Hole and Corner by Patricia Wentworth Page A

diamond brooch would be enough. But then all he wanted was to get the girl into trouble, whereas Bessie had views of her own. It wasn’t her first inside job, not by a long chalk. She had worked with Ted for five years, and if she’d started with forged references, she’d got genuine ones now, and never been so much as suspected. Al Phillips wouldn’t have known anything about her if it hadn’t been for Ted’s sister that was married to a cousin of his. Funny how you came across people.
    She came into Mrs Huddleston’s bedroom and went straight to the built-in cupboard by the fireplace. It hadn’t taken her long to find out from Possett that Mrs Huddleston didn’t believe in safes or locking things up. She hid her jewellery, and put it in a different place every week. This week the emeralds were rolled up with her stockings. Possett had let that out when they were making the bed yesterday morning. She couldn’t keep anything to herself, Possett couldn’t. Bessie despised her a good deal.
    There were drawers inside the cupboard door. There was a whole drawerful of stockings. Bessie ran her fingers over them, and found the emeralds easily enough. They were beautiful and valuable stones, and they were beautifully set. She looked at them with professional admiration. There was a headband of green leaves set so that they would lie flat against the hair, and there were long earrings, and two brooches, one smaller than the other. It seemed a most awful waste to plant them all on Miss Dale. The headband would be enough to make it look as if she had planned the theft, not just been tempted by the brooch lying, as you might say, to her hand on the drawing-room mantelpiece. She’d got to be in the thing up to her neck, had Miss Dale, but the headband would be enough for that.
    Bessie slipped all the things into her apron pocket under her handkerchief and ran down the stairs again. Would Al Phillips find out if she kept some of the emeralds? She didn’t see why he should. She could keep the earrings and one of the brooches, and no one would be any the wiser. If they weren’t found in the hem of the grey coat, it would only look as if Shirley Dale had hidden them somewhere else—that’s all it would look like. Bessie would be safe enough, and Ted’s old fence would give her a price for the brooch and earrings. She made up her mind to keep them.
    Then she hid the headband and the larger brooch as she had hidden the diamonds, pushing them down through the slit in the lining of Shirley’s coat. The headband lay flat along the hem, and she worked the brooch round to the back on the opposite side to the diamonds, taking care to keep the two brooches sis inches apart so that they couldn’t possibly knock against each other and give the show away.
    Bessie stepped back from the coat-stand with triumph in her heart. There was rather a mouldy-looking fern in a pot on the hall table. Her eye lighted upon it approvingly. The earthenware pot was concealed by a majolica jar. She took it out, dropped the remaining emeralds into the jar, and when the fern had been replaced there was nothing of an incriminating nature anywhere except a dirty mark on Bessie’s thumb. One minute later she was washing it off under the scullery tap with Primrose soap, and half a minute after that she was sitting close up to the kitchen window to catch the light, with her eyes bent on page 101 of a novelette entitled The Perils of Pansy , whilst her ears noted gratefully the fact that Cook was still snoring. Not much to choose between her and the old grampus upstairs, but Cook perhaps a bit louder and rather more on the bass side.
    She became engrossed with Pansy, who was being subjected to the perfidious advances of an unscrupulous duke who had nothing except his wealth and his title to recommend him, while her heart remained perseveringly true to a virtuous commercial traveller who had been