The Adventure of the Deverill Diamonds

We made a quick stop off at Sam’s house, much to the delight of Mrs Wiggins who had been very worried about us both and was pleased to see we were no longer at loggerheads.

She had hand-washed Sam’s clothes (the ones I had worn) and they were now hanging up in front of the fire, bone dry. Sam and I had decided I should wear something less bright and less conspicuous than the clothes which Mrs Wiggins had kindly given me. So, once again, I slipped into Sam’s clothes and Sam and I ended up looking like the strangest twins ever to grace the face of the Earth.

While I had been changing, Sam had disappeared upstairs to Jack’s room to get (as he put it) some “tools”. Jack, Sam’s brother, had been an expert cracksman (safe-breaker) and my assumption was that by ‘tools’ he meant equipment to pick Hettie Deverill’s locks. He had come downstairs again carrying a small Gladstone bag, which I assumed contained the necessary.

Mrs Wiggins made us eat to ‘keep our strength up’. We gulped down some food and charged out of the door, waving at a bewildered Mrs Wiggins over our shoulders and making our way to Hampstead.

My heart raced with the thrill of the adventure, pumping twice as fast at the prospect of finally laying our hands on the Deverill Diamonds. If I’m being honest (which to you I always am of course) I was equally thrilled at the thought of doing something as illegal as house-breaking! Sam being Sam, he seemed fairly non-plussed, as if lock-picking his way into a stranger’s house to recover some priceless stolen jewels was the sort of thing he did to idle away many a lazy day.

Having made our way to Hampstead we enquired the way to Wavel Mews from a series of strangers until we found the tiny road. Luckily, the road was a small one and only six ramshackle houses stood on it. It really was a squalid part of town and it was no surprise to me that Hettie Deverill had determined to steal the diamonds to get herself and her son out of the situation they were in.

It was only as we arrived in Wavel Mews that it dawned on me that we did not have a clue which of these six houses belonged to Hettie… We could not just break into all of them in hope of finding the right one!

“Sam…?” I began, but he interrupted me by pulling a piece of paper from his bag with a flourish.

“Don’t worry. This’ll sort it!” he said with a half-smile and he yanked me up to the front door of the first house we came to.

He gave a very loud knock on the door and then stepped back, waiting patiently.

Ten seconds passed before the door opened a crack and a thin, reedy, crackling, aged voice called out, “Who are ya?”

All I could make out through the cracks was the stooped figure of a very old man. He wore crooked pince-nez, had the most wrinkled brow I had ever seen in my life, scored with years of poverty and hardship, and a tatty old tailcoat, flecked with blobs of candle wax. He was like a very poor version of Mr Deverill and, in a flash, I saw the crime scene over again in my minds’ eye - The old man lying helpless on the ground, the blood, the empty diamond case, the locks on the door split and splintered…

“Sorry to disturb ya,” began Sam, his tone as nice as pie, “but I have a letter for a Miss Hettie Deverill.” He flashed the piece of paper to show that he was not lying (which he was).

“She don’t live ’ere..” creaked the old man, his breath wheezy and fractured.

“Oh, ya see it just says ‘Wavel Mews’ on the letter and I was sent to deliver it, but I ain’t go a clue which ’ouse she lives in!” said Sam, faking a chuckle.

“She don’t live ’ere…” repeated the old man and, for a moment, I thought he was going to shut the door in Sam’s face with no more explanation.

Sam gently held the door open with one hand and asked the man if he could tell us which number she did live at.

“Number Three… She don’t live ’ere….” the old man rasped.

“Thanks old timer!” chirped Sam, as the door was shut firmly in his face.

“Well done, Sam!” I said, impressed by his foresight.

“Nuffink to it,” he replied, throwing the paper back in his bag, “Thought it might come in ’andy!”

We crept our way up to number three, which was in darkness with curtains drawn. I suppose, thinking about it now, we should have just gone for the empty looking house first, but it was best to be sure and the paper trick had the benefit of being more fun! We could have done it a different way but hindsight, as you will see when you look back upon it one day, is a wonderful thing!

We looked all around us to check that the small street was completely empty. Then Sam pulled a small tool kit from the bag. As I had suspected these were Jack’s safe-cracking tools.

“I seen Jack do it lotsa times. Don’t worry,” he whispered, pulling out a thin metal tool that looked like a tiny golf club.

He inserted the tool into the lock and I looked around again to make sure we were not being watched breaking into this house. I could hear Sam fiddling with the lock, the sound of metal being scraped and scratched. But, despite the length of time it was taking, I did not hear the sound of a lock unlocking.

For a moment I thought I saw the curtain of the old man’s house at number one twitch and I suddenly became worried that, if we did not get inside soon, we were likely to be arrested and detained in one of Inspector Wakefield’s cells.

I turned back to Sam and hissed, “What’s the matter?”

“I can’t get it to budge,” he moaned, exasperation in his voice.

“Why not?” I whispered.

“I dunno. I’m tryin’ to get the mechanism to move. It won’t move. Supposed to move left. If it’s locked you get your lock picks in, move the mechanism left and you’re in. But.. it won’t move..”

A thought struck me.

“Well… is it locked?” I asked.

“What?”

“You said ‘if’ it’s locked. Maybe it’s not locked. So you can’t pick it,” I ventured.

“I ain’t an idiot ya know!” he snapped, “D’ya fink I ain’t tried the door?”

“I don’t know. Have you?”

There was the smallest of uncertain pauses before Sam replied, “Have I what?”

“Tried the door!” I barked in whispers, “You know full well what!”

Sam looked even more unsure as he said, “Yeah. ’Course I ’ave.”

Not convinced, I reached my hand out and turned the doorknob with ease. The door swung wide open at my touch, creaking slightly as it did so. Sam looked at me, dumbfounded.

“What made you think th…?” he burbled.

“The old man at number one didn’t unlock his door to open it for us. So, this is either the kind of neighbourhood where everyone trusts everybody else, or it’s the kind of neighbourhood where nobody feels they have anything worth stealing and so don’t bother to lock up.”

I smiled (admittedly rather smugly) at him and beckoned towards the door as if to say ‘after you’.

Sam entered the house and went straight into the door on the right, which obviously led into a sitting room, judging from what little of the furniture I could make out. I entered the house, shutting the front door behind me.

It was as I shut the front door and looked at the lock that it happened. I felt a thought course through me like lightning! The thought was such an incredible one that it made the hairs on my arms and neck stand on end. I stood there, thinking everything through and it was as if a thousand doors to other worlds had opened up before me. Gazing immediately to my right I saw a coat stand and again waves of revelation poured over me.

I was lost in this electric moment as Sam re-entered the hallway carrying Hettie’s mysterious cloth bag in his hand.

Sam pulled two pieces of shiny fabric from inside it. He straightened the material out before me and I could see that one of them was a dress and the other, a child’s waistcoat. They were covered in bright sequins, which caught what little moonlight was streaming in to the hallway and glistened.

He threw these items to the floor and hurriedly scrambled in the bag, this time pulling a piece of paper from it.

He thrust it at me and demanded to know what it said.

Still reeling and only half paying attention, I read :

“Performing for the first time together at the Green Gate Theatre – Hettie Deverill and her magician son – James!”

“Oh Gawd,” said Sam. “’Bright and sparkling’. It was these costumes Colverd was talkin’ about! She ain’t got the diamonds! They’re startin’ an act togevver! That’s why James ain’t goin’ up the chimneys no more. Colverd ‘id them for her so the boss of the Britannia didn’t find out she was leavin’. And this is the bill! It’s an ’andbill for the upcoming show!”

He was overwhelmed by this new evidence that proved Hettie’s innocence. He looked at me with shock and excitement in his eyes. But my mind was distracted, my thoughts elsewhere. I was back in that world of possibilities that the shutting of the front door had opened up to me.

Sam noticed my abstraction and, slightly annoyed that I was not sharing the excitement of the moment, demanded “What’s up?”

I took a deep breath, knowing that I would have to get all my thoughts together and present them to Sam in an orderly fashion, so that he followed their every twist and turn. But it was not easy. I had suddenly made sense of the whole case and my mind flitted from thought to thought – the hammer and chisel; the small, opened window; the boots; the cloak; the arm; the safe; the dress; the attack on Aunt Cordelia; the disbelief in the face; the shop – all the disconnected pieces of the puzzle came together to form one solid picture. My heart was racing now, and I tried to collect my thoughts. All that I could find to say was :

“Not locked.”

Sam’s expression changed from mild annoyance to utter confusion in an instant.

“You what?” he insisted.

I replied with urgency in my voice:

“We need to get to Dover. And we need to get there fast.”

Having thrown the costumes back in the cloth bag and deposited them back where Sam had found them, he and I bolted out of the door as fast as we could.

Sam was still bewildered but, as we ran with all our might, I shouted my theory to him ; who was the culprit, how the crime had been done and, most importantly, why it had been made to look impossible. I also, finally, asked Sam the question I had been meaning to ask him since the day we had wormed our way into the hospital. His answer helped me to attach even more of a motive to my suspect. And he also explained the meaning of a word that had baffled me. Then the case made even more sense and pinpointed the culprit’s plan.

’Are you going to tell us who it is, Esther?’ I hear you cry. Of course, I am, but if reading Mr Dickens has taught me anything, it is to keep your reader in just the right amount of suspense. For the rest of this chapter (and a little bit of the next) I shall call our culprit ‘X’. I promise you it will be worth it when I reveal the truth to you like a magician revealing the end of one of his illusions. I hope that suits you and that you are not too put out? (You being you, you have probably figured it out yourself and, if you have, then you are the very brightest of the buttons. If you haven’t, worry not, Sam hadn’t figured it out by this stage either!)

We ran all the way to Scotland Yard, burst through the doors with the force of an explosion and charged up to the front desk where a burly policeman sat, idly doodling on a scrap of paper. It was evidently a bit of a quiet day at the Yard, ‘but not for long!’ I thought. Soon they would be all activity!

“We need to speak to Inspector Wakefield!” I rasped.

“Not ’ere” came the glib reply of the policeman, who did not look up from his doodle.

“It’s urgent! We need his help to catch a murderer!” I yelped.

“’Course you do..” murmured the policeman, “but he ain’t ’ere. ’E’s out… ’E’ll be back sometime..”

“D’ya know when?” blurted Sam.

“Nope.”

“Do you have pen and paper?” I asked hurriedly.

“Yep.” He passed me a sheet of paper and pointed listlessly at a pen and ink.

I grabbed both and scribbled out a note for Inspector Wakefield. I wrote as much detail as I could. When I had finished the note told him who was responsible, why, how and that we were heading for Dover to cut off X’s escape. I handed it over to the man on the desk who took it without much attention.

“I’ll get Constable McGarrigle to take it up to his office,” he said with a yawn. “McGarrigle!”

‘McGarrigle’ walked into the vestibule, carrying some sheafs of paper, which he dropped upon seeing us.

Horror-struck, I recognised him. It was the watch-watching policeman from the hospital, the one who had given chase to Sam to try to recover my ‘stolen bag’.

“You! You were in it together!” he yelled, pointing an accusing finger at us.

Without hesitation we raced to the door and back out into the street, running as fast as we could to get away from Scotland Yard! Behind us we heard the door opening and the cries of the burly policeman, but we did not look back. We put as much distance between us and him as we could, his bulk slowing him down so much that, within a few streets, we had lost him completely. Whether the vital note would make its way to Inspector Wakefield upon his return I could not tell. But if it didn’t we were on our own. The police would not come to help us..

We stopped running and stood, mirroring one another’s stance, with our hands on our knees, bent double, gasping for breath.

“What now?” asked Sam. “We can’t get ’old of Wakefield and we can’t go back! ’Ow the ’ell are we meant to get to Dover before the boat leaves?”

I thought for a moment as I panted in lungfuls of air. And, just as the solution to the crime had entered my head in an instant, so the only solution to our problem came just as quickly.

“I’ve got a plan,” I said.

“Good,” Sam huffed.

“But… it’s a mad one.”

I told you earlier that Sam knew the underworld. I called upon his knowledge to direct us to where we needed to go. We had to get to Dover quickly and this was, as far as I could see, the only option left to us. Sam protested all the way, that it was a bad idea, that it was suicidal, that we should not be going where we were going, but even he had to concede that we had no other option, and that this plan of mine was the only way either of us could think of to beat the boat train down to Dover.

The only other option was to let X escape us. We were both determined to make sure that did not happen. X had attacked Mr Deverill, leaving him for dead; X had stolen Mr Deverill’s diamonds; X had tried to strangle Aunt Cordelia; X had tried to kill me. To let X simply get away would have been heresy.

“You sure you wanna do this?” asked Sam, as we approached the door of a dark black warehouse with trepidation. The warehouse was down an alleyway, littered with rubbish, broken bottles, pools of sick and what smelt like urine. I had asked how Sam knew where this place was and Scotland Yard did not. He tapped his nose and remained mysterious.

I nodded in answer to Sam’s question and, with a gulp, I knocked on the door. Visions of my own death flashed before my eyes. I thought about the world I could easily leave if my plan backfired. I struggled to think of one thing I would miss, besides Sam. As long as Sam was safe I could perish in the attempt to catch X. I had no family that cared for me and no house to call home. My life, I decided, was expendable. And this might be the last action in it of which I could be proud.

A moment passed in silence and then the door was opened by a man I recognised. He was thin, painfully thin, dressed all in black and he smoked an equally thin cheroot.

“Hello, Snorky,” I said in as steady a voice as I could muster, “Please tell Mr Eddie Holloway that Miss Esther Morstan-Eyre would like to talk to him.”