‘Fifty-fifty?’ said Patsy.
‘Make up your mind,’ said Miss Hodge.
Patsy’s quick little mind shifted: spotted a discrepancy, ‘Possession is nine points of the law,’ she said. ‘You have possession of the pearls. Why divvy up? Why not scoop the lot?’
‘I am not an habitual criminal,’ said Miss Hodge simply. ‘I wouldn’t know how to dispose of them.’
‘Impasse,’ said Patsy.
‘Impasse,’ agreed Miss Hodge.
And yet, not quite. ‘Possession’s nine points of the law,’ said Patsy again. ‘But the law will not allow you to possess Lady Blatchett’s pearls. You do possess Lady Blatchett’s pearls. Suppose I cut my losses and inform the police?’
‘You do just that,’ said Miss Hodge, growing alarmingly less desiccated every minute. ‘And see where it will get you.’
‘It won’t get me anywhere: except one up over you. And if I can’t have my proper share of the pearls, that’ll do next best for me. Twenty-five per cent—of what a fence will give for them!—it’ll be worth that much to see you doing time. And don’t think you won’t. You can say what you like to them about me—I haven’t got them, I’m in the clear; they don’t even know that I know Edgar. But Edgar was at that old woman’s last night, and he was here the next morning. You wait till Edgar starts coming clean to the police: how you bribed him to deal with the sale of the pearls—which you’d already stolen on one of the old woman’s visits here, replacing them with false ones: perfectly easy while the doctor was examining the patient. You’d have told him to look for them behind the picture frame,’ said Patsy warming to her theme, ‘and to swallow them down with some medicine and so smuggle them out…’ She shrugged. ‘Lots of holes; but Edgar will stop all those up, never fear! He’s a past master, is Edgar, at conning the police. And there’ll still be nothing against him; he won’t ever have touched the pearls, he’ll tell them you have them, and that’ll be true. And against me also—nothing.’
‘Except, of course,’ said Miss Hodge, ‘that the most casual enquiry will reveal you as being the Niece from Scotland: with a grudge against Lady Blatchett and a well-founded conviction that what she possesses is rightfully yours.’
‘Oh, that!’ said Patsy. ‘No dice there, I’m afraid, love! You didn’t really fall for that, did you?’
‘Well, no,’ said Miss Hodge. ‘You cooked it all up on the spur of the moment from what poor Gladys had confided to your friend, Mr. Snaith. You thought such a story must surely win over my sentimental spinster heart, and I’d turn over the pearls to you.’
‘But you didn’t believe it?’
‘Lady Blatchett is an old woman,’ said Miss Hodge. ‘So odd for her to have a niece of your generation; especially as your poor dying mother is still so young—you are not the child of elderly parents.’ She smiled at Miss Comfort with the smile of a crocodile. ‘So much more likely, don’t you think, that the Niece from Scotland is by now at least a middle-aged woman.’
Miss Comfort saw the light immediately. ‘Like you?’ she said.
‘That’s right, my dear,’ said Miss Hodge. ‘Like me.’
The Niece from Scotland: obliged to earn her own living, wangling herself at last with her excellent references into a post where she might observe the old aunt at close quarters: might even ingratiate herself into her favour. The older one becomes, the more frequent one’s visits to the doctor—chosen because he dwelt so handily just across the way—and the more necessary the attentions of the doctor’s kindly receptionist. Miss Comfort bowed to necessity. ‘You are the Niece from Scotland?’
‘And you a professional thief,’ said Miss Hodge, ‘and that’s all about it.’ She rose, dusted down her charmless dress. ‘So I think fifty-fifty is a very fair division. Where do we begin?’ she said.
At Number 20, Lady Blatchett rang the bell for Gladys. She continued a serial lecture upon the sins and follies of careless talk in public. ‘But I have decided after all to retain you in my service.’
Gladys was not entirely astonished; not for nothing had she made herself indispensable over all these years. She said however, with due deference: ‘Thank you, my lady.’
‘I have had a nice cheque from the insurance people so I feel rather better.’
‘Oh, I am glad,’ said Gladys, much relieved. ‘Now your ladyship can have some pearls again.’ She said humbly, for in some mysterious way the theft was acknowledged to have been all her fault, ‘Always seeing you with them—I’ve missed them, my lady.’