Page 93 of Guardian
I stepped inside and closed the door. “He’s in hospital. There was an accident.”
“So you’re here to deliver the story instead.” He scowled his disapproval, and I didn’t blame him. He trusted James; he barely knew me.
I’d spent the walk here trying to decide how I would unfold the story for him.
Over the years, I had seen how different newspapers portrayed crimes, how they presented facts in ways that left varying impressions, cast the police as heroes or fools, danced around questions of blame, even left perpetrators unnamed, and yet still told a tale worth reading.
Like dodges, they gave people a story they could readily believe.
I knew that Mr. Fuller wanted to write the story. His promise to James and me aside, I believed he wanted to help Sarah; he longed to help the Yard; he wished to see justice done and the brutal murderers caught.
The story of stolen jewels was good newspaper fodder; the sticking point would be naming the Simonsons.
Still, Mr. Fuller was clever, and I believed he could manage it.
But would he want to?
Instinctively, I felt a call to right an injustice was my strongest card. Simonson had behaved vilely—criminally, and he had escaped punishment. I’d draw Simonson as a villain and hope it was enough that Mr. Fuller would want to find a way to implicate him.
But first, the proof.
I slid my hand into my pocket. At Amelia’s, I’d separated the diamonds, folding two inside a handkerchief; three were still in the pouch.
Inside my pocket, I loosened the drawstring, took the diamonds into my palm, then set them gently on the scribbled page before Mr. Fuller.
He drew back as if they were a vial of poison. “Are those real?”
“They are.” I removed Amelia’s coat, folding it over the back of the wooden chair, sat facing him across the desk, and said, slowly and carefully, “These three diamonds, from an important family heirloom, have been replaced with counterfeit gems on the premises of Simonson’s Jewelers in Hatton Garden.”
His expression was wary. “What heirloom?”
“The Hargrave necklace,” I replied. “Lady Hargrave is to wear it at Lord Charleton’s ball this week.”
He picked up one of the stones, replacing his spectacles and bringing it close to peer at it.
“Each of those is approximately one carat weight, clear and well cut, valued at over two hundred pounds. A thief could disguise them by having them cut down. The owner might never know of the substitution, until it was too late to recover them.”
He set the stone down. “Can you put those away, please?”
I replaced them in their pouch. “You promised us you would print the story we gave you,” I reminded him.
“Iwill, so long as I don’t have to commit a crime to do it.” He sniffed. “I have not forgotten your young sister. The thought of a kidnapped child harrows my bones. But to accuse a jeweler of fraud—to destroy his livelihood when he was no true party to it—”
“You simply write that it occurred in his shop, where it was being cleaned and repaired. That is the truth.”
“I need to know why.”
I’d expected he would.
“What do you know of a woman named Maggie Wirth?” I asked.
His eyes narrowed. “Nothing.”
“Patty Wirth?”
His face cleared. “The Southwark thief. Of course.”
“Maggie is her daughter, and twenty years ago, she was caught thieving by a jeweler,” I began. I unfolded the story, piece by piece, describing the day of the theft, giving every detail I could remember about Simonson’s attack on Maggie.
