Rattle His Bones (19 page)

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Authors: Carola Dunn

BOOK: Rattle His Bones
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“Brown?” Alec interrupted. “That was the name he gave?”
“Brown,” the old man confirmed, shrugging. “Is not his name?”
“I wish I knew!” Alec wondered if it was ffinch-Brown, or a simple alias, or if he was altogether on the wrong track.
“Smith, Jones, Brown.” Young Goldman laughed.
“Brown,” his grandfather insisted. “I write in my book, so.” He took a diary from a pocket and slowly turned the pages, holding it a couple of inches from his eyes. “Many people give not own name. He say he has bought gems for investment, but his wife vants to vear. She is careless woman, often loses t'ings, so he comes to me. Here, see, Mr. Policeman.”
He handed over the notebook. The writing was large and shaky and—to Alec—totally incomprehensible, in an unknown alphabet.
Seeing Alec's blank face, Goldman took the notebook from him. “Brown, evening,” he translated, “and the date is Monday the second of July.”
“Thank you. It fits nicely.” The first day of Pettigrew's holiday. “But I assume, sir, you can't have made the copies on the spot?”
“No, no, Mr. Brown stay with me for all night, tell wife he is avay for business. I make many measurements, drawings, photographs, notes of colours. Vas much hurry, but no fancy settings to vorry. Early, very early in morning, he take stones and go.”
“He must have smuggled them back into the museum,” said Goldman admiringly, “and put 'em back so nobody knew they'd been gone, then pinched them again later on.”
“Vun veek and some days he give me to make.”
Goldman found the next entry. “Brown, midday. Friday the thirteenth.”
Not generally regarded as an auspicious date. It had
worked for “Brown.” Pettigrew had returned to the museum the following Monday and noticed nothing wrong.
“Brown” had gone on his lunch hour to pick up the fakes. He must have stayed at work late that evening, made the substitution … and done what with the real gems?
Abramowitz was getting restless, muttering something in Yiddish to his grandson.
“Sorry,” said Alec, “you wanted to be home by sunset.”
“The old people think it's wrong to travel or work on the Sabbath,” Goldman said indulgently.
“I'll get you there.” Thanks to Summer Time. Now for the all-important question: “What did Brown look like, sir?”
“Dark clo'es. Hat. Big man.”
Looking at the bespectacled gnome, Alec's heart sank. “Big wide or big tall?”
Abramowitz gestured vaguely. “Big,” he repeated.
Goldman confirmed Alec's fears. “
Zeyde
thinks I'm big. He does close work with a jeweller's glass, of course, but he's practically blind without it.”
Alec swallowed an oath. Without much hope, he asked, “What about his voice. Did he have any kind of accent?”
“No, he speak good English.”
At best it was another indication that the Grand Duke was not responsible for the theft. Neither Ruddlestone's Lancashire nor Witt's public-school pronunciation would make any impression on an immigrant from Central Europe.
“I hope we haven't wasted your time, sir,” said Goldman rather anxiously, as if he expected imminent arrest for obstructing the police in the course of their duties.
“Not at all,” Alec reassured him. “The dates and times give us something to work on. It's always possible the name may prove useful, though it doesn't seem likely. Most of all, we now don't need to waste any further effort looking for the
maker of the imitations. No, as I said before, we very much appreciate your coming forward, gentlemen. And now let me drive you home.”
Rescuing his dinner just as Abramowitz was about to sit on it, Alec transferred it to the Austin's back seat, beside Goldman. He delivered them to Whitechapel just before the sun touched the horizon.
“I'll have a constable drop in on Sunday, sir,” he said to the old man, “just in case you remember anything else. And we may have to take a formal statement at a later date.”
Leaving Goldman explaining this to his grandfather, Alec hurried back towards Chelsea, eating on the way. Dobson and Bel had done him proud, with cold chicken and cheese cut to bite size, a raw carrot, an apple sliced and cored, a bread-and-butter sandwich, and two of Bel's rock buns. These last were much less rocklike than her first effort, made months ago in Daisy's honour.
In Mulberry Place, Daisy was watching at the sitting-room window. She dashed out to the car before Alec had time to do more than get out and go around to open the passenger-side door for her.
“No arrest,” she commiserated, “but the concert sounds simply spiffing, darling. What happened?”
He told her about the strass glass maker and his grandson, and she reciprocated with Grand Duke Rudolf Maximilian's near attack on the cave bear. As she finished, they reached Langham Place. Though they had to leave the car some distance from Queen's Hall, they were not quite the last stragglers to arrive.
“Sorry I'm not in evening togs,” Alec said as they hurried up the stairs to take their seats.
“Darling, it's such a wonder to have you to myself for half an evening, you could wear bathers and I wouldn't care.”
Between holding his hand and the waves of music surging into Fingal's Cave, Daisy had no thoughts to spare for crime for a while. The unknown Prokofiev piano concerto, his third, proved so spectacularly brilliant as to be all-absorbing. Yet somewhere in the back of her mind she must have been mulling over the new information, for when the interval came, the questions on the tip of her tongue were all about theft and murder.
Alec got in first, as they went to stretch their legs in the lobby. “How is your article coming along?”
“Very well. I went to the Entomology department this morning. I've typed up those notes, and read through the whole lot, and actually started really planning the article. It's more complicated than anything I've done before.”
“But you're finished at the museum? Good.”
“Pretty much. There are bound to be a few odds and ends to clear up once I start writing. Do you think the jewels are still there, hidden somewhere frightfully clever?”
“It's possible. Not inside a cave bear, perhaps. Your objections to that seem valid. But finding something so small in a place so large is as good as impossible.”
“And you can't search everyone every day, of course. So what can you do?”
“It's a waiting game. We've bolted and barred all but one staff exit and we have men watching that and the main entrance. All the chief suspects are discreetly followed from the moment they leave the museum until they return. If any of them goes near a jeweller, we've got him.”
“What a pity your fake-making jeweller is blind as a bat! Still, ffinch-Brown—even if he was idiotic enough to give half his real name—is small, and Ruddlestone is surely large enough to qualify as more than merely big.”
Alec laughed. “Yes, that's a point. The dates may help,
too, though it's rather a long time ago for people to remember whether they noticed anything odd.”
“I guessed the jewels must have been stolen while Pettigrew was on holiday,” Daisy said smugly. “Oh, darling, that reminds me! I suppose you know that one of the constables who was on night duty then has retired since?”
“What!” He stared at her, shaking his head. “Great Scott, Daisy, how the deuce did you … ? No, never mind, in this case ignorance is bliss. Do you happen to know and recall his name?”
“Southey? North? Eastman? Westcott, that's it.”
“And his address?”
“Darling, I haven't the foggiest. The Chelsea police will know, won't they?” Daisy grabbed Alec's arm. “You are
not
going now. By the time you found out and got there, the poor old chap would be in bed and fast asleep. There's the bell, let's go back.”
At the end of the concert, Daisy and Alec, along with the greater part of the audience, hummed bits of the symphony as they emerged into the rain-gleaming night. Daisy's head was too full of music to think of anything else. Alec had to open the windscreen and concentrate on peering into the darkness between lamp-posts all the way to Chelsea.
Sheltering under his umbrella, they stopped on the front step for a good-night kiss, then Daisy felt in her handbag for her key.
“That reminds me,” she said.
“Not again!”
“Oh well, I expect you already know,” Daisy said airily, sticking the key in the lock.
“I didn't know about Westcott. Tell me.”
“Right-oh, darling. The museum locks match—not all of
them, but, for instance, Dr. Smith Woodward's key opens Dr. Pettigrew's office.”
“Yes, typical of government institutions. What's more, apart from the museum police, Pettigrew had the only key to the iron gate, which he may well have left in his office while he was away.”
“And Dr. Smith Woodward is constantly losing his keys.”
“He is? Now that I didn't know,” Alec said thoughtfully. “So much the more likely that it's a museum staff member who burgled the mineral gallery, and of course a constable who recognized him wouldn't report it.”
“Not when no hue and cry was raised until after he left,” Daisy agreed. “Still, there's not much chance Westcott did see him.”
“Not much chance, but some. I'll run Westcott to earth first thing in the morning. Thank you, love. You have saved me from sitting around waiting for a purchasing jeweller to turn up, or for the thief to go looking for one.”
Alec was pretty good at holding the umbrella with one hand while hugging with the other. Quite some time passed before Daisy made use of her key.
Lucy was down in the kitchen, making cocoa. “Half an hour on the doorstep in the rain,” she observed dryly. “Why didn't you invite him in, darling? I wouldn't have interrupted the billing and cooing.”
“He didn't mean to stay. He has to work tomorrow, and so do I.”
“Cocoa?”
In spite of cocoa, Daisy was too keyed up to fall asleep easily. One of the tunes from the
New World
kept going round in her head like a ghostly gramophone record, and above it sailed Alec's words. Not, alas, the sweet nothings
he had whispered in her ear, but the comment about the probability of the villain being a member of the museum staff.
Witt, Mummery, Steadman, Ruddlestone.
Harbottle said Ruddlestone could not possibly be a murderer. Though that jibed with Daisy's opinion of the invertebrate curator, it was not evidence, of course, only a testimonial to his popularity as a boss.
But could any man keep up Ruddlestone's obviously genuine joviality under the pressure of being hunted by the police? And, concerned for his own skin, would he have any thought to spare for recataloguing centuries-old collections of millennia-old fossils?
The last argument applied equally to Steadman, who was absolutely obsessed with Saltopus. Daisy had gone to look at progress on the little dinosaur after her appointment with the Creepy-Crawly man.
O'Brien had left for good, having learnt all he wanted, Atkins told her. The loss of the Hollywood incentive had not visibly dampened Steadman's enthusiasm. Saltopus's spine had grown by several inches.
Sotto voce,
Daisy observed to the commissionaire that the construction would go faster if the assistant was allowed to do more than merely stand ready to hand up the next vertebra.
“Not flippin' likely, miss,” Atkins had whispered back. “Has to do it all himself, does our Mr. Steadman.”
Steadman was too obsessed with dinosaurs to care two hoots for a fortune in gems.
What about Witt? Daisy thought, turning over in bed and shaking her pillow, which felt as if it was stuffed with stones, precious or otherwise.
When she last saw him, Witt had been studying a primitive
horse, but he had not been too absorbed to spend quite some time talking with her about the crimes. He had introduced the subject, as far as Daisy could remember. She rather suspected he had tried to pump her about the progress of the police investigation, and he might have tried to divert suspicion to ffinch-Brown.
Though she quite liked Witt, she was not at all sure she entirely trusted him. He was by far the least candid and straightforward of the four curators.
Where could he have hidden the jewels? Was the Grand Duke right, after all, about the cave bear and its fellow shaggy mammals? Did one or more of them have precious stones in their heads, like the toad in the old tale? Alec agreed that it was improbable, but there might be other places no one but Witt was likely to disturb.
He also had the most obvious motive for killing Pettigrew.

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