Free Pickpocket's Apprentice by Sheri Cobb South Page B

I’ll—”
    “Sir, this isn’t right,” blurted out Pickett, waving the broadsheet at him.
    The magistrate scowled. “What isn’t right?”
    “These emeralds. They weren’t stolen. Mrs. Cranston-Parks spouted them.”
    Mr. Colquhoun was still trying to assimilate the discovery that the boy could read when the significance of his words began to dawn, and he demanded, “What the devil are you talking about?”
    “That maid didn’t steal those emeralds, sir,” Pickett said again.
    The bushy eyebrows lowered in an expression of curiosity not unmixed with skepticism. “And how could you possibly know such a thing?”
    “I didn’t steal them myself, sir, if that’s what you’re thinking,” Pickett put in hastily. “How could I? I never knew they existed until two weeks ago, when this Mrs. Cranston-Parks sold them at Alfred Figgins’s pawnshop.”
    “I wasn’t aware that you were acquainted with the lady,” observed the magistrate, his voice heavy with irony.
    “No, but I was delivering coal to Mr. Figgins’s shop in Great Hart Street and I watched her sell them for twelve guineas. She tried to get more, saying they were worth forty pounds at least, but Mr. Figgins wouldn’t give it to her. She was wearing a bonnet with a veil so that her face wouldn’t show, and—”
    “And how, if her face were veiled, do you know it was Mrs. Cranston-Parks? Is it likely she would sell her jewelry for less than one-third of its worth? I will certainly send Mr. Foote over to Figgins’s pawnshop to inquire as to any emeralds that have come into his possession recently, but even if they were Mrs. Cranston-Parks’s missing emeralds, it is much more likely that you saw her maid.”
    Pickett shook his head. “That was no maid, sir.”
    “And what makes you so sure?”
    Pickett hesitated, recalling his impressions of the veiled woman. There were her clothes, of course, and that bonnet, which were much finer than he’d seen any of the women on Mr. Granger’s staff wear, even on their days off. But clothes could be borrowed (with or without their owner’s permission), or even bought at secondhand. No, there was something else, something more difficult to counterfeit than clothes—the same thing, in fact, that had called the lady to his attention in the first place.
    “It was the way she talked,” he told the magistrate. “She didn’t sound like a maid. Even Sophy doesn’t talk like that, though not for lack of trying.”
    Mr. Colquhoun made a noncommittal noise to cover his own confusion. First there was the realization that John Pickett could read, and therefore was capable, in spite of his unsavoury past, of better things than to spend the rest of his life hauling coal. Then there was the chance— outrageous of course, but just within the realm of possibility—that this boy had by the merest happenstance solved a case that had confounded an experienced Bow Street Runner for a fortnight.
    He said nothing of any of this to John Pickett, however, but gave the boy a bank draft and sent him on his way, apologizing once again for keeping him waiting. But he stood there studying the Hue and Cry long after the coal wagon rumbled up the street, and made up his mind to have a word with William Foote.
     

 
     
     
     
     
Chapter 10
     
    In Which Mr. Colquhoun Conducts a Private Investigation
     
    Before he broached the subject with Foote, however, Mr. Colquhoun wanted to carry out an investigation of his own. He began his quest at Figgins’s pawnshop in Great Hart Street, where a discreet inquiry yielded the information that yes, such a piece had come that way only a fortnight earlier.
    “In fact, it’s in the back room now, locked away in the safe,” the pawnbroker confided, jerking his thumb in the direction of a door that led into the rear of the shop. “I haven’t quite decided what to do with it. Rundell and Bridge would probably give me thirty guineas for it, but I’ve been in this business long enough to