Shape of Snakes

'I remember,' I said.

Her husband, Larry, a tall, soft-spoken American, stirred in his seat. 'In fact it's jadeite,' he said, 'which is the most expensive of the jades. We had it assessed in '83 so that Sheila could demonstrate to the police that she wasn't imagining the value of what was in Annie's house.' He circled the bracelet with a finger and thumb. 'It's of Mexican origin ... probably eighteenth century ... worth in excess of L200. Considering Sheila thinks there were ten in the set, it gives you some sort of starting point for estimating Annie's wealth.'

Sam gave a low whistle. 'No wonder you wanted the police to investigate.'

Sheila sighed. 'I still feel I should have pushed a bit harder ... at the very least forced Drury to face a disciplinary hearing. He was appallingly negligent. Worse, a racist. He just assumed a black woman would be living in squalor.'

Larry clicked his tongue impatiently. 'That's twenty-twenty vision speaking. I agree the man was an asshole but he was correct about one thing ... no one suggested there was anything odd about the house ... even John Hewlett, the RSPCA inspector, didn't challenge the conditions.' He spoke with surprising firmness as if the subject were a touchy one between them. 'And there weren't enough hours in the day for you to commit any more time to Annie's cause, not with your practice and two kids to bring up. Also,' he went on, turning to us, 'the Superintendent made sense when he talked about zero success rates. Sheila made a list of the things she remembered but it was very vague on detail and, as the police pointed out, there was no hope of a prosecution if she couldn't be more positive in her descriptions. In the end it seemed pointless to go on.'

We were sitting outside on the terrace under the shade of a worn umbrella which had had most of its color bleached out by long summers of sunshine. The garden fell away at the back of the house and some sensible person in the distant past had had the foresight to construct a raised platform out of Portland stone, which gave a glorious view of the other side of the bowl-shaped valley in which we lived. It seemed strange to me how the English climate had changed during the years we'd been away. I had always thought of it as a green and luscious place, but the garden, paddocks and fields had turned brown in the heat, and the drought-starved flowers drooped their heads. Sheila and Larry were sporting matching panama hats and they made an elegant couple, she in a primrose-colored cotton dress, he in white shirt and chinos. I guessed him to be about ten years older than she was, and I wondered where they'd met and when they'd married, and whether the two children he'd mentioned were his or a previous husband's.

I leaned across the table to refill their wineglasses while I thought lazily about going inside to fetch lunch, a simple affair of cold meat, salad and French bread. 'If it was one of her neighbors who robbed her,' I said idly, 'they might have kept some of the pieces, particularly if they weren't of any value. The peacock feathers in the artillery shell, for example ... the one John Hewlett described. When I read his letter I couldn't help thinking they were the kind of things someone would hang on to, if only because feathers could never be specifically identified as Annie's.'

Sheila eyed me curiously. 'You seem to have quite a down on her neighbors,' she remarked. 'Why is that?'

Sam answered for me. 'The whole damn street took against her after she labeled them racists at the inquest. They plagued us for weeks with abusive phone calls. It's the reason we left England.'

Liar! I thought.

'No wonder you hate them,' said Larry sympathetically.

It was a throwaway line, which Sheila, with a questioning lift of her eyebrows, invited me to expand upon. Instead I stood up and said it was time for lunch. I had learned to talk about threatening phone calls without becoming strident...

...but hate? That was a different matter entirely.

Sheila and I walked down to the paddock after lunch and leaned on the rail to watch the horses nibble halfheartedly at the withered vegetation. 'Larry and I always assumed it was professional thieves,' she told me. 'I don't think it ever occurred to us that it might have been someone closer to home.'

'How would professionals know what was in the house?' I asked. 'You said yourself she never let anyone inside.'

'That's equally true of her neighbors,' she pointed out reasonably. 'She was more suspicious of them than she was of strangers.'

'They used to look through her windows,' I said, remembering how I'd come across a gang of young thugs making faces at her through the glass. 'The children were the worst. They thought it was funny to frighten her.'

Sheila caught at the brim of her hat as a warm breeze blew across the field. 'Larry's convinced it was whoever did that valuation she showed me. He thinks it was a scam-someone knocking on doors and posing as an art or antiques expert in order to find out which houses were worth robbing.'

It makes sense, I thought.

'But I don't agree with him,' she went on. 'I'm almost certain it was a Sotheby's valuation because I remember thinking that the figures must be right if a bona fide auction house had come up with them.' She sighed. 'And now I'm furious with myself that I didn't question it at the time. I mean, the whole episode was very odd. What prompted her to get a valuation? And how on earth did she gear herself up to letting a stranger loose on her treasures?' She shook her wrist and rattled the jade bracelet against her watch. 'When she asked me to choose a present she wouldn't let me touch anything. I had to choose by sight, not by feel.'

'When did she show you the valuation?'

'Sometime during the summer. I remember she was particularly difficult that day. One minute she wanted me to read it, the next she snatched it away as if she thought I was going to steal it. She used to get caught in mental loops that made her repeat the same words and actions over and over until something new pushed her on to another track. She could be very tiresome when she was in that sort of mood, which is probably why I didn't question what the valuation was for.'

'An insurance condition?' I suggested. 'No valuation, no insurance.'

She gave an exasperated sigh. 'That's what the police said and it made me boiling mad. 'You can't have it both ways,' I told them. Either she was a mindless cretin who let cats and drink destroy her life, or she was so switched on that she was able to organize insurance for herself. It might have helped if I could have talked to her bank manager but by the time I got around to thinking about it he was long gone. Someone told me he was working in Saudi Arabia but I never followed it up.'