Diamonds and Daggers by Nancy Warren

Author:Nancy Warren [Warren, Nancy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781928145929
Publisher: Ambleside Publishing
Published: 2020-09-16T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter 14

I nodded. Maybe at one time I’d believed he was overprotective, but I no longer did.

I yawned. I hadn’t been sleeping well, for obvious reasons, and it was getting late. Rafe glanced up at me and then said to Theodore, “Let’s go through the rest of these fairly quickly so Lucy can get to bed. After that, you and I will go through each frame and see if we can identify who else Bryce Teddington spoke to, Patricia Beeton spoke to, and the mysterious young woman who didn’t seem to belong there at all.”

We both agreed—Theodore because he normally did agree with Rafe, and me because I was dying to go to bed. Nothing too startling emerged as we went through the last fifty or so photographs, except that the young woman who had been seen in that first photograph talking to Bryce appeared several more times. Three times she was in the background talking to Bryce Teddington. In one frame, she appeared just behind Patricia Beeton’s right shoulder. Had they just turned apart from an intense conversation? Or was it purely coincidence? She’d spoken to Lord Pevensy, and there was a photograph where Annabel was turning away from her with an irritated expression on her face. I wondered what that was about. Maybe she’d discovered the woman had no business there and was going to throw her out.

She didn’t seem to be having a good time. I never saw her with a drink in her hand. In fact, her behavior was in every way suspicious. Twice Theodore said, “I wish I could place her. I know I’ve seen her somewhere.”

I said, “We need somebody who watches a lot of TV who might recognize her.”

They looked at each other and, as one, said, “Hester.”

They agreed that Hester would be the next person to see the movie and the stills, but I warned them that they had to do it when Sylvia was nowhere to be found. “Better if Hester comes here. If Sylvia walked in and saw a movie of me wearing these jewels looking so glamorous… I’d rather talk to ten murderers than have to deal with the consequences.”

I went to bed. I was so tired, I thought I’d drop right off to sleep, but my mind was racing. It was as though I was looking at those photographs all over again. Mostly I saw the jewels in all their very many poses, so clearly the star of the show.

Gran had tactlessly mentioned them being broken up, and I’d assumed that’s what would happen to them too, but I thought back to Sylvia going to those auctions of pieces she had no intention of buying—well maybe she had, I don’t know—pieces also by Cartier, her favorite jewelry designer. She’d kept the auction programs. Part of the reason she’d kept them was that she liked to collect her favorite designer.

I sat up in bed. What if the thief was a collector? What if it was one of those obsessed

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