The Attenbury Emeralds (18 page)

‘But then the next day Diana called on us; she’s the Marchioness of Writtle, you know. And she asked what Verity would do for a costume, and when we told her she looked rather put out and said her friend Helen was coming as a maharani. Then she saw Verity look a bit crestfallen, and she said it wouldn’t matter if there were two Indian ladies in the party.’

‘It sounds like twice the fun, to me,’ said Harriet.

‘You will perhaps think badly of me, Harriet,’ Lady Sylvia resumed. ‘But I was so cross! I was sure that Diana’s wealthy friend would have a real sari, and all sorts of authentic stuff, and it would put my beloved Verity in a curtain in the shade. And then I remembered that emerald. I thought I remembered that you could wear it as a necklace or as a tiara, and I sent Verity round to the bank to get it and see.’

‘For such a purpose you could have used the paste copy,’ said Peter.

‘Was there a copy? I didn’t know that,’ she said. ‘I knew only about the real one. And we asked the ayah to advise us how to wear it. She came round right away, and looked at the emerald, and was very impressed by it. She looked at it and turned it over, and looked again. Then she said to wear it as a necklace. I must say, it looked stunning against the pale green silk. It drew your eyes at once. And it looked, well, authentic. It didn’t look gloomy or out of place at all, as I had heard Roland’s sisters say.

‘Lily – did I mention the ayah was called Lily? – was all over smiles, and almost reverent about the emerald. She told us it was really something special – well, we knew that – and she said it would bring good luck in love, because there was a love-spell written on the back. Verity said that would be nice, and we gave Lily a discreet present for her trouble – half a dozen eggs, as I remember, which we had from the chickens at Fennybrook Hall.

‘So on the night of the party Verity got herself dressed up, and put on the emerald, and she stood in the hall of the London house looking so lovely, and so confident. My son happened to be there, on his way back to his regiment, and he said, “My God, you look beautiful!” just like that. And he went out into the street and called her a taxi, because it was a bit wet, and she was wearing little gold sandals that just slip on between your toes. And she waved at me from the foot of the steps, and got into the taxi, and I never saw her again.’

At this point Harriet realised that tears were running down Lady Sylvia’s face.

‘I’m sorry we have brought such sadness to mind,’ she said.

‘Oh, no – I quite understand,’ said Lady Sylvia. ‘You are only trying to help my son. But I think I had better ask you now to go and talk to Diana about what happened. After all, she was there, and I was not.’

Peter got to his feet. ‘I shall try to make sure that the distress we have caused you in asking you to recall such a painful affair is not wasted,’ he said. ‘I hope we shall get to the bottom of what has happened to the family jewel, once and for all.’

‘I wish you luck, Peter,’ she said. ‘Naturally I do.’

15

‘So are you game to encounter the notorious Marchioness of Writtle?’ Lord Peter asked his wife the following morning.

‘Certainly,’ said Harriet. ‘But put me in the picture first. I take it the Marquess is dead by now?’

‘Oh, long ago. Somewhere around 1935, I think. Leaving no children and a great deal of money.’

‘But if you are still calling her the Marchioness, she has not remarried?’

‘No.’

‘I suppose she had a slightly toxic reputation?’

‘Well, after the notorious trial Writtle kept a firmer hand on her, I gather. Perhaps she didn’t want to risk a second husband who might cramp her style.’

‘No triumph of hope for her?’

‘Well, most husbands would expect to rule the roost. Would expect obedience, submissive charm and co-operation. You have an unduly rosy view of marriage, Harriet, because I myself am so exceptionally permissive and undemanding.’

But this squib failed to flare, because Harriet simply looked at her husband and said, ‘Indeed you are.’

The conversation was interrupted, as their conversations sometimes were these days, by a long, steady, slightly smiling mutual contemplation. Then Harriet said, ‘So what was this lifestyle that a normally repressive husband would have impaired?’

‘Oh, house-parties; moving around with a great cluster of satellite friends between Chamonix, the Riviera, New York and Madeira. Always in the
Tatler
for this or that grand do.’

‘I wonder how such a person got on in the war?’ asked Harriet.

‘So do I,’ said Peter. ‘Shall we call on her and see what we shall see?’

Lady Diana opened her front door herself. She was wearing a caftan of Liberty silk spattered with sequins which might have been an evening dress, and might have been a dressing-gown. She was smoking a Balkan Sobranie in a long black cigarette-holder. She stared at Peter and then said, ‘Oh, it’s you. Come in. Place is a bit of a mess, I’m afraid. Can’t get servants these days. I suppose you’ve still got that creepy manservant of yours?’

‘No,’ said Peter firmly. ‘I can’t stand creepy servants. I’ve got rid of any I ever had.’

‘You must be Harriet,’ said Diana. ‘Don’t you do something rather odd? Writing or something?’

‘I write detective stories,’ said Harriet.

‘Quite a family quirk, then,’ said Diana, leading the way into her drawing-room.

The lack of servants, creepy or otherwise, was immediately apparent. There were dozens of ashtrays full of cigarette butts lying around, and fashion magazines lying everywhere, on sofas and on the floor. A dead fire in the fireplace had probably not expired recently, since the ash pile was sprinkled with cigarette butts and sweet papers. Unwashed glasses and empty wine bottles stood around. The curtains had been roughly and unsymmetrically partly drawn. There was only one chair in the room uncluttered enough to sit in, and Diana sat down in it, and said, ‘Sit down,’ to her visitors.

Without comment Harriet and Peter picked up piles of papers, moved them from a sofa to a side table, and sat side by side.

Harriet reflected, looking at Diana, on the advantages of having been a striking rather than a beautiful woman in youth. Diana, now in her mid-fifties, still looked striking. Any grey in her dark, short-cropped hair had been dealt with. She was boldly and skilfully made-up, and had arranged herself gracefully in her chair. There was a curious, bright, hard glitter about her dark eyes. No fading for her, unlike her unfortunate niece Verity.

‘If you expected a drink you should have let me know you were coming,’ Diana now observed. ‘What do you want?’

Harriet wondered how Peter would start. ‘I suppose you know about the strange claim that the family emerald has been swapped for another, and the one in the Attenbury strongbox is not the right one?’ Peter asked.

‘No, I don’t,’ Diana said. ‘Nobody tells me anything. That will have put the wind up Edward, I’ll bet. What fun!’

‘What I need to ask you might not be fun,’ said Peter. ‘I am trying to track the emerald on every occasion when it has been out of the bank. As, for example, it was when you took your niece Verity to a ball at the Café de Paris the night it was bombed.’

‘And you’ve brought
her
along so that she can make a bob or two out of putting it in one of her paperback shockers, I suppose?’ said Diana, waving her cigarette-holder at Harriet.

Peter put a hand on Harriet’s arm.

‘If this were a social occasion, Lady Diana,’ he said, ‘we would leave at once and make sure that we never encountered you again. But I have a professional obligation to your nephew which I shall discharge as faithfully as I can.’

Lady Diana turned her face away from them and answered in a very different tone from her previous brittle light voice: ‘It was absolutely bloody, if you want to know. Bloody, bloody bloody.’

‘It would be helpful if you could tell us as best you can remember what happened that night,’ said Peter.

‘I don’t want to,’ said Diana. ‘The whole thing gives me nightmares every time I think of it. And don’t tell me it would help Edward, because I don’t give a toss about Edward. He’s a pompous, disapproving young shit.’

Harriet said, ‘There have been some deaths in the penumbra of that jewel. Not helping Peter might amount to helping a murderer. How would you feel about that?’

‘You know something?’ Diana said. ‘I could believe that. I really could believe it. I always hated that thing.’

‘What did you hate about it?’ asked Harriet.

‘It was dark. It didn’t look right with the other stones. It seemed somehow jinxed. It wanted to be picked up…Oh, I don’t know, I just didn’t like it. More fool me if we were just thinking of the price it could be flogged for.’

‘Murders have happened for less,’ said Harriet. ‘Please help. Tell us what happened at that party.’

‘I need a drink,’ said Diana.

Peter looked around the room, spotted something that looked like a cocktail cabinet, and went over to open it. He found some tumblers and a bottle of malt whisky.

‘Don’t worry about water,’ Diana called over to him. ‘And there isn’t any ice. I’ll have it neat.’

Peter brought the drink across to her, and sat down again.

She downed the whisky with remarkable speed and then said, ‘Right. Well, I thought Verity was looking a bit peaky, so I asked her to join a mob of friends I was getting together to go out for the night. It was a fancy dress affair – we used to have such fun with those before the war – there were ten of us, enough for one table in the ballroom. A day or so before, I asked what costume she had dreamed up, because I thought with that boring mother of hers there might not be too much French lingerie or harlequin coats around in the wardrobes. I meant to help. When she said she was going in a sari I was a bit bothered, because the Honourable Helen Harrison had said she was going as an Indian girl, and I thought Verity would be shown up. Helen was so good at costumes…anyway, you don’t really want two the same in the same party. So I asked Helen to think of something else, and she came dolled up as Marie Antoinette. Funny, that, when you think what happened to her.’

‘What did happen to her?’ asked Peter.

‘She was decapitated by a sheet of flying glass,’ said Diana. ‘I need another drink.’

Peter got up and refilled her glass.

‘I ought to offer you one,’ she said.

‘It’s a bit early in the day for us, thank you,’ said Harriet. She was beginning to look at Lady Diana with concern.

‘We all met in the foyer,’ Diana continued. ‘And pretty damn good we looked too. A bit of glamour and fun about every one of us. That basement ballroom was supposed to be safe!’ she added indignantly. ‘There was a big crowd milling about, and I saw there was another party in fancy dress, including, would you believe it, another girl in a sari. Someone said she must be a silly cow because she was wearing a turban fixed with a brooch in front, and it wasn’t right to have a turban with a sari. I can’t think why, but he seemed very sure of it. I looked across at this annoying woman. She had a red turban fixed with a big green brooch. Anyway, we all went in and sat at the corner table I had booked, and ordered some champagne. Well, it was supposed to cheer us up. And people got up from time to time and danced; it was Snakehips Johnson and his band. Jolly good.

‘Then there was a rumble, and a terrific bang, and all the lights went out, and stuff started falling on our heads. People were screaming…I reached out for Helen, and her arm was all wet and dusty, and she fell over as I touched her. My ears were hurting, and there was something trickling down my forehead. I called to everyone, “Get out! We must get out of here!” and we began to struggle out into the foyer. Someone had a torch, and was playing the beam around the floor, and there were terribly injured people all over the floor, half buried in rubble, some of them, and I didn’t want to see. I’d give anything not to have seen…

‘Anyway, we were holding hands and struggling to get out into the foyer, and walking all over dead people and stuff, and it was very cold. I looked up and the place was open to the sky. Stars. There were stars, and such awful screams and groans…and the foyer was still there. It even had lights on. People were milling about in it covered with dust, and scratched and bleeding. And the emergency services were there, helping people out into the street, and I looked around and saw at once that we weren’t all there. Helen was missing, and Verity and Jamie. So I started trying to get an ambulance man to go back and look for them, and he wouldn’t. They didn’t seem to realise that they were helping people who were still on their feet, and there was all that mayhem in the ballroom. So Donald wrestled a torch off one of the ambulance men, and we went back ourselves.

I thought she was all right at first – Verity, I mean, because she was sitting with her back to the wall, and there was no blood on her, only dust on her hair, and her drink was on the table in front of her. I began to shout at her to come out. Then Donald’s torch picked up Helen’s head on the floor, and I threw up. And when I straightened up Donald had got across to Verity and he said she was dead. And then the rescue services arrived, and crowded in and told all the walking wounded to get out quick, and someone carried me out of there. They put me in an ambulance and drove me to Bart’s. It was full of frantic people, and terribly injured people being carried in. Someone gave me a cup of tea, and I realised that I only had a cut forehead, I wasn’t injured and I was getting in the way of people who were. So I staggered out of there and walked home.

‘I can’t have been thinking clearly because the way home was down Coventry Street, past the Café de Paris. There was still a line of ambulances, and there were all these bodies lying lined up on the pavement. All dressed up. Like beautiful broken dolls. I thought of looking for Verity but I couldn’t manage it. I only just managed to get home.’

‘How dreadful for you,’ said Harriet softly.

‘I’ll get over it,’ said Diana. ‘I don’t think of it so often now.’

Peter said, ‘We don’t need to ask you much more, Lady Diana. But can you tell us how it is that the jewel Verity was wearing came back to the family?’