Or could they?
"It wasn't his, no."
Or could they? But if they had . . . of what possible importance could it have been to the French, who had plundered most of Europe, from the horses of St Mark's to the hard cash in the treasuries of whole kingdoms? And . . .
and even more—even if Colonel Suchet had coveted it... there was no conceivable way that it could interest Josef Ivanovitch Novikov of the KGB—
"It was yours, Elizabeth," said Paul.
She hadn't heard him properly. "What?"
"It was yours." Paul sat down on the edge of the bed, and started to reach for her hand, but then thought better of it.
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"He stole it from you."
She had heard him properly, she just didn't understand what ne was saying. "From . . . me?"
"Del Andrew took Ray Tuck—lifted him out of somewhere in the Essex marshes this morning, bright and early. And then made him sing by the simple expedient of letting him choose between singing and being turned loose on the street for Danny Kahn's boys to pick up ... So Ray Tuck sang like a canary."
That was the authentic voice of Del Andrew, thought Elizabeth irrelevantly, while thinking at the same time from me?
"The funny thing is ... Ray Tuck sang true, and yet it was all a pack of lies, the song he sang, Del Andrew thinks—Harry Lippman's lies. Or maybe your father's lies, but we can't check on that now."
"What lies, Paul?" All Elizabeth could think was From me?
How could Father have stolen from her, who had nothing to steal?
"Oh ... a cock-and-bull story about hidden treasure from the old Vengeful—how your father was picking it up bit by bit from somewhere in France, and Lippy was fencing it for him.
Which was a whole pack of lies, because there's no Vengeful treasure—or not this treasure, Elizabeth."
She had to listen to what he was saying. "How do you—how does . . . Del. . . know that?"
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"At first he didn't. But Ray Tuck gave him the name of one of the buyers—a dead-respectable jeweller who'd never handle
'dodgy' goods . . . apart from the fact that Lippy wouldn't have sold any to one of his 'straight' clients, Del says, and the jeweller himself wouldn't have bought this jewellery anyway, without proper provenance for the record."
"Jewellery? What jewellery? What . . . ?"
"Provenance? 'Commander Hugh Loftus, VC—family heirlooms—item, one emerald-and-diamond necklace, with matching earrings, very fine—£12,000 . . . item, one diamond tiara set in gold, central stone umpteen carats, very fine—
£15,000 . . . those are two we've been able to check. And also some small trinkets Lippy couldn't bear to part with, because he loved good antique jewellery, which he passed on to his daughter to wear on Saturday, down the market. . . having paid the full market price himself, of course."
Listening was one thing, but grasping the sense of it was still another. "Why couldn't it have come from the Vengeful, Paul? How can you be so sure?" She grasped at the word
'antique'. "If it was old—"
"It was old, but not old enough." He gazed at her sadly.
"About 150 years old to be exact—between 150 and 130, that is."
Elizabeth made the subtraction dumbly, hopelessly.
"Early Victorian. Made by a jeweller named Savage who opened up shop in Bond Street in 1832, which his son sold in dummy3
1883—they made the necklace and the tiara, anyway: their work is apparently quite distinctive . . . Lippy's buyer recognised it straight off, because Savage pieces are highly regarded in the trade—real craftsman's work ... So naturally Lippy would have recognised it too, it was right up his street.
Some of the rings and brooches he gave his daughter aren't Savage work—they're late Victorian and Edwardian, which is equally distinctive. So there's no possible doubt about it, Elizabeth." He paused. "And no doubt that it's yours, either."
Elizabeth waited, oddly aware that her feet, which had been warm, were cold now.'
"You see, Elizabeth, our Chief Inspector Andrew is an observant fellow, and he's done his time on the robbery squad, or whatever they call it. So when a certain Lebanese tycoon showed him a certain emerald-and-diamond necklace, with matching earrings, late yesterday afternoon ...
he remembered that he'd seen it all before, in a picture on the wall of a house in Hampshire he'd searched two days earlier ... as worn by Mary, Lady Varney, wife of Admiral Sir Alfred Collingwood Varney—necklace and earrings, and a lot of other jewellery, tiara and rings and suchlike. 'Got up like a Christmas tree', is how he remembered her . . . your great-great-grandmother, Elizabeth—or would she be great-great-great?"
Great-great-grandmother, dripping with jewels, thought Elizabeth, the cold at her back now.
"The way Del sees it, the jewels very often pass straight down dummy3
the female line, mother to daughter, grandmother to granddaughter, great-aunt to great-niece, with no publicity.
Even before death duties came into the picture they were passed as gifts on the quiet, with no fuss and bother. Which is how they must have come to your mother, Del thinks. But she died when you were a baby, so . . ." he trailed off diplomatically ". . . so that's how we think it was, Elizabeth."
That was how they thought it had been. And that was how she thought it had been, too.
Paul shrugged. "Del thinks . . . maybe Lippy tried to make it all sound difficult—or at least too difficult for a little wanker like Ray Tuck to try and get his hands on, anyway—"
" 'Wanker'?" For a moment Del's vernacular flummoxed her.
Paul waved one hand vaguely. "Small-timer. . . The idea of hiding it in France, and historical research, and all that... It never occurred to him that Ray would sell the whole idea to Danny Kahn—"
"Who's got a lot of bottle?" She tried to hold on to the absurdity of the dialogue because she didn't want to think of Father quibbling about the house-keeping bills.
" 'Bottle'? Oh . . . yes . . . Danny Kahn's a whole lot smarter, yes—" Paul rallied "—smarter and even greedier, unfortunately. Not that he matters now . . ."
Not that anything mattered much—now, thought Elizabeth.
It was an odd feeling, to be a rich woman again, so quickly, with Madame Hortense and M'sieur Pierre at her elbow to dummy3
advise her, and yet to be so poor and lonely at the same time, in the traditional way in which unloved and unbeautiful rich women were supposed to be poor and lonely.
"We'll never know which of them made up the story for Ray Tuck." Paul drew a deep breath. "But anyway . . . that's the size of it, Elizabeth. And I'm sorry for disturbing your rest, but I wasn't going to tell you all this in front of that—that fellow Aske—"
"That 'wanker' Aske?" It was better to smile than to cry: that was the lesson she must learn from his charade, for the future. "He can't help being what he is, Paul."
He stood up, carefully adjusting his dressing-gown. "Just leave me my irrational prejudices intact, Miss Loftus dear. I have problems enough without that."
"What are you going to do about it?" The cold was in her voice
—she could hear it.
"Why—nothing, of course." He stared at her. "I mean, Del Andrew will put in his report to Jack Butler. But it isn't any of our business . . . and Jack Butler's not that sort of chap, I mean . . . And we had a deal, I seem to recall, eh?"
Prize-money, remembered Elizabeth. Father had lived in the wrong century for that, just as he had missed out on the battle-squadrons of dreadnoughts. But he had managed the next best thing with the Varney jewellery which should have been hers.
"You shouldn't think too badly of him, Elizabeth," said Paul.
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"He may have spent a fair bit of it, but he also put plenty away for you—tax-free, remember."