Free The Attenbury Emeralds by Jill Paton Walsh Page A

looked both smart and old-fashioned in the world of the Festival of Britain, which they had resolved to visit as soon as it opened. When they reached the pleasant path along the bank of the lake, Harriet said, ‘Tell on, tell on.’
    ‘The next thing was Sugg’s great coup de théâtre . He stopped me on the stairs as I came down to dinner.
    ‘“I understand, Lord Wimsey, that you have been taking a particular interest in this case,” he said.
    ‘“Who told you that?” I asked. I hoped it wasn’t Charles – Sergeant Parker I should call him. “I can’t help keeping an eye on things, Inspector,” said I. “I was an intelligence officer. It comes with the rations.”
    ‘“War’s over now, in case you haven’t noticed, sir,” he said. “However, it does no harm to humour a young gentleman. I have solved the case. Lord Attenbury’s guests are free to leave. I’m just on my way to tell him so.”
    ‘“Have you recovered the jewel?”
    ‘“Not yet, sir. But we have a warrant for the arrest of the thief and the search of his premises. I have no doubt the recovery of the jewel will follow. The key to the whole thing” – he was preening himself, Harriet, positively preening – “was finding the link between the thief and his inside conspirator. I have arrested her . This was a clever plan, Lord Wimsey, laid well in advance.”
    ‘“You have arrested Jeannette?” I said, with a sinking heart.
    ‘“And even as we speak,” he said, “officers from the Yard are seeking to apprehend Mr Osmanthus, in whose possession the missing jewel will be found. You didn’t think of that, did you? I think you will find, with age and experience, Lord Wimsey, that the appropriate training for the job in hand has a lot to be said for it.”’
    ‘You are making this up, Peter!’ exclaimed Harriet.
    ‘By our first strange and fatal interview,’ he said, ‘By all desires which thereof did ensue, By our long starving hopes, etc., etc., I swear I am not.’
    ‘Can he really have been so patronising? How he must squirm at your later successes!’
    ‘I have wondered whether just this very thing is the source of his ill-disguised dislike of me.’
    ‘We can forgive those who injure us, but we never forgive those we have injured?’
    ‘He didn’t exactly injure me. Annoy would be a better translation.’
    ‘Well, so Inspector Sugg arrested poor Jeannette, and, I take it, Nandine Osmanthus?’ asked Harriet as they stopped to admire a patch of pale blue wood anemones, spreading across the grass like a skylit puddle. ‘Did he have a shadow of a reason?’
    ‘He had made a great discovery, which linked the two: the man known to desire the king-stone, and the person who had had the best opportunity to take it. Jeannette it was, and none other than she who had taken Osmanthus his lunch in the little sitting-room.’
    ‘So?’
    ‘So she had an opportunity to conspire with him. Perhaps she had taken the job with the Attenburys specially to await this chance, and indeed had been the one to summon Osmanthus to verify the authenticity of the stone. What do you think of that?’
    ‘I feel a certain shame. If Sugg found it easier to suspect a servant and a foreigner than any member of an upper-class house-party…’
    ‘There is no need for either of us to feel implicated in the bêtise of Inspector Sugg.’
    ‘But I do so feel, somewhat. I must have read dozen upon dozen detective stories in which the writer evinces such prejudices, and, worse, assumes them in the reader.’
    ‘Popular fiction is of its time. And don’t you think, Harriet, that that time is past, or rather passing? I think I can feel the social weather changing as we speak.’
    Harriet mused. If Peter was right about that, she thought, the coming world might be hard on him.
    ‘It will be hard on my brother the Duke,’ said Peter, as though her thought had been spoken. ‘He is already falling into difficulties trying to look after that great house.