“He shook his head. ‘Haven’t the time. I told you this jewel has to accompany me out of England this afternoon.’
“ ‘It doesn’t take all day to make a charge,’ I assured him in my driest tones.
“ ‘I’m afraid, if I do make it, I may never live to make anything else,’ he explained. ‘Fanny has a husband — and even a public school education doesn’t seem to give these gangmen any respect for the police.’
“He grinned, said, ‘So long, Fanny,’ and to my disgust out she went a good deal cooler than when she came in.
“I was properly angry now. ‘You’d no right to do that, sir,’ I told him. ‘She may be robbing someone else’s safe within the hour.’
“ ‘That’s their luck,’ he said.
“ ‘You ought to have given her in charge,’ I insisted.
“ ‘That’s her luck,’ he told me.
“ ‘There ought to have been an arrest,’ I said again.
“ ‘That’s your luck.’ He’d gone before I’d properly understood what he meant. I was beginning to think: ‘That’s life; just a lot of beginnings that don’t lead anywhere,’ when one of my colleagues came in with some photographs in his hand.
“ ‘Keep a look-out for these,’ he said, putting them down. ‘Some gang got away with the Pendleton Emerald this morning. Old Sir Joseph’s foaming at the mouth, and seeing what a squat bald little chap he is, it isn’t safe for him to work overtime at that game. It seems it’s worth a lot of money — four thousand, the experts say — and he was got out of his house by a trick this morning, and then the thieves turned up as calm as you please, on a pretext of answering some advertisement, tied up the butler, and picked the lock of the safe as easy as kiss your hand.’
“ ‘Do they know who the chaps were?’ I asked.
“ ‘A man and a woman. Here are the pictures. Someone saw them in this part of London. How they got away with it in broad daylight takes some explaining. One thing, you’d know him again.’
“He put the pictures on my desk. Hers wasn’t very flattering, but I’d have recognized his anywhere, that tall dark fellow, with the big shoulders and long chin. I suppose she thought someone had hit her trail, so in she came, parked the jewel as calmly as you please in case questions were asked, and then he popped along to warn her the coast was clear. It was all very prettily done.”
“Did they get them?” someone asked.
Inspector Field shook his head. “I did hear the emerald was seen round the neck of a lady in Central Europe some time afterwards, but that might be just gossip. Anyhow, Sir Joseph died of apoplexy within the month, so it wouldn’t have been much use to him.”
We all felt a bit delicate about putting the final question. Finally, the barmaid, braver than the rest of us, or perhaps just more curious, asked: “And what happened when the story came out?”
Field looked at her disapprovingly. “When you’re as old as I am,” he told her, “you’ll understand there’s times when it’s positively unhealthy to know more than your superiors. Gives them a wrong impression, and an ambitious man — and I was ambitious in those days — doesn’t make mistakes like that. But it’s an odd thing,” he wound up, pushing his tankard across the counter, “and I daresay these newfangled psychologists would find some indecent reason for it, but since that time I’ve never been really partial to a tortoise.”
Telling
by Elizabeth Bowen
What makes a writer write? What causes the distinction between a writer who merely wants to write and a writer who simply has to write? What gives a potential writer the final push? In Elizabeth Bowen’s case it was a period in her late teens when she suffered extreme economic hardship. A spree of seemingly uncontrollable extravagance had forced Miss Bowen to sell or pawn most of the things she valued; then for months she lived in rigorous simplicity, barely making ends meet, existing from hand to mouth. During this interval of semi-stagnation, of withdrawal from the world, Miss Bowen suddenly discovered she wanted to write. From the moment her pen first touched paper, the desire became an inner compulsion, and from that time she has thought of practically nothing but writing, its problems, and its fulfillment. True, there have been interims of idleness, but during those lapses or purely transitional phases, she felt only half alive.
Miss Bowen confesses to lining her life, and the life around her, orderly; she loves small gay parties, movies, detective stories, music, and long walks — though not in that order of preference. Today, in the opinion of many critics, she shares with the late Virginia Woolf the highest position among contemporary women novelists in England. Phyllis Bentley once wrote that Elizabeth Bowen’s “short stories are limited in range... but as regards human emotion they are both deep and wide; there is a poignancy, an intensity, in her presentation of experience.”
You will find those qualities — poignancy and intensity, and an incredibly deep understanding — in Miss Bowen’s presentation of the experience of murder. Indeed, she projects the experience of murder, as relived in the mind of an abnormal human being, so realistically that one wonders from what depths of creative perception Miss Bowen brought forth so morbid and so telling a study...
Terry looked up; Josephine lay still. He felt shy, embarrassed all at once at the idea of anyone coming here.
His brain was ticking like a watch: he looked up warily.
But there was nobody. Outside the high cold walls, beyond the ragged arch of the chapel, delphiniums crowded in sunshine — straining with brightness, burning each other up — bars of color that, while one watched them, seemed to turn round slowly. But there was nobody there.
The chapel was a ruin, roofed by daylight, floored with lawn. In a corner the gardener had tipped out a heap of cut grass from the lawn mower. The daisy-heads wilted, the cut grass smelled stuffy and sweet. Everywhere, cigarette-ends, scattered last night by the couples who’d come here to kiss. First the dance, thought Terry, then this: the servants will never get straight. The cigarette-ends would lie here for days, till after the rain, and go brown and rotten.
Then he noticed a charred cigarette stump in Josephine’s hair. The short wavy ends of her hair fell back — still in lines of perfection — from temples and ears; by her left ear the charred stump showed through. For that, he thought, she would never forgive him; fastidiousness was her sensibility, always tormented. (“If you must know,” she had said, “well, you’ve got dirty nails, haven’t you? Look.”) He bent down and picked the cigarette-end out of her hair; the fine ends fluttered under his breath. As he threw it away, he noticed his nails were still dirty. His hands were stained now — naturally — but his nails must have been dirty before. Had she noticed again?
But had she, perhaps, for a moment been proud of him? Had she had just a glimpse of the something he’d told her about? He wanted to ask her: “What do you feel now? Do you believe in me?” He felt sure of himself, certain, justified. For nobody else would have done this to Josephine.
Himself they had all — always — deprecated. He felt a shrug in this attitude, a thinly disguised kind of hopelessness. “Oh, Terry...” they’d say, and break off. He was no good: he couldn’t even put up a tennis net. He never could see properly (whisky helped that at first, then it didn’t), his hands wouldn’t serve him, things he wanted them to hold slipped away from them. He was no good; the younger ones laughed at him till they, like their brothers and sisters, grew up and were schooled into bitter kindliness. Again and again he’d been sent back to them all (and repetition never blunted the bleak edge of these homecomings) from school, from Cambridge, now — a month ago — from Ceylon. “The bad penny!” he would remark, very jocular. “If I could just think things out,” he had tried to explain to his father, “I know I could do something.” And once he had said to Josephine: “I know there is Something I could do.”