Page 52 of Marriage and Murder
Jacobs had, by now, realized that Barnaby and Penelope were filling roles he didn’t understand.
Seeing his confusion, Stokes explained their presence as consultants to Scotland Yard, a piece of information that did nothing to ease Jacobs’s mounting concern. He stared at Stokes. “This can’t be about the aquamarines. Scotland Yard, let alone high-society consultants, don’t come knocking about such things.”
Rather than reply, Stokes drew out the pouch he’d retrieved from Madeline and laid out the bracelet and placed the aquamarines beside it, matching the various stones with the fakes currently in their settings.
As a simple, straightforward demonstration that the aquamarines were, indeed, the stones taken from the bracelet, the move was quietly effective.
After studying the bracelet and stones, Stokes looked at Jacobs. “Do you know the name of the lady to whom this bracelet belonged?” When Jacobs stared at the evidence and kept his lips shut, Stokes asked the obvious next question. “Did she instruct you to replace the stones with paste and sell the stones, as you admitted, on commission?”
Jacobs raised his gaze and looked at Stokes, but still said nothing.
Barnaby sighed as if bored. He flicked a finger at the bracelet and stones. “We can all see that the stones are a perfect match, and if need be, it will be easy to get another jeweler to confirmthat.” To Jacobs, he said, “There is no chance that you will avoid the charge of stealing the aquamarines.”
Stokes had been studying Jacobs. “Would it help if I explained that the lady to whom this bracelet belongs—a Miss Viola Huntingdon—was recently murdered, strangled to death in her own parlor, and the man who brought you the bracelet, your untrustworthy charlatan, is our prime suspect?”
As Stokes’s revelation had unfolded, Jacobs’s eyes had grown wider and wider as all resistance vanished. “Murdered? Good Lord!”
“Indeed.” Stokes nodded. “Fencing a bit of this and that is one thing. Being an accessory to murder is something else again.”
Helpfully, Penelope added, “That’s a hanging offence.”
Thoroughly rattled, Jacobs looked from one to the other. “I don’t know anything about any murder. What do you want from me?”
Stokes promptly replied, “The name of the man who brought you the bracelet, asked you to copy it as a necklace and, at the same time, replace the aquamarines in the bracelet with paste. A clear and accurate description of him would also help your cause.”
Jacobs wet his lips. “I can do the description well enough. A gentleman, or so you’d take him to be, the way he carries himself, walks, the way he’s always dressed. He’s middling tall, a trifle taller than me but younger. Leaner. Athletic-looking. Handsome, too, with dark-brown hair, straightish and neatly cut, and blue eyes. He’s charming when he wants to be and a peevish, irritating beggar when he doesn’t, which is most of the time. He’s come to me on and off over the years—over the past decade and more—with similar requests to copy some piece and switch out stones for paste.” Jacobs shrugged. “I saw no reason not to do the work for him. For all I knew, he could have beena gentleman gradually replacing the stones in his wife’s jewelry to cover up his gambling debts and using the pretext of getting some new, matching piece made to engineer the opportunity to switch the stones.” Jacobs looked at Stokes, then glanced at Mallard. “Not my place to question, is it?”
Her tone flat, Penelope said, “So in your eyes, you were performing a helpful service.”
Jacobs wasn’t sure how to react to that. Warily, he murmured, “Yes.”
“So,” Barnaby said, reclaiming Jacobs’s attention, “who was this gentleman with the continual need for fake stones?”
Stokes helpfully prompted, “You can start with his name.”
Jacobs grimaced. “Farmer. He always said he was Mr. Farmer.”
When everyone else in the room stared in varying degrees of disbelief at Jacobs, he hung his head and admitted, “I know, I know. I never did think it was his real name, but that’s the one he always gave me, and I had no reason to go hunting for his real identity.”
Silence reigned as they all digested that—and that their great hope of learning the mysterious H’s name had vaporized before their very eyes.
Eventually, Stokes sighed and said, “You’re a shopkeeper—a jeweler. And you’ve interacted with this man many times over the years. You have to know more about him, so try harder with your description.”
“For instance,” Penelope said, “was he English? Did he have any particular accent?”
“Oh, he’s English through and through,” Jacobs said, “and as for accent, I’d say he was a local, born and bred. His roots have to lie close to Salisbury.”
“Anything distinctive about his dress?” Barnaby asked. “Did he wear a signet ring or carry a cane?”
“No ring, no cane.” Jacobs paused and was clearly consulting his memories. “In fact, I never saw any jewelry on him at all. No pin. Nothing. And he rarely wears a hat. As for his clothes, they were unquestionably a touch above average. Well-cut and tailored. From them alone, you would have said he was a gentleman, and he spoke like one, too.” Jacobs paused, then tipped his head toward Barnaby. “But he wasn’t as upper-class as you.”
To Penelope’s surprise, Jacobs transferred his gaze—now shrewd and calculating—to Stokes and added, “Or you, for that matter.”
More than anything else, that convinced her that Jacobs was telling them all he knew, and that his observations were acute and, most importantly, accurate. Very few would correctly detect Stokes’s background. A thought occurred, and she leaned forward, her gaze fixed on Jacobs’s face. “Do you have any reason to think that Mr. Farmer, whoever he is, isn’t actually a gentleman?”
Jacobs held her gaze for several seconds, then replied, “Not exactly that he isn’t a gentleman. His hands are those of a gentleman—never did a day’s hard labor, that one. But I always got the impression that he was…well, dancing on the edge, so to speak. Meaning the edge of the gentry. He was one of them, but he walked right on the edge of being a gentleman. He was never anything but polite to me, but he was always just a bit too arrogant with it.”
Stokes snorted. “There’s polite, and then there’s asking you to replace real stones with fakes.”
