I paused. The first expression on Mr Sterndale’s face was one of blank astonishment. Then he broke into Billingsgate abuse of me.
‘You infernal liar! You two-faced cat! You dirty little witch! I’m not going to stay in this room to be insulted by a miserable creature –’
He made for the door. ‘Stop him!’ I cried. As he reached the door it was thrown back almost in his face, and who should come into the room but Mr and Mrs Travers. How glad I was to see them! ‘Stop him!’ I cried to Mr Travers. ‘Stop that man!’ And Mr Travers stopped him. ‘Put your hand into the pocket of his jacket and take out what he has there.’
Mr Travers, knowing nothing of what had been taking place, must have been rather at a loss as to what I might mean by such a request; but he did as I told him, all the same. Mr Sterndale struggled; he did his best to protect himself and his pocket; but he was rather a small man, and Mr Travers was a giant, both in stature and in strength. In a very few seconds he was staring at the contents of his hand.
‘From the look of things, this gentleman’s pocket seems to be stuffed with diamonds. Here’s a diamond necklace.’
He held one up in the air. Heavy weight though she was, I believe that Mrs Anstruther sprang several inches from the floor.
‘It’s my necklace!’ she screamed.
‘And where are my pearls?’ demanded Mrs Newball.
‘Miss Sterndale whispered to her brother that your pearls were inside the bodice of her dress.’
The words were scarcely out of my lips before Mrs Newball sprang at Miss Sterndale, and there ensued a really painful scene. Had she not been restrained, I dare say she would have torn Miss Sterndale’s clothes right off her. As it was, someone opened her bodice, and the pearls were produced.
The scene which followed was like pandemonium on a small scale. It seemed as if everyone had gone stark, staring mad. Guests, manager, and staff were all shouting together. I know that Mrs Travers had her arm round me, and I was happier than – only a few minutes before – I thought that I should ever feel again.
We did not prosecute the Sterndales – which turned out not to be their name, and they were proved not to be sister and brother. Law in Switzerland does not move too quickly; the formalities to be observed are numerous. I did not very much want to have to remain in Switzerland for an indefinite period, at my own expense, to give evidence in a case in which I was not in the faintest degree interested. The others, the guests in the hotel, did not want to do that anymore than I did. Their property was restored to them – that was what they wanted.
They would have liked to punish the thieves, but not at the cost of so much inconvenience to themselves. So far as we were concerned, the criminals got off scot-free; but, none the less, they did not escape the vengeance of the law. That night they were arrested at Interlaken on another charge. It seemed that they were the perpetrators of that robbery in the hotel at Pontresina which, according to Mr Sterndale, his apocryphal clerical friend had laid at my door. They had passed there as Mr and Mrs Burnett, and were found guilty and sentenced to a long term of imprisonment. I have not seen or heard anything of that pseudonymous brother and sister since. I hope I never shall.
To find out what people are saying to each other in confidence, when they suppose themselves to be out of the reach of curious ears, may be very like eavesdropping. If it is, I am very glad that, on various occasions in my life, I have been enabled to be an eavesdropper in that sense. Had I not, at Interlaken, had the power which made of me an eavesdropper, I might have been branded as a criminal, and my happiness, my whole life, have been destroyed for ever.
DIANA MARBURG, ‘THE ORACLE OF MADDOX STREET’
Created by LT Meade (1844-1914) and Robert Eustace (1854-1943)
She appeared in only a handful of stories, first published in Pearson’s Magazine in 1902, but Diana Marburg is one of the most interesting and offbeat women detectives of the period. A palmist by profession, with an interest in the occult and what she calls ‘strange mysteries of the unseen world’, she is invited to use her expertise in solving crimes. Although palm-reading plays its part in the Diana Marburg stories, the explanations and motives for the wrongdoings in them are rooted very firmly in the natural world rather than the realm of the supernatural. One tale provides an early example of the use of fingerprints (the first UK Fingerprint Bureau was only established in Scotland Yard the year before the story’s publication); another contains arguably the most ingenious, if wildly implausible, method of murder in all of Edwardian crime fiction. There is no murder in ‘Sir Penn Caryll’s Engagement’, only fraud and deception, but the perpetrators certainly display plenty of ingenuity in the means they employ to carry out their scam. Whether it is plausible or
