Koh-i-Noor

The Koh-i-Noor is the absent jewel at the center of a hidden history that alters the apparent meaning of the murder at Chimneys. For Superintendent Battle, its disappearance is not a closed mystery: the possibility that King Victor came back to recover it offers a motive for his presence at the house and a new way to read Prince Michael’s death. The jewel’s location remains unknown, but Anthony Cade’s recollection of Count Stylptitch’s words gives the old disappearance fresh bearing on the present investigation.

The Jewel and Its Disappearance

Battle introduces the Koh-i-Noor indirectly, referring to it as “the K” after George Lomax warns him not to mention names. That caution makes the jewel more than a celebrated object in conversation: its history is politically sensitive, and even its name is treated as something that should not be spoken aloud. Battle recalls that the jewel disappeared while King Victor was at large. The king was arrested in Paris three days afterward, but the jewel was never recovered; the authorities had long hoped that he might eventually lead them to it.

The search had already been extensive. Chimneys was one of four places where a certain royal visitor might have concealed the jewel, yet the house had been ransacked and examined repeatedly without success. Battle’s reply is not that the earlier searches were careless, but that searching without knowing where to look may accomplish little. His reasoning turns the apparently exhausted investigation into an unresolved possibility: the jewel could still be at Chimneys, hidden in a place that repeated searches failed to identify.

The Royal Visit and the Concealed Past

Battle later supplies the political background. Nicholas IV and Queen Varaga had visited England as guests of the late Marquis of Caterham, then Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs. Because Herzoslovakia could not be excluded from diplomatic reception, Queen Varaga was received at Chimneys. Battle describes her as both a royal personage and an expert thief, and considers the substitution of the jewel so convincing that only an expert could have made it. In his account, the plan’s daring and audacity point to King Victor as its author.

The affair was hushed up and never made public. Battle says that the authorities did what they could in private, but the jewel did not leave England with the Queen of Herzoslovakia. His conclusion is that she hid it somewhere in the house, although its hiding place remained unknown. The object therefore connects royal hospitality and international secrecy: the visit gave Queen Varaga access to Chimneys, while the concealed theft left the house carrying the trace of an undisclosed political scandal.

The Murder Hypothesis

The old disappearance becomes relevant to the murder investigation when Battle proposes that King Victor may have come to Chimneys to seek the jewel. On that hypothesis, Prince Michael surprised him and was shot. It remains a possibility rather than a demonstrated account, but it changes the interpretive stakes of the case: Prince Michael’s death may have arisen not only from the immediate political rivalries surrounding him, but from an attempt to recover a jewel hidden years earlier.

The hypothesis also gives the repeated searches a double significance. Chimneys had been thoroughly overhauled, yet the Koh-i-Noor’s absence was not proof that it had left the house. Battle’s distinction between searching often and knowing where to search keeps the mystery open, while the possible return of King Victor makes the old hiding place a potential cause of present violence.

Stylptitch’s Clue and the Changed Interpretation

Cade adds a second line of connection when he recounts what Jimmy McGrath told him about his meeting with Count Stylptitch in Paris. McGrath had rescued the count from a band of Apaches at considerable risk to himself. Stylptitch, exhilarated at the time, made two remarks: he claimed to know where the Koh-i-Noor was, and said that the gang were King Victor’s men. McGrath had paid little attention to the first statement, but Cade recognizes the two remarks as significant when considered together.

The juxtaposition does not establish where the jewel is, nor does it prove that King Victor committed the murder. It does, however, connect knowledge of the jewel’s hiding place with King Victor’s associates and makes Battle’s return-to-Chimneys theory newly consequential. Battle says that even Prince Michael’s murder now wears a different aspect; the French detective counters that King Victor has never taken a life. The jewel thus remains both a missing object and an evidentiary hinge: it joins a suppressed royal theft, a surviving secret about its location, and competing explanations of a killing.