The maid’s eyes widened when Alec showed his warrant card. “You’ve not come to arrest the master?” she gasped.
“No, I’d like to speak to him.”
Leaving the others in the hall, he followed close on her heels as she headed towards a door at the rear. He wanted to see Mummery’s reaction to his arrival.
Unfortunately, the Curator of Fossil Reptiles was facing the other way, only his untamable mop of hair visible above his chair’s back. He was seated by a cheerful fire, with a chess board on a small table in front of him. His opponent was a young man in a wheelchair.
In spite of the scars, the black patch over one eye, and the pallor of ill-health, the round facial bone structure and mismatched hook nose revealed the relationship. Mummery’s son had no right arm. When he turned the wheelchair to look towards the door, Alec saw his legs ended above the knee. He had to pivot the wheelchair to see, because his head was immovably tilted towards his right shoulder.
Unfortunately, young Mummery’s condition did not alter Alec’s duty to search the house. It just made him feel like an absolute rotter.
He hoped he had at least succeeded in hiding his shock.
Mummery jumped up. He looked anxious, but no more so than any householder unexpectedly called upon by the police. He still had on the dark suit with sagging pockets which he wore at work when he was not in a laboratory coat. No money for evening clothes? Alec wondered. Or did he not change for dinner in deference to his son’s difficulty in doing likewise?
“How can I help you, Chief Inspector?” he asked, surprisingly civilly.
“May I have a private word with you, sir?”
“Oh, no secrets here! This is my son, Andrew. Andy, Detective Chief Inspector Fletcher of Scotland Yard.”
“How do you do, Mr. Fletcher.” His voice was a hoarse, breathless gasp. Mustard gas, Alec guessed—a bad hit, attacking the tissues and followed by gangrene, but he must have managed not to breathe too deeply or he would be dead.
Not that he was likely to live long anyway, when a simple cold would inevitably lead to deadly pneumonia in those corroded lungs. Five years since the War ended—he must have very good care. Expensive care.
He gave Alec a crooked grin and wheezed, “My father may not look it, but he’s delighted at the interruption. I have him in check.”
Alec crossed to the board and studied it. He didn’t have time to play often or seriously, though he had taught Bel the moves, but he could see Mummery was in trouble. “So you do, sir,” he said.
“Andy had a good teacher,” Mummery observed affectionately, “though I say it as shouldn’t.”
“I shan’t keep you from your game, sir. I’m afraid I have a search warrant and I must ask you not to hinder my men in the execution of their duty.”
Mummery’s lips tightened, but instead of the expected outburst he said mildly, “Go ahead. My daughter’s upstairs but she’s not likely to take fright.”
Tom was at the hall door. Alec nodded to him, and turned back to the sitting room as Mummery asked the obvious question: “Looking for those damned gemstones, eh?—Sorry, dear. My wife, Chief Inspector.”
A woman stood in the doorway connecting with the front room. Tall—nearly a head taller than her husband, Alec estimated—and fine-drawn, she wore a well-cut but plain navy wool dress and pearls, a circlet at her throat, not a fashionable knee-length rope. She gave Alec a rather remote nod, her gaze going past him to her son.
Her tense shoulders relaxed a little as Andrew produced that heartbreaking, lopsided grin and said, “Excitement upon excitement, Mother. I’m beating Dad hollow, and now, to top it, a police raid!”
“Excitement upon excitement,” she echoed dryly. “Darling, perhaps the Chief Inspector would like a sherry. I know I should.”
Mummery cocked his dishevelled head at Alec, who said, “Not for me, thank you.”
“No booze in the course of duty,” said Andrew. “I don’t know that you ought, Mother. Goodness knows what effect it will have on those lectures you’re working on. Mother’s preparing for the Michaelmas term, Mr. Fletcher. She’s a prof at Bedford College, if you haven’t ferreted out that tidbit for yourself.”
“I hadn’t,” Alec admitted. Two incomes, then. “Have you a desk in there, sir?” he asked as Mummery took his wife a glass of sherry. They deliberately touched hands, Alec noticed, inferring a close relationship. “Do you mind … ?”
Mummery’s shaggy eyebrows twitched in exasperation. “Do I have a choice? Here’s the key.” He turned away. “Just you wait, Andy, I’ll escape and checkmate you yet.”
“Nothing, Chief,” Tom Tring reported when they all returned to the car. “Leastways, if he split ‘em up and hid them all separately, we could’ve missed them, but I’d’ve thought we’d find at least one, and there’d be a big risk of someone else finding them.”
“You looked at the daughter’s room?”
“Yes. There wasn’t any place she or the maids wouldn’t get into. Nice young lady, dolling herself up to go out with college friends, she being a student. She was worried her brother’d be upset about us. I told her he didn’t seem like it to me.”
“Turn left here, Chief,” said Ernie Piper from the back seat.
