James looked gratified. “They both did,” he answered. He opened a leather-bound folder that lay on his desk and selected a photograph, which he then handed to Bethancourt. “That’s Evony in costume.”
Bethancourt examined the picture curiously. It portrayed a young, sloe-eyed woman who smiled flirtatiously at the camera. She was festooned in jewels and very little else, and the angles of her broad cheekbones suggested a Slavic descent.
“Exactly right,” said James when Bethancourt mentioned this. “She made her reputation in Paris, and Evony St. Michel was a stage name she adopted. She was actually born and raised in Kiev.” He consulted a sheet of paper from his folder. “Her real name was Ionna Hrushevsky—not really appropriate for a Parisian actress.”
“Doesn’t have a very romantic ring, no,” agreed Bethancourt, handing back the photograph. “So she was Miranda Haverford’s great-grandmother? It seems an odd relationship for a respectable English spinster. How did a Ukrainian actress in Paris end up here in England?”
“She married a respectable English button manufacturer.” James smiled slyly at Bethancourt’s startled expression. “Yes, it was a very peculiar way to end a most notorious career. Like to see the wedding photo?”
“I would indeed,” said Bethancourt, leaning forward to take the picture James plucked from his folder.
By the style of Evony’s wedding dress, the photograph had been taken around the turn of the century. She stood, stiff and proper, by her new husband’s side, her cloud of dark hair liberally adorned with pearls. The groom was the possessor of a fine walrus mustache, behind which he looked quite young and rather uncomfortable.
“She was somewhere in her forties there,” said James, “but she looks much younger. Charles Haverford was thirty-one when he married her, and by all accounts completely besotted. His friends and relations predicted she would ruin him, but in fact they did very well together. Apparently Evony became financially prudent in her old age, having learned from her own past mistakes, and never let Haverford spend too much money on her.”
“A happy ending, then,” said Bethancourt. “I take it they had a child?”
But James shook his head. “No, I imagine Evony was past that by the time of the marriage. But they did officially adopt one of her sister’s children, a son by the name of Michael.”
Bethancourt raised his eyebrows and James laughed heartily.
“You’re a quick one, aren’t you?” he said. “Yes, he is thought to be Evony’s own child, whom she had foisted off on her sister after giving birth. No one knows who his father was, although he seems to have been born during the period that Evony was the mistress of the Russian Grand Duke Alexander. But of course she was notoriously unfaithful—she may not have known herself who her son’s father was.” James tucked the wedding photograph away and began leafing through the others in the folder. “In any case,” he continued, “Grand Duke Alexander—whether he fathered Evony’s son or not—is the reason we’re all here now. He was an extremely generous man.”
James had withdrawn another photograph from the leather folder, which he now held out for Bethancourt to take. In it was pictured an elaborate necklace, mid-Victorian in style, whose centerpiece appeared to be an emerald of nine carats or so, accompanied by smaller emeralds and diamonds forming the pattern around it. A second photograph on the bottom half of the page showed an identical necklace, only this one used rubies instead of emeralds.
Something was ringing a dim bell in Bethancourt’s mind as he studied the gemstones. Glancing up, he met James’s gaze, which had an expectant air. He returned his attention to the photographs, frowning as his eye picked out details.
“These aren’t two different necklaces,” he said slowly.
“Hah!” said James, obviously pleased. “Then what are they?”
“I would imagine,” answered Bethancourt, “that this is an example of a necklace made from color-change gemstones.”
James was grinning broadly. “You’re as clever as Sergeant Gibbons,” he said, satisfaction in his tone. “Although he was somewhat hampered in his answer by never having heard of a color-change gemstone. What you’re looking at there are some of the famed Ural Mountain alexandrites.”
“Yes, of course,” said Bethancourt excitedly. “I remember now—the mine didn’t last long, but the jewels it produced were said to be extraordinary.” He glanced back at the photograph in his hands. “I’d forgotten they were red and green, though.”
“The Russian imperial colors,” supplied James. “In the beginning, alexandrite was only mined for royalty. It was a mark of special favor to be gifted with one; but then, Evony St. Michel was said to be the sort of woman to whom men gave special favors.”
Bethancourt was still looking at the necklace. “Which is which?” he asked. “I can’t tell from the picture.”
“You mean natural and artificial light?” said James. “Oh, the green’s the daylight, and the red electric light. This particular necklace is said to be of the very finest quality: a clear, deep green in daylight, and a rich purple-red under an electric lamp. The original appraiser’s assessment goes on about it at great length. The Haverfords used to lend it out for museum exhibits—I’ve got some of the clippings here—but Miranda Haverford refused all requests over the last few years. Possibly it was just too much bother as she got older.”
“Do you have a picture of her?” asked Bethancourt, handing back the one of the jewels.
“Of Miranda Haverford?” said James, surprised. “I think there’s one in one of the newspaper clippings … let’s see … yes, here it is.”
It was just a small, square headshot accompanying a much larger photo of the necklace itself, both in illustration of a review of a museum exhibit in Paris. The photograph showed a woman in her sixties with widely spaced eyes and just a hint of the broad cheekbones of her forebear. It was a studio photograph with nothing of the candid about it, but Bethancourt thought he could just see in those wide-spaced eyes and the tilt of the narrow lips a hint of intelligence and humor.
“Thank you,” he said, handing the clipping back.
“What did you want to see it for?” asked James, curiously. “Miranda Haverford has nothing to do with the case—there’s not the slightest doubt that she died naturally, of old age.”
Bethancourt smiled. “Well, they were her jewels, after all,” he said. “And Jack thought she sounded interesting. I’m interested in
people,” he added. “It’s more or less why I like to hear about Jack’s cases.”
“Ah, yes,” said James, steepling his fingers and leaning them against his chin. “Do you mind my asking how you come to know Gibbons’s boss so well?”
Bethancourt was startled. “Detective Inspector Davies?” he asked. “I don’t know him—never met him.”
“No, I wasn’t referring to Davies,” said James. “I meant Detective Chief Inspector Carmichael—who, I gather, is thirsting for my blood for having placed his favorite sergeant in peril.”
“Really?” asked Bethancourt alertly. “And did you?”
“Not to my knowledge,” said James ruefully. “And I like to be aware when I’m taking risks. I’m not even sure that what happened to the sergeant has anything to do with the Haverford case. Frankly, it looked very much to me as if the robbery was just another example of thieves who check the obituaries regularly. It’s quite common, you know, a burglary at a house just after the occupants have died.”
“No,” sighed Bethancourt. “I didn’t know.”
“But you haven’t answered my question.”
“Oh, about Chief Inspector Carmichael.” Bethancourt paused for a moment. In general, he liked to be as circumspect as possible about his involvement in any police matters, but he was a good judge of character and James struck him as a discreet man. And the investigator was, in any case, to a certain extent already in the police confidence. “Jack sometimes lets me tag along on some of his cases,” he said. “I’ve naturally met Chief Inspector Carmichael during the course of those investigations.”
James raised an eyebrow. “It’s absolutely none of my business,” he said, “but I must confess to a violent curiosity as to how you managed to pull that off.”
Bethancourt smiled deprecatingly. “My father was at school with the chief commissioner,” he said, inwardly sighing.
James laughed. He had a big hearty laugh, and Bethancourt found himself grinning in spite of himself.
“Not such a mystery after all then,” James said, recovering. He looked to the clock over the mantelpiece and began to tuck the photos
back into the leather-bound folder. “There were, of course,” he said, “other jewels in the Haverford collection. In particular, a beautiful pair of ruby earrings, a Golconda diamond brooch, and a Colombian emerald ring and bracelet. Not to mention the pearls. I have the complete list, of course. Plus a little tract Miranda apparently wrote herself, trying to trace the various jewels to the men who had given them to Evony.”
“I’d like very much to see that, if it’s possible,” said Bethancourt, whose interest had been piqued by the story of the jewels.
James gave him a sharp glance. “It’s perfectly possible,” he answered. “Miss Haverford had several copies of it printed up. It will hardly have any bearing on what happened to Sergeant Gibbons, however—I don’t believe he’d even read it.”
“I know,” said Bethancourt, feeling faintly guilty for having let himself become distracted from the reason for his visit. “It just sounds interesting, that’s all.”
“I found it so,” admitted James. He set aside the folder and regarded his guest thoughtfully. “I’m trying a new restaurant for lunch,” he said. “I wonder if you would care to accompany me, and we could discuss the case further there.”
To this Bethancourt happily agreed and after James had instructed his secretary to add one to his reservation, James ushered him out.
The Pennycook Case
U
pon returning to Scotland Yard, Carmichael cast about for an errand to send Constable Lemmy on in order to get the young man out of his hair, and belatedly remembered he had wanted to have the Scotland Yard security footage from Tuesday night examined for any sign that Gibbons had returned to the Yard after his pint with O’Leary. Lemmy accepted this task amicably, without the resentment that most aspiring detectives would have shown. Carmichael barely noticed. With the constable out of the way, he went off in search of O’Leary, only to find that Inspector Hollings had apparently laid claim to his own subordinate today, and had sent O’Leary off to investigate the Pennycook murder down in Walworth.
“And Hollings may be right at that,” said Carmichael to himself.
He paused thoughtfully, frowning. He had, during the course of yesterday, glanced over both the Pennycook case file and the report O’Leary had prepared on his conversation at the pub with Gibbons. But he found that he remembered little about either today. He was quite put out with himself.
“Old man,” he muttered. “Can’t do without sleep anymore. Useless, that’s what you are. Bloody useless.”
He tramped into his office and found both files shoved to one side of his desk, where he vaguely remembered placing them when he had begun to feel another moment reading in his chair would put him to sleep. Had he ever gone back to them? He wasn’t entirely sure, but he was beginning to suspect not.
Heaving a great sigh, he pulled out his desk chair and settled himself in it, drawing O’Leary’s report toward him. It would be by far the shorter of the two and with any luck he could be done with it quickly.
“On Tuesday, at approximately five thirty P.M.,” O’Leary had written, “Detective Sergeant Jack Gibbons rang my office phone to ask if I would be free to have a pint with him after work. This was not an unusual occurrence, although I had not seen him since he began working with the Arts Theft Division some two or three weeks ago. In reply to his invitation, I said I was planning to leave the office at about six and would like to join him for a drink, but that I could not stay long as I had a date at seven thirty. Accordingly, I rang him when I was done for the day and we met in the lobby, proceeding across the street to the Feathers Pub …”
“Bloody long-winded,” muttered Carmichael under his breath, and quite unfairly. Reports were supposed to be crammed with as much detail as the detective could remember in case an apparently irrelevant point later proved significant, and all detective candidates were trained in this style of writing. Carmichael sighed and slogged through a thorough description of the Feathers, of O’Leary’s impressions of the patrons that night, of what he and Gibbons had ordered, and of their brief conversation with the bartender while their orders were being filled.
Having got them seated at a table near the bar, the cleanliness of which was meticulously described, O’Leary at last passed on to his estimation of Gibbons’s mood: perfectly normal. Here Carmichael removed his reading glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose for a moment.
“I then asked him,” continued O’Leary, “how he liked Arts Theft after working Homicide for so long. He replied that he found it very interesting, but very different. He went on to explain that it was not just the work that was different—he had expected that—but the
atmosphere of the office and the attitudes of the detectives were also quite different to that of Homicide. He said the air at Arts Theft was at once lighter, but also more rarified, that it was altogether a more cerebral atmosphere than Homicide. We continued discussing these differences for a little time, though I do not remember exactly what was said. I received the impression from DS Gibbons that although he was enjoying learning something new at Arts Theft, he also missed investigating murders and did not think Arts Theft was the niche for him.”
“Thank God,” muttered Carmichael, and turned the page.
“In the course of this discussion,” O’Leary went on, “DS Gibbons, prompted by questions from me, told me something about the case he was working on, a large jewelry theft from a private home in Southgate. What struck me at the time was the amount of knowledge DS Gibbons was supposed to acquire about the jewels themselves.”
Here O’Leary dutifully recorded all he remembered Gibbons telling him about gemstones in general and the Haverford jewelry in particular, which to O’Leary’s credit was enough to fill a page and a half. Grumbling, Carmichael worked his way through the rudiments of gemology, a subject that interested him not at all.
Having dealt with the odd discrepancies between investigating murders and jewel heists, O’Leary moved on to what he had told Gibbons about his own case.
Carmichael had not paid much attention to the Pennycook murder, principally because it struck him as so very out of character for Gibbons to meddle on another man’s patch. If he had had a thought about the case, he would have rung O’Leary with it, not gone haring off to investigate on his own.
But now it occurred to him that anything might contribute a piece to the puzzle that was a criminal investigation; it was perfectly possible that some facet of the Pennycook murder had given Gibbons a new angle on his own case.
So he read on with interest, although here O’Leary was less precise than he had been earlier, owing to being unsure what points he might have skipped over in the course of conversation.
Albert Pennycook had been found dead in his pawnshop in East
Street a week ago last Wednesday. The chief suspect was Frank Pennycook, the murdered man’s nephew and heir, who seemed to be the sole person who gained from his uncle’s death. But Pennycook had been found with a bashed-in skull, and Frank had never in his forty years shown any sign of violent tendencies; to the contrary, he was known to be a physically timid man. That left, as O’Leary had mentioned yesterday, old grudges, which he and Hollings were ferreting out and investigating.
It seemed to Carmichael a very ordinary kind of murder, Albert Pennycook being a person leading a reprehensible life that had finally caught up with him. He could not see, on the face of it, anything that might have inspired Gibbons to solve a jewel robbery.
“I remarked on the coincidence,” continued O’Leary, “of my investigating the murder of a well-known fence while DS Gibbons was investigating the theft of a valuable jewel collection. DS Gibbons laughed in reply to this and asked me if I had happened on any nineteenth-century alexandrite necklaces in the pawnshop.”
“The devil,” swore Carmichael, suddenly sitting up and paying attention. “How could I have missed that?” he muttered, turning back a page. “Where the hell is that shop—there it is. Bloody hell.”
He stared at the words “pawnshop in East Street” in disbelief at his own dull-wittedness. East Street, in the heart of Walworth. East Street, just round the corner from where Gibbons had been shot.
But what was the connection between the two cases, other than that they both had been discussed in a pub by two detective sergeants? Alfred Pennycook could not have had anything to do with the Haverford robbery; he had been dead for more than a week when the jewelry had been stolen.
Carmichael leaned back in his chair, his eyes fixed on the middle distance, and reached into his desk drawer for a cigar, which he proceeded to roll back and forth between his fingers. If Pennycook could not have been involved in the actual robbery, might he still have had something to do with the planning of it before his death? Could he have been killed for backing out of the plan to steal it?
Carmichael stuck the unlit cigar in his mouth and seized the phone, speed-dialing Inspector Hollings’s mobile.
But Hollings, when he answered, seemed largely puzzled by Carmichael’s sudden interest in the Pennycook case.
“But we looked into that yesterday,” he protested. “As soon as I heard O’Leary had been telling Gibbons about the case, I looked for a connection. I sent you an e-mail about it.”
Carmichael scowled, but since Hollings could not see it, he was not intimidated.
“I must have missed it,” lied Carmichael.
“Well, it was mostly negative,” Hollings told him. “It’s true Pennycook was a big player in things like the Haverford robbery at one time—between his bouts in prison, that is. But he’d been out of that high-end sort of business for years, ever since his health started to fail. The shop in Walworth was nothing like any of his old storefronts—it’s just a pawnshop. Mind you, I’m not saying that no stolen goods ever pass through there, just that they don’t include million-pound jewelry collections. The odd gold wedding ring is more like it.”
“And this nephew of Pennycook’s?” asked Carmichael.
Hollings snorted. “Frank Pennycook hasn’t got the gumption to involve himself in anything like that. There’s some evidence he tried to go into the family business in his youth, but he was convicted of grand larceny some fifteen years ago, and ever since he got out of prison he’s stayed on the straight and narrow. He hasn’t collected so much as a speeding ticket in the last ten years.”
It seemed Pennycook was a dead end, and yet Carmichael still disliked the coincidence. He rang off, leaving Hollings to get on with his own investigation, and thoughtfully lit his cigar. He opened the Pennycook case file, laying it beside O’Leary’s report, and leafed through it, picking out the salient points. Pennycook had been at his shop with his nephew on the day of his death, and they had closed the place together as usual at six. Pennycook had gone home to his supper, but afterward informed his wife that he had to return to the shop that evening for an appointment. She had not bothered to ask with whom, knowing from long experience that no answer would be forthcoming. According to her testimony, he had set out at about 8:30 and had rung her when he had reached the shop to reassure her that he had arrived safely.
She had expected him back around ten, but had not begun to worry unduly until 10:30 or so, at which point she had rung the shop, but received no answer. She had waited another twenty minutes for him to return, and then had called on her nephew to go and look for his uncle.
Frank Pennycook affirmed that he had received such a call at about 10:50 and had proceeded back to the shop, looking for his uncle along the way. He reached the place without sighting him, however, and let himself in by the back door. The lights inside were on, and he found his uncle lying on the floor of the little office in the proverbial pool of blood. He had felt quite faint and had had to go sit down and recover himself before ringing the paramedics. (“Very likely he was clearing out anything he didn’t want the police to see,” Hollings had noted.)
The working theory was that whoever Pennycook had gone to meet had killed him, but no one seemed to know who that might have been. An alternative theory had either Frank or Pennycook’s wife committing the murder, as they both had keys to the shop’s back door.
Carmichael pushed the file aside and smoked meditatively for several minutes. As experienced a detective as he was, he found it impossible to create any kind of reasonable scenario in which the Pennycook and Haverford cases were related, particularly if he accepted as given that Gibbons would not have interfered in someone else’s case.
Carmichael examined that assumption carefully. It was just possible, he admitted to himself, that Gibbons might have had an idea so out of the ordinary that he had been reluctant to pass it on without first checking it out. That would not be at all out of character; Carmichael had known his sergeant to produce quite unique views many times before. And if he had shared such an idea with anyone, Carmichael strongly suspected it would have been with Bethancourt, whom Gibbons had rung and left a message for.
Which reminded him that he had never finished O’Leary’s report.
“We joked about our cases being related for a bit,” continued O’Leary, “and then DS Gibbons asked where in Walworth Pennycook’s pawnshop was. When I told him it was on East Street off Walworth
Road, he looked concerned and mentioned that his cousin lived very near there. I was surprised to hear it, since that part of Walworth is a notoriously bad neighborhood, and I asked DS Gibbons how he had come to let her move in there. He replied that it was all done before he heard about it, and he had not had much luck in persuading her to move. He seemed to feel a little guilty about this, and I gathered that he had been asked by his mother to see this cousin settled, but it had occurred last fall while he was in the Cotswolds, and he had rather shirked his family duty in preference to his official ones. We then discussed how awkward balancing personal and professional lives could be, at which point I remembered my personal life was waiting, and told him I had to go. DS Gibbons said I should go ahead, that he would just finish his pint while he decided what to pick up for dinner. We said good-bye quite cheerfully, and he seemed to me to be in much the same mood as when we had sat down. Nor did I at any time during the conversation feel he was particularly struck by anything I or he said.”
Carmichael was willing to bet those last pronouns had been struggled over, and probably changed more than once, and he wished (not for the first time) that he had had recourse to a computer and word processor back when he had first been a detective sergeant and laboriously writing out reports.
He leaned back in his chair, sipping at coffee gone cold, and tried to put himself in Gibbons’s place. There he was, a smart, ambitious young officer, his head full of a lot of new information about jewelry and jewel thieves, having a pleasant pint after work and chatting about somebody else’s murder case. What might have struck him? And had Gibbons really been giving much thought to the Pennycook case, or did his mind revert back to his own case as soon as it had the chance, just like Carmichael’s always did? Could something O’Leary had told him about the Pennycook murder have illuminated some aspect of the Haverford case for him? But then why would he have gone to Walworth?