Daisy thought he looked rather shifty, and she wondered whether he had been giving the extinct mammals a rather closer examination than was permitted to the public. Going through into the gallery, she saw that Sergeant Hamm had his hands full—his one and only hand, anyway—with the multitudinous visitors. In the midst of those swarms of locusts, he might not have noticed what the Grand Duke was about. Contrariwise, swarms of visitors could hardly have helped observing him if he had indecently molested the sabre-tooth or a mammoth.
In the reptile gallery, a crowd had gathered around the Pareiasaurus, though it was still hidden by dust-sheets. In the dinosaur gallery, a lesser crowd stared at the dust-sheets concealing the Saltopus stand and the bone table.
For a moment, Daisy thought the ladders were gone, but then she saw them, folded and laid on the floor against the wall. Steadman would not have to risk arousing suspicion by asking the Superintendent of House Staff to have a ladder brought up specially, perhaps with the excuse of dusting his dinosaurs. He must have done that, she supposed, when he hid the jewels, but no one knew then that they had been pinched. Now all he had to do was stay late after work tomorrow.
Assuming she was right, once he had retrieved the jewels, what then? Daisy pondered as she left the museum and walked briskly homeward through the dank afternoon.
Then all he needed was patience. If he realized he wasbeing watched, he must also realize the police could not spare the men to follow him forever. The police circular describing the gems would disappear into the backs of files or piles of papers, and jewellers would forget the details.
If Steadman waited long enough, and failing other evidence, he might get away with his crimes.
Daisy was pleased with this conclusion, since it meant she and Jameson were justified in looking for the jewels tonight, before Steadman had a chance to get there first. Whether Alec would accept her argument was another matter, but in his absence, she had to do what she thought best.
As Daisy approached home, and thus neared the Thames, she noticed wisps of mist curling up the street and lurking Grand-Duke-like between the houses. Cold air over the warm river was the breeding ground for London’s famous pea-soupers, but it was early in the season for a full-scale fog. Most people in the megalopolis cooked with gas nowadays, and as yet few would have lit the coal fires whose smoke and soot nourished the river mists.
Shutting the front door firmly on the ominous vapours, Daisy hoped a breeze would come up and blow them away. Anyway, she wasn’t going to let a fog stop her going back to the museum. She might be wrong about Steadman and his dinosaurs, but if she was right, she did not want Sergeant Jameson hogging all the glory.
She might be wrong. As Daisy sat down at her desk, she frowned absently at the sheet she had left half-typed in the machine.
Whatever Steadman’s place on Alec’s list, she had not rated him highly as a suspect. A passion for dinosaurs need not exclude a passion for money, she supposed. If only she knew something of his private circumstances. Alec had kept to himself whatever he had discovered.
Witt said Steadman had a rotten home life. A nagging wife, perhaps? Did he want money to be able to leave her? How would desertion affect his position at the museum, and thus his work with his precious dinosaurs?
Unable to answer any of these questions, Daisy tried to concentrate on her own work, but she was writing a passage about dinosaurs, so her thoughts kept returning to Steadman.
Steadman and his precious dinosaurs. Precious stones stolen. What was the connection, if any? The Grand Duke’s motive was far more understandable. He was as mad about his lost country as Steadman was about dinosaurs.
His lost country and his lost ruby, doubly lost—unlesshehad pinched it—now that only a fake gem remained. Rudolf Maximilian left with a fake gem, Daisy mused, and Steadman with his fake Diplodocus. She remembered his chagrin as he explained to Derek and Belinda that the pride of his collection was just plaster of Paris.
Daisy sat bolt upright. Suddenly she remembered so clearly she practically heard Steadman’s voice: “The Diplodocus was found in America. The American museums bag all the best. They have themoney …”
… The money to send out their own expeditions. The trustees of the British Museum (Natural History) had been debating setting up an expedition for years, without a decision. Wasthatwhat Steadman wanted money for, pots of money—his own dinosaur-hunting expedition?
In Steadman’s eyes, Daisy suspected, that would be motive enough for robbing the mineralogy gallery. After all, as his colleagues agreed, compared to once-living fossils, what importance had mere inanimate stones?
Of course, coming up with a credible motive still didn’t mean she was right, but it made her more determined than ever to find out.
With that decided, she managed to write a few paragraphs before Lucy brought her a cup of tea.
“It’s perfectly beastly out,” Lucy said. “Mrs. Potter laid a fire in the sitting room. I thought I’d light it later. We could turn on the wireless and eat by the fire—tomato soup, fillet of sole, runner beans, potatoes in their jackets—and have a game of parcheesi or something.”
“It sounds lovely.” Glancing at the window, Daisy shivered. The air had taken on a sickly yellowish tinge. A haze blurred the roof of Lucy’s studio and the houses on the other side of the mews. “But I have to go out for a bit first.”
“Darling, must you?”
If the fog set in for several days, Alec’s watchers might easily lose Steadman. Shehadto go, to keep Jameson up to the mark. “Yes, I’d better,” she sighed.
“Too, too maddening. I won’t light the fire till you get back, so that we don’t have to bring up more coal.”
Warmed by the tea, Daisy went quickly to put on her winter coat, hat, and gloves before the warmth vanished. As soon as she set foot outside the front door, the fog grabbed her by the throat. She coughed.
Breathing through her nose, she set out. The lamp-post at the corner was already lit, murkily haloed. Visibility was not too bad as yet. Turning into Church Street, Daisy saw a ’bus and a motor-car crossing at the top, in the Fulham Road. The few pedestrians she met had hunched shoulders and drips on their noses. They were obviously hastening home. She envied them.
Reminding herself that the game was afoot, she stiffened her sinews and, imitating the action of a sabre-toothed tiger in a hurry, she sped museum-ward.
In the quarter of an hour it took Daisy to reach Cromwell Road, the fog thickened perceptibly. The museum’s towers,which should have loomed above the plane trees, were invisible. The planes themselves were greenish blotches. A lone ’bus moved cautiously down the street, and Daisy crossed in its wake. Sundays were always quiet, but this was morguelike.
A uniformed constable stood at the museum gates. “The museum shuts in a few minutes, miss,” he said. “I’d get on home, if I was you, ’fore it gets any worser.”
