Mrs Pargeter 01; A Nice Class of Corpse

∨ A Nice Class of Corpse ∧

31

The routine was by now familiar. She got out of bed, put on her dressing gown, gloves and sheepskin slippers. In her pockets she put the late Mr Pargeter’s skeleton keys, pencil torch and eye-glass. Then she slipped out on to the landing.

She was now accustomed to the creaky stairs of the main flights and avoided them expertly. She glanced at the other residents’ bedroom doors as she went down, but all appeared to be safely closed. When she reached the Entrance Hall, the door down to Newth’s domain was also shut.

She trod gently in the Hall, although she had checked that there were no pressure pads except in front of the main doors. During the day she had taken an unobtrusive look at the lock on the Office door and she had the right skeleton key ready.

It slipped in and turned silently as if it had been cut specifically for that lock. Mrs Pargeter went inside and closed the Office door behind her.

She switched on the late Mr Pargeter’s torch and moved across to the safe. She memorised the exact setting of the dials and then her gloved fingers expertly twiddled them to the numbers Kipper Hollingberry had provided. The safe door swung open easily and silently.

There was quite a lot of money on the top shelf, piles of large denomination notes held by rubber bands, but she ignored this. She also ignored her own jewellery, and homed in on a pile of jewel cases on the bottom shelf.

She took them out of the safe and saw with satisfaction that on the top of each Lady Ridgleigh’s monogram was impressed in gold.

She removed the contents of the first box, matching necklace, bracelet and ear-rings of emeralds set in silver. She examined these minutely with the late Mr Pargeter’s eye-glass.

She replaced them and moved on to the next box. An opal necklace. This was subjected to the same intense scrutiny.

She thought she heard a noise and froze. The irreverent thought occurred to her that to be discovered now would not be good for her image. If Miss Naismith wanted confirmation of the suspicions she had had about the theft of Mrs Selsby’s jewellery…

There was no further noise. Perhaps she’d imagined it.

She continued to work through all of Lady Ridgleigh’s jewellery. When she had finished, with a little sigh of satisfaction, she replaced the boxes on the bottom shelf exactly as she had found them. She closed the safe door and reset the dials exactly as they had been before. Then she left the Office and carefully relocked the door.

She felt euphoric as she returned silently to her room. She had been right.

The settings of Lady Ridgleigh’s jewellery were real silver and gold. But all of the stones were well-made imitations.

Just as all of Mrs Selsby’s had been.

♦

So euphoric was she, so delighted to have had her suspicion proved right, that Mrs Pargeter did not look around on her way from the Entrance Hall up to her bedroom on the second floor.

So she did not notice a door opened a crack, or see through it the gleam of the diarist’s eye.