The Mammoth Book of Best British Crime 10

THE UNKNOWN CRIME by Sarah Rayne

I’VE NEVER BEEN a high-profile thief. I’d better make that clear at the start. But I’m moderately prosperous and over the years I’ve developed my own line in small, rare antiques. An elegant chased silver chalice from some obscure museum, perhaps, or a Georgian sugar sifter.

But I’ve always had a yen to commit a crime that would create international headlines. The removal of the Koh-i-noor or St Edward’s Crown or a Chaucer first folio. You’re probably smiling smugly, but there are people who will pay huge sums of money for such objects. (I’d be lying if I said the money didn’t interest me.)

And then my grandfather died, leaving me all his belongings, and the dream of a theft that would echo round the world and down the years suddenly came within my grasp.

He lived in Hampstead, my grandfather, and the solicitors sent me the keys to the house. I didn’t go out there immediately; I was absorbed in a delicate operation involving the removal of a Venetian glass tazza from a private collection – very nice, too. A saucer-shaped dish on a stem, beautifully engraved. So between tazzas and fences (yes, they do still exist as a breed and I have several charming friends among the fraternity), it was a good ten days before I went out to Hampstead. And the minute I stepped through the door I had the feeling of something waiting for me. Something that could give me that elusive, longed-for crime.

I was right. I found it – at least the start of it – in a box of old letters and cards in the attic. I know that sounds hackneyed, but attics really are places where secrets are stored and Rembrandts found. And, as my grandfather used to say, if you can’t find a Rembrandt to flog, paint one yourself. My father specialized in stealing jewellery, but my grandfather was a very good forger. He was just as good at replacing the real thing with his fakes. If you’ve ever been in the National Gallery and stood in front of a certain portrait… Let’s just say he fooled a great many people.

At first look the attic wasn’t very promising. But there was a box of papers which appeared to have been my great-grandfather’s. He was a bit of mystery, my great-grandfather, but there’s a family legend that he was involved in the theft of the Irish Crown Jewels in 1907. My father used to say he had never been nearer the Irish Crown Jewels than the pub down the road, but I always hoped the legend was true. And it has to be said, the Irish Crown Jewels never were recovered.

It wasn’t the Irish Crown Jewels I found in that house, though. It was something far more intriguing.

Most of the box’s contents were of no interest. Accounts for tailoring (the old boy sounded as if he had been quite a natty dresser), and faded postcards and receipts. But at the very bottom of the box was a sheaf of yellowing notes in writing so faded it was nearly indecipherable.

How my grandfather missed those papers I can’t imagine. Perhaps he never went up to the attics, or perhaps he couldn’t be bothered to decipher the writing. If your work is forging fine art and Elizabethan manuscripts, it’d be a bit of a busman’s holiday to pore over faded spider-scrawls that will most likely turn out to be somebody’s mislaid laundry list or a recipe for Scotch broth.

But the papers were neither of those things.

They were an account of Great-grandfather’s extraordinary activities during the autumn of 1918.

October 1918

I’ve been living in an underground shelter with German shells raining down at regular intervals for what feels like years, although I believe it’s actually only three weeks. But whether it’s three weeks or three days, it’s absolute hell and I’d trade my virtue (ha!) to be back in England.

You’d expect a battlefield to be cut off from the rest of the world, but we get some news here: how the Germans have withdrawn on the Western Front, how the Kaiser’s going to abdicate, even how a peace treaty is being hammered out. It’s difficult to know what’s truth and what’s propaganda, though. And then last night I was detailed to deliver a message a couple of miles along the line.

I’m not a coward, but I’m not a hero either and it doesn’t take a genius to know that a lone soldier, scurrying along in the dark, is a lot more vulnerable than if he’s in a properly dug trench, near a gun-post. But orders are orders and I delivered the message, then returned by a different route. That’s supposed to fool the enemy, although I should think the enemy’s up to most of the tricks we play, just as we’re up to most of theirs.

I was halfway back when I saw the château. The chimes of midnight were striking in the south and there was the occasional burst of gunfire somewhere to the north. It was bitterly cold and I daresay I was temporarily mad or even suffering from what’s called shell-shock. But I stood there for almost an hour, staring at that château. It called out to me – it beckoned like Avalon or Valhalla or the Elysian Fields.

I was no longer conscious of the stench of death and cordite and the chloride of lime that’s used to sluice out the trenches. I could smell wealth: paintings, silver, tapestries…

But I can’t drag a Bayeux tapestry or a brace of French Impressionists across acres of freezing mud. Whatever I take will have to be small. And saleable. There’s no point in taking stuff that hasn’t got a market. I remember the disastrous affair of the Irish Crown Jewels…

The present

That’s as far as I read that first day. The light was going and the electricity was off, and it’s not easy to decipher a hundred-year-old scrawl in an attic in semi-darkness. Also, I had to complete the sale of the tazza. That went smoothly, of course. I never visualized otherwise. I’m very good at what I do. That night I celebrated with a couple of friends. I have no intention of including in these pages what somebody once called the interesting revelations of the bedchamber; I’ll just say when I woke up I was in a strange bed and I wasn’t alone. And since one can’t just get up and go home after breakfast in that situation (very ungentlemanly), it was a couple of days before I returned to Great-grandfather’s papers.

November 1918

For two weeks I thought I wouldn’t be able to return to the château. You can’t just climb out of the trenches and stroll across the landscape at will.

Then last night I was chosen to act as driver for several of the high-ranking officers travelling to Compiègne, and I thought – that’s it! For once the British army, God bless it, has played right into my hands. I’ll deposit my officers in Compiègne, then I’ll sneak a couple of hours on my own.

We set off early this morning – it’s 10 November, if anyone reading this likes details.

Later

I have no idea where we are, except that it’s in Picardie. I’ve been driving for almost an hour and it’s slow progress. We’ve stopped at an inn for a meal; the officers are muttering to one another and glancing round as if to make sure no one’s listening.

I’m in the garden, supposedly taking a breath of air, but actually I’m staring across at the château and writing this. I can see the place clearly, and it’s a beautiful sight.

The present

I was interrupted by the phone ringing. A furtive voice asked if it had the right number and, on being assured it had, enquired if I would be interested in discussing a jewelled egg recently brought out of Russia. Yes, it was believed to be Fabergé. No, it was not exactly for sale, simply considered surplus to requirements. A kindness, really, to remove it.

“Considered surplus by whom?”

“A gentleman prepared to pay very handsomely. He could see you in an hour.”

I hesitated. On the one hand I had Great-grandfather’s exploits. On the other hand was the lure of a Fabergé egg.

Fabergé won. Thieves have to eat and pay bills like anyone and I had recently bought a very snazzy dockside apartment.

I rather enjoyed that job. There were electronic sensors in the floor, so I used a simple block and tackle arrangement, which I slid along by means of a suspended pulley-wheel. I scooped the egg from its velvet bed, stashed it in the zipped pocket of my anorak, then wound the pulley back and hopped out through the window.

The client was a charming and cultured gentleman of complicated nationality and apparently limitless funds, and we celebrated the transaction liberally with vodka and caviar. After that we discussed Chekhov and explored the causes of the Russian Revolution until he fell off the chair while making a toast to the House of Romanov and had to be taken to the local A &E with a fractured wrist.

A &E were busy and we were there all night. But my client was polite and civilized during the whole time.

10 November 1918

We’re all being very polite and civilized during this journey, whatever its purpose might be. We’re even being civilized to the enemy – half an hour ago we were overtaken by a car carrying three Germans of unmistakable high rank. I didn’t panic until we came upon them a few hundred yards further along, parked on the roadside.

“They’ve got a puncture,” said the colonel in the back of my car, and told me to stop in case we could help.

“Are you mad, sir?” said the major next to him. “It’ll be a trick. They’ll shoot us like sitting ducks.”

“We’re all bound for the same place, you fool. There won’t be any shooting.”

I don’t pretend to much mechanical knowledge, but I can change a wheel with the best – although it felt strange to do so alongside a man with whose country we had been at war for four years. I expected a bullet to slam into my ribs at any minute, and I promise you I kept a heavy wrench near to hand. But we got the job done in half an hour, with our respective officers circling one another like cats squaring up for a fight.

I stowed the punctured wheel in the boot.

“Not too close to that case,” said the German driver, pointing to a small attaché case.

“Why? It hasn’t got a bomb in it, has it?”

“Oh, no,” he said, earnestly. He had better English than I had German.

“It contains a- I have not the word-” He gestured to his own left hand where he wore a signet ring.

“A ring? Signet ring?”

“Signet ring, ach, that is right.”

“From a lady?”

He glanced over his shoulder, and then, in a very low voice, he said, “From the Kaiser. I am not supposed to know, but I overhear… It’s for the signing of the Peace Treaty.”

I didn’t believe him. Would you? I didn’t believe a Peace Treaty was about to be signed, and even if it was, I didn’t believe Kaiser Bill would send his signet ring to seal the document. Nobody used sealing wax and signet rings any longer.

Or did they? Mightn’t an Emperor of the old Prussian Royal House do just that? In the face of defeat and the loss of his imperial crown, mightn’t he make that final arrogant gesture?

“So,” said the German driver, “it is to be well guarded, you see.”

I did see. I still didn’t entirely believe him, but I didn’t disbelieve him. So, when he got back into his car, I reached into that attaché case. I expected it to be locked and it was. But it was a flimsy lock – not what you’d expect of German efficiency – and it snapped open as easily as any lock I ever forced. No one was looking and I reached inside and took out a small square box, stamped with a coat of arms involving an eagle. I put the case quietly in my pocket, got back into the car, and drove on.

The present

Infuriatingly, the next few pages were badly damaged – by the look of them they had been shredded by industrious mice or even rats to make nests. I didn’t care if the Pied Piper himself had capered through that attic, calling up the entire rodent population of Hampstead as he went. I needed to know what came next.

Clearly Great-grandfather had driven high-ranking officials to that historic meeting in a railway carriage in Compiègne Forest, at which the Armistice ending the Great War was signed. And on the very threshold of that iconic meeting, he had planned to go yomping off to some nameless château to liberate it of easily transportable loot! Carrying with him what might be Wilhelm II’s signet ring.

I carried the entire box of papers home, but after several hours poring over the disintegrated sections I gave up, and hoped I could pick up the thread in the pages that were still intact.

11 November 1918

Well! Talk about Avalon and Gramarye! I got into that château at dawn, and it was so easy they might as well have rolled out a welcome mat.

And if ever there was an Aladdin’s cave…

The family who owned it must have left very hastily indeed, because it didn’t look as if they taken much with them. The place was stuffed to the gunnels with silver and gold plate, paintings, furniture… But I kept to the rule I had made earlier and only took small objects. Salt cellars, sugar sifters, candle snuffers. Some Chinese jade figurines, and a pair of amber-studded snuff boxes. Beautiful and saleable, all of them. I thought – if I survive this war, I shall live like a lord on the proceeds of this.

And so I would have done if the military police hadn’t come chasing across the countryside. You’d have thought that with a Peace Treaty being signed – probably at that very hour – they’d overlook one soldier taking a few hours extra to return to his unit. But no, they must needs come bouncing and jolting across the countryside in one of their infernal jeeps.

I had the stolen objects in my haversack, and I ran like a fleeing hare. I had no clear idea where I was going and I didn’t much care, but I got as far as a stretch of churned-up landscape, clearly the site of a very recent battle. There were deep craters and a dreadful tumble of bodies lying like fractured dolls half-buried in mud. The MPs had abandoned their jeep, but I could see its lights cutting a swathe through the dying afternoon, like huge frog’s eyes searching for prey. Prey. Me.

The haversack was slowing me down, so eventually I dived into the nearest crater and lay as still as I could. It was a fairly safe bet they would find me, and probably I would get a week in the glass-house, but if they found the château loot I would get far worse than a week in the glass-house. And find it they would, unless I could hide it…

I’m not proud of what I did next. I can only say that war makes people do things they wouldn’t dream of in peacetime.

There were four dead men in that crater. I had no means of recognizing any of them, partly because they were so covered with mud and partly – well, explosives don’t make for tidy corpses. I chose the one who was least disfigured, and tipped the stash into the pockets of his battledress, buttoning up the flaps. He was a sergeant in a Lincolshire regiment. I memorized his serial number.

One last thing I did in those desperate minutes. I slipped the Kaiser’s signet ring out of its velvet box and put it on the man’s hand.

Then I stood up and walked towards the MPs, my hands raised in a rueful gesture of surrender.

I didn’t get a week in the glass-house. I didn’t even get forty-eight hours. Armistice was declared at eleven o’clock that morning, and four hours filched by a soldier who had driven the colonel to the signing of the Peace Treaty was overlooked.

And after the celebrations had calmed down, those of us who had survived had to bury the dead.

They say every story is allowed one coincidence and here’s mine. I was one of the party detailed to bury the bodies from the very battlefield where I had hidden. That Lincolnshire sergeant was where I had left him, lying in the mud, his jacket securely buttoned, the signet ring on the third finger of his right hand. I promise you, if I could have got at any of the stuff I would have done, but there were four of us on the task and I had no chance.

But when they brought the coffins out, I watched carefully and I saw my Lincolnshire sergeant put into one with an unusual mark on the lid – a burr in the oak that was almost the shape of England.

The present

The journal ended there. Can you believe that? I felt as if I had been smacked in the face when I realized it, and I sat back, my mind tumbling. What had my great-grandfather done next? Had he tried to get into the coffin later? But he couldn’t have done. If the signet ring of the last German Emperor had been up for grabs after the Armistice, I would have known. The whole world would have known.

I went back to Hampstead next morning. I intended to scour that house from cellar to attics to find out if Great-grandfather had recovered the Kaiser’s signet ring from the coffin-

I’ve just reread that last sentence, and it’s probably the most bizarre thing I’ve ever written. Hell’s teeth, it’s probably the most bizarre thing anyone has ever written. I hope I haven’t fallen backwards into a surreal movie or a rogue episode of Dr Who, and not noticed.

But there were no more journal pages. Eventually, I conceded defeat, and returned to my own flat. This time I ransacked the few family papers I possessed. I don’t keep anything that could incriminate any of us, of course – there’s such a thing as loyalty, even though my family are all dead. But there were birth certificates, carefully edited savings accounts – burglars have to be cautious about investments. Too much money and the Inland Revenue start to get inconveniently interested. My father used to buy good antique furniture; my grandfather invested in gold and silver. I don’t know what my great-grandfather did.

There were letters there, as well, mostly kept by my parents out of sentiment, and it was those letters I wanted. I thought there might be some from my great-grandmother and I was right; there were several. Most were of no use, but one was dated September 1920, and attached to it was a semi-order for Great-grandfather to report to the HQ of his old regiment. He had, it seemed, been chosen “at random” to be one of the soldiers who would assist in exhuming six sets of “suitable” remains from battlefields in France.

Random, I thought, cynically. I’ll bet he contrived it, the sly old fox.

The six coffins, said the letter, would be taken by special escort to Flanders on the night of 7 November. A small private ceremony would take place in the chapel of St Pol, and Great-grandfather would be one of the guard of honour.

By that time a pattern was starting to form in my mind, and I unfolded my great-grandmother’s letter with my blood racing. It read, “My dear love… What an honour for you to be chosen for that remarkable ceremony. When you described it in your last letter it was so vivid, I felt I was there with you… The small, flickeringly lit chapel, the six coffins each draped with the Union Jack… The Brigadier General led in, blindfolded, then placing his hand on one of the coffins to make the choice…”

That was when my mind went into meltdown and it was several minutes before I could even get to the bookshelves. Eventually, though, I rifled through several reference books, and in all of them the information was the same.

“From the chapel of St Pol in Northern France, the Unknown Soldier began the journey to the famous tomb within Westminster Abbey… The man whose identity will never be known, but who was killed on some unnamed battlefield… The symbol of all men who died in battle no matter where, and the focus for the grief of hundreds of thousands of bereaved…”

Great-grandmother’s letter ended with the words, “How interesting that you recognized the coffin chosen as one you had helped carry from that battlefield shortly before the Armistice. I wonder if, without that curious burr, you would have known it? It’s a sobering thought that you are probably the only person in the whole world who knows the identity of the Unknown Warrior.”

All right, what would you have done? Gone back to your ordinary life, with the knowledge that the grave of the Unknown Warrior – that hugely emotive symbol of death in battle – contained probably the biggest piece of loot you would ever encounter? The signet ring of the last Emperor of Germany – the ring intended to seal the Peace Treaty that ended the Great War. Wilhelm II’s ring, that never reached its destination because a German car had a puncture.

The provenance of that signet ring was – and is – one hundred per cent genuine. It’s documented in Great-grandfather’s journal and Great-grandmother’s letter. Collectors would pay millions.

It’s calling to me, that iron-bound casket, that unknown soldier’s tomb that’s the focus for memories and pride and grief every 11 November. It’s calling with the insistence of a siren’s seductive song… Because of course it’s still in there, that ring, along with the loot taken from the French château. It must be, because in almost a century there’s never been the least hint of anyone having tried to break into that tomb.

I’m ending these notes now, because I have an appointment. I’m joining a party of tourists being taken round Westminster Abbey. Quite a detailed tour, actually. After I come home I shall start to draw a very detailed map of the Abbey. Then I shall make precise notes of security arrangements and guards, electronic eyes, CCTV cameras…