Night Over Water - Ken Follett [113]
He looked at the bag under Lord Oxenford’s seat. The stewards were still busy. He decided to push his luck.
He pulled out Oxenford’s bag. It was like a carpetbag, but leather. It was fastened with a zipper at the top, and the zipper had a little padlock. Harry carried a penknife with him for moments such as this. He used the knife to snap the padlock, then unzipped the bag.
As he was rifling through the contents, the little steward, Davy, came through, carrying a tray of drinks from the galley. Harry looked up at him and smiled. Davy looked at the bag. Harry held his breath and kept his frozen smile. The steward passed on into the dining room. He had naturally assumed the bag was Harry’s own.
Harry breathed again. He was a master at disarming suspicion, but every time he did it he was scared to death.
Oxenford’s bag contained the masculine equivalent of what his wife was carrying: shaving tackle, hair oil, striped pajamas, flannel underwear and a biography of Napoleon. Harry zipped it up and replaced the padlock. Oxenford would find it broken and wonder how it had happened. If he was suspicious he would check to see whether anything was missing. Finding everything in place, he would imagine the lock had been faulty.
Harry put the bag back in its place.
He had got away with it, but he was no nearer the Delhi Suite.
It was unlikely the children were carrying the jewels, but, recklessly, he decided to go through their luggage.
If Lord Oxenford had decided to be sly and put his wife’s jewelry in his children’s luggage, he would be more likely to pick Percy, who would be thrilled by the conspiracy, than Margaret, who was disposed to defy her father.
Harry picked up Percy’s canvas holdall and put it on the seat just where he had placed Oxenford’s bag, hoping that if Davy, the steward, passed through again, he would think it was the same bag.
Percy’s things were so neatly packed that Harry was sure a servant had done it. No normal fifteen-year-old boy would fold his pajamas and wrap them in tissue paper. His sponge bag contained a new toothbrush and a fresh tube of toothpaste. There was a pocket chess set, a small bundle of comics and a packet of chocolate biscuits—put there, Harry imagined, by a fond cook or housemaid. Harry looked inside the chess set, riffled through the comics and broke open the biscuit packet, but he found no jewels.
As he was replacing the bag, a passenger walked through on the way to the men’s room. Harry ignored him.
He could not believe Lady Oxenford had left the Delhi Suite behind, in a country that might be invaded and conquered within a few weeks. But she was not wearing it or carrying it, as far as he could tell. If it was not in Margaret’s bag, it had to be in the checked baggage. That would be tough to get at. Could you get into the hold while the plane was in the air? The alternative might be to follow the Oxenfords to their hotel in New York....
The captain and Clive Membury would be wondering how he could take so long to fetch his camera.
He picked up Margaret’s bag. It looked like a birthday present: a small, round-cornered case made of soft cream leather with beautiful brass fittings. When he opened it he smelled her perfume, Tosca. He found a cotton nightdress with a pattern of small flowers, and tried to picture her in it. It was too girlish for her. Her underwear was plain white cotton. He wondered whether she was a virgin. There was a small framed photograph of a boy about twenty-one, a handsome fellow with longish dark hair and black eyebrows, wearing a college gown and a mortarboard hat: the boy who died in Spain, presumably. Had she slept with him? Harry rather thought she might have, despite her schoolgirl underpants. She was reading a novel by D. H. Lawrence. I bet her mother doesn’t know about that, Harry thought. There was a little stack of linen handkerchiefs embroidered “M.O.” They smelled of Tosca.
The jewels were not here. Damn it to hell.
Harry decided to take one of the scented handkerchiefs as a souvenir; and just as he picked