Which was roughly when she stopped wearing it, I thought. After Larry's public lecture, and the curry for two that did or didn't follow it.
"Where is Miss Manzini, by the way?" Bryant asked.
I had my answer prepared and delivered it with authority. "When last heard of, somewhere between London and Newcastle on a concert tour. She likes to travel with the group that plays her music. She's their guiding spirit. Where she is at this precise moment, I don't know. It's not our way to be in constant touch. I'm sure she will telephone me very soon."
* * *
Now it was Luck's turn to have his fun with me. He had opened another package, but it seemed to contain nothing but inky notes he had written to himself. I wondered whether he was married and where he lived—if he lived anywhere outside the shiny, disinfected corridors of his trade.
"Did Emma happen to inform you that her jewellery was missing at all?"
"No, Mr. Luck, Miss Manzini did not."
"Why not? Are you trying to tell us your Emma's been shy of thirty-five thousand quid's worth of jewellery for a couple of months and hasn't even bothered to mention it?"
"I'm saying Miss Manzini may not have noticed that the jewels were missing."
"And she's been around, has she, these last months? I mean around you. It's not that she's been touring all that time."
"Miss Manzini has been at Honeybrook throughout the entire summer."
"Nevertheless you did not have the smallest inkling that one day Emma had her jewellery, and the next day Emma was without it."
"None whatever."
"You didn't notice that she wasn't wearing the stuff, for instance? That might have been a clue, mightn't it?"
"Not in her case."
"Why not?"
"Miss Manzini is capricious, like most artists. One day she will appear in her finery, then whole weeks can go by when the notion of wearing something valuable is anathema to her. The reasons can be many. Her work—something has depressed her—she is in pain from her back."
My reference to Emma's back had produced a pregnant silence.
"Injured, was it, her back?" Bryant enquired solicitously.
"I'm afraid it was."
"Oh dear. How did that happen, then?"
"I understand she was manhandled while taking part in a peaceful demonstration."
"There could be two views about that, though, couldn't there?"
"I'm sure there could."
"Bitten any more policemen recently, has she?"
I refused to answer.
Luck resumed. "And you don't ask her: Emma, why aren't you wearing your ring? Or your necklace? Or your brooch? Or your earrings ... for instance?"
"No, I don't, Mr. Luck. Miss Manzini and I don't speak to each other that way."
I was being pompous and knew it. Luck had that effect on me.
"All right. So you don't talk to each other," he blurted. "Same as you don't know where she is." He appeared to be losing his temper. "All right. In your highly personal, highly privileged Treasury opinion, how does your friend Dr. Lawrence Pettifer, in July this year, come to be flogging off your Emma's jewellery at two-thirds what you gave for it, to a dealer in Hatton Garden, claiming the jewels came from his mother, when in fact they came from you, via Emma?"
"The jewellery was Miss Manzini's to dispose of as she wished. If she had given it to the milkman I could not have raised a finger." I saw a means to strike at him and seized it gratefully. "But surely your Mr. Guppy has already provided you with your solution, Mr. Luck?"
"What's that supposed to mean?"
"Wasn't it July when Guppy claims he saw Pettifer approach my house? A Sunday? There's your burglar for you. Pettifer approaches the house and finds it empty. On Sundays there are no staff around. Miss Manzini and I have gone out for lunch. He forces the window, enters the house, goes to her apartment, and helps himself to the jewellery."
He must have guessed that I was teasing him, for he had coloured. "I thought you said Pettifer didn't steal," he objected suspiciously.
"Let's say you have given me reason to revise that opinion," I replied suavely as the tape recorder gave a choke and stopped rotating.
"Leave it like that a minute, will you, please, Oliver," Bryant ordered sweetly.
Luck had already reached out to change the tape. Now, somewhat ominously, I thought, he removed his hand and laid it beside its companion on his lap.
"Mr. Cranmer, sir."
Bryant was standing close beside me. He had cupped his hand on my shoulder in the traditional gesture of arrest. He was stooping, and his lips were not an inch from my ear. I had forgotten physical fear till now, but Bryant was reminding me of it.
"Do you know what this means, sir?" he asked me, very quietly, as he gave my shoulder a painful squeeze.
"Of course I know. Take your hand off me."
But his hand didn't budge. The pressure of it increased as he continued speaking.
"Because this is what I'm going to be doing to you, Mr. Cranmer, sir, unless I have a lot more of the collaboration I spoke about than I am getting from you at the present time. If you don't play ball with me very soon, I'm going to fake any pretext, bend any evidence, as the old song goes, and I'm going to make it my personal business to see you spend the remaining best years of your life looking at a very boring wall instead of at Miss Manzini. Did you hear that, sir? I didn't."
"I can hear you perfectly well," I said, trying in vain to shake off his hand. "Let go of me." But he held me all the more firmly.
"Where's the money?"
"What money?"
"Don't 'what money' me, Mr. Cranmer, sir. Where's the money you and Pettifer have been salting away in foreign bank accounts? Millions of it, the property of a certain foreign embassy in London."
"I've no idea what you're talking about. I have stolen nothing, and I am not in league with Pettifer or anybody else."
"Who's AM?"
"'Who?"
"AM who's all over Pettifer's diary in his lodgings. Phone AM Brief AM Visit AM"
"I have absolutely no idea. Perhaps it means morning. And PM means afternoon."
I think in a different place he would have hit me, for he lifted his eyes to the mirror as if appealing for permission.
"Where's your pal Checheyev, then?"
"Who?"
"Don't give me bloody who again. Konstantin Checheyev is a Russian cultural gentleman, formerly of the Soviet, then Russian, embassy in London."
"I've never heard the name in my life."
"Of course you haven't. Because what you are doing to me, Mr. Cranmer, sir, is lying in your nasty upper-class teeth, whereas you should be assisting me in my enquiries." He squeezed my shoulder and pressed down on it at the same time, sending lines of pain shooting through my back. "Do you know what I think you are, Mr. Cranmer, sir? Do you?"
"I don't give a damn what you think."
"I think you're a very greedy gentleman with a lot of arrogant appetites to feed. I think you have a little friend called Larry. And a little friend called Konstantin. And a little gold digger called Emma, who you spoil rotten, who thinks the law's an ass and policemen are there to be bitten. And I think you play Mr. Respectable, and Larry plays your little lamb, and Konstantin sings along with some very naughty angels in the Moscow choir, and Emma plays your piano. What was that I heard you say?"
"I didn't speak. Get off me."
"I distinctly heard you insulting me. Mr. Luck, did you hear this gentleman using insulting language to a police officer?"