Edward Jeffries

In the short story Have You Got Everything You Want?, Edward Jeffries is the husband of Elsie Jeffries. He had come to Constantinople on business and his wife was travelling on the Orient Express to join him when her jewels were stolen.

Some time before Edward and Elsie married, he had been at a hotel in the West Indies. There one night, an attractive woman, one Mrs Rossiter asked to take refuge in his room as she was afraid of her violent husband and subsequently spent the night there. This turned out to be a scam and since that time, Mrs Rossiter had been blackmailing him.

Unable to raise ready cash for the latest round of blackmail demands, he stole his own wife's jewels to sell, and replaced them with paste copies. However, being a high-minded person, he did not wish for suspicion to be placed on his servants or his acquaintances and so arranged for one Madame Subayska to steal the jewels while Elsie was travelling on the Orient Express.

Parker Pyne had surmised as much and after confronting Edward at Constantinople, got Edward to hand over the real jewels which were restored to Elsie. Parker Pyne had a solution for Edward: confess everything about Mrs Rossiter to Elsie, but leave out the fact that he had been scammed. In Parker Pyne's estimation, Elsie was in love with Edward but he saw signs that this may not remain so if he continued "present to her a picture of such goodness and rectitude that it is almost synonymous with dullness." She was as high-minded as Edward and the only way she could get "any kick out of her life" was to believe that believe that she had reformed a rake.