Edith Crowe

Edith Crowe is 58 and has been manager of the safe deposit company in London's jewelry quarter for almost thirty years. She was born in Reading, the daughter of a bank clerk and a piano teacher, and joined the firm at 29 as the manager's secretary. She rose one rung per decade, with no haste and no shortcut, and today speaks of the company in the first person plural, the way one speaks of one's own family.

She lives alone in a high-ceilinged apartment in Pimlico, in a red brick building with a lattice-gate lift, which she climbs on foot as a matter of principle. The living room has a piano nobody has played since her mother's death, a bookcase of encyclopedias in alphabetical order and a sideboard with photos of her nephews and nieces. She takes afternoon tea at five, milk before tea, and corrects anyone who does the opposite.

She has graying blond hair in a bob, fair skin and reading glasses hanging from a gold chain, which she perches on the tip of her nose to read anything, even a menu. She wears a navy-blue blazer over a cream silk blouse and carries a heavy bunch of keys in her hand, like a bell. She is formal, proud of the firm, and corrects the grammar of whoever asks before answering the question.

About the holiday, her account is short: she spent the days at home and only went down to the basement on Tuesday, at eight, to open for business, when she found the three round holes in the vault wall, each the size of a plate, and the armored door intact beside them. She says plainly that the basement alarm went off at 12:21 a.m. on Friday, that the control center phoned her and that she said it was a false alarm. She says almost six hundred boxes sleep in that vault, most belonging to jewelers from the quarter, and that the firm never asks what goes inside. With the building closed from Thursday to Tuesday, no one can say for certain where each person was during the holiday.

Edith knows that whoever answers the alarm phone and says to ignore it becomes the detective's first question. When he suggests she gave the thieves the way in for a share, the perfect grammar hardens: she recalls her thirty years in that house and asks how anyone can call her an accomplice in her own basement. It may be the wounded pride of a manager who never lost a box. It may be someone who prefers to correct the question rather than answer it. The detective will have to decide which.