“Do you have them?”
“They’re safe. Was Azzopardi going to make you sign them over by threatening you in some way?”
“He already has. Said he’d take Kitty and cut her into little pieces,” Nellie admitted. “He’d probably eat her as well, given the man’s gluttony. He had a dummy run at her the week before last, tried to take her off the street. Oh, it’s all right,” she said when she saw the look on Niven’s face. “She’s gone.”
“Gone?” Where had Kitty gone?
“Packed her off to a convent in St. Albans. Know some nuns there who owe me a favour.” (Nuns owed Nellie a favour?) “They’ll keep her well hidden.”
“Apparently,” Niven said, “you have something of his that Azzopardi wants back. Is it something to do with that box?”
Nellie sighed. “It’ll be Shirley or Betty that he goes after next. Can’t keep ’em all safe for ever.”
“What’s in the box?”
“I wondered when you would ask,” Nellie said.
* * *
—
It was like one of the pirates’ treasure chests that populated his boyhood reading. Jewellery—diamonds, sapphires, rubies, and God knows what else. Even in the low light of the Crystal Cup they seemed to glow.
It was, Nellie confessed, how she had got started. Niven had been at the Front and had known nothing of Great Percy Street and the kindly old landlady. All Nellie had told him when he returned from the war was that she’d “had some luck.” It seemed the old lady had been a fence and was holding the proceeds of several robberies for the man who had stolen them. “His last one was the big one, he was planning to retire to the Riviera. Leave the life of crime behind for good.”
“Let me guess—Azzopardi.”
“Went by a different name then,” Nellie said. “I didn’t know anything about him. It was before we came to London.” The story, “according to my friend Agnes” (his mother had a friend?), was that a man had come to the capital from Switzerland to hawk “sparklers” to a Hatton Garden dealer. “He was an agent, engaged by some Russian nobility—émigrés—don’t know who. Every second person you met was claiming to be a Romanov in those days.” The nameless middleman had stayed at the Ritz and it was from there that Azzopardi—Spiteri was his real name—had pinched the lot.
“Let me get this straight,” Niven said, offering his mother a magnificently sceptical eyebrow. “Azzopardi, or whatever he called himself, stole the Russian crown jewels and then you stole them off him?”
“Don’t be silly,” Nellie said. “The Soviets have flogged the crown jewels.”
“So that’s where he was caught?”
“No, he decided to do one last job—at the Goring. Shot in the hand, arrested. Take that as a lesson.”
She had sold, Nellie said, one item only from the hoard—an amethyst necklace, a stake that had proved lucky. She closed the lid of the box and patted it affectionately. “I was keeping the rest for my retirement,” she said. “Give it back to him and he’ll leave us alone.”
Niven didn’t think he’d ever seen his mother concede defeat before. Perhaps Azzopardi had been right, it was time for her to leave the field of battle.
“We’ve got bigger problems than the Maltese,” she said. “Maddox is about to make his move.”
“And have you got a plan?”
“Always,” Nellie said.
* * *
—
Niven made the delivery to Eaton Square himself. Azzopardi kept him on the doorstep and didn’t check the contents of the box. He trusted Nellie to be honourable, he said. He must be the only one in London who does, Niven thought.
* * *
—
Where was Gwendolen Kelling? He went to the flat and pressed the buzzer on the street door for a long time, but there was no answer. He imagined she had gone shopping or was having lunch with someone. He liked her too much. He worried it was making him weak. But what if it was making him stronger?
The True Bride
“Oh, look, it’s Miss Kelling. Have you met Miss Kelling, Chief Inspector?”
Frobisher shook her hand (barely touching it) while looking anywhere but at Gwendolen. He was not good at theatrics. Honest men rarely are.
Gwendolen was confused. Nellie had telephoned her, urging her to meet her at the Sphinx as quickly as possible. From what Gwendolen could discern from Nellie’s caginess, she had had another “casualty” (as she put it) that needed attending to. Had someone had an accident in the Sphinx? It couldn’t be another gang fight surely, the club wouldn’t be open yet. When she arrived there was no sign of anyone needing medical attention, just a rather exasperated-looking Frobisher, holding a silver dance shoe in his hand as if he had come to the unlikely venue of the Sphinx to find his Cinderella.
Gwendolen waited for a cue from Nellie, which was duly given. “We resolved our little matter without you, after all, Miss Kelling,” Nellie said. “I’m so sorry if I’ve wasted your time by dragging you here.”
“Not at all, Mrs. Coker,” she said smoothly. “I was nearby.”
“As Inspector Frobisher has finished here, perhaps he would escort you out,” Nellie said. Frobisher didn’t look as if he thought he’d finished, but he said, “Of course. Allow me, Miss Kelling.”
* * *
—
“Little matter, what little matter?” he asked quickly once they were in the street.
When Gwendolen ignored the question and marched ahead, he grabbed hold of her arm and pulled her back. She glared at his hand on her arm until he let her go. “I’m not your dog on a leash, Inspector,” she bridled. The memory of Oxford hung between them.
“My apologies.”
He retrieved his actual dog from the lamppost that it was tied to. The dog greeted Gwendolen like an old friend, softening her mood, and she relented and told him how Nellie had phoned for help, and he told her of the murder that never was. “Something happened in there,” he said, “but I can’t for the life of me figure out what.”
He flagged down a taxi and told her he needed to pick something up from Bow Street and then he had to go to Southwark mortuary.
“Dear God—not Freda or Florence?”
“No, no, I didn’t mean to alarm you.” Much of their relationship so far seemed to have been built on them causing alarm to each other.
He soon returned from the police station, clutching another silver shoe, and held it up next to the first one, which he had left in her keeping. “What do you think? Are they a pair?”
“Well, they look like they are, but it’s hard to be completely certain. But look…” she said, turning over the shoe in her hand. “You haven’t examined it thoroughly. I make a better detective than you, Inspector.” The shoe had been branded with its ownership, initials burnt into the leather sole—“with a charred stick, probably,” she said. “My brother Dickie used to do that, not with his shoes but pretty much everything else. I expect the girls in the dance schools get mixed up all the time, they all look alike—the shoes, I mean, not the girls. An M and a C—does that mean anything to you, Inspector?”
He looked at the sole of the shoe he had brought from the station. It was a match. The same initials. Yes, it did mean something to him. It meant a great deal. “A girl called Minnie Carter,” he said.
“And she’s dead?”
“Yes.”
“In the mortuary we’re going to?”
“That I’m going to. I hope to find her there. I promised her mother. Minnie was wearing one of the shoes when she was pulled from the river.”
“And you found its partner in the Sphinx. What does that mean, do you suppose?”
“I think it means that someone killed her there,” Frobisher said. “Isn’t that obvious?”
“Not that someone wants you to think that she was killed there?”
Frobisher sighed heavily and said, “Occam’s razor, Miss Kelling. You have a tendency to overcomplicate.”
“And you have a tendency to oversimplify. There are people trying to ruin Nellie.”
“I am one of those, may I remind you.”
“And your Inspector Maddox is another.”