The Best of Sisters, Part One
I persuaded my mother to write me a Raffles story if I would illustrate it. She's kindly agreed to let me share it with you, so here it is. It is fairly long (15,000 words), so I have split it up and will be posting the rest in the next few days.
The Best of Sisters
G.L. Morrissey
My tastes are as refined as any man’s, I think; and my perceptions unusually quick. In general, it takes me not five minutes in a roomful of paintings to scan them all and know whether any are worth a second look. The simple fact of the matter is that there was nothing whatsoever that year in the Royal Academy’s whole summer exhibition that I cared to linger long before- and so I told Raffles at least a dozen times.
“Beyond the ‘Ganymede’,” I said, “and one or two of the sculptures (that ‘Mower’ is Thorneycroft at his best, don’t you think?), there’s nothing here but a lot of milk-faced young ladies, and cows lounging in improbably picturesque meadows. -Oh, and seascapes. Hundreds of seascapes. Drag me before another one, and I shall be sea-sick.”
Rather than give up his pose of pretending to like the pictures, Raffles affected to believe that my admittedly ill humor had another cause entirely.
“I want that necklace as badly as you do, Bunny,” he said quietly. “But in order to get it, we must be patient.”
The necklace to which he was referring was an ugly modern thing, of massy gold set with diamonds and other stones interspersed, the colors of the gems all at war with one another, and the whole thing of a weight inconvenient, I should have thought, for any lady to wear. In other words, it was precisely the thing for us. Seeing to it that the hideous object was broken up and melted down would not only enrich us, but constitute a benefaction on those members of society who might otherwise have been forced, at some point, to look at it.
The necklace’s present owner was a northern industrialist come to London alone on business, and initially we anticipated no particular difficulty in relieving him of the piece- along with some other rich but tasteless small articles he had acquired along Bond Street. But although, by means of a little close surveillance, we were able to discover the precise layout of the hotel in which the industrialist stayed, and by which unguarded door we might easily enter that hotel, and exactly which of Raffles’ many keys would - with the aid of a simple pick-lock - allow us access to our target’s room during one of the brief times that it was empty every day, we had so far been utterly thwarted in our efforts to secure the prize by the fact that Mr. Northern Industrialist persisted in carrying the object - in a plush case - with him wherever he went.
“Well, while we’re being patient,” I complained in an undertone, “he’ll be making plans to go home. What are we going to do then? Follow him to Birmingham, and hope to take it there?”
“Perhaps.”
“I’d rather starve than go to Birmingham,” I replied to this grimly. “-And starve I shall, too. My account at the bank is nearly empty.”
As was Raffles’ cash-box, I was certain.
“The pictures, Bunny. Forget the necklace, and look at the pictures,” urged Raffles dryly.
I tried for a few moments to feign some interest in the alleged “art”, but before long we came to a scene of ladies before a plentifully-supplied tea-table which reminded me that I was both hungry myself and without the wherewithal for a good dinner. Of course, Raffles had already offered to stand me dinner in exchange for my company at the exhibition; but what about the next day, I wondered? And the one after that?
On a sudden inspiration, I turned to my friend. Asked I, “Why not just pick his pocket?”
Raffles eyebrows, always so expressive, shot sky-ward.
“Do what?” he inquired, as though disbelieving.
“Pick his pocket,” I repeated. “If he won’t leave the necklace in his room, then take it from him.”
I made the suggestion lightly, the notion having just that moment popped into my head; but the more I considered it, the better I liked the idea. For someone with a touch like Raffles, strong and true, but light as gossamer where a situation called for delicacy, the mere extraction of a jewel-case from the roomy pocket of an outer garment would surely prove no great matter.
“See here,” I urged. “We know the thing rides about all day in the right side pocket of his mackintosh. It would be the work of a moment for you to sidle alongside him and just fish it out.”
For a moment, Raffles simply stared at me, apparently incredulous. Then he demanded, “Are you imagining that he won’t notice that his pocket’s been suddenly considerably lightened in weight?”
“He might; but you’ll be gone by then,” I explained eagerly. “An anonymous figure, lost in the crowd.”
“What crowd?”
“The one we’ll lead him into before you pick his pocket.”
“Oh, I see: A crowd of blind men,” Raffles replied, scoffingly. “It would have to be. Any other sort, and someone in it would see what I was up to and give a warning.”
Stung, I retorted, “I don’t intend to stand uselessly by, you know. I’ll create a distraction. Everyone will be looking at me, not at you.”
“Lower your voice,” advised Raffles quietly. “Everyone’s looking at you right now.”
And indeed, when I glanced around, I saw a number of faces turned my way, all wearing expressions of disapproval.
Abashed, I muttered, “At least tell me you’ll consider my idea.”
But this Raffles refused to do. He was not a pick-pocket, he told me coldly. Picking pockets was a highly-refined art- and one of which he knew nothing.
“This is certainly an inconvenient time for you to have an attack of scruples!” I complained. “I haven’t ten shillings in my pocket.”
“Not scruples,” Raffles protested, wincing at the word. “Merely common sense. I’ll get the necklace in my own time, in my own way. Be patient, can’t you?”
But patience, perhaps, is not my crowning virtue. At any rate, I continued to urge my plan - and Raffles to resist it - through several more Academy galleries.
Then all at once (so little attention was I paying to anything but advancing my arguments), in the midst of making what I thought a particularly persuasive appeal to Raffles’ known relish for a challenge, I stumbled backward into a column supporting some statue - a head-and-shoulders representation of some notable or other; an un-handsome fellow, with a mustache like a gorse thicket - and nearly overset it.
An instant of sheer horror followed, as I watched the black marble pillar rock in one direction, while the white marble bust upon it teetered to the other; and then, to the accompaniment of ladies’ screams, half-a-dozen pairs of hands seized me and pulled me rather roughly away, while a like number steadied the sculpture upon its plinth, and the catastrophe that threatened was thereby averted.
“It’s always best,” a female voice remarked coolly from somewhere, “to keep one’s eyes turned in the direction one is going. Don’t you think so?”
I felt myself flushing deeply; but when I would have offered excuses (and really, what the devil was the thing doing in the middle - literally the middle - of a crowded room anyway?), Raffles grasped my arm and began dragging me away.
“Come along, Mr. Murgatroyd,” he said rather loudly. “It’s nearly tea-time. We must be getting back to your house in, ah, Wimbledon.” Before I could make any reply to these baffling untruths, my friend - turning so that he couldn’t be seen by anyone but me - put a cautionary finger to his lips.
The Albany, where Raffles had his rooms, is luckily just around the corner from the Royal Academy, of course.
“By Mercury!” I cried, when we were safely through its doors. (I had recently adopted Mercury as my particular patron.) “What was that all about? Who, in heaven’s name, is Mr. Murgatroyd?”
“Sorry, old son,” Raffles said, laughing as though something had delighted him. “At the moment, it was the only name that came to me. That was a blind, of course- as was my reference to Wimbledon. -Just in case, later, the albino connects his empty pocket with your clumsiness and comes to the proper conclusion.”
“What albino?” I asked, confused. “Do you mean the one at the Academy?” I’d caught sight of an albino, pallid and be-spectacled, among those observing open-mouthed the aftermath of my unfortunate collision with the marble bust. “What’s he got to do with anything? - Give me a whisky, won’t you, Raffles? I’m still reeling from that near-miss with the statue. Good heavens, what do you suppose they’d have done to me if I’d broken the thing?”
“They’d have made you buy it,” my friend assured me, indulgently pouring me a large one as he spoke. “You’d now be the proud owner of a very expensive pile of marble-dust.”
After taking a long drink, I exclaimed bitterly, “Good luck to them in collecting their money! I haven’t a bean!”
“Certainly you do,” Raffles replied. “Let’s see how much, shall we?”
From his pocket he thereupon extracted a wallet.
It was a large one, of an old-fashioned style; rather worn, and not at all the kind of thing Raffles usually carried.
“What’s that?” I asked suspiciously. “It’s not mine, if that’s what you’re implying.”
“It is now,” he returned, an impish twinkle lighting his blue eyes. “Or say rather- it’s ours. -A good, fat one, too,” he added, weighing it in his hand with satisfaction.
“Whose?” I asked, my forehead furrowing in confusion.
“Ours,” he repeated. “You were so insistent I should pick a pocket, Bunny, that I thought I’d oblige you. Your ‘distraction’ was overdone, I thought- but ultimately effective. -Oh, what a pity. Look: So many papers in it, but so few of them bank-notes. Still, this will keep us for some days. Time enough to get the necklace, anyway.”
“You picked an albino’s pocket?” I asked slowly. It seemed to me that someone so unfortunate as to require the protection for his eyes of a pair of blue spectacles even indoors ought, perhaps, to be spared the indignity and inconvenience of having his wallet stolen.
“Don’t look like that,” Raffles replied, a little uneasily. “I did it for you. And anyway, I gave the man a useful lesson. To carry his purse as he does, half sticking out of a rear pocket, is as much as to offer it to a thief. If I hadn’t taken it, someone in the street, or on an omnibus, soon would have.”
After weighing, for a moment, my compunctions against my undoubted need, I conceded, “That’s true. He did need to be taught a lesson, didn’t he?”
“Indubitably,” my friend replied.
One last, faint misgiving- and then curiosity overcame me. I jumped up from my chair and, coming forward, asked eagerly, “How much did we get?”
Dinner that evening was a rather hilarious affair. Raffles’ triumph with the wallet put him in an excellent mood- though, to my regret, he continued to resist the notion of securing the necklace by the same means. We dined and drank well (though, as the stolen wallet had not been a rich one, not too well); and afterward strolled arm-in-arm down the Strand, past the hotel where the owner of the coveted necklace lodged, and plotted in confident undertones what we should buy with the proceeds once we had secured our ugly but valuable plunder.
“Come up and have a short one with me before you go home, Bunny,” said Raffles, when we had reached the Albany at last. “-But just a short one, mind,” he warned. “I’m dead for sleep.”
And so we went up, still lightheartedly talking.
It was to be the last cheer we experienced for some time after.
As soon as we stepped through the door, I sensed a change come over Raffles.
Seeing his eyes darting about the room and his face growing grave, I inquired, “What’s the matter? -And where’s that whisky you promised me? Shall I pour?”
“Not you,” Raffles said quickly. “You never know when to stop pouring. No, I’ll do it.”
But having said as much, my friend suddenly bolted straight past the table on which the decanter sat and went into the next room.
Shrugging to myself, I poured my own drink, and one for Raffles, too.
“Soda?” I called brightly. I knew perfectly well that he wanted soda, of course. I only asked in an attempt to rekindle, somehow, our earlier jocosity.
No reply from Raffles, whom I could hear moving about in the bedroom.
Appearing suddenly behind me, he said grimly, “Someone’s been in here.”
“Your girl?” I asked, unconcerned. I meant by this the housemaid who came in once a week to dust and change the bed-linen. “No, wait: It’s not her day, is it?”
I held out his glass to him; but, ignoring me, Raffles abruptly crossed instead to the small table that stood next to his favorite chair and stood staring down at it. After a moment’s silent contemplation, he moved the cigarette box that lay there a few inches to its right, and set the matches atop it, as usual.
I, meanwhile, took my customary seat.
“Come and have your drink,” I urged. “-You know, what we need is a spell of really warm weather. Warm, and very dry. That would get the mackintosh off our Mr. Industrialist.”
Still no response from Raffles, who had turned and was now contemplating the book-shelves.
I was continuing to speculate idly aloud as to whether, if he were obliged by hot weather to leave his overcoat in his room, the necklace’s owner might not leave the necklace there as well.
“It would spoil the line of his trousers to carry a bulky jewel-case in them,” I pointed out.
Raffles interrupted me to say, without preamble, “I suppose to you I must seem an indifferent house-keeper; but I assure you, Bunny, I know the exact position of everything in my rooms. When anyone makes the slightest alteration to an item’s location, I immediately put it back precisely as it was, and therefore I can tell you with absolute certainty that someone has been in here since we left.”
“It was the maid,” I insisted, “just as I said before.”
“Not the maid.”
“Of course it was. No one else has a key.”
“Bunny,” Raffles said heavily, in a manner that suggested that he was becoming annoyed with me, “we left this room near eight o’clock. It is now midnight. Have you ever known a housemaid to come in the night?” This statement gave me pause. No housemaid would do such a thing, of course. “And anyway,” Raffles continued, “all the dust is still here. It’s been disturbed- but not wiped away.”
“Is anything missing?” I asked then.
I assumed that the answer to this question would be “no”; and indeed, my friend shook his head.
“Someone’s been here, though. That’s clear. -And yet he took nothing,” Raffles said musingly. “That means he was looking for something quite specific. Something that, ultimately, he didn’t find. What could it have been, I wonder?”
“Perhaps he’d settle for nothing less than those baubles you’re keeping,” I ventured. “Not finding them, he went away disappointed.” By “baubles”, I meant the trove of treasures Raffles had from time to time taken and afterward been unable to bring himself to give up. I knew he had them hidden in his bedroom somewhere, in a place kept quite secret even from me.
“No,” Raffles said. “The ‘baubles’, as you call them, have been gone through, too; but they’re all still there.”
This news convinced me that Raffles’ “intruder” had to be a figment of his own imagination. His treasures were of a sort that no one who saw them could possibly resist, I thought. Raffles had an eye for the best and most beautiful.
“You’re imagining things,” I said. “Here: Have your drink.” And I poured myself another.
But Raffles refused it.
He said, “I had an impression - just an impression, you understand - that someone was following us earlier, when we were on the Embankment. I didn’t like to say anything until I was certain. Well, now I am.”
As he said this, he slipped to the window, and cautiously lifted just the merest edge of the shade.
“Is anyone there?” I asked calmly, downing my drink.
After a long, long look up and down the street below, Raffles admitted, “No. -That is, possibly. I’m not sure.” Turning to me, he said, “You’d better stay here tonight, Bunny. After three more whiskies on top of what you had at dinner, I don’t think we should take any chances on you encountering the evening’s ‘visitor’ round a dark corner on your way home.”
How he had observed me to take three whiskies when his attention had apparently been entirely fixed elsewhere, I couldn’t imagine; but of course I had no objection to spending the night in the Albany.
A note: The catalogue for the Royal Academy exhibition can be viewed here, if you're interested. Some of the artwork is online, and I've assembled as much of it as I could find on a Pinterest board.
Part Two / Part Three / Part Four / Part Five
The Best of Sisters
G.L. Morrissey
My tastes are as refined as any man’s, I think; and my perceptions unusually quick. In general, it takes me not five minutes in a roomful of paintings to scan them all and know whether any are worth a second look. The simple fact of the matter is that there was nothing whatsoever that year in the Royal Academy’s whole summer exhibition that I cared to linger long before- and so I told Raffles at least a dozen times.
“Beyond the ‘Ganymede’,” I said, “and one or two of the sculptures (that ‘Mower’ is Thorneycroft at his best, don’t you think?), there’s nothing here but a lot of milk-faced young ladies, and cows lounging in improbably picturesque meadows. -Oh, and seascapes. Hundreds of seascapes. Drag me before another one, and I shall be sea-sick.”
Rather than give up his pose of pretending to like the pictures, Raffles affected to believe that my admittedly ill humor had another cause entirely.
“I want that necklace as badly as you do, Bunny,” he said quietly. “But in order to get it, we must be patient.”
The necklace to which he was referring was an ugly modern thing, of massy gold set with diamonds and other stones interspersed, the colors of the gems all at war with one another, and the whole thing of a weight inconvenient, I should have thought, for any lady to wear. In other words, it was precisely the thing for us. Seeing to it that the hideous object was broken up and melted down would not only enrich us, but constitute a benefaction on those members of society who might otherwise have been forced, at some point, to look at it.
The necklace’s present owner was a northern industrialist come to London alone on business, and initially we anticipated no particular difficulty in relieving him of the piece- along with some other rich but tasteless small articles he had acquired along Bond Street. But although, by means of a little close surveillance, we were able to discover the precise layout of the hotel in which the industrialist stayed, and by which unguarded door we might easily enter that hotel, and exactly which of Raffles’ many keys would - with the aid of a simple pick-lock - allow us access to our target’s room during one of the brief times that it was empty every day, we had so far been utterly thwarted in our efforts to secure the prize by the fact that Mr. Northern Industrialist persisted in carrying the object - in a plush case - with him wherever he went.
“Well, while we’re being patient,” I complained in an undertone, “he’ll be making plans to go home. What are we going to do then? Follow him to Birmingham, and hope to take it there?”
“Perhaps.”
“I’d rather starve than go to Birmingham,” I replied to this grimly. “-And starve I shall, too. My account at the bank is nearly empty.”
As was Raffles’ cash-box, I was certain.
“The pictures, Bunny. Forget the necklace, and look at the pictures,” urged Raffles dryly.
I tried for a few moments to feign some interest in the alleged “art”, but before long we came to a scene of ladies before a plentifully-supplied tea-table which reminded me that I was both hungry myself and without the wherewithal for a good dinner. Of course, Raffles had already offered to stand me dinner in exchange for my company at the exhibition; but what about the next day, I wondered? And the one after that?
On a sudden inspiration, I turned to my friend. Asked I, “Why not just pick his pocket?”
Raffles eyebrows, always so expressive, shot sky-ward.
“Do what?” he inquired, as though disbelieving.
“Pick his pocket,” I repeated. “If he won’t leave the necklace in his room, then take it from him.”
I made the suggestion lightly, the notion having just that moment popped into my head; but the more I considered it, the better I liked the idea. For someone with a touch like Raffles, strong and true, but light as gossamer where a situation called for delicacy, the mere extraction of a jewel-case from the roomy pocket of an outer garment would surely prove no great matter.
“See here,” I urged. “We know the thing rides about all day in the right side pocket of his mackintosh. It would be the work of a moment for you to sidle alongside him and just fish it out.”
For a moment, Raffles simply stared at me, apparently incredulous. Then he demanded, “Are you imagining that he won’t notice that his pocket’s been suddenly considerably lightened in weight?”
“He might; but you’ll be gone by then,” I explained eagerly. “An anonymous figure, lost in the crowd.”
“What crowd?”
“The one we’ll lead him into before you pick his pocket.”
“Oh, I see: A crowd of blind men,” Raffles replied, scoffingly. “It would have to be. Any other sort, and someone in it would see what I was up to and give a warning.”
Stung, I retorted, “I don’t intend to stand uselessly by, you know. I’ll create a distraction. Everyone will be looking at me, not at you.”
“Lower your voice,” advised Raffles quietly. “Everyone’s looking at you right now.”
And indeed, when I glanced around, I saw a number of faces turned my way, all wearing expressions of disapproval.
Abashed, I muttered, “At least tell me you’ll consider my idea.”
But this Raffles refused to do. He was not a pick-pocket, he told me coldly. Picking pockets was a highly-refined art- and one of which he knew nothing.
“This is certainly an inconvenient time for you to have an attack of scruples!” I complained. “I haven’t ten shillings in my pocket.”
“Not scruples,” Raffles protested, wincing at the word. “Merely common sense. I’ll get the necklace in my own time, in my own way. Be patient, can’t you?”
But patience, perhaps, is not my crowning virtue. At any rate, I continued to urge my plan - and Raffles to resist it - through several more Academy galleries.
Then all at once (so little attention was I paying to anything but advancing my arguments), in the midst of making what I thought a particularly persuasive appeal to Raffles’ known relish for a challenge, I stumbled backward into a column supporting some statue - a head-and-shoulders representation of some notable or other; an un-handsome fellow, with a mustache like a gorse thicket - and nearly overset it.
An instant of sheer horror followed, as I watched the black marble pillar rock in one direction, while the white marble bust upon it teetered to the other; and then, to the accompaniment of ladies’ screams, half-a-dozen pairs of hands seized me and pulled me rather roughly away, while a like number steadied the sculpture upon its plinth, and the catastrophe that threatened was thereby averted.
“It’s always best,” a female voice remarked coolly from somewhere, “to keep one’s eyes turned in the direction one is going. Don’t you think so?”
I felt myself flushing deeply; but when I would have offered excuses (and really, what the devil was the thing doing in the middle - literally the middle - of a crowded room anyway?), Raffles grasped my arm and began dragging me away.
“Come along, Mr. Murgatroyd,” he said rather loudly. “It’s nearly tea-time. We must be getting back to your house in, ah, Wimbledon.” Before I could make any reply to these baffling untruths, my friend - turning so that he couldn’t be seen by anyone but me - put a cautionary finger to his lips.
The Albany, where Raffles had his rooms, is luckily just around the corner from the Royal Academy, of course.
“By Mercury!” I cried, when we were safely through its doors. (I had recently adopted Mercury as my particular patron.) “What was that all about? Who, in heaven’s name, is Mr. Murgatroyd?”
“Sorry, old son,” Raffles said, laughing as though something had delighted him. “At the moment, it was the only name that came to me. That was a blind, of course- as was my reference to Wimbledon. -Just in case, later, the albino connects his empty pocket with your clumsiness and comes to the proper conclusion.”
“What albino?” I asked, confused. “Do you mean the one at the Academy?” I’d caught sight of an albino, pallid and be-spectacled, among those observing open-mouthed the aftermath of my unfortunate collision with the marble bust. “What’s he got to do with anything? - Give me a whisky, won’t you, Raffles? I’m still reeling from that near-miss with the statue. Good heavens, what do you suppose they’d have done to me if I’d broken the thing?”
“They’d have made you buy it,” my friend assured me, indulgently pouring me a large one as he spoke. “You’d now be the proud owner of a very expensive pile of marble-dust.”
After taking a long drink, I exclaimed bitterly, “Good luck to them in collecting their money! I haven’t a bean!”
“Certainly you do,” Raffles replied. “Let’s see how much, shall we?”
From his pocket he thereupon extracted a wallet.
It was a large one, of an old-fashioned style; rather worn, and not at all the kind of thing Raffles usually carried.
“What’s that?” I asked suspiciously. “It’s not mine, if that’s what you’re implying.”
“It is now,” he returned, an impish twinkle lighting his blue eyes. “Or say rather- it’s ours. -A good, fat one, too,” he added, weighing it in his hand with satisfaction.
“Whose?” I asked, my forehead furrowing in confusion.
“Ours,” he repeated. “You were so insistent I should pick a pocket, Bunny, that I thought I’d oblige you. Your ‘distraction’ was overdone, I thought- but ultimately effective. -Oh, what a pity. Look: So many papers in it, but so few of them bank-notes. Still, this will keep us for some days. Time enough to get the necklace, anyway.”
“You picked an albino’s pocket?” I asked slowly. It seemed to me that someone so unfortunate as to require the protection for his eyes of a pair of blue spectacles even indoors ought, perhaps, to be spared the indignity and inconvenience of having his wallet stolen.
“Don’t look like that,” Raffles replied, a little uneasily. “I did it for you. And anyway, I gave the man a useful lesson. To carry his purse as he does, half sticking out of a rear pocket, is as much as to offer it to a thief. If I hadn’t taken it, someone in the street, or on an omnibus, soon would have.”
After weighing, for a moment, my compunctions against my undoubted need, I conceded, “That’s true. He did need to be taught a lesson, didn’t he?”
“Indubitably,” my friend replied.
One last, faint misgiving- and then curiosity overcame me. I jumped up from my chair and, coming forward, asked eagerly, “How much did we get?”
Dinner that evening was a rather hilarious affair. Raffles’ triumph with the wallet put him in an excellent mood- though, to my regret, he continued to resist the notion of securing the necklace by the same means. We dined and drank well (though, as the stolen wallet had not been a rich one, not too well); and afterward strolled arm-in-arm down the Strand, past the hotel where the owner of the coveted necklace lodged, and plotted in confident undertones what we should buy with the proceeds once we had secured our ugly but valuable plunder.
“Come up and have a short one with me before you go home, Bunny,” said Raffles, when we had reached the Albany at last. “-But just a short one, mind,” he warned. “I’m dead for sleep.”
And so we went up, still lightheartedly talking.
It was to be the last cheer we experienced for some time after.
As soon as we stepped through the door, I sensed a change come over Raffles.
Seeing his eyes darting about the room and his face growing grave, I inquired, “What’s the matter? -And where’s that whisky you promised me? Shall I pour?”
“Not you,” Raffles said quickly. “You never know when to stop pouring. No, I’ll do it.”
But having said as much, my friend suddenly bolted straight past the table on which the decanter sat and went into the next room.
Shrugging to myself, I poured my own drink, and one for Raffles, too.
“Soda?” I called brightly. I knew perfectly well that he wanted soda, of course. I only asked in an attempt to rekindle, somehow, our earlier jocosity.
No reply from Raffles, whom I could hear moving about in the bedroom.
Appearing suddenly behind me, he said grimly, “Someone’s been in here.”
“Your girl?” I asked, unconcerned. I meant by this the housemaid who came in once a week to dust and change the bed-linen. “No, wait: It’s not her day, is it?”
I held out his glass to him; but, ignoring me, Raffles abruptly crossed instead to the small table that stood next to his favorite chair and stood staring down at it. After a moment’s silent contemplation, he moved the cigarette box that lay there a few inches to its right, and set the matches atop it, as usual.
I, meanwhile, took my customary seat.
“Come and have your drink,” I urged. “-You know, what we need is a spell of really warm weather. Warm, and very dry. That would get the mackintosh off our Mr. Industrialist.”
Still no response from Raffles, who had turned and was now contemplating the book-shelves.
I was continuing to speculate idly aloud as to whether, if he were obliged by hot weather to leave his overcoat in his room, the necklace’s owner might not leave the necklace there as well.
“It would spoil the line of his trousers to carry a bulky jewel-case in them,” I pointed out.
Raffles interrupted me to say, without preamble, “I suppose to you I must seem an indifferent house-keeper; but I assure you, Bunny, I know the exact position of everything in my rooms. When anyone makes the slightest alteration to an item’s location, I immediately put it back precisely as it was, and therefore I can tell you with absolute certainty that someone has been in here since we left.”
“It was the maid,” I insisted, “just as I said before.”
“Not the maid.”
“Of course it was. No one else has a key.”
“Bunny,” Raffles said heavily, in a manner that suggested that he was becoming annoyed with me, “we left this room near eight o’clock. It is now midnight. Have you ever known a housemaid to come in the night?” This statement gave me pause. No housemaid would do such a thing, of course. “And anyway,” Raffles continued, “all the dust is still here. It’s been disturbed- but not wiped away.”
“Is anything missing?” I asked then.
I assumed that the answer to this question would be “no”; and indeed, my friend shook his head.
“Someone’s been here, though. That’s clear. -And yet he took nothing,” Raffles said musingly. “That means he was looking for something quite specific. Something that, ultimately, he didn’t find. What could it have been, I wonder?”
“Perhaps he’d settle for nothing less than those baubles you’re keeping,” I ventured. “Not finding them, he went away disappointed.” By “baubles”, I meant the trove of treasures Raffles had from time to time taken and afterward been unable to bring himself to give up. I knew he had them hidden in his bedroom somewhere, in a place kept quite secret even from me.
“No,” Raffles said. “The ‘baubles’, as you call them, have been gone through, too; but they’re all still there.”
This news convinced me that Raffles’ “intruder” had to be a figment of his own imagination. His treasures were of a sort that no one who saw them could possibly resist, I thought. Raffles had an eye for the best and most beautiful.
“You’re imagining things,” I said. “Here: Have your drink.” And I poured myself another.
But Raffles refused it.
He said, “I had an impression - just an impression, you understand - that someone was following us earlier, when we were on the Embankment. I didn’t like to say anything until I was certain. Well, now I am.”
As he said this, he slipped to the window, and cautiously lifted just the merest edge of the shade.
“Is anyone there?” I asked calmly, downing my drink.
After a long, long look up and down the street below, Raffles admitted, “No. -That is, possibly. I’m not sure.” Turning to me, he said, “You’d better stay here tonight, Bunny. After three more whiskies on top of what you had at dinner, I don’t think we should take any chances on you encountering the evening’s ‘visitor’ round a dark corner on your way home.”
How he had observed me to take three whiskies when his attention had apparently been entirely fixed elsewhere, I couldn’t imagine; but of course I had no objection to spending the night in the Albany.
A note: The catalogue for the Royal Academy exhibition can be viewed here, if you're interested. Some of the artwork is online, and I've assembled as much of it as I could find on a Pinterest board.
Part Two / Part Three / Part Four / Part Five