When Alec returned to the kitchen, the jam had reached setting point. He was pressed into service to help fill and cover the pots.
“You must take some with you,” said Ruddlestone, “unless it would get you into trouble.”
“Bribery and corruption? I think a jar of jam would pass.”
“You might find a ruby in the bottom.”
“Fortunately, I’ve seen these filled. But since you mention it, if you have any more home-made jam in the larder, perhaps I’d better have a look.”
Ruddlestone chortled. Alec felt an utter idiot holding jars of jam up to the electric light and stirring up the contents of one or two. He found no jewels.
Nor did the others. Tom Tring had been through the curator’s papers, the few deemed worthy of keeping, chucked in an unlocked drawer along with more fossil shells and corals, because there was no room in the house for a desk. “Nothing suspicious there, Chief,” he reported, steadying the jar of hot jam on the car’s floor, between his feet. “Frankly, I can’t see how he’d ever have saved enough to pay for the copies.”
“Nor can I,” Alec gladly admitted. Another suspect he didn’t want to have to arrest. “But he could have borrowed it.” Ruddlestone was still on his list.
They headed north to Ealing.
Steadman lived in a newish semi-detached, in a featurelessstreet full of indistinguishable newish semi-detacheds. The front garden was too small for any trees. The patch of lawn was shaved to near baldness, but by the nearby lamp-post Alec, who always wished he had more time for gardening, picked out the leaf-rosettes of dandelions and daisies. In the strip of flowerbed along the shared path, a few straggling pansies struggled through the smothering yellowed foliage of long dormant daffodils.
The front door was heliotrope, as (very much) opposed to its neighbour’s canary. No knocker. Alec pressed the electric door-bell and heard it shrilling inside.
The man who came to the door looked like Steadman gone to seed. He was as tall and narrow-shouldered, his faded hair similarly thinning, but his face was jowled, his eyeballs red-tinged, his belly straining at the braces beneath his royal blue blazer.
“Mr. Steadman?” Alec said.
“That’s me. What can I do you for, gentlemen?” Taking a closer look at Alec’s companions, he exclaimed, “Uh-oh, it’s the rozzers, right? It’s my brother you want, I expect—I hope, ha ha! He’s not here.”
“Mr. James Steadman does reside at this address?” Usually Alec would have said “live here,” but the officialese sprang to his lips in reaction to the other’s loud heartiness.
“Oh yes, Jim-boy lives here all right, when he’s at home. The old man left the house to both of us, see, and I wasn’t going to sell a nice place like this, nice bit of freehold property, not with house prices …”
“Who is it, Teddy?”
A buxom blonde came up behind him. Her hair was marcelled and all too clearly peroxided. Her fringed, heavily beaded dress was in the height of fashion, yet somehow missed elegance, at least to Alec’s inexpert eye. He knew onlyas much of women’s clothes as any observant detective experienced in judging their wearers. In this case it was as much the wearer as the lime-green cloth that made him suspect artificial silk rather than the real thing.
“It’s the busies, sweetie.”
“Well, don’t leave them on the doorstep for all the neighbours to see! Oh, plain clothes. All right, then. Are you after Jimmy, over that museum business? He’s out, so you can just go away again.”
“I’m afraid not, ma’am.” Alec introduced himself and explained about the search warrant.
Mrs. Steadman protested shrilly.
“Oh, shut up, Mavis,” said her husband, waving her out of the way and the detectives into the house. “They’re the law, aren’t they? It’s not like we’ve got anything to hide. Nor has Jim-boy, I’ll bet. The poor weed hasn’t got the gumption to pinch those sparklers.”
Tom and the D.C.s went about their business.
“I suppose you’d better come into the lounge,” Mrs. Steadman ungraciously invited Alec.
He followed the Steadmans into a sitting room furnished with a modern couch and easy chairs wildly patterned in jazz colours—mostly magenta, sulphur-yellow, and black—and matching curtains. One corner was occupied by an expensive wireless set, another by a gramophone, playing a tango. A low table held two glasses, a large glass ashtray, a fashion magazine, the pinkSporting Times,and theEvening Standardwith its banner headline: MUSEUM MURDERER STRIKES AGAIN? There were no books, and no pictures on the walls. In spite of the bright hues, the room had a stark feeling.
Mrs. Steadman dropped sulkily into a chair. Picking up a lit, lipsticked cigarette between two crimson-nailed fingersshe puffed it back to life, then reached for a tumbler holding a liquid much the same sickly color as her dress.
“Cigar, old chap?” Teddy Steadman offered Alec, taking his own, still burning, from the ashtray. “B-and-s? Or are you a whisky man?”
“Not for me, thanks.”
“Not on duty, eh? Never could see why anyone’d want to be a copper, no offence. I’m in insurance myself, and doing very nicely, thank you. I keep telling Jimmy he could triple his income if he joined me, but he hasn’t got the gumption to switch.”
