“Did you mean Jason to kill me?” I asked flatly.
“No! Of course not!” The idea seemed genuinely to shock him.
“He could have done,” I said.
“I’m not a murderer!” His indignation, as far as I could tell, was true and without reservation, quite different to his reaction to my calling him a thief.
“What were you doing two days ago, on Sunday afternoon?” I said.
“What?” He was bewildered by the question but not alarmed.
“Sunday afternoon,” I said.
“What about Sunday afternoon? What are you talking about?”
I frowned. “Never mind. Go back to Saturday night. To Jason giving me a concussion with half a brick.”
The knowledge of that was plain to read. We were again on familiar territory.
“You can kill people,” I said, “hitting them with bricks.”
“But he said...” He stopped dead.
“You might as well go on,” I said reasonably, “we both know that what I’ve said is what happened.”
“Yes, but... what are you going to do about it?”
“I don’t know yet.”
“I’ll deny everything.”
“What did Jason say about the brick?”
He gave a hopeless little sigh. “He said he knew how to knock people out for half an hour. He’d seen it done in street riots, he said, and he’d done it himself. He said it depended on where you hit.”
“You can’t time it,” I objected.
“Well, that’s what he said.”
He hadn’t been so wrong, I supposed. I’d beaten his estimate by maybe ten minutes, not more.
“He said you’d be all right afterward,” Pross said.
“He couldn’t be sure of that.”
“But you are, aren’t you?” There seemed to be a tinge of regret that I hadn’t emerged punch-drunk and unable to hold the present conversation. Callous and irresponsible, I thought, and unforgivable, really. Greville had forgiven treachery; and which was worse?
“Jason knew which office window to break,” I said, “and he came down from the roof. The police found marks up there.” I paused. “Did he do that alone, or were you with him?”
“Do you expect me to tell you?” he said incredulously.
“Yes, I do. Why not? You know what plea bargaining is, you just tried it with five diamonds.”
He gave me a shattered look and searched his common sense; not that he had much of it, when one considered.
Eventually, without shame, he said, “We both went.”
“When?”
“That Sunday. Late afternoon. After he brought Grev’s things back from Ipswich and they were a waste of time.”
“You found out which hospital Greville was in,” I said, “and you sent Jason to steal his things because you believed they would include the diamonds which Greville had told you he had with him, is that right?”
He rather miserably nodded. “Jason phoned me from the hospital on the Saturday and said Grev wasn’t dead yet but that his brother had turned up, some frail old creature on crutches, and it was good because he’d be an easy mark... which you were.”
“Yes.”
He looked at me and repeated, “Frail old creature,” and faintly smiled, and I remembered his surprise at my physical appearance when I’d first come into this room. Jason, I supposed, had seen only my back view and mostly at a distance. I certainly hadn’t noticed anyone lurking, but I probably wouldn’t at the time have noticed half a ship’s company standing at attention. Being with the dying, seeing the death, had made ordinary life seem unreal and unimportant, and it had taken me until hours after Jason’s attack to lose that feeling altogether.
“All right,” I said, “so Jason came back empty-handed. What then?”
He shrugged. “I thought I’d probably got it wrong. Grev couldn’t have meant he had the diamonds with him.” He frowned. “I thought that was what he said, though.”
I enlightened him. “Greville was on his way to Harwich to meet a diamond cutter coming from Antwerp by ferry, who was bringing your diamonds with him. Twelve teardrops and eight stars.”
“Oh.” His face cleared momentarily with pleasure but gloom soon returned. “Well, I thought it was worth looking in his office, though Jason said he never kept anything valuable there. But for diamonds... so many diamonds... it was worth a chance. Jason didn’t take much persuading. He’s a violent young bugger...”
I wondered fleetingly if that description mightn’t be positively and scatologically accurate.
“So you went up to the roof in the service lift,” I said, “and swung some sort of pendulum at the packing room window.”
He shook his head. “Jason brought grappling irons and a rope ladder and climbed down that to the window, and broke the glass with a baseball bat. Then when he was inside I threw the hooks and the ladder down into the yard, and went down in the lift to the eighth floor, and Jason let me in through the staff door. But we couldn’t get into the stockrooms because of Grev’s infernal electronic locks, or into the showroom, same reason. And that vault... I wanted to try to beat it open with the bat but Jason said the door is six inches thick.” He shrugged. “So we had to make do with papers... and we couldn’t find anything about diamonds. Jason got angry... we made quite a mess.”
“Mm.”
“And it was all a waste of time. Jason said what we really needed was something called a Wizard, but we couldn’t find that either. In the end, we simply left. I gave it up. Grev had been too careful. I got resigned to not having the diamonds unless I paid for them. Then Jason said you were hunting high and low for them, and I got interested again. Very. You can’t blame me.”
I could and did, but I didn’t want to switch off the fountain.
“And then,” he said, “like you guessed, I inveigled you into Grev’s garden, and Jason had been waiting ages there getting furious you took so long. He let his anger out on the house, he said.”
“He made a mess there too, yes.”
“Then you woke up and set the alarms off and Jason said he was getting right nervous by then and he wasn’t going to wait around for the handcuffs. So Grev had beaten us again... and he’s beaten you too, hasn’t he?” He looked at me shrewdly. “You haven’t found the diamonds either.”
I didn’t answer him. I said, “When did Jason break into Greville’s car?”
“Well... when he finally found it in Greville’s road. I’d looked for it at the hotel and round about in Ipswich, but Grev must have hired a car to drive there, because his own car won’t start.”
“When did you discover that?”
“Saturday. If the diamonds had been in it, we wouldn’t have needed to search the house.”
“He wouldn’t have left a fortune in the street,” I said.
Pross shook his head resignedly. “You’d already looked there, I suppose.”
“I had.” I considered him. “Why Ipswich?” I said.
“What?”
“Why the Orwell Hotel at Ipswich, particularly? Why did he want you to go there?”
“No idea,” he said blankly. “He didn’t say. He’d often ask me to meet him in odd places. It was usually because he’d found some heirloom or other and wanted to know if the stones would be of use to me. An ugly old tiara once, with a boring yellow diamond centerpiece filthy from neglect. I had the stone recut and set it as the crest of a rock crystal bird and hung it in a golden cage... it’s in Florida, in the sun.”
I was shaken with the pity of it. So much soaring priceless imagination and such grubby, perfidious greed.
I said, “Had he found you a stone in Ipswich?”
“No. He told me he’d asked me to come there because he didn’t want us to be interrupted. Somewhere quiet, he said. I suppose it was because he was going to Harwich.”
I nodded. I supposed so also, though it wasn’t on the most direct route which was farther south, through Colchester. But Ipswich was where Greville had chosen, by freak mischance.