‘Nice of them to leave us a bottle of champagne, don’t you think?’ Inspector Christopher Kingsley was standing at the tall window of room 107 on the first floor of the Ritz Hotel overlooking Piccadilly. Lord Francis Powerscourt was pacing up and down the room. It was the evening after Deputy Director Ragg sent his dispatch to the blackmailer. Ragg was due to come to the hotel reception in an hour and ten minutes’ time to meet the man who might or might not have the Caryatid. The time and the place was all Ragg would tell them, and even that had caused a row, with Inspector Kingsley accusing the Deputy Director of placing his own vanity and reputation above the prospects for the safe return of the statue. Ragg had refused all offers of protection. He insisted that he be allowed to go to the meeting alone and that no policemen should be on duty at the time of his arrival. He had refused to show Powerscourt and the Inspector either his original letter or the blackmailer’s reply. The Head of Scotland Yard had been emphatic.
‘I don’t care how you do it, Kingsley, I couldn’t care less really. But we’ve got to have a presence there. We’ve got to arrest this blackmailer if we can. And we can’t let anything happen to Ragg. Bloody fool must think he’s performing heroics at the Siege of Troy or some damned thing. It’s bad enough losing a bloody Caryatid for God’s sake. To lose a Deputy Director as well would be a catastrophe!’
Less than an hour to go now. Powerscourt was not happy. ‘Tell me again, Inspector, if you would, the full disposition of our forces.’
‘What you have to remember, my friend, is that there are no policemen here this evening. I felt we had to let Ragg think that he was coming alone. I don’t think he’d be a very good liar. Let me see now. There are a number of guests at the hotel, dressed in plain clothes, their Sunday best most of them. There’s a sergeant and a constable one floor up, two constables on the third floor and another five spread out all over the upper floors. There’s another inspector and a sergeant in a room right at the back in case they try to go out the back way through Green Park. Some clever chap here at the hotel offered to fix up a system of bells like they have in all the rooms here. He said he could even make me a little control panel showing which bell was ringing at any given time. I said no in the end because we couldn’t work out a system for what one, two or three rings might mean. The chap thought we might get confused. They’ve put a trainee footman, young and quick, on every floor to carry messages.’
Kingsley peered out through the gap in his curtains once more. ‘No sign of Ragg yet. I bet he’ll be early but not this early. That’s just the guests, my lord. In the lobby there are three police footmen, there’s a pair of police waiters in the dining room and an assistant sommelier from Marylebone Police Station who knows as much about wine as I do about the Mohammedans. There are more officers deployed up and down the street and two police cars with drivers who know London well lurking in the side streets. And, I nearly forgot, there are a couple of cyclists hidden away in the streets opposite the hotel.’
One of the young footmen knocked on the door. He came from the third floor. What, the young man panted, were they to do if Ragg and the blackmailer went into one of the rooms on their level? ‘Watch and wait,’ Inspector Kingsley replied. ‘Send immediately for reinforcements. If you do anything rash Ragg might end up dead.’
The ornate French clock by the side of the fireplace said it was a quarter past seven. Fifteen minutes left.
Powerscourt tiptoed to the other great window looking out over the street and stared out through the curtains. It had started to rain. The pavements were glistening in the street lights. The citizens of London pulled their coats tight around themselves and continued their journeys home. Powerscourt thought that action seemed to have revived the Inspector. The urge to resign seemed to have been conquered by a passion for logistics and organization. He hoped it would last.
‘I’m very impressed,’ said Powerscourt, pulling back from his window. ‘It’s like being back in the Army hatching plans for a secret night attack. Mind you, I’m still worried that this may all be a waste of time.’
The Inspector checked his watch. ‘Ten minutes to go now,’ he said, taking up his position by the window. ‘I know it could all be a waste of time. But we can’t take that chance, can we?’
Powerscourt returned to his sentry station by the other window. Anybody looking at the Ritz very carefully from the other side of the street would have noticed tiny gaps in the curtains all the way up the front of the great hotel. Every floor had its own tiny sliver of light. Down below the rain was falling faster now. It rattled off the street and onto the pavement of the arcade that ran between the front of the hotel and the reception. The porters had greatcoats on now, buttoned up to the throat.
Five minutes to go. ‘Damn, damn and damn again!’ cried the Inspector. A forest of black umbrellas, adorned with the crest of the Ritz, a lion with an orb in its paw, had shot up, raised aloft by the porters anxious to preserve the health of their guests. All Powerscourt and the policemen on the higher floors could see were the umbrellas outside the front of the building.
‘You could commit murder down there and we’d be none the wiser!’ The Inspector was kicking the leg of a Louis XIV table very hard. A tinkle from the clock said it was now half past seven. The rain showed no signs of abating.
‘Christ, Powerscourt! You must have been in these kinds of situation before! What do you think we should do? Should we all rush downstairs?’
There was another knock at the door. The footman was panting this time.
‘Message from the fourth floor, sir. “Can’t see for the bloody umbrellas. Please advise.”’
‘Tell them to sit tight and wait for news,’ replied the Inspector.
‘You’ve got men in the lobby, haven’t you?’ said Powerscourt. ‘And all across the ground floor? Charging downstairs like the Light Brigade at Balaclava won’t do any good. The blackmailer will take to his heels and run.’
Down below the ritual pavane continued on the pavement outside the Ritz. Taxis would draw up. The porters would rush forward to shelter the guests under their umbrellas. Distinguished visitors would receive an even more obsequious greeting from the Head Porter. People leaving the hotel would be escorted to the waiting taxis or, occasionally, lent an umbrella from the supply held for the purpose in a stand behind the double doors that led into the great entrance hall. Staring down, Powerscourt counted nine Ritz lions on top of the umbrellas dancing about in the half-light. The rain was still spluttering onto the pavement by the arcade and running down the gutters, discreetly tucked into the facade of the building.
At seven thirty-five, according to the later testimony of the porters, a middle-aged man of average height, wearing a dark overcoat and a hat with a very wide brim, made his way out of the hotel and into a passing taxi. The driver, one of the porters reported, seemed to be expecting him. Another man was just visible on the back seat. There was a brief greeting and the taxi drove away. Behind it a black hearse appeared to be having some difficulty. The steering seemed to have gone awry. The vehicle slewed across the road and came to a halt at an angle of forty-five degrees across Piccadilly. A bus, following behind, could not get past. The driver of the hearse climbed out of his seat and ran into the hotel, looking for assistance. Black smoke began to ooze out from the engine, as if some serious mechanical problem was under way. Behind the bus, other drivers and other buses began hooting their horns. After a couple of minutes the traffic jam extended right back to Piccadilly Circus with tributary blockages in the side streets leading onto the main thoroughfare. Further up on the opposite side towards Piccadilly Circus, the Royal Academy, packed with masterpieces of British art, could only watch as the seizure gradually spread to the other side of the street.
It was many hours later in Markham Square before Powerscourt and Inspector Kingsley understood what had happened. The porters were only asked to report on what they had seen at ten o’clock.
‘I should have seen it coming, Inspector! God knows, I’ve planned enough engagements where the trick was to attack from the direction the enemy least expected.’
‘You’ve got to hand it to the blackmailer, I suppose,’ admitted the Inspector. ‘He had us all looking the wrong way. We thought Ragg would disappear into the hotel, like a rabbit down a hole, and we could catch them in flagrante, as it were. Instead he walks out of the front door and into the taxi he must have sent to collect Ragg. All our plans went up in smoke. Plain clothes men disguised as hotel guests on every floor, waste of time! Police waiters, police footmen, police sommeliers, useless and redundant every one! Half the cars and the cyclists stuck in the traffic jam! Why didn’t we think it might all work the other way?’
‘You mustn’t reproach yourself. I’m as much to blame as you are.’ Powerscourt poured the Inspector another glass of whisky. ‘I don’t suppose your people have told you any news about Ragg? Is he all right, that sort of thing?’
‘Sorry. I should have told you. He didn’t go back to the Ritz. He didn’t go back to the museum. A taxi dropped him off at home shortly after nine o’clock. My man on duty at the house said that there seemed to be a second man in the cab, travelling with Ragg.’ Inspector Kingsley checked his notebook. ‘Just one thing about the passenger. Nondescript sort of fellow, apparently. Took his hat off as Ragg was getting out. My man thinks, but he’s not sure because of the light and the rain, that the fellow was completely bald.’
‘The Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police for you, Prime Minister.’
Sir Edward Henry, Britain’s most senior policeman, was trying hard to conceal his irritation. He was not cross with the Prime Minister or his Government. He was cross with his own subordinates and most of all with himself for not keeping a tighter watch on events. Kingsley’s behaviour he could not condone but the man was young, with a brilliant track record and a reputation as one of the most original detectives in the Force. That was why he had been assigned to the British Museum case in the first place. But the Head of Scotland Yard? What had the man been thinking of? He might not have given his blessing to the Piccadilly operation, but he had not forbidden it and he had not reported it upwards as he was duty bound to do. In a lifetime dealing with the maintenance of rules, of drawing up rules for the behaviour of his men, of suggesting or advising on rules or laws for regulating the behaviour of the general public, Sir Edward had always been sceptical about complete success in these difficult areas. Rules and laws were all very well, he had once told a conference of chief constables, but human frailty would always get through in the end.
The Prime Minister smiled at the policeman. Coffee and biscuits were being served.
‘You asked to see me, Sir Edward, on a matter of great urgency. How can I help?’
‘The matter is delicate, Prime Minister. It has to do with the theft of the Caryatid from the British Museum. I believe you know some of the details of the case?’
‘That is correct. I have been informed about the matter.’
Sir Edward Henry had a reputation for blunt speaking when he felt it was appropriate. He had always maintained in domestic negotiations with his wife that there were times when it was better to run the risk of offending the person you were speaking to, rather than dodging the issue and hiding in the long grass. This was such a time.
‘Forgive me if I have been misinformed, Prime Minister—’ there was no hostility in his voice at all ‘—but I was given to understand that you and the Chancellor of the Exchequer had given your blessing to some preposterous scheme to pay blackmail to secure the return of the British Museum Caryatid. Is that true?’
‘What a lot of trouble that elegant young woman has caused us all! It might have been better if Lord Elgin had left her where she was. Don’t you think so? Yes, you are quite right, Commissioner. The Chancellor and I did come to such an understanding, let me call it that.’
‘I’m sorry, Prime Minister, forgive me, but I believe that was the wrong decision.’
‘You may be right, of course you may.’ The Prime Minister was famed for his ability to disarm his critics. ‘If I can be allowed to speak off the record, as it were, and for your ears only, it was a political calculation. Leave things as they are and the Caryatid may never be returned. God alone knows where the wretched statue is now. But it would be a continual reproach to this administration that prides itself on keeping a firm grip on questions of law and order, as the wretched newspapers keep referring to it. How can the electors feel safe in their beds when the Government cannot even recover a Greek statue seven and a half feet tall? If, on the other hand, the statue were recovered, then the question of how the return was effected will be drowned out in the general rejoicing. Nobody is going to quibble once she is back on her plinth or whatever she stands on in the British Museum. By the way, Commissioner, I have not yet been informed what happened when Deputy Director Ragg had his meeting yesterday evening. I believe you may have some news on that?’
‘I have very little to report, Prime Minister. The two men met. They managed to avoid my officers who were disguised as hotel guests and hotel staff in the Ritz Hotel. Both are safe and well. I have, as yet, no knowledge of what was said. Deputy Director Ragg is having a meeting with my inspector early this afternoon. But let me come to the point, Prime Minister. As the senior policeman in the capital, I am asking you to take steps to ensure that the discussions about paying a ransom are closed down, and that there will be no more meetings like the one last night.’
‘That is rather a lot to ask for all in one go, Commissioner. Might I ask why?’
‘Of course, Prime Minister. We have had a policy in the force for some years now of never paying blackmail. Let me explain. We believe – and the experience of some other European countries bears me out here – that paying blackmail becomes like a virus. Once you start, it is very hard to stop. Consider, if you would, the likely reaction in the criminal fraternity to the news that the return of the Caryatid was secured for £100,000. The thieves who traffic in these kinds of crime are not stupid, not by any means. Word will leak out, it always does. Soon they will have a sort of stock exchange in their minds of the monies the authorities are likely to pay out to redeem some work of art or public figure they may have kidnapped for ransom. Fifteen thousand pounds for a Constable? Forty thousand for a Raphael? Fifty for a Leonardo? Eighty for a real duchess? The National Gallery will be denuded of masterpieces; not all at once for that would bring the prices down, but over time. One a year, perhaps? The knowledge may spread lower down the ranks of the criminal fraternity. Robbery could become a popular pastime, not because the thieves want the furniture or the precious stones, but because they know they can get ready cash to hand it back. You could end up, Prime Minister, having to pay to have your stolen spoons returned.’
‘Surely it cannot be as bad as that?’
‘I exaggerate, of course, but only to make the point. Once you start paying up for blackmail the road is slippery, the path treacherous. Who knows where it may lead? Refuse to pay and the thieves may still steal – what else are they there for, after all – but they will not think it worth their while to go in for blackmail.’
‘Are you sure that it would become known in the criminal fraternity that we had paid a ransom? What happens if the whole business is conducted through an intermediary, somebody whose name neither you nor I need ever know of? Surely that would meet your objections?’
‘My objections, Prime Minister, are to do with the paying of blackmail. Whether it is paid by the Chancellor of the Exchequer or the Garter King of Arms or the Archbishop of Canterbury is immaterial. The results will be the same.’
‘I see,’ said the Prime Minister. ‘I am most grateful to you for bringing the matter to my attention. I shall consult with colleagues and let you know what we have decided.’
Instant defeat, instant capitulation, the Prime Minister had decided, would never do. It would be like giving in to the blackmailers. He would disguise his retreat behind the matador’s cloak of consultation with his Cabinet. Not that he had any intention of speaking to a single one of them.
‘Of course, Prime Minister, I am most grateful for your time.’ The Commissioner had played this game often enough to know that an orderly retreat was the most likely course to bring success. Further argument would be futile. He did, however, have one last card to play.
‘If I could just make one final point, Prime Minister. I would remind you that Deputy Director Ragg is due to meet my Inspector immediately after lunch.’
‘Of course, my dear Commissioner. I haven’t forgotten.’
The Headmaster thought his colleague looked quite peaceful. He had heard the details of Carwyn Jones’s death from the police and shuddered. As the attendant in the hospital morgue began to pull back the sheet he thought he was going to be sick. But the face he saw was not the battered and bloodied wreck he expected. Somebody must have cleaned him up. Thank God for that, the Headmaster said to himself.
‘Yes.’ He nodded to the senior policeman. ‘Yes, that’s Carwyn Jones. I’d know him anywhere.’
Illtyd Williams walked slowly back to his school. He had been a teacher and then head teacher here for nearly forty years. The nearest he had come to violence in all his time there did not have to do with his pupils. The violence came from the terrible accidents at the mines further down the valley where so many of his children had uncles and cousins working. Illtyd could still see the faces of the women standing at the pithead, waiting to see if their man would be the next body brought up to the surface from the killer coal hundreds of feet below.
He knew there was a letter waiting for him in his office. Mrs John the cleaning lady had told him. She also informed him that there was no stamp on it, so it must have been hand delivered, and she thought she recognized the handwriting as that of his deceased colleague Carwyn Jones. Mrs John was waiting for him when he returned and hovering around with her best duster. He knew she was waiting to be told what was in the letter. Illtyd thanked her for her good work and showed her the door.
‘Dear Illtyd,’ the letter began. ‘I think I may have made a terrible mistake.’ Carwyn went on to describe his role in providing the cover story for the enormous coffin sent off to Bristol months before. He mentioned the rumours, of men working through the night in the lonely barn beside the entrance to the caves, of extra food being purchased by the undertaker when he had no guests staying in his house. He mentioned his suspicions after reading the London paper that events in the Brecon Beacons might have had something to do with the Caryatid stolen from the British Museum. He mentioned his financial problems, the rugby tickets sold, the roof in need of repair, the extra mouth or mouths soon to arrive, for his wife’s family had a long history of giving birth to twins. He confessed that he had written to the undertaker asking for more money to keep his mouth shut. He even mentioned his threat to go to his cousin the policeman in Ebbw Vale and tell him the whole story. Now, in his final sentence, he told his headmaster that he was due to meet the undertaker and a couple of his friends specially come from London to talk things over with him in the Green Dragon in an hour’s time.
There was no mention in the letter of what Carwyn expected him to do. Was he supposed to go immediately to the police and hand over the letter? The policeman who told him about Carwyn’s death had left little out of his account of the last minutes of his colleague’s life, the cigarette burns on the arms, the savage kicking, the stamping on his face. The policeman was sure the two men responsible had gone back to London. What if they came back? When he was a boy, like everybody else, he had been forced to play rugby. Being in the centre or out on the wing he didn’t mind so much. It was cold and sometimes you had to stop people getting past you. But then somebody had suggested putting him in the scrum as a second row forward. Illtyd could still remember his fear and the sheer discomfort of sticking your head into the gap between the faces of the front row, other forwards leaning into you from the side and the back, and pushing for all he was worth. Not long afterwards he gave up rugby altogether. He walked over to the window and stared out at the mountains beyond the playground. He thought of Carwyn in his happier days, tramping across the hills, climbing to the top of Cader Idris on a summer’s day and exulting in the view of Cardigan Bay stretched out beneath them like an enormous map. He thought of the broken body down in the hospital morgue, kicked to death by killers from another country. He shivered slightly. For the moment, he decided, he would do nothing. He would keep quiet about the letter. He wasn’t even going to tell his wife or their children. Maybe, he said to himself, things will be clearer after the inquest.
Theophilus Ragg, Deputy Director of the British Museum, was late for his meeting with Inspector Kingsley and Powerscourt. It was half an hour after the appointed time when he walked slowly into his office and threw his hat and coat onto a chair.
‘My apologies, gentlemen. I would have left word if I could. I didn’t know I was to be summoned to see the Home Secretary at very short notice.’
Powerscourt thought Ragg sounded tired. He looked like a beaten man. He made it sound as if being summoned to see the Home Secretary was an ordeal like being called upon to meet one’s maker, frightening at best, possibly terminal.
‘Might I ask what he had to say?’ Inspector Kingsley too had an appointment to keep that afternoon, with the Commissioner himself at five o’clock.
‘You may indeed, Inspector. You may indeed. I am more annoyed than I can say. Who, after all, is meant to run this museum? The Director and his deputy and their staff? Or the Home Secretary, a man with no experience of running artistic establishments at all? I doubt if he has ever stepped inside this building, now I come to think about it. But this former newsagent dares to tell me what I may and may not do in the course of my duties! It is disgraceful! It’s worse than disgraceful! It’s probably unconstitutional!’
‘Perhaps you could tell us,’ Powerscourt asked in his most emollient tones, ‘what it is that you may or may not do? Is the Home Secretary proposing to come and reorganize the seating arrangements in the Reading Room? Change some of the galleries round perhaps? Send the Hittites to Assyria and the Assyrians to the basement?’
‘Would that he were, Lord Powerscourt. It’s not as simple as that. The Home Secretary, speaking, he assured me, on behalf of the Cabinet, told me that it is Government policy never to give in to blackmail. Therefore all negotiations with the purported blackmailer must cease. Therefore our best chance of recovering the Caryatid is gone, swamped by the Home Secretary and his newspapers. It’s monstrous!’
‘It does seem a little steep to me,’ said Inspector Kingsley, ‘the Government taking such a high and mighty line on blackmail. It only takes about fifty backbenchers to leap up and down and threaten to withdraw their support for them to change their minds, or commission a policy review as they usually call it. However, I’m not a politician. Ours not to reason why.’
‘I can fully understand your irritation, Mr Ragg,’ said Powerscourt. ‘You have my sympathy. Did the Home Secretary give any idea what caused the change of heart? There were no objections from the Head of Scotland Yard to the meeting at the Ritz yesterday, after all.’
‘Nobody said anything, but I rather gathered the shift came from the very top, from the Prime Minister.’
‘This only goes to reinforce my feelings about what we were talking about the other day, my lord.’ Inspector Kingsley was shaking his head. ‘Why should I stay when my actions are rejected by my superiors? I am virtually certain that it was the Commissioner himself who persuaded the Prime Minister.’
Powerscourt thought the meeting was in danger of getting out of control. ‘I don’t think there is anything we can do about this decision now. I can’t see the Prime Minister changing his mind. But I am sure we still have much to learn from the meeting yesterday evening. In our haste to vent our wrath on the Government we have rather forgotten about the Caryatid and the blackmailer. Mr Ragg, could you tell us what happened yesterday evening? Starting perhaps with your collection by the taxi?’
Theophilus Ragg put his head in his hands. He leant forward on his desk. Powerscourt thought he might be going to cry. After a moment or two there was a rustling noise as the Deputy Director searched in his pockets for his snuff. He took a very large pinch and stared sadly at his visitors.
‘Forgive me, please, this is all rather difficult.’ Ragg took another, smaller, dose of snuff, and stared at his bookshelves. ‘Let me tell you something about myself, gentlemen. In my early days I made my reputation in Oxford as an administrator. I was known for my ability to control costs. This involved such life-threatening decisions as whether the cleaning staff should start work at nine or half past, and whether it would be cheaper to have four porters working overtime or to have six on normal hours. On such pillars did my reputation rest. I came here to this great institution where the same skills were required. Should we have separate departments for all the Middle Eastern holdings, or should they all be parcelled up into a single body with one head rather than seven? Should the museum be prepared to lend some of its treasures to other similar institutions? But now, I don’t have to tell you gentlemen, I am plunged into high politics. The Government changes its mind about what I believe might be the best course of action. I am confronted with blackmailers. Nothing has prepared me for this, nothing. It is as if a junior officer in the commissariat has been lifted up to field marshal’s rank and told to run the entire campaign. I am not fit for this level of responsibility. I am not the right man to have to carry out the necessary actions.’
Powerscourt felt sorry for the Deputy Director. But he knew from his time in the military that the reluctant are often called and that fate does not always wait for the right man to come along.
‘When I served in the Army in India, Mr Ragg, I spent a lot of time with a man who went on to become a most distinguished general. He was a colonel then, a colonel of artillery, a gunner. By accident he found himself in charge of a large detachment of foot about to be assailed by a much larger enemy force. I always remember what he said to us before the battle. “We are where we are,” he said, “we are who we are, and, a gunner in charge of infantry or no, I am going to do my damnedest to win this fight.” And he did. One of his junior officers said to him afterwards, “You are who you are, sir, and you’ve just won a bloody great victory.” Just because you have sailed in calmer waters in the past doesn’t mean that you’re not fit to command in a storm.’
‘Think of those two at Rorke’s Drift,’ said Inspector Kingsley, ‘two young officers, Chard and Bromhead, who’d never fought in a battle. Yet they organized their defence so well with their 150 men that they were able to hold off thousands of Zulu warriors.’
‘Come, Mr Ragg, you are who you are and you are where you are. Tell us, if you would, what transpired yesterday evening with the blackmailer.’
They were not out of the woods yet. Ragg put his head in his hands once more. ‘I promised the man,’ he said finally, ‘that I wouldn’t tell anybody what had happened between us. I wouldn’t say what he looked like or anything like that. I swore. I gave him my word.’
Inspector Kingsley muttered under his breath. He looked as though he were about to fire a salvo or two of his own. Powerscourt thought he might make the point more gently.
‘My dear Ragg,’ he said as mildly as he could. ‘Let us consider the facts. We are all engaged on the recovery of the Caryatid. That is the only priority. There was a meeting with the blackmailer. The Prime Minister, we believe, has forbidden any further negotiations with this person. So you are not going to meet him again. It is our duty, your duty, to do everything in your power to further the cause of recovering the statue. That includes knowing all we can about the man who may or may not be a thief or part of a gang of thieves. I suggest you tell us all you know. We wouldn’t want another directive from Number Ten Downing Street so soon after the last one.’
Ragg stared at Powerscourt for quite a long time. ‘May God forgive me,’ he began.
‘I’m sure he will,’ put in the Inspector.
‘There’s not very much to say,’ Ragg continued. ‘He never told me his name. I never saw what he looked like. We didn’t go anywhere, you see, not to a house or anything like that. We drove round in that cab until he dropped me back at my house.’
‘What did you talk about?’ asked Powerscourt.
‘He tried to persuade me that he really did have the Caryatid. He said he wasn’t going to give me any details of handing over the money until I agreed to do so. He said the statue would be returned the day after the ransom had been collected.’
‘But no details of when or where the transfer was to take place?’ Inspector Kingsley, practical policeman to the last, planning ambushes and surprise attacks.
‘None. You see, I think he was suspicious. He kept his hat on all the time. He kept looking round a lot and checking in the mirror.’
‘What was his voice like?’ Powerscourt felt the details were sketchy. He wondered if Ragg was telling them the whole truth.
‘Well spoken. He sounded like one of us, really.’ Clever criminals always did, Powerscourt thought bitterly.
‘And that’s it, Mr Ragg, is it? You drove round in a cab, you promised not to tell anybody anything and the man said he would let you know about dropping off the ransom? Nothing more?’
‘No,’ said Ragg. ‘I would you tell you more if there was any, I promise.’
‘Two last queries,’ said Powerscourt. ‘The policeman on duty by your house thought he got a glimpse of the blackmailer as you got out of the cab. He thought the man was completely bald. He raised his hat as you got out, apparently. Good manners and all that. Did you see that?’
‘No,’ said Ragg rather sadly. ‘I didn’t. Sorry to be such an inadequate witness. And the other thing?’
‘The other thing, Mr Ragg, is this. Did you think the blackmailer was genuine? By which I mean, did you think he had the Caryatid? That he wasn’t bluffing?’
‘As a matter of fact,’ Ragg replied, ‘I did think he had the Caryatid or that he knew how to get his hands on her. I was quite sure about that.’