The Trouble with Tiffany Glass
The theft was discovered on a Tuesday, which Edith Margrave always thought was the most treacherous day of the week. Mondays, people were watchful. By Wednesday, they had settled. But on Tuesdays, the world was neither one thing nor another, and that was precisely when things went wrong.
She had been arranging the church flowers — her turn on the rota — when Reverend Callow came hurrying through the vestry door, his reading glasses askew and his face the colour of uncooked pastry.
“The Fenwick panel,” he said. “It’s gone.”
Edith set down her scissors and followed him to the north aisle. The narrow lancet window that had held the Fenwick memorial glass for one hundred and forty years now showed only a rectangle of plain grey sky. The leading was still there, bent outward like a broken picture frame. The panel itself — three feet of hand-painted medieval revival glass depicting Saint Crispin in his cobbler’s workshop, donated by the Fenwick family in 1881 and valued, she understood, at rather more than most houses in the village — had been removed with considerable care.
Constable Dreethe arrived within the hour, examined the empty frame, wrote several things in his notebook, and announced that it was almost certainly the work of professional thieves passing through. He said the word “professional” with great satisfaction, as though it absolved the village entirely.
Edith said nothing. She was looking at the stone floor beneath the window.
There was a single muddy boot print, pointing not toward the door, but toward the organ loft staircase. Constable Dreethe had walked directly through it.
She excused herself quietly and spent the next hour doing what she did best — which was talking to people in a manner so unhurried and pleasant that they forgot they were being asked anything at all.
She started with Gerald Prout, the verger, who was a meticulous man and kept a visitors’ log. Three names had signed in the previous Friday afternoon, the last occasion the panel had been confirmed present. Two were a retired couple from Derbyshire doing a brass-rubbing tour. The third was a Mr. A. Sibley, who had written his address as Flat 4, Cormorant House, Sefton-on-Wye.
“Do you remember him?” Edith asked.
Gerald thought carefully. “Tall. Youngish. Asked a great many questions about the window specifically — the provenance, the artist. I thought he was a student of some kind.”
“Did he go up to the organ loft?”
Gerald blinked. “I don’t recall seeing him, but I was in the vestry for a good twenty minutes around half past two.”
Next, Edith visited Dot Hemsley, who ran the post office and whose memory for faces was a local institution. Dot confirmed that a tall young man had bought a local map on Friday afternoon and had asked, with no apparent self-consciousness, whether the church was typically locked at night.
“I told him Reverend Callow leaves it open until evensong,” Dot said. “We’ve always done. Is that important?”
“Very possibly,” said Edith pleasantly, and moved on.
She called on the one person she had wanted to speak to from the beginning: Margaret Fenwick, the last of the family whose ancestors had donated the glass. Margaret was eighty-one, arthritic, and extremely sharp. She lived at Fenwick Grange, a house that had been gradually selling off its contents for the better part of three decades.
“I wondered when someone sensible would come,” Margaret said, when Edith appeared at her door. She led her into a sitting room where the wallpaper showed pale rectangles where paintings had once hung. “I’ve had solicitors’ letters, you know. From a dealer. Claiming the panel belongs to the estate and was only loaned to the church. Complete nonsense, of course — my grandfather gave it outright. But they’ve been rather persistent.”
“Do you recall the dealer’s name?”
Margaret handed her an envelope from the mantelpiece as though she had been expecting precisely this request. The letter was signed on behalf of an art recovery firm called Sibley and Associates.
Edith walked home through the churchyard, thinking. The theft had been careful — too careful for opportunism, too confident for a stranger unfamiliar with the building. Someone had visited on Friday to confirm the panel’s presence and study the window mechanism. Someone had returned in the evening, after evensong, and used the organ loft stairs — she suspected to access the upper edge of the window, where the panel would have been easier to tilt free. Someone who believed, however wrongly, that they had a claim on what they were taking.
She telephoned Constable Dreethe and outlined her conclusions in a tone she had spent forty years perfecting — one that managed to be entirely deferential while making it absolutely clear that the correct answer was already known. She suggested he check whether Sibley and Associates had premises in the county and whether a panel of antique stained glass had been delivered to any of them in the past forty-eight hours.
It had. On Wednesday morning, a routine enquiry to three addresses associated with the firm produced an immediate result. The panel was found, undamaged, in a storage unit in Hereford. A young man named Arthur Sibley — son of the firm’s founder — was cautioned and the matter passed to the relevant authorities. The civil question of the glass’s true ownership, Edith gathered, would take rather longer to resolve, but the Reverend Callow was confident the church’s original deed of gift was quite unambiguous.
The panel was returned to St. Crispin’s on a Friday, reinstalled by a conservator who declared it unharmed. Edith was arranging flowers again when the light came back through Saint Crispin’s cobbler’s workshop and fell in warm amber shapes across the stone floor.
Gerald Prout appeared at her elbow. “How did you know to ask about the organ loft?”
“The boot print pointed toward it,” Edith said, trimming a stem with precision. “And there was a faint scrape on the upper sill that hadn’t been there the week before. I polished that window ledge myself in October.”
Gerald considered this. “I suppose Constable Dreethe missed it.”
“Constable Dreethe,” said Edith serenely, “had rather large feet.”
She placed the last lily in the vase and stepped back to admire her work. Through the restored panel, Saint Crispin gazed down with his customary patience, one hundred and forty years of coloured light restored exactly where it belonged.
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