“I hadn’t been in the police long,” Appleby said, “when they put me into plain clothes. It meant a much more colourful life.”
“Not, I imagine, in the literal sense.” The Vicar knocked out his pipe in the grate and turned an expanse of shabby clerical flannel comfortably to the blaze. “Plain clothes are commonly drab.”
Appleby shook his head. “Think of hunt balls and a dozen other such things. They all allow free play to the thwarted male instinct for bright feathers. And I went to all of them. I was the scarlet-coated but otherwise unobtrusive guest, with his eye on the gold plate, the silver cups, the more portable objets d’art in unnoticed corners.”
“You kept an eye on things generally?”
“And on people too. At times it was not at all a nice trade. Even in the most polite society efficient peeping and peering uncovers a good deal that is far from edifying.”
“No doubt.” The Vicar pushed his tobacco-jar companionably across to Appleby. “But, when the gold plate really disappeared, what sort of person was commonly responsible? Would it be a professional criminal, or just a bad baronet or absent-minded bishop?”
“You never could tell until you’d caught your man. That was part of the difficulty, for instance, in the Clancarron affair.”
“Ah!” The Vicar straddled himself yet more comfortably before the fire. “Now we come to something. Proceed.”
Appleby leant forward and thrust a spill into the flames. “A big evening party among people of that sort means hosts of tradesmen, caterers, extra servants, and so forth hard at work from early morning. I liked to keep an eye on the whole thing. So I would arrive with the milk, more or less, and looking as if I were the head man from the florist’s or the confectioner’s.
“Lady Clancarron counted as an important political hostess in those days. She was determined to get her husband out of county cricket, where he was a notable fast bowler, and into the Cabinet, where it was unlikely he would have got things moving so rapidly. When she gave a really large-scale affair she opened up the whole of Carron House, although during the months the family spent in town they commonly made do with about half of it. When I arrived on the morning of her biggest party it seemed impossible that, in a mere twelve hours, order and every appearance of settled splendour and luxury could be extracted from the chaos of the place. The great ballroom, in particular, was like a museum emerging from cold storage: dust-covers coming off the chairs and chandeliers, a squad of men working on the floor, another on the lighting, and a third bringing in so much vegetation that they looked like a tropical Birnam Wood arriving on an equatorial Dunsinane. Not that the temperature was at all equatorial. Outside it was quite freezingly cold, and yet another army of men were busy draught-proofing the line of French windows which open on the flat roof of the offices.
“And it was pretty well the same all over the house. In such conditions one can do little more than hope for the best. Anybody can walk in, you see, make a grab at anything, and stump off with it as if under orders. A terrible headache these occasions are, you may believe me, both for the police and the insurance people. Particularly as, among the owners of easily vanishing heirlooms and the like, it is decidedly within wheels, so to speak, that wheels sometimes incline to revolve.”
The Vicar chuckled. “A dark saying! But proceed to the ball.”
“The ball was a relief when it came. If I’d had eyes in the back of my head, and a large endowment of extrasensory perception, I might really have felt quite on top of things. But don’t let me spin the story out. Just after midnight the whole place was suddenly plunged into darkness. The dancing stopped, the band stopped, there was a hum of people exchanging amused and reassuring remarks. But they didn’t reassure me. I wasn’t surprised to catch, seconds later, the sound of breaking glass and splintering wood.
“And then the light went on again. Some of the nice young people on the floor clapped their hands, to show what fun it all was, and the assembled elder aristocracy who were scattered around the walls just continued conversing as if nothing had happened at all. But a good many of them were guessing, all the same. Indeed, there was something pretty definite to guess about. Those lights had been out for a matter only of seconds. But in that interval the frame of one of the French windows had been splintered and was hanging open.
“I became aware that Lady Clancarron was approaching me from across the room with an appearance of the very largest leisure. She even stopped for a moment to say something polite to a couple of rather obscure guests. Then she came up to me and tapped my shoulder with her large fan. You would have thought she was talking about the next by-election or the Prime Minister’s sore throat. ‘My diamond necklace,’ she said, smiling charmingly. ‘It was snatched from my throat the instant the lights went out.’ And she turned away for a moment to give a particularly delightful bow to some inconsiderable personage – a cultural attaché, perhaps, from a minor legation. It was the noblesse oblige business in action. I admired it very much.”
The Vicar nodded. “Wonderful! But then the nobility are trained to that sort of thing.”
“Quite so.” Appleby smiled ironically. “Training is uncommonly useful, there’s no doubt. I had some of sorts myself, as it happened, that was quite useful on that difficult occasion. But let me continue. Lord Clancarron, who had been standing beside his wife near one of the ballroom’s two big fireplaces, now came across to us rather more quickly, but in the same carefree way. ‘My God, Kate!’ he said as he came up. ‘Some rascal’s got your diamonds and made off by that window. What shall we do? Some people have spotted what’s up. Beastly unpleasant for them, eh?’ He had ignored me as he spoke to his wife, but now he wheeled round on me with his athlete’s speed, so that his coat-tails swung in air behind him. ‘Have you anyone on guard out there, my man? Or will the fellow have got clean away?’
“I shook my head. ‘I don’t think anybody will have got clean away, my lord. And it’s possible that the broken window may be a feint.’
“ ‘What the devil do you mean?’
“ ‘The thief may still be in this room. He may have managed that business at the window simply to set us on a false scent.’
“Lord Clancarron stared at me. ‘That’s a deuced clever idea.’ He glanced round the room. ‘Look here – nobody’s gone out. What about a search – of every man-jack and woman-jill of us in the room?’
“I believe he meant it quite seriously – that he had no notion of how monstrous and impracticable such a course would have been. I gave a second to looking him squarely in the eye. ‘Nothing of the sort is necessary,’ I said.
“It was Lady Clancarron who spoke this time – and quite clearly in the most sincere bewilderment. ‘You mean–’
“‘I mean that your ladyship’s diamonds are quite safe. There is no reason why the ball should not continue on its normal course.’”
Appleby took a last puff at his pipe. “It was three in the morning, and the ballroom was empty except for the Clancarrons and myself when I got a step-ladder and fished that diamond-necklace out of the great central chandelier – where it had been no more than a few purer points of fire amid a myriad gleams of crystal. Lord Clancarron was very upset. ‘I can’t understand it’, he said. He didn’t ‘my man’ me this time.
“ ‘A tiresome practical joke, my lord.’ And I hope I managed to give him a sufficiently nasty look that his wife didn’t see. ‘Somebody had an opportunity to tinker with some of the temporary wiring earlier in the day, so as to control the entire lighting with a flick of a toe. It’s a thing very easy to do. And the same person snatched the necklace from her ladyship in the darkness and tossed it into the chandelier. He must have had plenty of practice and a very good aim. But he did something more. He carried round some suitable object in the pocket of his tails – say a cricket ball. It didn’t show – except perhaps to a trained eye wondering why those tails didn’t swing evenly in a dance. And with that object our practical joker did a really wonderful job – still in the dark, mind you, just before flicking the lights on again. He contrived the effect of somebody’s bursting out through that French window.’
“ ‘You amaze me.’ His lordship was now looking pretty green.
“ ‘No doubt.’ I waited until Lady Clancarron, simple soul, had wandered over to stare at the broken window. ‘And now, my lord, I must be off. Like the Australians last season’ – and I looked round the vast, empty room – ‘I shall have good reason to remember the famous Clancarron ball.’”