Buckingham Palace Gardens - Anne Perry [110]
Together they walked back up the stairs to his room and put it down on the table. She stood in front of it, not even allowing him to question whether she was going to remain or not.
Very carefully he unwrapped the newspaper around the pieces and looked at the debris. It was exactly as Walton had said: small pieces of broken china, some of it not more than chips and dust, other pieces as large as an inch across. There was blue and gold paint on them in an exquisitely delicate pattern: tiny little lattice in gold, leaves and the edge of what looked like a woman’s dress. The largest piece was curved as if from the side of a pedestal.
Gracie picked up a lump that was mostly white, and turned it over in her fingers. “Looks like it were the bottom, or summink,” she said thoughtfully. “But why make all that fuss over a broke dish? Why ’ide it instead o’ just throwin’ it out like anythin’ else wot’s bust. D’ yer think it’s summink special? Royal, like?”
“I don’t know,” Pitt said honestly, picking up another piece, which was quite large and of irregular shape. “The painting on it is beautiful, but I don’t know what it could be.” He turned it over. “It seems to have a painted inside as well as outside. And that bit looks too flat for a bowl. I wonder if it’s a lid? How could anyone break something this badly? It’s completely smashed.”
“Throw it at the wall,” Gracie said, screwing her face up. “Yer don’t bust summink like this by just droppin’ it, even on a stone floor. An’ it come from upstairs. Wood floor’d just break it ter pieces, but this is like someone trod on it, on purpose, like.” She stared at it in dismay. “’Oo’d do summink rotten like that, just break a dish wot’s beautiful inter little bits, on purpose?”
“I don’t know, but I think perhaps we need to.” Pitt pushed his fingers around the broken shards carefully, searching for anything large enough to identify. “There’s not much, is there. Have you ever broken a large dish, Gracie?”
She blushed unhappily. “Yeah.” She did not add any details.
“Was this how much of it was left?”
“No. Were a lot more. But I broke cups before, an’ they weren’t this much in bits, not the good porcelain ones. D’yer reckon as this weren’t a reg’lar plate, Mr. Pitt?”
“Yes, I do, Gracie. I just can’t work out what it was.” He pulled out a small, round piece, three-quarters of an inch at its widest. He turned it over, looking at it carefully. It was mostly plain white, but there was a little bit of writing on one side—the letters IMO and what looked like an E, incomplete.
It was part of a word, and suddenly he knew what the word was: “Limoges.” He had seen it before written on exquisite porcelain: candlesticks, chargers, vases, bowls, and figurines. Long ago in the police he had dealt with theft of such works of art.
“It was an ornament,” he said quietly. He turned over the piece in his hand again. “I think this was part of the base. The name was on it. The gold was probably the rim. The blue would be part of a picture.”
“Is it very precious?” she asked, her face tight in sympathy with whoever had broken it. “Somebody’s gonna lose their place ’ere ’cos they smashed it?”
“Do you think that is enough to explain Mr. Tyndale hiding it?” Pitt said instead of answering her.
She shook her head, a stiff, tiny gesture.
“It seems to have been broken the night Sadie was murdered,” he went on, thinking ahead. “It has to have had something to do with it. That’s the only thing that would explain why he would go to so much trouble to conceal it.”
“’Ooever it belongs ter is goin’ ter be pretty angry,” she said seriously.
“He’s not hiding it from them; they’ll find out anyway,” he said. “He’s hiding it from us.”
“D’yer think so?” She frowned.
“Yes, otherwise he could have told us in confidence, and we would have thought no more of it. Domestic breakage is hardly Special Branch business. I wonder where it came from, whose room it was in?”
“D’yer reckon