EAN FABOS BEGINS HIS STORY.
_June 15th, 1904._
So to-night my task begins.
I am to prove that there is a conspiracy of crime so well organised, so
widespread, so amazing in its daring, that the police of all the
civilised countries are at present unable either to imagine or to defeat
it—I am to do this or pay the supreme penalty of failure, ignominious
and irrevocable.
I cannot tell you when first it was that some suspicion of the existence
of this great republic of thieves and assassins first came to me. Years
ago, I asked myself if it were not possible. There has been no great
jewel robbery for a decade past which has not found me more zealous than
the police themselves in study of its methods and judgment of its men. I
can tell you the weight and size almost of every great jewel stolen,
either in Europe or America, during the past five years. I know the life
history of the men who are paying the penalty for some of those crimes.
I can tell you whence they came and what was their intention should they
have carried their booty away. I know the houses in London, in Paris, in
Vienna, in Berlin where you may change a stolen diamond for money as
readily as men cash a banknote across a counter. But there my knowledge
has begun and ended. I feel like a child before a book whose print it
cannot read. There is a great world of crime unexplored, and its very
cities are unnamed. How, then, should a man begin his studies? I answer
that he cannot begin them unless his destiny opens the book.
Let me set down my beliefs a little plainer. If ever the story be read,
it will not be by those who have my grammar of crime at their call, or
have studied, as I have studied, the gospel of robbery as long years
expound it. It would be idle to maintain at great length my belief that
the leading jewel robberies of the world are directed by one brain and
organised by one supreme intelligence. If my own pursuit of this
intelligence fail, the world will never read this narrative. If it
succeed, the facts must be their own witnesses, speaking more eloquently
than any thesis. Let me be content in this place to relate but a single
circumstance. It is that of the discovery of a dead body just three
years ago on the lonely seashore by the little fishing village of
Palling, in Norfolk.
Now, witness this occurrence. The coastguard—for rarely does any but a
coastguardsman tramp that lonely shore—a coastguard, patrolling his
sandy beat at six o’clock of a spring morning, comes suddenly upon the
body of a ship’s officer, lying stark upon the golden beach, cast there
by the flood tide and left stranded by the ebb. No name upon the buttons
of the pilot coat betrayed the vessel which this young man had served.
His cap, needless to say, they did not find. He wore jack-boots such as
an officer of a merchantman would wear; his clothes were of Navy serge;
there was a briar pipe in his left-hand pocket, a silver tobacco box in
his right; he carried a gold watch, and it had stopped at five minutes
past five o’clock. The time, however, could not refer to the morning of
this discovery. It was the coastguardsman’s opinion that the body had
been at least three days in the water.
Such a fatality naturally deserved no more than a brief paragraph in any
daily paper. I should have heard nothing of it but for my friend Murray,
of Scotland Yard, who telegraphed for me upon the afternoon of the
following day; and, upon my arrival at his office, astonished me very
much by first showing me an account of the circumstance in the _Eastern
Daily Press_, and then passing for my examination a roll of cotton wool
such as diamond brokers carry.
“I want your opinion,” he said without preface. “Do you know anything of
the jewels in that parcel?”
There were four stones lying a-glitter upon the wool. One of them, a
great gem of some hundred and twenty carats, rose-coloured, and
altogether magnificent, I recognised at a single glance at the precious
stones.
“That,” I said, “is the Red Diamond of Ford Valley. Ask Baron Louis de
Rothschild, and he will tell you whose property it was.”
“Would you be very surprised to hear that it was found upon the body of
the young sailor?”
“Murray,” I said, “you have known me too long to expect me to be
surprised by anything.”
“But it is somewhat out of the way, isn’t it? That’s why I sent for you.
The other stones don’t appear to be of the same class. But they’re
valuable, I should think.”
I turned them over in my hand and examined them with little interest.
“This pure white is a Brazilian,” said I. “It may be worth a hundred and
fifty pounds. The other two are jewellers’ common stuff. They would make
a pretty pair of ear-rings for your daughter, Murray. You should make
the Treasury an offer for them. Say fifty for the pair.”
“The police haven’t much money to waste on the ladies’ ears,” he said
rather hardly; “we prefer ’em without ornament—they go closer to the
doors. I thought you would like to hear about this. We can’t make much
of it here, and I don’t suppose you’ll make more. A ship’s officer like
that—you don’t expect him to be a fence in a common way, and he’s about
the last you’d name for a professional hand in Paris—for if this is
Baron Louis’s stone, as you say, it must have been stolen in Paris.”
“No reason at all, Murray. His wife wore it in her tiara. She was at the
Prince’s, I believe, no more than a month ago. Does that occur to you?”
He shrugged his shoulders as though I had been judging his capacity,
which, God knows, would have been an unprofitable employment enough.
“We haven’t begun to think about it,” he said. “How can we? No ship has
reported his loss. He carried a pipe, a tobacco box, a gold watch, and
this. Where does your clue start? Tell me that, and I’ll go on it.”
“There are no papers, then?”
“None—that is, this paper. And if you can make head or tail of it, I’ll
give a hundred pounds to a hospital.”
He passed across the table a worn and tattered letter case. It contained
a dirty calendar of the year, a lock of dark-chestnut hair, a plain gold
wedding ring, and a slip of paper with these words upon it:
“Captain Three Fingers—Tuesday.”
“Is that all, Murray?” I asked when I had put the paper down.
“Absolutely all,” he replied.
“You have searched him for secret pockets?”
“As a woman’s bag at a remnant sale.”
“Where did he carry the diamonds?”
“Inside his waistcoat—a double pocket lined with wool.”
“No arms upon him?”
“Not a toothpick.”
“And you have no trace of any vessel?”
“Lloyd’s can tell us nothing. There has been no report made. It is
evident that the man fell off a ship, though what ship, and where,
heaven alone knows.”
This, I am afraid, was obvious. The police had asked me to identify the
jewels and now that it was done I could be of no more service to them.
It remained to see what Baron Louis de Rothschild would have to say, and
when I had reminded Murray of that, I took my leave. It would be idle to
pretend that I had come to any opinion which might help him. To me, as
to others, the case seemed one of profound mystery. A dead seaman
carried jewels of great price hidden in his clothes, and he had fallen
overboard from a ship. If some first tremor of an idea came to me, I
found it in the word “ship.” A seaman and a ship—yes, I must remember
that.
And this will bring me to the last and most astonishing feature of this
perplexing mystery. Baron Louis expressed the greatest incredulity when
he heard of the loss of his famous jewel. It was at his banker’s in
Paris, he declared. A telegram to the French house brought the reply
that they had the stone sure enough, and that it was in safe keeping,
both literally and in metaphor. To this I answered by the pen of my
friend at Scotland Yard that if the bankers would cause the stone to be
examined for the second time, they would find it either to be false or
of a quality so poor that it could never be mistaken by any expert for
the Red Diamond of Ford Valley. Once more fact confirmed my
suppositions. The jewel in Paris was a coarse stone, of little value,
and as unlike the real gem as any stone could be. Plainly the Baron had
been robbed, though when and by whom he had not the remotest idea.
You will admit that this twentieth century conception of theft is not
without its ingenuity. The difference in value between a diamond of the
first water and the third is as the difference between a sovereign and a
shilling. Your latter day thief, desiring some weeks of leisure in which
to dispose of a well-known jewel, will sometimes be content with less
than the full value of his enterprise. He substitutes a stone of dubious
quality for one of undoubted purity. Madam, it may be, thinks her
diamonds want cleaning, and determines to send them to the jeweller’s
when she can spare them. That may be in six months’ time, when her
beautiful gems are already sparkling upon the breast of a Rajah or his
latest favourite. And she never can be certain that her diamonds were as
fine as she believed them to be.
This I had long known. It is not a fact, however, which helps the
police, nor have I myself at any time made much of it. Indeed, all that
remained to me of the discovery upon Palling beach was the suggestion of
a ship, and the possession of a slip of paper with its almost childish
memorandum: “Captain Three Fingers—Tuesday.”