The Sirens Sang of Murder

CHAPTER 9

Amateurs of military anecdote will no doubt be better versed than I in the history of the Remnant Club, founded in the early nineteenth century by a group of officers, survivors of the Peninsular campaign, whose conduct had to their astonishment proved insufficiently sedate for other gentlemen’s clubs in the neighbourhood of St. James’s. Occupying as its premises an agreeable Regency town house just off Piccadilly, it has a relatively small membership, distinguished rather for gallantry than prudence, and is not much used for the entertainment of outside guests. Curiosity, if nothing else, would have compelled me to accept Colonel Cantrip’s invitation to join him there after lunch.

It was no more than five minutes’ walk from the Godolphin Hotel. A club servant of extreme antiquity, whose hobbling progress seemed to bear witness to ancient and honourable wounds, conducted me to the library — a long, oak-panelled room, smelling of leather and tobacco smoke, with shelves full of military histories and little-known memoirs.

The Colonel was sitting in a deep leather armchair looking rather pleased with himself, the demonic brightness of the eyes beneath the snow-white eyebrows undimmed by any remorse for the events of the previous evening. Facing him, at opposite ends of a long low sofa, sat Patrick Ardmore and Gideon Dark-side — the former, brandy glass in hand, giving every sign of ease and contentment, the latter with his legs stretched stiffly out in front of him in an attitude which looked to be as lacking in comfort as it was in aesthetic charm. The Colonel effected introductions and asked me what I would drink.

Although Julia was absent from the gathering, presumably detained by paramount obligations with regard to the seminar, it had plainly been contrived with her assistance, possibly even her encouragement. Quite what she had said of me to persuade the Colonel that I ought to be there, and what role he expected me to play, I could only speculate, but he evidently believed my presence indispensable to his purpose — which was, it appeared, to find out what had happened to Cantrip.

“Thing is,” said the Colonel, “I’m getting a bit worried about the lad. Been AWOL more than forty-eight hours now. Twenty-four I wouldn’t worry about, but forty-eight starts looking like trouble. Well, he’s a bit of a po-faced young blighter at times, but I wouldn’t like anything to happen to him. The girls wouldn’t like it either — I’d never hear the last of it from the girls.” His look of sudden apprehension conjured up a regiment of female Cantrip relatives bitterly reproaching him for the loss of their cherished kinsman.

“Well,” said the accountant, “I’ve always known instructing Counsel meant a lot of fuss and bother, but this is the first time I’ve been told I ought to hire a nursemaid to see him home.”

“Are we to understand,” said Ardmore, seeming at least in some measure to share the old soldier’s anxiety, “that Michael has not yet returned to London? And that you’ve had no news of him for the past two days?”

“That’s right,” said the Colonel. “Tried ringing him at home this morning — no answer. Went round to what he calls his Chambers — not a sign of him. Then I got talking to the secretary there — nice little thing — what’s her name? Lily? Eileen? Something like that.”

“I believe,” I said, “that her name is Lilian.”

“That’s right. Well, I got talking to her, and it came out she was damned worried about the boy. She’s got a soft spot for him, apparently, and I can tell you, Professor, she was nearly in tears, poor little thing. She’s heard that some pretty rum things happen to people who get mixed up with this Daffodil business, and on Monday night some chap got himself killed. She didn’t know the details, though, and there was no one else down there who knew a damn thing about anything. I knew young Julie Larwood was lunching at the Godolphin, so I thought I’d pop round there and see if she’d heard the same story. And she told me that these two gentlemen had been with Mike in the Channel Islands, so if we had a word with them, we could get the whole story straight from the horse’s mouth. So here we are.”

The degree of responsibility for the Colonel’s conduct implied by the pronoun we in his penultimate sentence was sufficient to make my blood run cold, but I could think of no way of disclaiming it.

“I might have known,” said Darkside. “I might have known that Larwood woman was at the bottom of all this nonsense. No offence, Colonel, but I’m a busy man, and quite frankly I think I’ve been brought here under false pretences. I came because you implied in your note that you could tell us something relevant to the Daffodil settlement, not to hear about a lot of silly rumours put about by a lot of silly women.”

“Colonel Cantrip,” said the Irishman, ignoring his colleague, “if I thought there was any cause for you to be worried about Michael, then I would be as concerned as you are, but I’m quite sure there is not. It’s true, I’m very sorry to say, that one of our colleagues met his death in an accident on Monday night. But if you’ll allow me to tell you about it, you’ll see that it has nothing to do with your nephew in any way at all.”

He gave the same account of Edward Malvoisin’s death that he had earlier recommended to Darkside, attributing it to an unlucky encounter with the drunken Albert in his career across the Coupee, but he delivered it now with a more unqualified conviction and the fluency of a man long practised in reassuring nervous clients of the safety of their investments. It had been, he concluded, a very tragic accident, but Cantrip had been in no way involved.

“Forgive me,” I said, “but is that entirely certain? Has either of you actually seen him since?” Had any members of Lincoln’s Inn been present they would probably have thought it helpful at this point to remind me that Cantrip had been alive and well and sending telex messages several hours after the time of the accident to the carriage, but fortunately there were none.

The Irishman seemed slightly disconcerted.

“I suppose — now that you mention it, Professor Tamar, I suppose not. The last time I saw him was on Monday evening in the bar of our hotel. He left us rather early, I remember. My colleague, the Contessa di Silvabianca, and our English solicitor, Miss Derwent, had been given rooms in an annex a little distance away from the main building and so had Michael. They both wanted an early night, and I think Michael felt that he ought to escort them back there. That must have been — sometime between quarter and half past ten, I suppose.”

“You see,” I said, “I was wondering whether Cantrip — whether Michael might conceivably have accompanied Edward Malvoisin on his nocturnal excursion.”

“Oh, I hardly think so, Professor Tamar. If Edward had an appointment at that hour of night, it must surely have been of a very confidential nature — I can’t believe he’d have wanted company. And they certainly didn’t leave at the same time. Edward stayed in the bar with us until — oh, about half past eleven, I should think. Do you remember, Gideon?”

“I remember him saying he wanted to get to bed,” said the accountant. “He didn’t say anything about going out.”

“The world is full of duplicity, Gideon. Since we know that in fact he did go out, we must infer that it was for some purpose he chose not to tell us of. And that’s the last time we saw the poor fellow alive. Gideon and I stayed on until midnight, when Philip Alexandre closed the bar. We were on our way up to our rooms when we heard all the noise of Albert coming back. We looked out of the landing window to see what was going on, and there he was up on his horse and shouting out about the woman in white, with Philip swearing back at him in Sercquais. Then he climbed down and started hurling bricks about. It was plain enough that he was as tight as a lord, and it didn’t occur to us that there was anything seriously wrong.”

The accountant had been looking with increasing frequency at his watch and giving other indications of impatience to be gone. The Irishman, however, took no notice of them, evidently intending to finish his brandy at leisure. It occurred to me that he felt a genuine reluctance to leave the Colonel with his anxiety unallayed.

“I do assure you,” he said, “that there is nothing sinister about the Daffodil Settlement, and I don’t doubt that at the time of the accident your nephew was safe in his bed. And if he was up bright and early in the morning and across the Coupee as soon as it was clear, he’d have been away on the boat to Jersey without ever hearing a word about poor Edward Malvoisin. After that you couldn’t blame him if he decided to stay on for a day or two. He’s enjoying himself on the beach at St. Brelade’s at this very moment, I daresay, with no idea of anyone being worried about him.”

“He could be in Timbuctoo,” said Darkside, “for all we can do about it. Well, Patrick, I don’t know about you, but I’ve paid good money to attend this seminar, even if it is just a lot of fancy lawyers talking a lot of hot air, and we’ve already missed twenty minutes of the afternoon session. So if you don’t mind, Colonel, I’ll be getting back to it.”

“Stay where you are,” said the Colonel, with a brisk authority which I could imagine to have been of notable effect on the battlefields of his youth.

Darkside, already in the process of rising, now sank back, as if almost physically incapable of continuing his upward movement. I at first supposed him merely to have succumbed to the old soldier’s forceful personality and commanding tone of voice; but he had more probably been influenced, I perceived after a moment, by the fact that the Colonel was pointing a pistol at him.

The Irishman gave no sign of being disconcerted by this turn of events. On the contrary, his amber-coloured eyes became bright with what seemed to be amusement, as if at the charming whimsicality of some eccentric but highly valued client. Darkside, though his lips moved in silent protest, appeared to have lost the power of speech: he gazed as if mesmerised at the pistol, and his pallor had taken on a greenish, putrescent tinge.

“You say there’s nothing sinister about this Daffodil business,” said the Colonel. “But one man’s dead and another’s gone missing. And the one who’s gone missing is my nephew. In my book you’ve still got a lot of explaining to do. Right, they’re all yours, Professor — you’re the expert. Fire away.”

Whatever Julia had said to recommend to him my skills in investigation, she had evidently failed to mention my extreme distaste for all forms of physical coercion. It would have seemed unkind to disappoint him, however, by declining to proceed with the questioning of the two witnesses whom he had presented to me at gunpoint with such innocent satisfaction. Moreover, though I did not quite believe that he would actually shoot anyone, I did not so entirely disbelieve it as to feel disposed to vex him.

Searching in vain, in the agitation of the moment, for any useful or appropriate question, I finally enquired, for want of anything better, whether those concerned with the Daffodil Settlement had had, on the previous Monday evening, any particular cause for celebration.

“No,” said Patrick Ardmore, with the tentative care of a man just learning the rules of an interesting new game. “No, I don’t think so, Professor. Why should you suppose we had?”

“To stay in the bar until midnight suggests conviviality.”

“There was nothing convivial about it,” said Darkside, outraged into croaking audibility. “We had important business to discuss.”

“Indeed?” I said. “I am surprised that the bar of your hotel afforded sufficient privacy for the discussion of confidential matters.”

“We had it to ourselves,” said Ardmore. “There was Philip Alexandre behind the bar, of course — the owner of the hotel — but he hardly counts as a stranger. Do please acquit us of conviviality, Professor Tamar — it’s very hard on Gideon to be suspected of such a thing.”

Perceiving that this brief exchange would hardly be sufficient to satisfy the Colonel’s expectations, I cast about rather desperately in my mind for some further line of questioning.

“I wonder if you would care,” I said, “to tell us about the pen?”

The effect was gratifying — the two men stared at me with as much astonishment as if I had put my hand in my pocket and extracted a large white rabbit. I noticed with some relief that the Colonel looked deeply impressed.

“The pen?” said Ardmore, raising an eyebrow. Too late, however, for credibility, even if his companion had not at the same instant exclaimed, “How the hell do you know about that?”

“The fountain pen belonging to the Contessa di Silvabianca, which you found on the Coupee near the place where Edward Malvoisin fell to his’ death. If you happen to have it with you, Mr. Ardmore, I should be most interested to see it.”

The Irishman hesitated — he was evidently a good deal more troubled by my knowing about the pen than by being held up at gunpoint in a gentlemen’s club in the West End of London. He must have decided, however, that since I knew so much there could be no further harm in compliance. After an enquiring glance at the Colonel, who gave a brisk nod of assent, he opened his briefcase and produced something which gleamed prettily in the dusty sunlight from the library window. He handed it across to me — a fountain pen made, as I judged, of solid gold, engraved with a graceful and intricate design which incorporated the initials of Gabrielle di Silvabianca.

“Would you care,” I said, “to tell me how you came to find it?”

“I understood,” said the Irishman, “that you were already informed on the subject.”

“It would interest me,” I said, “to know the precise details.”

“Very well,” said Ardmore, “if they interest you, then by all means — but I can’t think why they should. It was on Monday morning, when we were on our way back across the Coupee — Miss Derwent, Gideon, and myself. Miss Derwent had run on ahead — I think she rather had the jitters about the place, not surprisingly in the circumstances, and wanted to be across as quickly as possible. I didn’t much care for it myself, but I stopped about half way across to look down at the place where the fishermen had found poor Edward’s body — they’d marked it with some kind of flag. I looked to see if there was any sign of how he’d come to fall — whether the railings were damaged or anything of that kind. There was something shining in the grass at the edge of the road and I bent down and picked it up. Then Gideon came up and wanted to know what it was. As you see, Professor Tamar, a very trivial incident, though I admit I’m a little puzzled about how you happen to know about it — I rather thought Gideon agreed with me that there was no point in mentioning it to anyone else.”

“I haven’t told anyone,” said the accountant. “I said you ought to tell someone, but it’s not my responsibility.”

“Have you any idea,” I said, “how the Contessa happened to drop her pen in that particular place?”

“I doubt very much,” said Ardmore, “that it was she who dropped it. Edward had been having trouble with his fountain pen all afternoon, I remember — making blots on all sorts of vital documents. I suppose the Contessa must have lent him hers, and he still had it, poor fellow, when he went out that night.”

“I didn’t notice him having trouble with his pen,” said Darkside.

“Indeed, why should you, Gideon?” said the Irishman generously. “I’m sure you had more important things to think of. Is there anything further, Professor Tamar, on which we can assist you?”

Glancing at the Colonel, I perceived a slight discontentedness in his expression, as if he did not yet consider that he had quite had his money’s worth.

“There is just one further point,” I said. “I believe that the Contessa has some family connection with Sark. Could you tell me — what precisely is her relationship to Philip Alexandre?” The bow, I admit, was drawn somewhat at a venture; but Cantrip had mentioned her talking in Sercquais, a language not generally studied in the lycées or universities of France.

“Oh, she’s his niece,” said the Irishman casually, evidently not thinking this an important or troublesome question. “Her mother was Rachel Alexandre — she married a businessman from Brittany. Colonel Cantrip, it is a great privilege to have been entertained in a manner, if I may say so, so much in accordance with the traditions of this very distinguished club, but we really ought to go back to the seminar. Oh, come along, Gideon, you don’t suppose that thing’s loaded, do you?”

A loud report and a shattering of plaster established that it was.

“Something further, sir?” enquired the ancient servant, appearing in the doorway of the library.

Problems insoluble to the Junior Bar require the advice of leading Counsel. At the hour when tea is customarily taken I found Selena, Ragwort, and Julia gathered in Basil Ptarmigan’s room, intending to direct his mind on his return from court to the problems created by Cantrip’s continued absence. These were, in ascending order of gravity: the inconvenience of undertaking those of Cantrip’s professional obligations which were of an urgent nature; the lowering effect on morale of Henry’s disaffection and Lilian’s tearfulness — after hearing the latest gossip from the offices of Stingham and Grynne she was now referring to the boy as “poor Mr. Cantrip” and in the past tense; and the impossibility of any longer remaining responsible for the Colonel. Something must be done — Basil was to consider what.

Accepting with gratitude the offer of tea, I described what had taken place at the Remnant Club. My account was punctuated by pitiful cries from Julia, who in a brief reencounter with Patrick Ardmore at the seminar had been given no hint of any unconventionality in the Colonel’s entertainment of his guests.

“This cannot go on,” said Ragwort with magisterial sternness. “Buckets of water and plates of spaghetti are one thing, but pointing guns at people is a serious matter — and I don’t suppose that he even has a licence for it. Heaven alone knows what the appalling old — I do beg your pardon, Julia — what the delightful old gentleman will do next.”

I confessed myself unable to prophesy on that subject. Following the departure from the Remnant Club of Ardmore and Darkside, I had spent the afternoon in attempting to persuade the Colonel of the need to reflect a little on what we had learnt. Though he had eventually promised, with some reluctance, to take no action until he heard from me again, I could not be confident that his patience would survive the evening nor predict what he would do when it was exhausted.

“I suppose it would be too much to hope,” said Selena, “that all this eavesdropping and pointing guns and so forth has actually produced any useful information.”

“I have made a little progress,” I said, “in my investigation of the death of Edward Malvoisin. It begins to look as if Ardmore and Darkside can be excluded from suspicion. They both say — or Ardmore says and Dark-side does not dispute it — that they were together in the bar of the Alexandra from the time Edward Malvoisin left until the time of the accident. I did not feel able, in the rather trying circumstances of our conversation, to question them as closely as I would have wished on this point, and it may be that they were not in each other’s company for literally every minute of that period, but the absence of either for a sufficient length of time to follow Malvoisin half way across the Coupee would surely have excited comment from the other. Like Clementine, they have what I believe is technically termed an alibi. That is on the assumption, of course, that they are not accomplices.”

“If I say,” said Julia, “that Patrick is not the sort of man who pushes people over cliffs, you will no doubt accuse me of sentimental prejudice. You surely can’t imagine, however, that he would choose Gideon Dark-side as an accomplice.”

“I agree,” I said, “that it seems unlikely, though the quest for profit, my dear Julia, makes strange bedfellows. Ardmore and Darkside together would have been in an admirable position to extract money from the trust fund for their personal benefit, and if Malvoisin had found out about it… Still, the conversation which I overheard at the Godolphin did not sound to me like one between co-conspirators. Moreover, Philip Alexandre is also said to have been with them at the material time, and one must assume, I think, that, if asked, he would confirm that — a conspiracy of all three seems decidedly improbable.”

Selena refilled my teacup.

“It looks,” she said, “as if all the people we know about are excluded. Unless you count the person the Contessa saw lurking in the garden, there seem to be no suspects left. Perhaps Edward Malvoisin’s death really was an accident — Patrick Ardmore’s explanation sounds quite convincing. What a shame, Hilary — you’ll have to go back to the birth and marriage certificates.”

I was obliged to remind her that thus far there was no evidence to exclude the Contessa di Silvabianca.

“She was in the Witch’s Cottage,” said Julia. “With Cantrip and Clementine.”

“My dear Julia, you surely don’t believe that Cantrip and Clementine, occupied as they were, would have noticed if the Contessa left her room and went out again. There would have been ample time for her to do so and to reach the place where Malvoisin met his death long before the accident to the carriage. Moreover, she would have had no difficulty in finding her way, even in pitch darkness — now that we know she is Alexandre’s niece, we may assume her to be entirely familiar with the cottage and its environs. Apart from which, there is the matter of the pen.”

On the subject of the pen Julia became indignant. She had never heard of such a thing — or at any rate she had never read of such a thing — or at any rate not in any piece of respectable crime fiction published since the beginning of the Second World War. A physical object, forsooth, with the initials of a suspect engraved on it — why, it was worse than a fingerprint. If we must have a clue of a physical nature — and in Julia’s experience the best authors nowadays wholly eschewed such vulgarities — then let it at least be one invisible to the naked eye and identifiable only by the most sophisticated techniques of modern pathology. If the progress of the past half century was to count for nothing, then one might as well go back, said Julia scathingly, to murders committed by means of arsenic or for motives of matrimonial jealousy.

“I do not doubt,” I said, “that in a crime novel having any pretensions to modernity, the pen would be quite inadmissible. As a mere historian, however, there is nothing I can do about it. Nature, as we know, does imitate Art, but I fear that she all too often falls short of the highest standards. Were you to turn your attention from fictional crimes to those reported in the newspapers, you would find that people are still leaving fingerprints and murdering unfaithful spouses for all the world as if they were living in the 1920s. In the more backward parts of the country they may even still be poisoning one another with arsenic. We cannot ignore the pen for the sake of literary fashion.”

Apparently pleased with the role of hostess, Selena poured further cups of tea.

“You seem unconvinced,” she said, “by the suggestion that it had been borrowed by Edward Malvoisin.”

“It did not look to me,” I said, “like the sort of thing which one would readily lend or forget to ask to be returned. I suspect that the story of Malvoisin having trouble with his pen was an extempore invention by Patrick Ardmore.”

“We know, of course,” said Ragwort, “that he and the Contessa are colleagues of long standing and evidently friends. And we have reason to believe,” he added, looking severely at Julia, “that he is a man who might too easily allow good nature to prevail over principle. But would he go to the length of telling lies to protect her if he thought her responsible for Malvoisin’s death?”

“He may merely believe,” I said, “that she had an assignation with Malvoisin and would be embarrassed by its disclosure. That is, I suppose, a possibility — perhaps she resented Malvoisin’s advances less than she appeared to.”

“I’m afraid,” said Julia sadly, “that Edward Malvoisin’s advances were of the kind which a well-bred and good-natured woman usually resents a great deal more than she appears to. I wonder if it really was Gabrielle’s pen that Patrick found on the Coupee. Would it be very difficult to have a duplicate made? One sees advertisements, in gift catalogues and so forth, for goods to be supplied with initials on them, and they don’t require the initials to be one’s own.”

“My dear Julia,” said Ragwort kindly, for he knows she is not well versed in such matters, “if I have followed Hilary’s description of it, that is not at all the sort of thing we are talking about. We are talking in effect of an item of jewellery, designed and made to order for a particular customer and intended to be entirely exclusive. No jeweller who valued his reputation would dream of duplicating the design without the consent of the original customer.”

I had begun to feel a certain uneasiness. The longer I reflected on the matter, the more suspicion seemed to direct itself towards the interesting and attractive figure of the Contessa: whose mother, it seemed — I was conscious of the absurdity of attaching any sinister significance to such a thing — was the namesake and descendant of Rachel Alexandre, burnt as a witch in the intolerant seventeenth century.

It had occurred to me that none of those with whom I had spoken had actually seen the Contessa or heard any news of her since the night of Malvoisin’s death. My anxiety was perhaps irrational; for I knew of no reason for her to wish Cantrip any harm, but when two persons simultaneously disappear, of whom one may be reasonably suspected of murderous propensities, it is difficult to feel no concern for the safety of the other.

This dismal train of thought was happily interrupted by the entry of Lilian, in possession of a new telex message.