Jessica Shaw—AJ Smith

Jessica Shaw and A.J. Smith share a relationship that Barnaby Shaw describes as intellectually intimate but physically nonsexual; its playful courtship becomes the private audience A.J. seeks to impress through crime. Jessica’s bond with him changes after Sid Towers is killed: she suspects A.J., conceals her suspicion, and ultimately joins him in a further plot that ends with Rupert Darby murdered and his death staged as suicide.

Financial Support and the Gallery

A.J.’s connection to Jessica begins in part through his substantial financial stake in the gallery she runs. He helps with its exhibitions, but his contribution reaches beyond artistic participation: he pays the recurring overheads that Barnaby says he and Jessica could not meet on their own. Heating, publicity, and the city’s business rates make the gallery costly to sustain, while Barnaby can contribute only when his own profits allow. A.J. takes care of those regular expenses.

The arrangement is not presented as an attempt by A.J. to secure special treatment. Barnaby explains that A.J. hopes to sell his paintings and could insist on a one-man show, yet accepts the same standing as any other artist who wants to exhibit. His financial stake gives him a practical interest in the gallery’s success, but Barnaby identifies friendship as the essential basis of his support. The distinction matters to Diamond, who is accustomed to searching relationships for jealousy and rivalry and finds Barnaby’s generosity difficult to interpret.

Barnaby separates A.J.’s regular financial help from his own occasional gifts to Jessica. He says he paid for the booze at one event because a single celebration was easier to fund than the gallery’s continuing bills. That detail makes the scale of A.J.’s contribution concrete: Barnaby’s gift is a one-off gesture, while A.J. helps keep the enterprise operating. It also shows that Barnaby does not initially treat the other man’s support as proof of an affair or as grounds for resentment.

Marriage and Intellectual Courtship

When Diamond raises the possibility that A.J.’s closeness to Jessica has a physical or romantic dimension, Barnaby answers with confidence in his wife. He describes Jessica as modern and intelligent but old-fashioned about fidelity, and says he trusts her absolutely. He does not claim that their marriage is passionately close; instead, he insists that Jessica would not be unfaithful. His trust therefore does not depend on denying the limits of the marriage or pretending not to notice the time she spends with A.J.

Barnaby acknowledges that Jessica and A.J. are close and may flirt intellectually, while drawing a firm boundary between that intimacy and physical infidelity. He describes attraction as something that can be channelled into other forms of shared activity, such as music or food, rather than acted on sexually. Diamond offers lunchtime walks as another possible expression of that closeness. Barnaby’s explanation is not that there is no attraction, but that the pair have made a game of it: an exchange of intelligence and amusement that gives their connection its own outlet.

This account unsettles the conventional inference that intense companionship must mean a sexual affair. Barnaby can recognise the charge between them without treating it as a betrayal. The relationship’s defining tension is precisely that it carries the signs of courtship while stopping short of sex. In the later account of the crimes, Diamond gives this pattern a darker consequence: the pair’s games are not harmless diversions once A.J. turns them into a means of impressing Jessica.

From Games to Criminal Spectacle

Diamond later characterises Jessica and A.J.’s relationship as nonsexual, with its courtship display ending before the physical act. He portrays them as players whose excitement lies in games, comparing their conduct to an adult version of truth, kiss, or dare. The comparison casts their intellectual flirtation as an escalating contest: the attraction is channelled into challenges, and the challenges acquire consequences beyond the pair’s private amusement.

In Diamond’s reconstruction, A.J.’s crimes arise from his desire to impress Jessica. He gives her most of the money he has taken from Miss Chilmark, but that is not enough for him; he plans a more spectacular demonstration. The theft of the Penny Black, its appearance at the Bloodhounds’ meeting, the riddles, and the padlock manoeuvre all contribute to the performance. A.J. is not merely committing a series of thefts and deceptions. He is constructing a display of cleverness for the woman whose intellectual attention is central to their bond.

The display collapses when Sid Towers comes to investigate the narrowboat and finds A.J. replacing the padlock. Diamond believes A.J. heard Sid approaching, hid inside the cabin, and seized a windlass as a weapon. He struck Sid on the head, apparently intending to knock him out, but killed him. This first killing, in Diamond’s account, was a panic during an operation that had seemed close to succeeding, rather than a planned murder. The distinction marks a turning point in the relationship: A.J.’s effort to impress Jessica has produced a death, and Jessica’s response becomes concealment rather than withdrawal.

Complicity and the Later Murder

Jessica’s involvement begins after Sid is dead. Diamond says she suspected A.J. was responsible and did not want the police to discover it. She could see how an alternative explanation might protect him: people might conclude that Sid had stolen the stamp and staged the locked-room trick himself. That theory gained plausibility because Sid was interested in locked-room puzzles and had been regarded by the Bloodhounds as intellectually unimpressive. The evidence could therefore be made to tell a story in which Sid, rather than A.J., had devised the crime.

Jessica helps that story along by writing on the paper bag in a way that appeared to confirm that Sid had written the riddles. She later admits this to Diamond. His account distinguishes her role from A.J.’s: he does not think A.J. told her what he had done, but says she worked it out for herself and then covered for him. Her participation is thus based on her own inference about his guilt, not on knowledge he had necessarily given her. The deception that might have allowed A.J. to escape responsibility is an active choice on her part.

When the first cover-up begins to unravel, Jessica and A.J. move from concealment of an unplanned killing to a jointly planned murder. Diamond says they devised a second plan to frame Rupert Darby and make his death appear to be suicide. They staged the gallery-graffiti incident and ensured that Rupert was sprayed with paint; A.J. then surprised him as he came out of his local. Diamond explicitly contrasts this killing with Sid’s: Rupert’s death was planned in cold blood, not the accidental result of a panicked blow. Their relationship consequently ends its progression from games and intellectual display in deliberate violence. Jessica’s loyalty, first expressed as protection of A.J. from suspicion, becomes complicity in a murder designed to shift blame onto Rupert.