Cat Among the Pigeons - Agatha Christie [64]
“But there must be,” said Julia to herself. “There must. The burglary at Jennifer’s home, the woman who came with that silly story about a new racquet….”
Only Jennifer would have believed that, thought Julia scornfully.
No, it was “new lamps for old” and that meant, like in Aladdin, that there was something about this particular tennis racquet. Jennifer and Julia had never mentioned to anyone that they had swopped racquets—or at least, she herself never had.
So really then, this was the racquet that everyone was looking for in the Sports Pavilion. And it was up to her to find out why! She examined it carefully. There was nothing unusual about it to look at. It was a good quality racquet, somewhat the worse for wear, but restrung and eminently usable. Jennifer had complained of the balance.
The only place you could possibly conceal anything in a tennis racquet was in the handle. You could, she supposed, hollow out the handle to make a hiding place. It sounded a little far-fetched but it was possible. And if the handle had been tampered with, that probably would upset the balance.
There was a round of leather with lettering on it, the lettering almost worn away. That of course was only stuck on. If one removed that? Julia sat down at her dressing table and attacked it with a penknife and presently managed to pull the leather off. Inside was a round of thin wood. It didn’t look quite right. There was a join all round it. Julia dug in her penknife. The blade snapped. Nail scissors were more effective. She succeeded at last in prising it out. A mottled red and blue substance now showed. Julia poked it and enlightenment came to her. Plasticine! But surely handles of tennis racquets didn’t normally contain plasticine? She grasped the nail scissors firmly and began to dig out lumps of plasticine. The stuff was encasing something. Something that felt like buttons or pebbles.
She attacked the plasticine vigorously.
Something rolled out on the table—then another something. Presently there was quite a heap.
Julia leaned back and gasped.
She stared and stared and stared….
Liquid fire, red and green and deep blue and dazzling white….
In that moment, Julia grew up. She was no longer a child. She became a woman. A woman looking at jewels….
All sorts of fantastic snatches of thought raced through her brain. Aladdin’s cave … Marguerite and her casket of jewels … (They had been taken to Covent Garden to hear Faust last week) … Fatal stones … the Hope diamond … Romance … herself in a black velvet gown with a flashing necklace round her throat….
She sat and gloated and dreamed … She held the stones in her fingers and let them fall through in a rivulet of fire, a flashing stream of wonder and delight.
And then something, some slight sound perhaps, recalled her to herself.
She sat thinking, trying to use her common sense, deciding what she ought to do. That faint sound had alarmed her. She swept up the stones, took them to the washstand and thrust them into her sponge bag and rammed her sponge and nail brush down on top of them. Then she went back to the tennis racquet, forced the plasticine back inside it, replaced the wooden top and tried to gum down the leather on top again. It curled upwards, but she managed to deal with that by applying adhesive plaster the wrong way up in thin strips and then pressing the leather on to it.
It was done. The racquet looked and felt just as before, its weight hardly altered in feel. She looked at it and then cast it down carelessly on a chair.
She looked at her bed, neatly turned down and waiting. But she did not undress. Instead she sat listening. Was that a footstep outside?
Suddenly and unexpectedly she knew fear. Two people had been killed. If anyone knew what she had found, she would be killed.
There was a fairly heavy oak chest of drawers in the room. She managed to drag it in front of the door, wishing that it was the custom at Meadowbank to have keys in the locks. She went to the window, pulled up the top sash and bolted it. There was