The Whole Megillah by Howard Engel

it. ‘The son of a bitch!’
    â€˜Tony found out that your separation had taken a turn for the worse, Honour. He knew you were seeing someone and he didn’t like it. Until then, he was living in hope that the split could be healed. He didn’t know about you, Mr. Lowther.’
    â€˜Now see here, Cooperman! There are laws in this country!’ Lowther was on his feet, his heavy shoulders hunched as though he wanted to plough into me.
    â€˜Look, Mr. Lowther, I hope you aren’t going to give me a hard time on this. I’ve been in divorce work for too long. Your office won’t tell me where to get in touch with you. Your phone is privately listed. All the familiar signs. So I followed you home. Your home is on Walmer Road. Same place as Honour’s. She’s listed; you’re not. You answer her bell. So please don’t protest too much. After all, she’s a very beautiful woman. We should all get so lucky.’
    â€˜I’m not admitting anything.’
    â€˜Oh Colin, give up. He knows, he knows, he knows!’ There was a note of exasperation in Honour’s voice.
    â€˜Well, all right. So what?’
    â€˜My heartiest congratulations for a start,’ I said. ‘You managed to access the wife without alienating the husband. Very deft, sir!’
    â€˜Well, Tony was a friend,’ Lowther said, shifting nervously. ‘We’ve always been friends. And Honour and I needed more time. We needed to prepare him. We knew he wasn’t going to like it.’
    â€˜But he found out that there was something going on. That made him angry enough to get the megillah out of the house. A private sale to Kurian, who would keep his mouth shut. And Tony covered his tracks with a fake robbery. He even brought me into the scheme just to make it look as though he was doing all he could to get the thing back again.’ Sergeant Pepper couldn’t hide his grin. He tried covering his mouth, but it was too late. ‘Sure, I was stupid enough to walk in unprepared and get taken for a ride just like the rest of you. But things began to go sour as soon as he got himself killed. First off, it became clear that Tony hadn’t reported the loss of the book to the cops. He was smart enough to know that that could get him into big trouble, so he drew the line and brought in a rent-a-cop: me.’
    â€˜This is going around in circles,’ Lowther interrupted. ‘Why don’t you come to the point and stop wasting all of our time?’
    â€˜I’m doing the best I can, Mr. Lowther. This is complicated stuff and I’m trying to keep it straight in my head. For instance, you were the only one to see the megillah after Tony brought it to Albany Avenue.’
    â€˜How do you know that?’
    â€˜Don’t get excited, Mr. Lowther,’ Sergeant Pepper said. ‘You just told us a few minutes ago. Things will go better for all of us if we try to relax. This is just an informal get-together as far as I’m concerned.’ Pepper turned his smile on the faces watching him. None of the owners of the faces showed any sign of relaxing. Who believes a dentist when he says ‘This isn’t going to hurt’? Lowther shrugged when the faces turned from Pepper to him.
    â€˜Sure, Tony showed it to me. But how did you know without my having admitted it?’
    â€˜The book’s been buried in a private collection since 1919. All of our descriptions of it go back to a catalogue of that 1919 sale.’
    â€˜We all know that,’ said Lowther. ‘It was the Sir Bernard Kendal sale. The catalogue is a collectors’ item itself.’
    â€˜Good. That will save time. The description there puts the book inside a protective plain leather cover. Mr. Dalton assured me that the dull outer cover was still there six years ago when he had a private look at it in one of the stately homes of England. That cover has been removed, so that now the book appears