?’ asked Quayle, in a voice so thin nobody would have believed it had harangued an audience from the platform of the Store Street Hall.
‘Sleeping Nymph and Satyrs. Occupied a place on the wall behind you until last Friday week. Dr Probert wants it back. I hope it ain’t mutilated.’
‘I don’t know anything about this, Constable.’
‘Sergeant, if you please. Cribb’s the name. Don’t waste my time. I want some sleep tonight. Etty was the artist, you see.’
‘I don’t think I have heard of him.’
‘That’s evident,’ said Cribb, ‘or you wouldn’t have walked out with the canvas you did. There’s better things on these walls than Ettys, I can tell you. You and I might say there isn’t much to choose between buxom wenches in the buff, but we’d be wrong. There’s some here worth ten of your Ettys. French ones. No man of culture would have helped himself to an English nymph when there was madamoiselles to be had. And why take only one, when you could have had an armful? You gave so much away, you see. You’re no picture-thief. You can’t even cut a canvas neatly off its frame. You’re a raw beginner, Professor, no doubt of it.’
Quayle said nothing, but his tongue raced nervously round his lips, moistening them.
‘It was the same at Miss Crush’s,’ Cribb went on. ‘You took a piece of common Royal Worcester when you could have had a priceless Minton. It was plain to me that you knew as much about china as you did about nudes, or housebreaking. You made a shocking mess of Dr Probert’s pantry, climbing in through all the biscuits and pearl barley, didn’t you? So it didn’t take a Scotland Yard man to work out that the thief wasn’t a professional cracksman.
‘How did I come to suspect you? Well, at first I did what you intended-I suspected Peter Brand instead. It was obvious the thief was primed. He knew the only favourable times to rob the houses: when the owners were out visiting. Consider the sequence of events. On October 15th there’s a seance at Miss Crush’s at which Brand and Dr Probert are guests. The doctor very civilly invites Miss Crush back to his house for a return seance on October 31st. She attends, and so does Brand. During the evening Dr Probert makes reference to a lecture he is going to give, which his wife and daughter will attend. The seance comes to an end, Brand leaves, and an hour later so does Miss Crush. When she gets home she discovers the theft of her vase. On November 6th, the night of the lecture, the Proberts’ house is broken into, and a picture stolen. Who can I suspect but Brand, the only person other than the doctor and Miss Crush who was present at both seances and knew when to execute the burglaries?’
‘It seems a reasonable inference to make,’ said Quayle, guardedly. ‘He is of humble extraction, as you must have gathered from his occasional lapses of speech. His father was a common cabman, I believe. A person of that class admitted suddenly to the residences of the well-to-do is subject to certain temptations, is he not?’
‘Ah,’ said Cribb, putting up a forefinger. ‘That’s what you wanted me to think, and so I did for a short time. Until I clapped my eyes on you, Professor.’
‘Where was this?’
‘Don’t look so alarmed. It wasn’t in Probert’s garden. It was legitimate enough at the time-your lantern lecture at the Store Street Hall.’
‘You were there?’
‘My assistant is Constable Thackeray, the man with the handcuffs.’
‘I might have guessed.’
‘You might, sir. You looked a trifle worried when Peter Brand removed the handcuffs from the envelope, as I recall, but so did Brand, of course. I must be fair. Before that, though, I was already starting to turn things over in my mind. It seemed to me that Peter Brand was a young man with ambition. He was earning something of a reputation in the metropolis. What was it? Spirit-writing in Camberwell and the levitation of a suite of furniture in Hampstead? At any rate, there can’t be many mediums of twenty capable of sharing the billing with you at the Store Street Hall.’
‘It was only at my invitation,’ insisted Quayle.
‘The whole point is,’ Cribb continued, ‘that he was starting to earn fat fees, and the prospects were even better. Why should he queer his own pitch by robbing the clients when he was fleecing them handsomely already? It made no sense.’
‘Fleecing them?’ repeated Quayle. ‘What do you mean by that?’
‘Simply that I class young Brand with any other sharp, and it’s my experience that the needle-pointed fraternity don’t play two games at once.’
‘I hope you are not equating spiritualism with racecourse practices.’
‘It’s all a way of lining your pocket, as I see it,’ said Cribb. ‘You don’t find your thimble-rigger picking pockets at the same time as he works the cups. When young Brand picked the handcuffs out of the envelope at the meeting, he was terrified, I could see that. But it wasn’t on account of the Etty or the Worcester vase; it was because he was afraid we’d tumbled to the fact that he already knew Miss Crush and all about her Uncle Walter.’
‘Oh that,’ said Quayle dismissively. ‘Pure opportunism. It was perfectly legitimate.’
‘I’d like to hear you justify that to your audience,’ said Cribb. ‘However, Brand, for whatever reason, took the first opportunity of dashing for the exit. We caught up with him a few yards short of Tottenham Court Road. Do you know, Professor, he didn’t even know the vase had gone from Miss Crush’s house, and when I mentioned it, he thought it was the Minton that must have been taken. Unlike you, you see, he can tell the value of a piece of china. He also talked about you.’
Quayle’s eyes flashed with fury. ‘Did he? The little guttersnipe!’
‘Yes. Called you a regular pal, if I recall correctly. Said that you took him in and taught him the rudiments of table-tapping.’
‘Oh, did he?’ Quayle rapidly switched to a conciliatory tone. ‘That’s perfectly true, of course. I gave him introductions to some of the best addresses in London.’
‘So I heard,’ said Cribb. ‘Just when you were slipping out of public favour, too. It takes a generous-hearted man to lend a helping hand to an up-and-coming youngster at a time like that.’
‘I’m glad you appreciate the fact.’
‘I asked myself why you did it.’
‘From altruism, Sergeant.’
Cribb walked to the sideboard and poured a glass of water from the flask there. ‘You’ve got all the answers ready, haven’t you? No, a man in your shoes doesn’t hand his livelihood over to an upstart for no good reason. I know why you did it. You gave him the helping hand to let him get ahead of you so that you could stab him in the back. Figuratively speaking, of course,’
Quayle shook his head so vigorously that his cheeks quivered. ‘Arrant nonsense!’
‘In that way there was far more chance of winning back the favour of your patrons. Have you ever studied prizefighting? You’ve got a lot in common with the great Jem Mace. Do you know, Professor, there’s only one thing that the Fancy like better than a novice who comes fresh to win a championship, and that’s the old’un who comes back to knock him out. It’s a sound principle, and it would have worked for you if you hadn’t been such a poor hand as a thief. All the conditions were right. Brand didn’t have the slightest notion of what you were planning, so he fed you all the information you needed. You broke into the houses when everyone was out and found the things of value without trouble. Unhappily, that’s where your plan ran into difficulties, because you picked the wrong things to steal. The objects didn’t matter to you; it was the act of theft that was important. That was all that was necessary to scotch Peter Brand’s career. Far better to do it that way, you decided, than expose him as a fraudulent medium, which would have raised doubts about mediums in general.’