He gave a short grim laugh.
“A paste copy would be as beautiful, and no one would do murder for it. I say that to myself, and I’ve said it to my daughter, but all the time there’s something in me that won’t tolerate a fake.”
Miss Silver looked up brightly.
“That is because it carries with it the suggestion of fraud. But if you call it a copy or let it stand on its own merits of design and craftsmanship, the stigma vanishes.”
He shook his head.
“If I can’t have a Rembrandt I don’t want a copy. Not rational, but there are plenty of us all in the same boat. Which is why the price of the real thing keeps on going up, and why murder was done for my necklace in Cranberry Lane a couple of days ago. Well, we’ve run off the rails. I was saying there had got to be a contact with my family circle, so I had better tell you something more about it. To start with, I am a widower, and I have a daughter-twenty-four last birthday-married a couple of years ago, not exactly against my will, but certainly against my wish. Nothing much against him-nothing much to him. Rackety young fellow whose idea of amusing himself was to drive as near a hundred miles an hour as his car would let him, and when he wasn’t doing that to spend as much money as possible in the shortest possible time. He finished up by crashing over a precipice in the Austrian Tyrol and leaving Moira a widow just about the time she was beginning to think she’d have done better to take my advice. Well, there she is-Moira Herne.”
Miss Silver said, “Excuse me, Mr. Bellingdon-” She went over to the writing-table, took from a drawer a bright blue exercise-book and a neatly pointed pencil, and came back to her chair. Her knitting laid aside for the moment, she headed a page with the words The Bellingdon Necklace, placed Moira Herne’s name on the left-hand side of the next line, and entered the particulars which Mr. Bellingdon had just imparted. When this had been done she said “Yes?” in an interrogative manner and waited for him to go on.
He said abruptly, “I have a service flat in town, but my home is at Merefields near Ledlington. Cranberry Lane is a short cut to it from the London road. It is a comfortable old-fashioned house, and I am lucky in having a good staff. The butler and cook have been with me for twenty years. They are husband and wife. The name is Hilton.”
Miss Silver wrote it down.
“Then there’s my secretary, Hubert Garratt. He has been in my employment for ten years, but I have actually known him for a great deal longer than that.”
Miss Silver held her pencil suspended.
“His death will have been a personal loss?”
“He is not dead.”
“The shot was not a fatal one?”
“Oh, yes, it was fatal all right. The person who was shot was not Hubert Garratt.”
“The papers-”
“The papers had got hold of the wrong end of the stick. What information they had was correct, but it didn’t go far enough-and don’t bother about my mixing my metaphors, because I’ve never been able to worry about that. I was earning my living when I was fourteen, and the books I bothered with were the ones that were going to help me to earn it. But to come back to Hubert Garratt. I wrote and told the bank he’d be fetching the necklace at twelve noon on Tuesday. Now the people who knew that were myself and the bank, Hubert Garratt, my daughter, and two other people. Early on Tuesday morning I was told that Garratt was ill. Since the war he has a tendency to asthma. I went to see him, and found him quite disabled, and told him he wasn’t to attempt to go for the necklace. I rang up the bank, spoke to the manager, and told him there was a change and I was sending Garratt’s assistant, a young fellow called Arthur Hughes. The manager took the precaution of ringing off and then ringing me back, and I gave him Arthur’s description and said he would show a letter from me naming him as Garratt’s substitute. Well, that all went off without a hitch. Arthur left the bank with the necklace, but he was shot dead in Cranberry Lane.”
Miss Silver confided these details to the blue exercise book. Bellingdon watched her with an odd look upon his face. The pale blue knitting and the bright blue book, the pencil, the hair-net, the brooch which fastened the front of her olive-green cashmere, a rose carved out of a black bog-oak with an Irish pearl at its heart, all combined to make as unlikely a picture of a private detective as he could well imagine. He thought he could transplant her to Merefields without there being the slightest risk of her being taken for one. When she had finished writing she looked up.
“And the other two people who were aware that the necklace was being fetched-was Mr. Hughes one of them?”
“Well, no, he wasn’t. As far as I know, he knew nothing about the plan until I called him in and told him he would have to go to the bank for me instead of Garratt.”
“You say as far as you know, Mr. Bellingdon.”
“Oh, that? It meant nothing. Garratt said he didn’t mention it, and no one else would.”
“And the other two people were?”
He made a mental note that she could be pertinacious.
“One of them is a guest in the house, and the other-there could be no possible connection.”
Miss Silver gave a gentle cough.
“If I am to help you, Mr. Bellingdon, it would be better that I should have all the facts. As Lord Tennyson so wisely says, ‘So trust me not at all or all in all.’ ”
“Does he? Well, it might do with some people, but I wouldn’t like to say it would answer in every case. Anyhow there isn’t any question about trusting here. The two people are my late wife’s cousin, Elaine Bray-Miss Bray, who is kind enough to run Merefields for me-and Mrs. Scott who is a guest in the house.”
Miss Silver remained in an attentive attitude. Without so much as a word or a look it was conveyed to Lucius Bellingdon that something further was expected. There are times when silence can be more particular than speech. Since the last thing he desired was any particularity in either of these two cases, he yielded the point with a trace of stubborn amusement.
“Miss Bray took charge of my daughter and of the management of the house when my wife died. She had been living with us for some years as my wife was not strong. I owe her a good deal. Mrs. Scott-” he tried, with what success he was not certain, to keep his voice and manner as indifferent as might be- “Mrs. Scott is, as I said, a guest and a close personal friend.”
Miss Silver wrote these things down. She also made a mental note that Mr. Bellingdon felt himself to be under an obligation to his late wife’s cousin, and that it was something of a burden to him. In the case of Mrs. Scott she had no difficulty in discerning a warmer feeling and the fact that he did not desire this feeling to appear. She wrote in her book, and heard him say with a note of relief in his voice,
“Well, I think that is all. There is a gardener and his wife-she helps in the house -and there is a woman and a couple of girls who come in by the day from the village, but they could have had no knowledge of how or when I should be getting the diamonds out of the bank.”
Miss Silver reflected that this was what was invariably said whenever an important leakage of information occurred. No matter how completely the event would prove him wrong, the person concerned invariably expressed entire confidence in those surrounding him and was prepared to dogmatize on the question of there being no possible way in which a leakage could have taken place. She picked up her knitting, drew on the blue wool, and said,
“Mr. Bellingdon, impossibilities do not occur. You will not ask me to believe that they do. This robbery and the resultant murder was no chance affair. It was very carefully planned, and every detail of the proposed transfer of the necklace was known to the people who planned it some nineteen hours before the crime took place. This is not in dispute. If the leakage did not occur in your own immediate circle, then it must have occurred at the bank. When you first notified them that you would be withdrawing the necklace, did you write, or did you telephone?”