Max Pemberton - Murder Mysteries Boxed-Set - 40+ Books in One Edition

His words astonished me very much. My own agitation could not measure his recollection or the unconcern which the strange episodes of the night had left to him. For my part, I could but pass long hours of meditation, in which I tried to gather up the tangled skein of this surpassing mystery. When morning came, my brother had left the house and Okyada with him. I have never seen him since that day, and his letters have told me little. He is upon a ship, well and happy, he says, and that ship is his own. His voyages have taken him to many ports, but he is not yet able to say when he will return.

“Be assured, dear sister,” he writes, “that the work to which I have set my hand would be approved by you, and that by God’s help I shall accomplish it. More I am unable to commit to writing for prudent reasons. You will keep the guards at the Manor until I am home, and my valuables will remain at the bank. Fear nothing, then, for yourself. The fellows who honoured us with their company—two of them, I should say—are now in South Africa. The third, who was a gentleman and may again become a man, is now on board this yacht. If he continues to behave himself, a farm in Canada and a little capital will be his reward. It is not the instruments but their makers whom I seek; and when they are found, then, dear Harriet, will we enjoy halcyon days together.”

To these words he added others, speaking of more private matters and those which were of concern but to him and to me. By the “guards” he meant an ex-sergeant-major and two old soldiers whom he had engaged upon his departure to watch the house in his absence. For myself, however, I was no longer afraid. Perhaps my unrest had been less if Ean had been altogether frank with me; but his vague intimation, the knowledge that he was far from me, and the inseparable instinct of his danger, contributed alike to my foreboding.

That these were not without reason subsequent events have fully justified. I have heard of his yacht as being in the South Atlantic. There have been rare letters from him, but none that says what secret it is which keeps him away from me. And for a whole month now I have received no letter at all. That other friends, unknown to me personally but staunch to my dear brother, put the worst construction upon his silence, the recent paragraph in the London newspapers makes very clear. What can a helpless woman do that these true friends are not doing? She can but pray to the Almighty for the safety of one very dear to her—nay, all that she has to live and hope for in this world of sorrow and affliction.

Table of Contents

June 15th, 1904.

So to-night my task begins.

I am to prove that there is a conspiracy of crime so well organised, so widespread, so amazing in its daring, that the police of all the civilised countries are at present unable either to imagine or to defeat it—I am to do this or pay the supreme penalty of failure, ignominious and irrevocable.

I cannot tell you when first it was that some suspicion of the existence of this great republic of thieves and assassins first came to me. Years ago, I asked myself if it were not possible. There has been no great jewel robbery for a decade past which has not found me more zealous than the police themselves in study of its methods and judgment of its men. I can tell you the weight and size almost of every great jewel stolen, either in Europe or America, during the past five years. I know the life history of the men who are paying the penalty for some of those crimes. I can tell you whence they came and what was their intention should they have carried their booty away. I know the houses in London, in Paris, in Vienna, in Berlin where you may change a stolen diamond for money as readily as men cash a banknote across a counter. But there my knowledge has begun and ended. I feel like a child before a book whose print it cannot read. There is a great world of crime unexplored, and its very cities are unnamed. How, then, should a man begin his studies? I answer that he cannot begin them unless his destiny opens the book.

Let me set down my beliefs a little plainer. If ever the story be read, it will not be by those who have my grammar of crime at their call, or have studied, as I have studied, the gospel of robbery as long years expound it. It would be idle to maintain at great length my belief that the leading jewel robberies of the world are directed by one brain and organised by one supreme intelligence. If my own pursuit of this intelligence fail, the world will never read this narrative. If it succeed, the facts must be their own witnesses, speaking more eloquently than any thesis. Let me be content in this place to relate but a single circumstance. It is that of the discovery of a dead body just three years ago on the lonely seashore by the little fishing village of Palling, in Norfolk.

Now, witness this occurrence. The coastguard—for rarely does any but a coastguardsman tramp that lonely shore—a coastguard, patrolling his sandy beat at six o’clock of a spring morning, comes suddenly upon the body of a ship’s officer, lying stark upon the golden beach, cast there by the flood tide and left stranded by the ebb. No name upon the buttons of the pilot coat betrayed the vessel which this young man had served. His cap, needless to say, they did not find. He wore jack-boots such as an officer of a merchantman would wear; his clothes were of Navy serge; there was a briar pipe in his left-hand pocket, a silver tobacco box in his right; he carried a gold watch, and it had stopped at five minutes past five o’clock. The time, however, could not refer to the morning of this discovery. It was the coastguardsman’s opinion that the body had been at least three days in the water.

Such a fatality naturally deserved no more than a brief paragraph in any daily paper. I should have heard nothing of it but for my friend Murray, of Scotland Yard, who telegraphed for me upon the afternoon of the following day; and, upon my arrival at his office, astonished me very much by first showing me an account of the circumstance in the Eastern Daily Press, and then passing for my examination a roll of cotton wool such as diamond brokers carry.

“I want your opinion,” he said without preface. “Do you know anything of the jewels in that parcel?”

There were four stones lying a-glitter upon the wool. One of them, a great gem of some hundred and twenty carats, rose-coloured, and altogether magnificent, I recognised at a single glance at the precious stones.

“That,” I said, “is the Red Diamond of Ford Valley. Ask Baron Louis de Rothschild, and he will tell you whose property it was.”

“Would you be very surprised to hear that it was found upon the body of the young sailor?”

“Murray,” I said, “you have known me too long to expect me to be surprised by anything.”

“But it is somewhat out of the way, isn’t it? That’s why I sent for you. The other stones don’t appear to be of the same class. But they’re valuable, I should think.”

I turned them over in my hand and examined them with little interest.

“This pure white is a Brazilian,” said I. “It may be worth a hundred and fifty pounds. The other two are jewellers’ common stuff. They would make a pretty pair of ear-rings for your daughter, Murray. You should make the Treasury an offer for them. Say fifty for the pair.”

“The police haven’t much money to waste on the ladies’ ears,” he said rather hardly; “we prefer ’em without ornament—they go closer to the doors. I thought you would like to hear about this. We can’t make much of it here, and I don’t suppose you’ll make more. A ship’s officer like that—you don’t expect him to be a fence in a common way, and he’s about the last you’d name for a professional hand in Paris—for if this is Baron Louis’s stone, as you say, it must have been stolen in Paris.”