Chapter Twenty-Seven

Gabriel held up the two bags, side by side. Blathers told everyone where he had found his treasure and that it contained some diamonds. Barkis laughed. “This here bag is full of diamonds. Isn’t it, Mr. Varden?”

Varden grimaced. “We sure thought so.” He opened the bag and placed one of the diamonds on the table in front of the detectives. He picked up Barkis’ hammer and crashed it down on the jewel. It disintegrated into powder. “Paste! I took these to the jeweler that Sir Robert relies on. He assured me they are all paste. Now let’s test Mr. Blathers’ find.” He took a stone from Blathers sack, placed it on the table, and smashed it. The diamond remained undamaged. “Ah, the real thing.” Varden took a knife from the pocket of his frock coat and pried the gem out of the tabletop. “Sorry to have damaged your furniture, Mrs. Barkis.”

“Don’t think a thing about it, Mr. Varden. That table has been dented a thousand times by all sorts of mugs.”

Varden asked me what I thought of the situation. Well, he really asked both Blathers and me, but I surmised that Blathers might need more time to develop an idea, so I jumped in with my thoughts. “If I wanted to guess, I would say Squod took the diamonds the Order left with him and spent them, at least most of them. He fooled the other members by substituting paste. Thus, a full bag of paste, with a small number of actual diamonds remaining.”

Blather agreed with me. “Yes, and it is a good bet the damn Order, whoever they are, was good and fooled, because they are looking here, but they didn’t search Squod’s place.”

Alice was downhearted. “All this means is that my brother was murdered for a sack of paste and a few measly stones. I wish neither he nor I had ever seen that silly cryptic note.”

Blathers put his arms around her and held her close. That’s when young Edward Childers strode into the taproom. “Take your hands of that girl, you old lecher.” He grabbed Blathers’ arm and spun him away from Alice. And her tears really began to flow.