“If you were right,” Miss Norman interrupted, “and I did in fact have the pendant, would you be able to return it to Viscount Latchmere without mentioning my name in any way?”

“Yes. That is my intention. Nothing would be gained, and much lost, by dragging your name through the mud.”

“Very well,” said she in a tone of resignation. She unfastened the capacious bag that lay in her lap and took from it a small bundle, wrapped in an embroidered handkerchief. This she unfolded, and held it out for us to see. Upon the handkerchief, in an elaborate gold setting, lay the largest gemstone I have ever seen in my life. The flickering light from our fire caught the facets of this remarkable stone, which flashed and sparkled with every slight movement of Miss Norman’s hand. “Here is my ‘booty’, as you call it,” said she. “That is all that I took. I know nothing about the missing ring.”

Holmes took the pendant from her hand and held it up by the chain, so that it flashed as it twisted. “There you are, Watson!” said he. “This little object – this little lump of compressed carbon, as a chemist would describe it to us – has been a focus for men’s greed and violence for more than a century! What a record of bloodletting and hatred it has carved for itself in that time! Here,” he continued, leaning across and placing the pendant in my hand. “You realize, of course, my dear fellow, that you are now, technically speaking, a handler of stolen goods! Miss Norman,” he continued, turning to our visitor, “you are an intelligent woman. What can have possessed you to commit such a bizarre and uncharacteristic crime?”

“I will tell you,” she responded. “There are facts of which you are unaware, Mr Holmes. But first, would you please indulge me by telling me how you knew that it was I that had taken the pendant? You are evidently a better detective than Inspector Sturridge, who seemed content simply to make our blood run cold with a list of gangs – Foulgers, Clays, and I don’t know who else – who were likely to climb in at our bedroom windows any night of the year. Or did you just guess?”

“I never guess,” returned Holmes firmly. “It is destructive of the logical faculty. Occasionally one must balance probabilities in order to proceed, but in this case that was scarcely necessary: the indications were clear enough.” He described to Miss Norman his thoughts on the glove found on the lawn, and the absence of any trace of an intruder. “It seemed to me then that the glove had been tossed on the lawn deliberately to throw us off the scent. What could this mean but that the pendant had in fact been taken by someone in the house? As I had, to my own satisfaction, eliminated the household staff from any suspicion, that left only Viscount Latchmere’s four guests and the viscountess herself. Unlikely as it may seem, the possibility that Lady Latchmere had herself had a hand in the disappearance of the pendant could not be dismissed. Her manner was certainly odd, and I was convinced she was keeping a secret of some kind, although whether that related to the missing pendant or not, I could not say.

“However, when I found the fourth glove, it clarified my view of the matter. Presumably the glove found on the lawn had been with the other one of the pair, under the straw hat. But why, then, had that particular glove been chosen to act as a blind, rather than one of the other pair which lay on the table in the dressing room? The only conclusion I could reach was that whoever threw the glove from the window wished it to be found the following morning, when, of course, the loss of the pendant would also be discovered, but did not wish its absence to be noted that evening, so that the precise time of the theft would not be known, and the notion of an intruder would therefore be plausible. But the only person who could have noticed that evening that a glove had disappeared was Lady Latchmere herself. Obviously, it is absurd to suppose that she would take such a precaution against herself, and therefore the glove was not taken by her, but by someone else.

“I was thus faced with something of a dilemma: if Lady Latchmere’s account were true, that she had retired for the night and locked her door immediately her maid had left her, then no one but she herself could have taken the pendant. On the other hand, the evidence of the fourth glove was that someone other than Lady Latchmere had moved the glove and taken the pendant. If that were true, then Lady Latchmere was not being entirely truthful and must have left her bedroom, if only for a few moments. How to resolve this conundrum? On balance, I felt more certainty in the mute testimony of the gloves than the testimony of Lady Latchmere, and therefore decided that the pendant had been taken by one of the guests, and that Lady Latchmere had indeed left her room, despite what she had told me. I dismissed the rajah as a possibility. Everyone seems to have heard him snoring, and although one can feign snoring for a few moments, it is not possible to keep it up for any length of time without bringing on a state of physical collapse. Neither Mr Brocklehurst nor Miss Wiltshire could have reached Lady Latchmere’s bedroom without treading on the creaking floorboards on the landing, and as you stated that you slept very badly away from home, and lay awake for a long time on Saturday night, you would have heard this noise, but you did not. This, I regret to say, left only yourself, Miss Norman.”

“It all sounds so obvious now you have explained it,” remarked our visitor, “that I am surprised I wasn’t arrested first thing on Sunday morning.”

“Now you must answer my question,” said Holmes with a chuckle. “Why did you steal the pendant?”

“I have been a visitor at Latchmere Hall for forty years or more,” replied Miss Norman after a moment. “As an unmarried female relative, I was aware that I was, generally speaking, nothing but a nuisance to the family, but I did have one specific merit: being single, I was always useful as a simple way of balancing the numbers and the sexes at dinner parties. The present viscount’s father always included me in any gatherings he had arranged. I think he hoped to marry me off to one of his single male guests – then he would have satisfied his family duty and could forget about me with a clear conscience – but for various reasons it never happened. So as the years rolled by, I continued my respectable but penurious existence in a small apartment to the north of Notting Hill, answering the summons to Latchmere Hall at regular intervals – the previous viscount always sent me the train fare – to solve the dinner-setting problems of my wealthy relations, and gradually becoming transformed, in the eyes of the world, from young and marriageable, if a little too independent-minded, to elderly and eccentric.”

“How is your family related to that of the viscount?”

“My father was a distant cousin, on the poverty-stricken side of the family. He succeeded to the Barony of Patrington as a young man, but it was not a title that brought any tangible benefit and he hardly ever used it. For many years, he farmed in the East Riding of Yorkshire, which is where I was raised, but he could never entirely break free from debt, and at the time of his death the farm was heavily mortgaged. My brother, Thomas, had been an officer in the Indian Army, but had lost his life during the Mutiny, and my mother had been dead some years, so, upon my father’s death, I was thrown very much on my own resources. I scraped together what money I could, from the sale of the farm and a few other odds and ends, and moved to London, where I had a few friends and where I could supplement my meagre savings with a little teaching work.

“I used to enjoy my periodic visits to Latchmere Hall – at least I knew I would get a square meal there, and would occasionally meet some interesting people – but my enjoyment has faded a little with each passing year. Of course, the estate is beautiful at this time of the year, clothed in the colours of autumn, but I can get a similar pleasure by taking a walk in Hyde Park. My main reason for continuing to go is so that they don’t forget I exist and will continue to invite me down for Christmas. The main problem is that I don’t care very much for the present viscount. Still, I didn’t mean to bore you with my personal concerns. I don’t expect you to understand, and I know it is no justification for my moment of madness, but I have come to resent the viscount’s wealth and my own poverty. It would not matter if they were not so mean. I know there was a time when my father approached the old viscount for a loan, which could have saved him from great difficulty, and which the viscount could easily have afforded, but he turned him down. I mentioned to you that the old viscount used to send me my train fare for visits to Latchmere, but I should add that when I had bought a return ticket from King’s Cross to Hatfield, there was usually not a penny left over. The present viscount is, if anything, even meaner than his father was, and when I had to sit and listen to him on Saturday evening, describing at length how his income from the estate – which I happen to know is huge beyond the dreams of avarice – had declined slightly this year, I’m afraid it made my blood boil. And the irony is that that precious stone, of which Viscount Latchmere and his predecessors have made such a show over the years, does not even really belong to them.”