“Well, now. In April 1914 this wedding of Mr. Henry Thorpe’s came along, and it was pretty well known that Mrs. Wilbraham was going to be there with her emerald necklace. There wasn’t a thief in London that didn’t know all about Mrs. Wilbraham. She’s a sort of cousin of the Thorpes, a lot of times removed, and long way back, and she’s got a stack of money and the meanness of fifty thousand Scotch Jews rolled into one. She’ll be about eighty-six or seven now and getting childish, so I’m told; but in those days she was just eccentric. Funny old lady, stiff as a ramrod, and always dressed in black silks and satins — very old-fashioned — with jewels and bangles and brooches and God knows what stuck all over her. That was one of her crazes, you understand. And another was that she didn’t believe in insurance and she didn’t believe a lot in safes, neither. She had a safe in her town house, naturally, and kept her stuff locked up in it, but I don’t suppose she’d have done that if the safe hadn’t been put in by her husband when he was alive. She was too mean to buy as much as a strong-box for herself, and when she went away on a visit, she preferred to trust to her own wits. Mad as a March hare, she must have been,” said the Superintendent, thoughtfully, “but there! you’d be surprised what a lot of these funny old ladies there are going about loose in the world. And of course, nobody ever liked to say anything to her, because she was disgustingly rich and had the full disposal of her own property. The Thorpes were about the only relations she had in the world, so they invited her to Mr. Henry’s wedding, though it’s my belief they all hated the sight of her. If they hadn’t have asked her, she’d have taken offence, and — well, there! You can’t offend your rich relations, can you?”
Lord Peter, thoughtfully refilled his own beer-mug and said, “Not on any account.”
“Well, then,” pursued the Superintendent, “here’s where Cranton and Deacon tell different tales again. According to Deacon, he got a letter from Cranton as soon as the wedding-day was announced, asking him to come and meet him at Leamholt and discuss some plan for getting hold of the emeralds. According to Cranton, it was Deacon wrote to him. Neither of ’em could produce a scrap of evidence about it, one way or the other, so, there again, you paid your money and you took your choice. But it was proved that they did meet in Leamholt and that Cranton came along the same day to have a look at the house.
“Very good. Now Mrs. Wilbraham had a lady’s maid, and if it hadn’t been for her and Mary Thoday, the whole thing might have come to nothing. You’ll remember that Mary Thoday was Mary Deacon then. She was housemaid at the Red House, and she’d got married to Deacon at the end of 1913. Sir Charles was very kind to the young couple. He gave them a nice bedroom to themselves away from the other servants, just off a little back stair that runs up by the butler’s pantry, so that it was quite like a little private home for them. The plate was all kept in the pantry, of course, and it was supposed to be Deacon’s job to look after it.
“Now, this maid of Mrs. Wilbraham’s — Elsie Bryant was her name — was a quick, smart sort of girl, full of fun and high spirits, and it so happened that she’d found out what Mrs. Wilbraham did with her jewels when she was staying away from home. It seems the old girl wanted to be too clever by half. I think she must have been reading too many detective stories, if you ask me, but anyway, she got it into her head that the best place to keep valuables wasn’t a jewel case or a strong-box or anything of that kind, that would be the first thing a burglar would go for, but some fancy place where nobody would think of looking, and to cut a long story short, the spot she pitched upon was — if you’ll excuse me mentioning it — was underneath one of the bedroom utensils. You may well laugh — so did everybody in court, except the judge, and he happened to get a fit of coughing at the time and his handkerchief was over his face, so nobody could see how he took it. Well, this Elsie, she was a bit inquisitive, as girls are, and one day — not very long before the wedding — she managed to take a peep through a keyhole or something of that kind, and caught the old lady just in the act of putting the stuff away. Naturally, she couldn’t keep a thing like that to herself, and when she and her mistress got to Fenchurch — which they did a couple of days before the wedding — the first thing she had to do was to strike up a bosom friendship with Mary Deacon (as she was then) for the express purpose, as it seems to me, of telling her all about it in confidence. And of course, Mary, being a devoted wife and all that, had to share the joke with her husband. I dare say it’s natural. Anyhow, counsel for the defence made a big point of it, and there’s no doubt it was that utensil kept Elsie and Mary out of quod. ‘Gentlemen,’ he said to the jury, in his speech, ‘I see you all smiling over Mrs. Wilbraham’s novel idea of a safe-deposit, and I we no doubt you’re looking forward to passing the whole story on to your wives when you get home. And that being so, you can very well enter into the feelings of my client Mary Deacon and her friend, and see how — in the most innocent manner in the world — the secret was disclosed to the one man who might have been expected to keep it quiet.’ He was a clever lawyer, he was, and had the jury eating out of his hand by the time he’d done with them.
“Now we’ve got to guess again. There was a telegram sent off to Cranton from Leamholt — no doubt about that for we traced it. He said it came from Deacon, but Deacon said that if anybody sent it, it must have been Elsie Bryant. She and Deacon were both in Leamholt that afternoon, but we couldn’t get the girl at the post-office to recognise either of them, and the telegram was written in block letters. To my mind, that points to Deacon, because I doubt if the girl would have thought of such a thing, but needless to say, when the two of them were told to show a specimen of their printing, it wasn’t a mite like the writing on the form. Whichever of them it was, either they were pretty clever, or they got somebody else to do it for them.
“You say you’ve heard already about what happened that night. What you want to know is the stories Cranton and Deacon told about it. Here’s where Cranton, to my mind, shows up better than Deacon, unless he was very deep indeed. He told a perfectly consistent tale from start to finish. It was Deacon’s plan first and last. Cranton was to come down in a car and be under Mrs. Wilbraham’s window at the time mentioned in the telegram. Deacon would then throw out the emerald necklace, and Cranton would go straight off with it to London and get it broken up and sold, dividing the loot fifty-fifty with Deacon, less £350 he’d given him on account. Only he said that what came out of the window was only the jewel-case and not the emeralds, and he accused Deacon of taking the stuff himself and rousing the house on purpose to put the blame on him — on Cranton, that is. And of course, if that was Deacon’s plan, it was a very good one. He would get the stuff and the kudos as well.
“The trouble was, of course, that none of this came out till some time after Cranton had been arrested, so that when Deacon was taken and made his first statement to the police, he didn’t know what story he’d got to meet. The first account he gave was very straightforward and simple, and the only trouble about it was that it obviously wasn’t true. He said he woke up in the night and heard somebody moving about in the garden, and at once said to his wife: ‘I believe there’s somebody after the plate.’ Then, he said, he went downstairs, opened the back door and looked out, in time to see somebody on the terrace under Mrs. Wilbraham’s window. Then (according to him) he rushed back indoors and upstairs, just quick enough to catch a fellow making off through Mrs. Wilbraham’s window.”