Inspector Bull left the Commissioner’s office expecting to go at once to see Albert Steiner in Hatton-garden. It was not the first time a case had taken him there; he had heard strange tales of human greed and depravity from the short enigmatic Jew, peering myopicaily through incredibly heavy lenses, and smiling quietly, with half the wisdom of Solomon in his dark voice, across the wide oak table in that unobtrusive shop. Mr. Steiner knew a great deal that Scotland Yard would like to know. Both Scotland Yard and Mr. Steiner knew this, but neither ever referred to it. Mr. Steiner was always willing to help the police, but, as Commissioner Debenham once remarked, Steiner was born a thousand years before Scotland Yard was thought of. Still, Bull was counting on him—for what, he did not quite know.
And yet, he did. He wanted to know precisely why they were reappraising Mrs. Royce’s diamonds. There seemed to &-several theories about that. If Mrs. Colton was right in believing her husband had a purchaser for them, Mrs. Royce gained £ 20,000 by the robbery; for, granting that Mr. Smedley was right about the depreciation, Colton could not sell them for more than £ 15,000, and they were insured for £ 35,000.
If, on the other hand, Mr. Smedley was right in thinking that Mrs. Royce had no idea of selling the stones, it was a slightly different matter. If she had decided to pocket her loss and unload, she was interested in having actual cash. If she was merely having them reappraised at the request of the assurance company, it was evident she did not need money at all.
In either case she gained, naturally, some £ 20,000 by their loss, and by any standard was devilishly fortunate. On the second assumption, that she had not intended to sell, she would have a great deal of money when she had expected none. On the first assumption, that she had intended to sell, she would have a great deal of money more than she had expected. In one case she might conceivably have regrets for the theft—assuming what Inspector Bull, having seen Mrs. Royce, was entirely unable to do, that she had a sentimental attachment to her jewels. In the other case she could only be delighted at her unexpected windfall. Unless—here Inspector Bull stopped with inborn and trained caution—she had expected just what she got. Was it possible . . . ?
The telephone on his desk was jangling, and Bull answered it impatiently. He wanted to be on his way to Hatton-gar-den.
He recognised the slow, slightly husky voice of Mrs. Colton.
“Mr. Smith, my husband’s clerk, is here, Inspector Bull. He’s in a very bad state. If you want to talk to him you’ll have to hurry, I’m afraid.”
“I’ll be right along,” Bull said.
He put down the receiver and took up his hat and overcoat. Mr. Steiner in Hatton-garden could wait. It seemed that Mr. Smith in Cadogan-square could not.
Bull was accustomed to the air of mystery that housemaids adopt when they admit the police. As much as to say, “Between ourselves this doesn’t surprise me. If you’d lived here as long as I have you’d expect anything to happen in this house.” He recognised the girl as the one he’d talked to that morning, but he had no time for her.
“I could of told him a few,” she observed when she went back to the kitchen where tea was being finished. “However, if he’s so high and mighty . . .”
Mrs. Coggins the cook shook her head. “You leave policemen be, my lass, it’s no concern of yours.”
“It not, isn’t it? Well I’d like to know whose it is, then. It’s all very well to talk, but I saw Miss Agatha slip down to talk to Peskett no sooner than he got out of sight this morning. And that’s not all. In five minutes down went the missus herself and talks to him. No wonder he gives hisself ans.
Mrs. Coggins shook her head more determinedly.
“It don’t do a girl any good to be carrying tales. No matter where she carries ’em. Now you wash up and I’ll go see poor Mr. Smith. Mark my words he won’t last long. Coggins was took that bad and he didn’t last the night.”
In the library Bull saw Mrs. Colton for the second time. Why Mrs. Royce should have called her scatter-brained he could not say. She obviously was not. If anything she was too reserved, too subdued. It never entered Inspector Bull’s mind that she might be grieving for her husband.
Bull of course was aware that he was a very bad judge of women. Nothing affected him as pleasantly as a beautiful one. In a completely detached way, of course. He regarded them much as he regarded the Dresden china shepherdesses he used to collect before he married one. They were to be admired from a distance. If you touched them, something always managed to come off—a hand, or a foot, or some of the brittle lace of their dresses. Or even their heads. Bull was a great believer in the dust on the butterfly’s wing. Which was pretty much the way he saw Mrs. Colton.
She was lovely. She had warm ivory skin and deep hazel eyes, crowned (he would have said) by sleek, smoothly waved ash-blonde hair drawn into a knot low on her neck. Her voice suited her very well, Bull thought several times.
“Mr. Smith is upstairs. He seems almost exhausted. I haven’t called a doctor, though. I thought rest would be enough for him. Will you go up now?”
“Yes. When did he come?”
“This afternoon about three. He was in a pitiful condition. He couldn’t speak coherently. I left him with Mrs. Coggins—she’s the cook—and after about an hour she came down and said he wanted to speak to me, so I went up. He told me about Gates’s not showing up. Then I called you.”
“That’s the boy?”
“Yes.”
Smith was lying on a white iron bed in what Bull gathered was a servant’s room on the third floor. He was the most fragile person the Inspector had ever seen. The thin transparent hands moved nervously with long twitching fingers over the eiderdown. Mrs. Colton went to his side and took one of the restless hands in hers. Bull felt that Death sat on the other side, holding the other hand. His was the stronger hold.
The old man opened his sunken eyes. His dry blue lips moved without a sound.
“Send for a doctor, Mrs. Colton,” Bull said quietly.
She turned frightened eyes on him and nodded. Bull took her place and put his fingers on the fading, fluttering pulse. He shook his head involuntarily. Sitting there alone he felt the thin thread of the old man’s life stop and flutter again. He thought of the spool on his mother’s sewing machine that he used to watch when he was a child. It whirled evenly as long as the spool was full. When the cotton was almost used, and the pull from the moving foot was too great for the reserve, it jumped and slipped and made uneven stitches. Bull watched the old man. Death on the other side was pulling too hard. There was no reserve.
“That’s like life,” Inspector Bull said seriously.
He heard people coming up the stairs.
It was Mrs. Colton, her step-daughter Agatha, and a doctor.
The doctor nodded to Bull, who stepped aside. The two women stood at the foot of the bed. Bull found himself watching them instead of the old man. They were both young. One was tall and fair, calm yet radiant as crystal. The other was short and dark, tense, and as burning as some elemental flame.
The doctor straightened up and replaced his hypodermic needle in his bag. He watched his patient with a professional narrowing of the eye.
“Pretty far gone,” he said to Bull. “Mrs. Colton says you wanted him to talk.”
Bull nodded. The frail wraith on the bed stirred feebly and opened his eyes. The lips moved. Bull quickly bent over him. Screened in his great palm, directly in the old man’s view but invisible to the three other people, was a small gold key.
He could not tell if the dying man saw it.
The lips moved feebly again. “Gates . . . gone . . .”
The old man’s eyes suddenly dilated with fear. He was staring straight ahead of him, at the two women at the foot of the bed. Bull turned suddenly. All he saw was a flicker in two dark eyes, and a tightening of two full red lips. Agatha Colton smiled and put her hands behind her back.
The doctor felt the old man’s pulse.
“That’s all,” he said. “I gave him a stiff dose. Heart too weak. I’ll make out the certificate.”
Inspector Bull and the two women stood motionless. Everything seemed to have stopped in the room.
Suddenly Agatha Colton turned to her stepmother and said in a voice that was as deadly calm as sunshine over a volcano, “I’m sorry, Louise. I can’t stick it any longer. I’m going. Good-bye.”
She went out of the room and the three of them watched her without a word.
Bull turned to her stepmother. She was standing with one white hand resting helplessly on the iron bedstead. He had the queer feeling that something terrible had happened without knowing what it was or how to go about it to find out.
The doctor looked from one to the other of them, then back at the door through which Agatha Colton had walked; shrugged his shoulders, and prepared to fill out the death certificate.