… But of course, everything is not normal at all, Fran wrote to Mo. I am supposed to be here on a detective mission and instead I’m attending fancy dress parties and receiving proposals of marriage. Eddie Edgerton is supposed to be one of the suspects, not a prospective suitor. He is driving me see Mrs Headingham in Sidmouth this afternoon, which means …
Fran put down her pen and reread the most recently written page. What did it mean? She could just imagine Mo, could almost hear her saying, ‘But you haven’t said “no”, have you? He’s a jolly nice chap and he’s obviously crazy about you. You could do a damn sight worse. In fact, you already have done, once …’
She picked up the last sheet of notepaper and tore it carefully into tiny pieces. She would bring Mo up to date another time about the Eddie complication. Anyway, it was time to set off for Sidmouth.
It took them almost an hour to drive to Sidmouth, but much to Fran’s relief, Eddie stuck to safe, ordinary topics and made no reference to the conversation which had taken place on the coast road in the early hours. She did wonder if she ought to interpret his silence as an indication of him having thought better of it, now that the effects of the gin punch had worn off, but somehow she rather doubted that. Instead they talked about the places they drove through and he asked her about the countryside where she lived, rather in the manner of a person who intended to visit the area soon.
Mrs Headingham lived in a white-painted terraced house, a couple of streets back from the promenade. Her maid opened the door and showed them into a rather over-furnished drawing room which reminded Fran very much of her own mother’s. She had been half expecting a faded femme fatale, but the woman who had once been Frederick Edgerton’s mistress was disappointingly ordinary. Warned to expect them by a telephone call from Roly, Mrs Headingham appeared to be as curious about them as they were about her.
‘Edward,’ she said. ‘Do come into the light, so that I can see you better. There now … very much like your grandfather, when he was younger. But you, my dear.’ She turned to Fran. ‘You are not like the Edgertons at all. But then you’re not a member of the family, are you? Roland tried to explain it on the telephone, but I’m afraid I couldn’t get the gist. You are going to have to tell me again. And do speak up, because I’m a trifle deaf.’
‘Mrs Black is helping the family with a bit of a mystery,’ Eddie said, probably rather too loudly. ‘It’s all to do with a piece of jewellery that we’ve lost. Grandfather was a little bit confused at times, in his last few months, and he may have put it somewhere unexpected. Mrs Black just thought that perhaps you – having known him very well at one time – might have had some ideas.’
‘Did she really? So this has got absolutely nothing to do with the fact that your grandfather met his death by falling off a cliff? Now really, young man, don’t look so surprised. I may be old but I’m not senile. I read the newspapers and my eyebrows hit the ceiling at that.’
‘It is just possible that old Mr Edgerton’s death was not an accident,’ Fran said, having made a swift assessment that Mrs Headingham’s unusual circumstances meant that her discretion could be relied upon. ‘We don’t know whether the missing jewellery is connected to his death or not.’
Mrs Headingham nodded thoughtfully. ‘Old Mr Edgerton? That’s what they call poor Fred now, is it? Well, well, I suppose there are probably people who call me old Mrs Headingham too. Which piece of jewellery is it that’s gone missing?’
‘You may not know it. It was a single diamond, which he never had made up into anything. It was kept in a black velvet pouch.’
‘And you can’t find it?’
‘No.’
‘When did you last see it?’
‘No one is really sure. Just some time before he died.’
‘Well, perhaps he gave it back.’
‘Gave it back?’ Fran asked, careful not to betray her suspicion that Mrs Headingham was also fairly well advanced in her dotage, in spite of the sentiments she had expressed a moment before.
‘Gave it back to its owners.’ Mrs Headingham scrutinized their faces before adding, ‘I can see that you haven’t the least idea of what I’m talking about. You don’t know the full story of that diamond, do you?’
Fran and Eddie shook their heads in perfect unison.
‘Well, what do you know about it?’
It was Eddie who answered. ‘As I’ve always understood it, Grandfather brought it back from Africa, along with various other assets. He had the stone cut, but for some reason or other, he never had it made into a piece of jewellery. I think he used to like to keep it close by him for some reason, and he often showed it to people. I expect it was worth a good deal of money, but I don’t ever remember him telling us how he got it – and certainly not that it belonged to anyone else,’ Eddie added by way of an afterthought.
Mrs Headingham looked thoughtful. ‘I suppose Fred told me a great many things that he would never have confided in anyone else. He wasn’t a man to make close friendships and after his wife died I became the next best thing. He asked me to marry him once, but I turned him down. I was very fond of him but I never could have loved him the way I had loved my husband.’ She sighed. ‘I told him that it wouldn’t have worked out well for him anyway, marrying his children’s governess. People would have looked down on us, I said, but that wasn’t the real reason. I couldn’t forget that I loved my first husband more than him. I suppose it was foolish really, because I was happy enough with Fred in a way … and I could never have my poor dead husband back again. It may sound strange to you, but I quite enjoyed being his mistress rather than his wife. There’s a lot of tiresome responsibility goes with being a wife, particularly one who is expected to participate in local society. But then, of course, your father, young Frank, married Lady Louisa and she was very shocked at the idea of living under the same roof as her father-in-law’s mistress, so I was shipped off to live here and Fred could only come and visit me after that. As he got older, the gaps between those visits grew longer and longer and I admit that I missed seeing him, perhaps rather more than he missed seeing me.’ She laughed softly and shook her head. ‘I hadn’t anticipated that and I admit I sometimes thought then that perhaps I should have settled for marriage, when it was offered, all those years before, but there, I didn’t and that’s all there is to it.’
‘And the story of the diamond,’ Fran prompted gently.
‘The diamond. Of course. Fred told me the story of the diamond years ago, when his girls were still quite small. It seems that when he was travelling about, making his fortune, he fell in with a French fellow, by the name of George. He and this George became good friends, and I think they got into some scrapes together, one way and another. George had been involved in the Kimberley diamond rush, and he’d done pretty well, but that kind of thing always attracts scallywags and ne’er-do-wells and Kimberley was no exception. George was a fool when it came to gambling, Fred said. Couldn’t resist a card game and had lost a great deal of his money through it. By the time he decided to return to his wife, he’d got himself into a lot of trouble with professional gamblers and card sharps and he was afraid they would find out that he was still in possession of not only quite a lot of cash, but also his one remaining diamond, so he asked Fred to take care of it for him.’
‘Gosh,’ said Eddie. ‘He must have really trusted Grandfather to do a thing like that.’
‘Indeed.’ Mrs Headingham inclined her head in agreement. ‘I understood that Fred and George were great friends. However, they travelled back to Europe separately, with George going on a few months ahead of Fred. When Fred returned to London, he wrote to the address which George had given him but he received no reply. He wrote again, but still nothing came. He wrote a third time and still there was nothing. He even asked the French Consulate to see if they could trace George, but they were unable to help. So he held on to the diamond, thinking that sooner or later, George would track him down and ask for it back.’
‘But he never did?’
‘No.’
‘I wonder why not,’ mused Eddie. ‘And why Grandfather never told us that the diamond was sort of held in trust, for someone else. I mean to say … we all just assumed that it belonged to the family.’
‘Eventually,’ said Mrs Headingham, ‘I think your grandfather operated a sort of finders-keepers policy. I sincerely believe that he made an initial attempt to track his friend down, but later on, I think a combination of factors encouraged him to – well, let us say – forget, that the diamond didn’t really belong to him.’
‘What factors were those?’ asked Fran.
‘To be candid, Fred did not like the French. His friendship with George, was, he always said, the exception which proved the rule. I believe there had been some problem, or rivalry, with a Frenchman, out in Africa, and there had always been a certain degree of suspicion about the French, among Englishmen … a sense that they would do an Englishman down, given half a chance … and of course he blamed France for dragging us into the Great War. Not that it was really France’s fault at all. The final straw were the French mutinies in 1917, when our brave boys were fighting on French soil and the French just threw in the towel and gave up, so to speak.’
‘But George had been his friend,’ Eddie protested.
‘I suppose the memory of that friendship had faded as time passed and other silly prejudices took its place.’ Mrs Headingham sighed. In a different tone altogether, she said, ‘I must ring for tea. It’s angel cake today. I’m sure you will enjoy it. Elsie has a very light hand.’
‘Tell me, Mrs Headingham,’ said Fran, anxious not to become overly distracted by the refreshments. ‘Can you recall George’s other name?’
‘Ah, now there you have me. Fred mentioned it a few times, I suppose, in the course of talking about their times together, but I have to admit that my memory is not what it was. Now when it comes to poetry I can still bring plenty of that to mind, particularly Lord Tennyson and good old Longfellow, and of course one never loses the multiplication tables … but names! Now let me see … It was a name that put you in mind of something else … a French name, of course … Poison … no, but something very like it, I think … Poussin?’
‘Poussin? Wasn’t he a composer?’ asked Eddie.
‘A painter,’ corrected Fran, as Mrs Headingham hesitated, doubt etched across her expression.
‘Yes,’ the old lady said at last. ‘I think I must have been thinking of Poussin.’
‘Well, well,’ said Eddie, when they were driving back along the road towards Exeter. ‘There we were, thinking that we were hunting for a missing family treasure and it turns out not to have been our family treasure at all.’
‘The question of actual ownership probably wouldn’t have bothered the thief – if there was one,’ said Fran. ‘But of course, the existence of this George – or more likely Georges – Poussin throws up another possibility.’
‘Does it?’ Eddie sounded surprised.
‘According to Mrs Headingham, your grandfather held on to this man’s diamond, when he’d promised to give it back.’
‘But only by default. I mean, he intended to give it back in the first place, surely?’
‘Well, yes,’ said Fran. ‘But suppose you were Georges Poussin and you didn’t get the diamond back. Suppose your grandfather wrote to the wrong address and didn’t get a reply, but all along Georges Poussin was still waiting for his old friend to get in touch with him at the right address to give him back the diamond, but he never heard a thing?’
‘Umm … yes, I see what you mean. Old Poussin would be pretty mad.’
‘Precisely. Maybe mad enough to take the diamond back and push his old friend over the cliff into the bargain.’
‘Good gracious, do you really think so?’
‘Oh!’ Fran gasped, as the car had to swerve to avoid a couple of geese that had wandered into the road. Recovering quickly, she said, ‘It’s a possibility. Though this Georges Poussin must be as old as your grandfather …’
‘Perhaps he had a brother? Or an avenging cousin?’
‘A son would be more likely. Let’s see, that would make it someone around the same age as your father and his siblings.’
‘Someone who’d married into our family – that’s what it would be in a detective yarn,’ said Eddie. ‘Except there’s no one who’s French. They’ve all got impeccably Anglo-Saxon heritage apart from Aunt Dolly, who’s lineage is probably Anglo-Saxon, but definitely not impeccable. East Peckham, more likely. What a shame Mother doesn’t employ a French lady’s maid. A French maid would be the obvious suspect. She could be called Hortense.’ He began to sing, ‘Hortense, you’re not so frightfully dense, the police just won’t see sense, though we all know you’re gu-i-i-lty …’
When Eddie had subsided again, Fran said, ‘I think that my enquiries here are pretty much exhausted. After the weekend, I will have to go home.’
‘Oh, but you don’t have to go home at all,’ Eddie protested. ‘Everyone loves having you here, and besides which it’s the Vyvian-Smythes’ party next weekend, and I was relying on you for a partner. Do say you will at least stay for the party? It’s always tremendous fun.’
‘I have really trespassed on your family’s hospitality quite long enough – and besides which, I have to go and see my mother and,’ Fran added, rather desperately, ‘my cat.’
‘Do you have a cat? I’ll bet your cat would enjoy life in Devon. I’m very fond of cats – you’ve never mentioned that before.’
‘There are lots of things I’ve never mentioned,’ Fran said. ‘That’s the point, you see – we hardly know anything about each other at all, and …’
‘All the more reason for you to stay on and give us time to get to know each other better. Dearest Fran, I’m trying not to pile on the pressure, but I’m absolutely mad about you. Please don’t go without giving me some hope. At least promise that you’re still thinking about things.’
‘Oh, I am … thinking about lots of things. But I simply can’t stay on here indefinitely. Being away from you – from here – doesn’t stop me from thinking. In fact, it will help, you know, a little bit of space and distance often puts things into perspective.’
‘And I can’t even persuade you to stay for the party?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘I think I ought to leave on Monday.’ I will definitely not stay for the party, she thought. There must be no more lingering kisses and moonlight drives, because one’s judgement could so easily get clouded …