The Necklace of Pearls

 

SIR SEPTIMUS SHALE WAS accustomed to assert his authority once in the

year and once only. He allowed his young and fashionable wife to fill his

house with diagrammatic furniture made of steel; to collect advanced artists

and anti-grammatical poets; to believe in cocktails and relativity and to

dress as extravagantly as she pleased; but he did insist on an old-fashioned

Christmas. He was a simple-hearted man, who really liked plum-pudding

and cracker mottoes, and he could not get it out of his head that other

people, “at bottom,” enjoyed these things also. At Christmas, therefore, he

firmly retired to his country house in Essex, called in the servants to hang

holly and mistletoe upon the cubist electric fittings; loaded the steel

sideboard with delicacies from Fortnum & Mason; hung up stockings at the

heads of the polished walnut bedsteads; and even, on this occasion only,

had the electric radiators removed from the modernist grates and installed

wood fires and a Yule-log. He then gathered his family and friends about

him, filled them with as much Dickensian good fare as he could persuade

them to swallow, and, after their Christmas dinner, set them down to play

“Charades” and “Clumps” and “Animal, Vegetable and Mineral” in the

drawing-room, concluding these diversions by “Hide-and-Seek” in the dark

all over the house. Because Sir Septimus was a very rich man, his guests

fell in with this invariable programme, and if they were bored, they did not

tell him so.

Another charming and traditional custom which he followed was that of

presenting to his daughter Margharita a pearl on each successive birthday—

this anniversary happening to coincide with Christmas Eve. The pearls now

numbered twenty, and the collection was beginning to enjoy a certain celebrity, and had been photographed in the Society papers. Though not

sensationally large—each one being about the size of a marrowfat pea—the

pearls were of very great value. They were of exquisite colour and perfect

shape and matched to a hair’s-weight. On this particular Christmas Eve, the

presentation of the twenty-first pearl had been the occasion of a very special

ceremony. There was a dance and there were speeches. On the Christmas

night following, the more restricted family party took place, with the turkey

and the Victorian games. There were eleven guests, in addition to Sir

Septimus and Lady Shale and their daughter, nearly all related or connected

to them in some way: John Shale, a brother, with his wife and their son and

daughter Henry and Betty; Betty’s fiancé, Oswald Truegood, a young man

with parliamentary ambitions; George Comphrey, a cousin of Lady Shale’s,

aged about thirty and known as a man about town; Lavinia Prescott, asked

on George’s account; Joyce Trivett, asked on Henry Shale’s account;

Richard and Beryl Dennison, distant relations of Lady Shale, who lived a

gay and expensive life in town on nobody precisely knew what resources;

and Lord Peter Wimsey, asked, in a touching spirit of unreasonable hope, on

Margharita’s account. There were also, of course, William Norgate,

secretary to Sir Septimus, and Miss Tompkins, secretary to Lady Shale, who

had to be there because, without their calm efficiency, the Christmas

arrangements could not have been carried through.

Dinner was over—a seemingly endless succession of soup, fish, turkey,

roast beef, plum-pudding, mince-pies, crystallised fruit, nuts and five kinds

of wine, presided over by Sir Septimus, all smiles, by Lady Shale, all

mocking deprecation, and by Margharita, pretty and bored, with the

necklace of twenty-one pearls gleaming softly on her slender throat. Gorged

and dyspeptic and longing only for the horizontal position, the company

had been shepherded into the drawing-room and set to play “Musical Chairs” (Miss Tomkins at the piano), “Hunt the Slipper” (slipper provided

by Miss Tomkins), and “Dumb Crambo” (costumer by Miss Tomkins and

Mr. William Norgate). The back drawing-room (for Sir Septimus clung to

these old-fashioned names) provided an admirable dressing-room, being

screened by folding-doors from the large drawing-room in which the

audience sat on aluminium chairs, scrabbling uneasy toes on a floor of

black glass under the tremendous illumination of electricity reflected from a

brass ceiling.

It was William Norgate who, after taking the temperature of the

meeting, suggested to Lady Shale that they should play at something less

athletic. Lady Shale agreed and, as usual, suggested bridge. Sir Septimus, as

usual, blew the suggestion aside.

“Bridge? Nonsense! Nonsense! Play bridge every day of your lives.

This is Christmas time. Something we can all play together. How about

‘Animal, Vegetable and Mineral’?”

This intellectual pastime was a favourite with Sir Septimus; he was

rather good at putting pregnant questions. After a brief discussion, it

became evident that this game was an inevitable part of the programme.

The party settled down to it, Sir Septimus undertaking to “go out” first and

set the thing going.

Presently they had guessed among other things Miss Tomkins’s

mother’s photograph, a gramophone record of “I want to be happy” (much

scientific research into the exact composition of records, settled by William

Norgate out of the Encyclopaedia Britannica), the smallest stickleback in

the stream at the bottom of the garden, the new planet Pluto, the scarf worn

by Mrs. Dennison (very confusing, because it was not silk, which would be

animal, or artificial silk, which would be vegetable, but made of spun glass

—mineral, a very clever choice of subject), and had failed to guess the Prime Minister’s wireless speech—which was voted not fair, since nobody

could decide whether it was animal by nature or a kind of gas. It was

decided that they should do one more word and then go on to “Hide-and-

Seek.” Oswald Truegood had retired into the back room and shut the door

behind him while the party discussed the next subject of examination, when

suddenly Sir Septimus broke in on the argument by calling to his daughter:

“Hullo, Margy! What have you done with your necklace?”

“I took it off, Dad, because I thought it might get broken in ‘Dumb

Crambo.’ It’s over here on this table. No, it isn’t. Did you take it, Mother?”

“No, I didn’t. If I’d seen it, I should have. You are a careless child.”

“I believe you’ve got it yourself, Dad. You’re teasing.”

Sir Septimus denied the accusation with some energy. Everybody got up

and began to hunt about. There were not many places in that bare and

polished room where a necklace could be hidden. After ten minutes’

fruitless investigation, Richard Dennison, who had been seated next to the

table where the pearls had been placed, began to look rather uncomfortable.

“Awkward, you know,” he remarked to Wimsey.

At this moment, Oswald Truegood put his head through the folding-

doors and asked whether they hadn’t settled on something by now, because

he was getting the fidgets.

This directed the attention of the searchers to the inner room.

Margharita must have been mistaken. She had taken it in there, and it had

got mixed up with the dressing-up clothes somehow. The room was

ransacked. Everything was lifted up and shaken. The thing began to look

serious. After half an hour of desperate energy it became apparent that the

pearls were nowhere to be found.

“They must be somewhere in these two rooms, you know,” said

Wimsey. “The back drawing-room has no door and nobody could have gone out of the front drawing-room without being seen. Unless the windows—”

No. The windows were all guarded on the outside by heavy shutters

which it needed two footmen to take down and replace. The pearls had not

gone out that way. In fact, the mere suggestion that they had left the

drawing-room at all was disagreeable. Because—because—

It was William Norgate, efficient as ever, who coldly and boldly faced

the issue.

“I think, Sir Septimus, it would be a relief to the minds of everybody

present if we could all be searched.”

Sir Septimus was horrified, but the guests, having found a leader,

backed up Norgate. The door was locked, and the search was conducted—

the ladies in the inner room and the men in the outer.

Nothing resulted from it except some very interesting information about

the belongings habitually carried about by the average man and woman. It

was natural that Lord Peter Wimsey should possess a pair of forceps, a

pocket lens and a small folding foot-rule—was he not a Sherlock Holmes in

high life? But that Oswald Truegood should have two liver-pills in a screw

of paper and Henry Shale a pocket edition of The Odes of Horace was

unexpected. Why did John Shale distend the pockets of his dress-suit with a

stump of red sealing-wax, an ugly little mascot and a five-shilling piece?

George Comphrey had a pair of folding scissors, and three wrapped lumps

of sugar, of the sort served in restaurants and dining-cars—evidence of a not

uncommon form of kleptomania; but that the tidy and exact Norgate should

burden himself with a reel of white cotton, three separate lengths of string

and twelve safety-pins on a card seemed really remarkable till one

remembered that he had superintended all the Christmas decorations:

Richard Dennison, amid some confusion and laughter, was found to cherish

a lady’s garter, a powder-compact and half a potato; the last-named, he said, was a prophylactic against rheumatism (to which he was subject), while the

other objects belonged to his wife. On the ladies’ side, the more striking

exhibits were a little book on palmistry, three invisible hair-pins and a

baby’s photograph (Miss Tomkins); a Chinese trick cigarette-case with a

secret compartment (Beryl Dennison); a very private letter and an outfit for

mending stocking-ladders (Lavinia Prescott); and a pair of eyebrow

tweezers and a small packet of white powder, said to be for headaches

(Betty Shale). An agitating moment followed the production from Joyce

Trivett’s handbag of a small string of pearls—but it was promptly

remembered that these had come out of one of the crackers at dinner-time,

and they were, in fact, synthetic. In short, the search was unproductive of

anything beyond a general shamefacedness and the discomfort always

produced by undressing and redressing in a hurry at the wrong time of the

day.

It was then that somebody, very grudgingly and haltingly, mentioned the

horrid word “Police.” Sir Septimus, naturally, was appalled by the idea. It

was disgusting. He would not allow it. The pearls must be somewhere.

They must search the rooms again. Could not Lord Peter Wimsey, with his

experience of—er—mysterious happenings, do something to assist them?

“Eh?” said his lordship. “Oh, by Jove, yes—by all means, certainly.

That is to say, provided nobody supposes—eh, what? I mean to say, you

don’t know that I’m not a suspicious character, do you, what?”

Lady Shale interposed with authority.

“We don’t think anybody ought to be suspected,” she said, “but, if we

did, we’d know it couldn’t be you. You know far too much about crimes to

want to commit one.”

“All right,” said Wimsey. “But after the way the place has been gone

over—” He shrugged his shoulders.

“Yes, I’m afraid you won’t be able to find any footprints,” said

Margharita. “But we may have overlooked something.”

Wimsey nodded.

“I’ll try. Do you all mind sitting down on your chairs in the outer room

and staying there. All except one of you—I’d better have a witness to

anything I do or find. Sir Septimus—you’d be the best person, I think.”

He shepherded them to their places and began a slow circuit of the two

rooms, exploring every surface, gazing up to the polished brazen ceiling

and crawling on hands and knees in the approved fashion across the black

and shining desert of the floors. Sir Septimus followed, staring when

Wimsey stared, bending with his hands upon his knees when Wimsey

crawled, and puffing at intervals with astonishment and chagrin. Their

progress rather resembled that of a man taking out a very inquisitive puppy

for a very leisurely constitutional. Fortunately, Lady Shale’s taste in

furnishing made investigation easier; there were scarcely any nooks or

corners where anything could be concealed.

They reached the inner drawing-room, and here the dressing-up clothes

were again minutely examined, but without result. Finally, Wimsey lay

down flat on his stomach to squint under a steel cabinet which was one of

the very few pieces of furniture which possessed short legs. Something

about it seemed to catch his attention. He rolled up his sleeve and plunged

his arm into the cavity, kicked convulsively in the effort to reach farther

than was humanly possible, pulled out from his pocket and extended his

folding foot-rule, fished with it under the cabinet and eventually succeeded

in extracting what he sought.

It was a very minute object—in fact, a pin. Not an ordinary pin, but one

resembling those used by entomologists to impale extremely small moths on the setting-board. It was about three-quarters of an inch in length, as fine

as a very fine needle, with a sharp point and a particularly small head.

“Bless my soul!” said Sir Septimus. “What’s that?”

“Does anybody here happen to collect moths or beetles or anything?”

asked Wimsey, squatting on his haunches and examining the pin.

“I’m pretty sure they don’t,” replied Sir Septimus. “I’ll ask them.”

“Don’t do that.” Wimsey bent his head and stared at the floor, from

which his own face stared meditatively back at him.

“I see,” said Wimsey presently. “That’s how it was done. All right, Sir

Septimus. I know where the pearls are, but I don’t know who took them.

Perhaps it would be as well—for everybody’s satisfaction—just to find out.

In the meantime they are perfectly safe. Don’t tell anyone that we’ve found

this pin or that we’ve discovered anything. Send all these people to bed.

Lock the drawing-room door and keep the key, and we’ll get our man—or

woman—by breakfast-time.”

“God bless my soul,” said Sir Septimus, very much puzzled.

Lord Peter Wimsey kept careful watch that night upon the drawing-

room door. Nobody, however, came near it. Either the thief suspected a trap

or he felt confident that any time would do to recover the pearls. Wimsey,

however, did not feel that he was wasting his time. He was making a list of

people who had been left alone in the back drawing-room during the

playing of “Animal, Vegetable and Mineral.” The list ran as follows.

Sir Septimus Shale

Lavinia Prescott

William Norgate

Joyce Trivett and Henry Shale (together, because they had claimed

to be incapable of guessing anything unaided)

Mrs. Dennison

Betty Shale

George Comphrey

Richard Dennison

Miss Tomkins

Oswald Truegood.

He also made out a list of the persons to whom pearls might be useful or

desirable. Unfortunately, this list agreed in almost all respects with the first

(always excepting Sir Septimus) and so was not very helpful. The two

secretaries had both come well recommended, but that was exactly what

they would have done had they come with ulterior designs; the Dennisons

were notorious livers from hand to mouth; Betty Shale carried mysterious

white powders in her handbag, and was known to be in with a rather rapid

set in town; Henry was a harmless dilettante, but Joyce Trivett could twist

him around her little finger and was what Jane Austen liked to call

“expensive and dissipated”; Comphrey speculated; Oswald Truegood was

rather frequently present at Epsom and Newmarket—the search for motives

was only too fatally easy.

When the second housemaid and the under-footman appeared in the

passage with household implements, Wimsey abandoned his vigil, but he

was down early to breakfast. Sir Septimus with his wife and daughter were

down before him, and a certain air of tension made itself felt. Wimsey,

standing on the hearth before the fire, made conversation about the weather

and politics.

The party assembled gradually, but, as though by common consent,

nothing was said about pearls until after breakfast, when Oswald Truegood

took the bull by the horns.

“Well now!” said he. “How’s the detective getting along? Got your man,

Wimsey?”

“Not yet,” said Wimsey easily.

Sir Septimus, looking at Wimsey as though for his cue, cleared his

throat and dashed into speech.

“All very tiresome,” he said, “all very unpleasant. Hr’rm. Nothing for it

but the police, I’m afraid. Just at Christmas, too. Hr’rm. Spoilt the party.

Can’t stand seeing all this stuff about the place.” He waved his hand

towards the festoons of evergreens and coloured paper that adorned the

walls. “Take it all down, eh, what? No heart in it. Hr’rm. Burn the lot.”

“What a pity, when we worked so hard over it,” said Joyce.

“Oh, leave it, Uncle,” said Henry Shale. “You’re bothering too much

about the pearls. They’re sure to turn up.”

“Shall I ring for James?” suggested William Norgate.

“No,” interrupted Comphrey, “let’s do it ourselves. It’ll give us

something to do and take our minds off our troubles.”

“That’s right,” said Sir Septimus. “Start right away. Hate the sight of it.”

He savagely hauled a great branch of holly down from the mantel-piece

and flung it, crackling, into the fire.

“That’s the stuff,” said Richard Dennison. “Make a good old blaze!” He

leapt up from the table and snatched the mistletoe from the chandelier.

“Here goes! One more kiss for somebody before it’s too late.”

“Isn’t it unlucky to take it down before the New Year?” suggested Miss

Tompkins.

“Unlucky be hanged. We’ll have it all down. Off the stairs and out of

the drawing-room too. Somebody go and collect it.”

“Isn’t the drawing-room locked?” asked Oswald.

“No. Lord Peter says the pearls aren’t there, wherever else they are, so

it’s unlocked. That’s right, isn’t it, Wimsey?”

“Quite right. The pearls were taken out of these rooms. I can’t tell yet

how, but I’m positive of it. In fact, I’ll pledge my reputation that wherever

they are, they’re not up there.”

“Oh, well,” said Comphrey, “in that case, have at it! Come along,

Lavinia—you and Dennison do the drawing-room and I’ll do the back

room. We’ll have a race.”

“But if the police are coming in,” said Dennison, “oughtn’t everything

to be left just as it is?”

“Damn the police!” shouted Sir Septimus. “They don’t want

evergreens.”

Oswald and Margharita were already pulling the holly and ivy from the

staircase, amid peals of laughter. The party dispersed. Wimsey went quietly

upstairs and into the drawing-room, where the work of demolition was

taking place at a great rate, George having bet the other two ten shillings to

a tanner that they would not finish their part of the job before he finished

his.

“You mustn’t help,” said Lavinia, laughing to Wimsey. “It wouldn’t be

fair.”

Wimsey said nothing, but waited till the room was clear. Then he

followed them down again to the hall, where the fire was sending up a great

roaring and spluttering, suggestive of Guy Fawkes night. He whispered to

Sir Septimus, who went forward and touched George Comphrey on the

shoulder.

“Lord Peter wants to say something to you, my boy,” he said.

Comphrey started and went with him a little reluctantly, as it seemed.

He was not looking very well.

“Mr. Comphrey,” said Wimsey, “I fancy these are some of your

property.” He held out the palm of his hand, in which rested twenty-two fine, small-headed pins.

“Ingenious,” said Wimsey, “but something less ingenious would have

served his turn better. It was very unlucky, Sir Septimus, that you should

have mentioned the pearls when you did. Of course, he hoped that the loss

wouldn’t be discovered till we’d chucked guessing games and taken to

‘Hide-and-Seek.’ Then the pearls might have been anywhere in the house,

we shouldn’t have locked the drawing-room door, and he could have

recovered them at his leisure. He had had this possibility in his mind when

he came here, obviously, and that was why he brought the pins, and Miss

Shale’s taking off the necklace to play ‘Dumb Crambo’ gave him his

opportunity.

“He had spent Christmas here before, and knew perfectly well that

‘Animal, Vegetable and Mineral’ would form part of the entertainment. He

had only to gather up the necklace from the table when it came to his turn to

retire, and he knew he could count on at least five minutes by himself while

we were all arguing about the choice of a word. He had only to snip the

pearls from the string with his pocket-scissors, burn the string in the grate

and fasten the pearls to the mistletoe with the fine pins. The mistletoe was

hung on the chandelier, pretty high—it’s a lofty room—but he could easily

reach it by standing on the glass table, which wouldn’t show footmarks, and

it was almost certain that nobody would think of examining the mistletoe

for extra berries. I shouldn’t have thought of it myself if I hadn’t found that

pin which he had dropped. That gave me the idea that the pearls had been

separated and the rest was easy. I took the pearls off the mistletoe last night

—the clasp was there, too, pinned among the holly-leaves. Here they are.

Comphrey must have got a nasty shock this morning. I knew he was our

man when he suggested that the guests should tackle the decorations themselves and that he should do the back drawing-room—but I wish I had

seen his face when he came to the mistletoe and found the pearls gone.”

“And you worked it all out when you found the pin?” said Sir Septimus.

“Yes; I knew then where the pearls had gone to.”

“But you never even looked at the mistletoe.”

“I saw it reflected in the black glass floor, and it struck me then how

much the mistletoe berries looked like pearls.”

 

OceanofPDF.com