“I’m afraid he’s busy in the work room, Miss Dalrymple, with a gentleman who brought some fossils he wants to sell us. Can I help?”
“I don’t want to tear you away from your work.”
“I’ll be glad of a change. This is going to be a long job at best, and the police searchers moved things about rather, which doesn’t make it any easier. I say, you found Pettigrew’s body, didn’t you?Andyou were there when the jewels turned up missing. What luck!”
“Luck!” Daisy echoed quizzically, eyebrows raised.
“Nothing exciting ever happens to me,” Harbottle mourned. “The nearest I’ve come to it was being searched before going home yesterday, but so was everyone else in the museum. I don’t know why they bothered. The thief is too clever to try to smuggle the loot out yesterday, of all days, with police swarming around.”
Daisy had not known about that search. It was logical, of course. Searching the museum was pointless if Alec had let the thief stroll out with the jewels in his pocket. “I presume nothing was found,” she said, “or everyone would be talking about it. Do you have any ideas as to who did it?”
“Dr. Pettigrew,” he said promptly. “It would have been easy for him. He was in league with the Grand Duke of Transcarpathia—their quarrelling was a blind. The Grand Duke killed him because he refused to hand over the ruby.”
“It’s a reasonable theory,” Daisy acknowledged, annoyed with herself for not thinking through her own suggestion to Alec of Pettigrew as the thief.
“It’s what most people here believe,” Harbottle assured her with a touch of belligerence.
“Because it would mean none of the rest of the museum staff is implicated.”
He sighed. “Yes. I suppose, really, we’ve had enoughexcitement already. There’s just one thing I’m sure of, and that’s that Mr. Ruddlestone is no murderer. Right-oh, I’d better answer your questions, if I can, and get back to work.”
Harbottle knew quite as much as Daisy cared to know about the early collectors, and far more than she cared to know about their collections. Mind sated, body starved (she had missed elevenses), she left him finishing up a drawerful before lunch, and went off in search of sustenance.
Tomorrow morning, she would tackle Entomology—the Keeper of which, she had discovered, was known as the Creepy-Crawly man—and that should pretty much finish the research for her article. As far as criminal investigation was concerned, however, she did not feel as if she was the slightest bit forrarder.
13
Without going too far out of her way, Daisy could avoid the Pareiasaurus’s corner of the museum, so she did. She was walking the length of the fossil mammal gallery, her mind on food, when she saw Rudolf Maximilian lurking—there was really no other word for it—by a fearsome cave bear. He managed to look both shifty and disconsolate.
“Hallo,” said Daisy, “I thought you were long gone.”
“Bitte?”
“I … Oh, never mind. Did they let you help to search?”
“No. Now to search is finish, and mine ruby dey have not finded. But it vas not a good search!”
“What do you mean?”
“See!” cried the Grand Duke, waving his arms. “See only dese aminals.”
Daisy scrutinized the cave bear, which had an unfriendly look, and the sabre-toothed tiger beyond, with its positively hostile glare.
“And in de museum, how many aminals are!”
“Lots,” she agreed blankly. “That is, after all, what it’s for. Mostly.”
“Inside dese aminals have dey not to searched. Comes det’ief viz mine ruby, cuts in de aminal a hole—here under vhere is not easy seen, inputs mine ruby, and sews again togizzer. Like so.” Parting the bear’s thick fur (borrowed from a grizzly) in an unmentionable place, he prodded it indecently, pointing out a seam.
“I suppose it’s possible,” Daisy said doubtfully.
“Dis I tell to dem, but dey vill not de aminals open to cut.” As he grew more and more excited, his uncertain grasp on the English language slipped still further. “Dey vill not me to let de aminals open to cut.”
Daisy tried to envisage the blizzard of kapok disembowelling a cave bear would create, let alone a mammoth. “They really can’t do that,” she soothed him.
“If I mine sword had, I vould do!” Rudolf took up a fencing pose. “I go now mine sword to fetch.”
“For heaven’s sake, don’t! Honestly, I can’t believe the ruby is hidden in any of these animals. It wouldn’t be easy to sew up a furry hide neatly enough, in a hurry, to pass muster.”
