‘No,’ she continued, ‘the robbery, if we can call it a robbery, took place earlier that night while everyone was still here. I may have some of the specifics a little wrong, but I believe I have the general outline of things. While the revels and roistering continued, someone – one of you, in fact…’ Another murmur ran through the small group of men. ‘…slipped out to the storeroom and indulged in a little deception. Our thief had been planning this for some little while. Perhaps the idea had come to him when he saw Lofty Tredegar’s old boots in the dressing room and decided to steal them, or perhaps he had formulated the plan much earlier and was just waiting for an opportunity to pinch the boots, but the boots were the key to his plan. On the night of the dinner, he retrieved those distinctively large old boots from their hiding place, put them on, and set about laying a trail. Knocking the oil can over was an inspired choice – oil cans are spilled all the time in tool sheds – but I suspect he had also considered whitewash or paint; anything that would leave a clear trail of size-twelve bootprints would do. With the boots on and the oil spilt, he went straight to the committee room, stood on tiptoes to check that no one was inside, opened the door, removed the booty and made good his escape back out through the store. He left a trail out onto the grass, with his footsteps leading off towards the lane. For all anyone would know, the burglar had headed back into the village.
‘Except that this morning, Armstrong and I took another look at those prints and discovered that they turned around and led back into the shed. The thief had not made good his escape, but had instead returned to the pavilion. We searched the shed, where I confess I expected to find the loot hidden in some dark corner but instead we found only the stolen boots. Clearly our thief had changed back into his own shoes, but why would he do that? Why return to the shed in his stolen boots? Why not get away and change the boots later? It seemed to me much more likely that if he had put his own shoes back on, he was returning to the party. He must have committed his theft during the festivities.
‘But then there was another problem. If he had come back to the gathering and hidden his boots, what did he do with the trophies? Surely he would have hidden them in the store to be retrieved and sold later. A former petty criminal like Lofty Tredegar, or someone trying to raise money to, say, rescue their ailing business…’ She looked at Flynn. ‘…would want to be certain of being able to lay their hands on the valuables later. It would be no good hiding them outside – some passing vagabond might find them – so they would want to keep them hidden somewhere safe.’
‘Now look here–’ said Flynn, angrily.
‘One moment, Mr Flynn,’ said Lady Hardcastle. ‘I’ve not finished yet. I pray your indulgence a little longer. The valuables were not hidden in the storeroom, and this morning, Sir Hector, Armstrong and I discovered why.’
She stepped over to the trophy cabinet and, with practiced ease, worked the mechanism which made the shelves slide back into place, revealing the Wessex Challenge Cup, the runner-up shield won by the Second XV in the 1908 Severn Vale Tournament, a jersey worn by Ripper Henderson in the Great Brawl of ’98, and the penny the club originally paid for the land on which the club was built in 1895. There was stunned silence in the room.
Eventually, it was Sir Hector who spoke. ‘I was here when you found it, m’dear,’ he said. ‘But I still can’t think for the life of me how you knew it was all there.’
‘To tell the truth, Sir Hector, I wasn’t at all sure that I’d worked it out correctly until the moment I found the lever under the cabinet.’
‘But how did you even know to look?’ he said, still plainly baffled.
‘Well it had been nagging at me for some time that the two sides of the fireplace are so very different. Look here,’ she said, walking back to the bookshelves to the left of the fireplace. ‘These bookshelves are deep – far too deep for the books you have on them. See here where you’ve even got room to double some of them up? While over here…’ She stepped back to the cabinet. ‘…the shelves in the trophy case are shallow, with barely enough room to hold this magnificent cup. It seemed odd that the niches should be so different, so I wondered if there might be something behind the cabinet.’
‘Something like a mechanism to make the shelves disappear,’ he said.
‘Something very much like that, yes. We saw in the club diaries that Jester Dunleavy liked to pinch other clubs’ trophies, and then when you told us that he was a designer for stage magicians, I just sort of put two and two together.’
‘That’s all very well and good,’ said Treble. ‘And it’s jolly exciting to find that we have such an entertaining piece of furniture, but you’ve made the serious allegation that one of us is responsible for faking this theft and you still haven’t shown that it’s not Lofty Tredegar.’
‘Please, Mr Treble, just a little more patience,’ she said. ‘The “thief” had stolen nothing, and was almost certainly someone who had returned to the club to resume his rollicking. I admit that at this point I had to make a bit of a leap, and decided that the culprit was probably one of you – the last to leave. It seemed that it would have been important to someone faking the theft to make sure that they had a handful of witnesses to provide them with an alibi. So it was someone from this group, I thought. But who?
‘For a time, Mr Flynn, Armstrong and I thought it could be you. Your business is ailing and even a few pounds from the sale of some stolen silver – which you would certainly be able to smelt in your workshop – might tide you over and enable you to save the firm. But the cup is still here; you can’t sell stolen silver if you don’t actually have any stolen silver to sell.
‘Then we found Mr Tredegar’s boots and Sergeant Dobson had no option but to arrest him. But it seemed a little difficult to believe that someone like Lofty, someone with experience as a burglar and n’er-do-well, would be so amateurish as to leave such an obvious trail, even if he were clever enough to use his old boots rather than his new ones.
‘With the trophies not actually lost, it now seemed possible that the intention was not the theft itself, but rather to create the appearance of a theft. What if you, Mr Treble, were intending to make a fraudulent insurance claim against the stolen items? The club might be saved by the injection of cash for the memorabilia. But by the time the cup and the shield had been replaced, there would be precious little money left.
‘But we kept coming back to the bootprints. Size twelve boots indicate a tall man. Lofty Tredegar is well over six feet tall, and those are his boots. You, too, Mr Treble are very tall; I imagine the boots would be about your size, as well. But neither of you seemed to have a proper motive for simply hiding the trophies. And then it struck me: you’re both very tall. Mr Treble, would you do me a great service and pop out into the passage and look in through the window?’
He frowned at her but did as she asked. He walked out of the room and as he passed along the passage we could clearly see most of his head as he passed the windows. He stopped and turned, looking in.
‘You can see in easily, Mr Treble?’ called Lady Hardcastle.
‘Very easily, thank you,’ he said. ‘What are you playing at?’
‘Do please rejoin us,’ she said, ‘and I shall explain.’
He returned to his seat.
‘I felt so utterly, utterly foolish when I realized that the most important clue had been on the floor outside the room all along. It was one of the first things we saw. The burglar stood in tiptoes to look through the window. We would see the prints most clearly on the passage floor where he had turned, raised himself up, and then doubled back to enter the room. He wasn’t a tall man, at all. He was a short man wearing big boots.’
She looked directly at “Big Jim” Molson. ‘I’m fairly certain it was you,’ she said, calmly. ‘But I’m not altogether sure why you might have done it.’
‘Absolute rubbish,’ he said with a laugh. ‘Why would I do such a thing?’