“Miss, Miss, I found one!”
Edith Langford smiled at the small child holding a painted egg and said, “Excellent!” for what felt like the thousandth time. Perhaps she and Mrs. Lundy had been too enthusiastic in organising the Longborough Easter egg hunt. They seemed to have hidden hundreds of the things.
Around her, parents temporarily relieved of duty chatted in the sunshine. Lady Elrington circulated amongst them, showing off her new proteges — an artist from London and his composer friend, who were renting a cottage on her estate. Meanwhile, her husband had cornered the vicar in a discussion of horses that looked like it would last quite some time.
Edith was considering coming to the rescue, when she felt a tug on her sleeve.
“Miss, look what I found!” A little girl danced around her excitedly, holding up her egg. “Isn’t it pretty?”
Edith stared, blinked, then stared again. It was certainly very pretty. It was also made of gold and encrusted with rubies and emeralds.
“A Faberge egg…” she breathed. She’d read about them last autumn when an exhibition of Russian imperial jewels came to London. “Susie, where did you get this?”
Susie pointed proudly to a corner of the churchyard, where something glinted in the weeds. It was an old toolbox, probably left to the elements when the old gardener died last year. His replacement, a young and careless individual, angered all the church ladies with his treatment of the hedges. No wonder he’d left this toolbox to rust in the rain.
It was the last place you’d expect to find a priceless treasure.
“You’ve found something very important,” said Edith. “We should show it to the vicar.”
Susie skipped excitedly to where the vicar was embroiled in a new discussion with Lady Elrington.
“We found a treasure!” she exclaimed, interrupting the lady’s hedge-related woes. She held up the egg.
“Incredible,” murmured the vicar. “But I’ve never seen it before. Should we inform the police?”
“Wait!” Lady Elrington peered at the egg and nodded. “You’re not going to believe this, but I know whose egg this is.”
An unusual group gathered in Lady Elrington’s drawing-room that evening to discuss the mystery egg. Detective-Sergeant Anderson smiled at Edith across their coffee cups. Next to him, a severe-looking woman in her fifties and a languid young man cast disapproving glances around them. They were apparently the Countess Orloff and her son, with whom Lady Elrington was acquainted through London society. On Edith’s other side, Mrs. Lundy — never one to be left out of anything — stared in awe at the Russian nobles.
Lady Elrington turned to her guests of honour.
“Maria Nikolaevna, Ivan Vassilyevich—” she pronounced their names with the pride of an English person who’d mastered a foreign language, “thank you for joining us on such short notice.”
The countess nodded.
“You find my Faberge egg. I thank you. But vy I cannot take it home?”
DS Anderson cleared his throat.
“I’m afraid it’s not that simple, ma’am. This egg disappeared from the Royal Society’s exhibition last December — a particularly clever heist, I must say. The investigation is still ongoing, and the egg is evidence.”
The countess frowned.
“Egg is my property, no? You have letter from me in Paris, vich I send with egg to exhibition.”
“That’s right, ma’am.”
“Two veeks later, I follow, and vot do I find? My precious egg is stolen, and police have no clue. And now finally it is restored, and police vant to take it!”
“Outrageous!” put in her son.
“I’m very sorry, ma’am,” Anderson said diplomatically. “But I assure you it will be safe in police custody.”
The countess huffed.
“Like it vos safe in your so-called Royal Society? Zis egg is more than trinket. All my father’s possessions were destroyed by revolutionaries. They burnt our home! Even his dear balalaika, which he played to me when I vos little girl — gone. Egg is only heirloom I have left!”
She looked close to tears, and her son patted her arm soothingly. Anderson cast Edith a glance that said “help!”
“Perhaps if we figure out how it got to Longborough, we can solve the mystery,” Edith suggested.
“Vy don’t you ask those two men?” The countess pointed out the window. “Alvays they skulk about! When I vos last here at Christmas, they skulk. Now they skulk again!”
Edith turned to the window, in time to see Lady Elrington’s tenants retreating down the path. Had they really been eavesdropping?
“I don’t think—” Lady Elrington spluttered. “They’re friends of mine. James is an artist, and Derrick is a composer.”
“James Avery?” asked Anderson quickly.
“That’s right.”
“The CID interviewed him at the time of the heist. He’d been hanging around the exhibition and for a while was a suspect. Same with his friend.”
“No!” Lady Elrington looked aghast. The countess jumped to her feet.
“You mean you harbour thieves?” she thundered. “You are no friend, you are vorse than Lenin! If only my husband, my dear Vladimir, vas here— vy he’d never—” she broke down into sobs.
“Outrageous!” repeated her son, putting an arm around his mother.
Anderson waved his hands feebly, trying to calm the situation.
“I’ll talk to those two myself,” he said. “Perhaps Scotland Yard missed something.”
“So both men were here at Christmas,” said Edith, as they all trooped down the path to the cottage.
Anderson nodded.
“They had the opportunity to hide the egg. Maybe now they’ve come back for it.”
They were soon crowded into the sitting room of the cottage, which was curiously devoid of art supplies of any kind.
“I wish we could help you, Detective.” James Avery shrugged nonchalantly. “But we’ve done nothing more than go to an exhibition and then visit here at Christmas.”
“When we learned that Lady E had a cottage to rent, we decided to come back in the spring,” added Derrick Masters.
“And perhaps you’ve been strolling around the churchyard, too?” asked Anderson sternly.
“I take my constitutional there,” said Derrick, “but so do many people.”
Edith didn’t miss the way his eyes shifted nervously, nor the sharp glance James cast her when she said:
“You don’t seem to have many painting supplies.”
“I work in a sketchbook,” he replied tersely.
Edith and Anderson exchanged hopeless glances. There was clearly something off here, but the lack of evidence was staggering.
“Well, thank you for your time, ” Anderson said, defeated.
“Vot, that is it?” Countess Orloff pushed her way to the front, her face flushed with anger. “You let them go just like zat?”
“Outrageous!” echoed her son. Edith wondered if it was the only English word he knew.
“Now ma’am—”
“No you listen to me!” The countess was fairly shaking with rage. “Revolution destroy my home, my country! Russian Empire stand for one thousand years before Communists come and take everything, and now—”
And suddenly Edith knew.
“And now, it’s time to stop pretending,” she told the countess, who trailed off in mid-sentence.
“I don’t understand—” she began, but Edith shook her head.
“You’re no more Russian than I am,” she said sternly. “I could half-believe that your father played the balalaika, although it was the instrument of the common people, and would be a bit like Her Ladyship doing the Highland Fling.”
Anderson made a choking noise.
“But,” Edith continued, “if your husband was Vladimir, why is your son Ivan Vassilyevich — not Ivan Vladimirovich? That’s how Russian names work, isn’t it?”
The countess went pale.
“And when you said the Russian Empire was a thousand years old, even though it was founded by Peter the Great in 1721, I knew for sure you were no Countess Orloff.” She turned to Anderson. “If you wire Paris, you’ll probably discover that the real countess never left France!”
The so-called countess tried to back away and found her arm firmly in Mrs. Lundy’s grip.
“Forget it, Alfie,” she said to her son, who was edging toward the door. “They’ve got us now.” And unsurprisingly, she didn’t have a trace of accent.
“Well I never!” Lady Elrington shook her head in wonder as Constable Horn led the two away. “Just common thieves, who didn’t know as much about Russia as they thought.”
Edith laughed.
“It’s lucky we did Russian history last term.”
“Always good to have a teacher on hand,” smiled Anderson.
The lady turned to her artistic friends. “And to think we almost accused you two of being impostors!”
“I’m afraid you’re in for another shock, Lady Elrington,” said Edith. James grinned.
“I don’t know how this young lady knows everything,” he said, “but it’s true.” He dug a piece of paper out of his pocket and held it up. “Soviet Agent Isayev, at your service. My colleague from your government,” he nodded at Derrick, “has been helping me track down the rightful property of the Russian people. Once the investigation is over, I will contend in court that the egg belongs to the USSR.”
Lady Elrington had no more exclamations left. She simply dropped into a chair and shook her head, dazed. Mrs. Lundy patted her arm and tutted disapprovingly at the young people.
“It’s a lot to take in,” she remonstrated, “that four of one’s acquaintance aren’t who they say they are!”
“At least you foiled a theft, Your Ladyship,” said Derrick encouragingly.
“And helped restore the property of the people,” added James.
“Now we’ve talked about this—” Derrick started.
“The law of the USSR is clear—” James interrupted.
Anderson steered Edith out of the cottage.
“What a headache,” he grumbled. Edith smiled.
“A jewel heist, false identities, an international dispute… This was certainly an Easter egg hunt to remember!”
Daria Writes 