Chapter 10: Recognition

It was hard for Gregg to come to terms with the fact that he had succeeded in his intentions, even though the emerald now sat in a small padded box in his room. His cock still craved the satisfaction of the women he had encountered as if only congress with Sally or Sharon would complete the act.

The reports of the robbery only gave him passing amusement. On the local TV news the news readers were claiming that the witnesses could hardly remember anything but that they were agreed that the robbery had been carried out by a strange eastern figure, more than six foot tall and dark skinned. Gregg at five feet six and with his sandy, freckled complexion, couldn’t understand how they were possibly referring to him. He wanted to stand up on the top of his apartment block and yell, “It’s me you fools, me!”

Maxine Connor was feeling smug. Of course, she had derived a certain glee from Aaron Rodwell’s fury at the robbery and the subsequent criticism he had received over the security arrangements but now she felt she was on the trail of an answer to the question of how the Heron emerald had been stolen.

Her smugness at Rodwell’s discomfort hadn’t lasted long though. The same day she was called into his office and fired. “You’re the curator,” Rodwell had said. “The trustees are looking for a scapegoat and it certainly isn’t going to be me. You should have made better security arrangements. I’m sorry, Maxine, you’ll have to go.”

Maxine thought of a dozen clever things to say after she left his office in stunned silence but it was too late. All she could do, she thought, would be to find the real culprit and, since she was not so naive as to imagine that would get her job back, and get her revenge on Rodwell for his treatment of her.

The answer to the first question, she was certain, had something to do with another incident, one at the college library.

Nothing had been made public about the actual circumstances of the museum robbery. The guard and poor Sharon had remembered almost nothing about what had happened, beyond their descriptions of their assailant but Maxine had been there when they had found the guard, half stripped of her uniform, and she had seen how confused Sharon had been about the whole incident. She was also interested by the fact that it was only the Heron jewel that had been taken. There were plenty of other artefacts every bit as valuable in the museum and the thief would have had free run of the place after dealing with the two girls but it was all untouched.

There were no real details either about the library incident and the only reason that she knew anything about it was because she occasionally met up with some of the girls from the library for a coffee or lunch. It all had something to do with Maria Barber. Normally Maria was a studious girl, more interested in cataloguing some of the early editions that the library held than dealing with those that came to use the library, but there was something strange, almost abstracted, about her of late. The others had all been convinced that she had a boyfriend. Maria had denied it in a flustered way. Maxine thought it had something to do with the disappearance of the library’s copy of Heron’s book. The library had only discovered that it was missing when Maxine had tried to arrange for it to be loaned to the museum for the exhibition. Maria and the other assistants had had some uncomfortable discussions with the Chief Librarian and Maria had seemed very upset about it all. She had confided in Maxine that there was one afternoon where she really couldn’t remember what had happened during her shift. It was then that Maxine realised she had seen a ginger haired, freckle faced, lad emerging from the library on that afternoon, and that he had been the same student that she had collided with at the museum.

Gregg had at least found one way to capitalise on his new found gifts. If he couldn’t get credit for his robbery be could at least reinvigorate his magic career, even if Samantha Wallace was still proving resistant to his efforts to entice her back as his assistant. (Gregg had been disappointed to discover that his hypnotic powers seemed useless when it came to telephone calls.)

He’d come up with the idea of busking a few tricks in the big square outside the college’s main building as a way of at least getting a bit of an audience that he might translate into something more ambitious. He’d found that since his experiences with the Swami’s hashish or whatever it was, he had a surprising ability to read hidden cards. His skill at the trick that had finally caused Samantha to throw in the towel was now such that he was able to astonish the group of students standing around his pitch at the side of the main steps.

“There’s no one here that’ll sit down to a game of poker with you,” one of them called with a grin, giving Gregg a considerable sense of satisfaction.